# Digital PR for a small product: the study, not the pitch

Digital PR earns links by giving writers something to write about. A pitch about your launch is not that. A figure nobody else has is. Here is what a small product can measure, how to publish it so it can be quoted, and how to reach the handful of people who cover your subject.

Updated 2026-09-15 · Source: https://porteur.ai/guides/digital-pr-for-seo

## Why your launch is not a story

A writer's job is to tell their readers something they did not know. Your funding round, your redesign and your new feature are things you did not know, not things they did not know.

A figure is different. If you can say what is true across ten thousand sites, or what changed in a market this year, the writer has a paragraph they cannot get anywhere else, and the citation carries a link because that is how attribution works.

> The link comes from the coverage, not from the pitch. Everything in this guide is about making coverage possible, not about persuading anyone to write about your product.

## What a small product can measure

You do not need a research budget. You need a question whose answer is inside data you already touch.

| Where the data is | The kind of question it answers |
| --- | --- |
| Your product's own aggregated usage | What share of sites in our sample do X, and how that changed this year |
| A crawl you can run yourself | What the top thousand sites in a category actually do about Y |
| A survey of your users and their peers | What practitioners believe and do, in their own words, with the sample size stated |
| Public data nobody has joined up | An index that combines two open sources into a ranking or a map |

Worked example. PingFox monitors uptime. It crawls the status pages of a thousand well-known products and counts how many are hosted on the same infrastructure as the product they report on. That is a question an engineer, a journalist and a rival all want answered, and only somebody with the crawl can answer it.

- Aggregate, never individual: no customer is identifiable, ever.
- Say the sample: how many, from where, over what period.
- Publish the method so someone can disagree with it.
- Pick a question you would read about if a rival published it.

## Publish it so it can be cited

A study that cannot be quoted does not get quoted. The page has a fixed shape and it is not a blog post.

1. **One headline finding, in the title** The title is the sentence a writer will paraphrase. Put the figure in it, and the population it describes.
2. **The findings as a list, near the top** Four or five lines, each a complete fact with its number. A writer on deadline reads this and nothing else.
3. **One chart per finding** Simple, labelled, with the axis units. Give each an alt text that states the finding, so it can be read and quoted without the image.
4. **The method, in full** What you collected, how, when, what you excluded, what could be wrong. This is what separates a study from marketing.
5. **A line granting permission** State that the figures may be reproduced with a link to the page. Writers check.
6. **A stable URL and a date** Put the year in the page, not the URL, so the update next year keeps the links.

Publish it on your own domain, at a path you will keep: yourproduct.com/research/status-pages-2026. Not on a third-party publishing platform, where the links accrue to somebody else.

## Reach the writers who cover the subject

You are not pitching a press list. You are writing to the small number of people who have already written about this subject in the last year.

1. **Build the list by reading** Search the subject and collect the bylines of the last year of coverage: trade press, newsletters, the big blogs in your field, the podcasts. Twenty names is a full list for a niche.
2. **Find the person, not the desk** Their contact is usually on their profile, their personal site or their social bio. Many publish an email precisely for this.
3. **Write one paragraph each** The finding, the population, the link, and one sentence on why it matters to their beat. No attachment, no embargo theatre, no boilerplate about your company.
4. **Offer the raw data** A writer who can re-cut your numbers writes a better piece and cites you more precisely. Offer the table as a file if they want it.

```text
Subject: 1 in 5 status pages sits on the infrastructure it reports on

Hi Marta,

We crawled the status pages of a thousand products and found that a
fifth are hosted on the same provider as the service they report on, so
they go down together. Method and full table here:
pingfox.com/research/status-pages-2026. Happy to send the raw data if
it is useful for your reliability coverage.

Thomas, PingFox
```

That subject line is the story. If it is not interesting to a stranger, the study is not ready and no email will save it.

## What a campaign costs in time

For one founder, working alone, a study of this kind is a week of real work spread over a month.

- A day to choose the question and check you can actually answer it.
- Two days to collect and clean the data, whatever the source.
- A day to write the page, with the charts and the method.
- A day to build the list of writers and send the emails, by hand.
- An hour a week afterwards to answer, to send raw data, and to log who covered it.

Most of the value arrives late. The first wave is coverage in the weeks after publishing. The second is people citing the figure for the next two years, because it is the only number available, which is why the yearly update matters more than the launch.

## What not to do

- Do not commission a survey whose conclusion is that people need your product. Readers and editors see it instantly.
- Do not round or reframe until the finding is exciting. A quiet, true figure survives scrutiny; an inflated one gets you a correction.
- Do not buy placements. A paid article that passes ranking is a link scheme under Google's policy, and it should carry a sponsored attribute, which removes the reason you bought it.
- Do not mass email a scraped media list. It is the fastest way to be blocked by the twenty people who matter in your field.
- Do not hide who funded the study. You did. Say so on the page.

One honest study, updated every year, out-earns a quarter of press releases. It also keeps working while you build the product, which is the only kind of marketing a small team can afford.

## Questions

### What is digital PR in SEO?

Earning coverage that carries links, by giving writers something worth covering: original data, an index, a survey, a map. It is distinct from link building outreach, where you ask for a link on an existing page, and from press releases, which announce your own news to people who did not ask.

### Does digital PR still work for small companies?

It works when you have a figure nobody else has. Size is not the barrier: a founder who can run a crawl or aggregate their own product data can answer a question a large company has no reason to ask. What does not work at any size is pitching your product as the story.

### How do I find journalists to pitch?

Read the last year of coverage on your subject and collect the bylines. Those twenty people are your list. Find their own contact details rather than a newsroom address, and write to each one about the finding, not about your company.

### Can I use my own product data for a study?

Yes, if it is aggregated so no customer is identifiable, and if you state the sample and the method. Data from your own product is often the only interesting data in the room, because nobody else can see it. Say plainly that it comes from your users.

### Should I pay for a guaranteed placement?

No. Paid links that pass ranking violate Google's link spam policy, and an honest publisher will mark the piece as sponsored, which removes the ranking benefit you paid for. Buy advertising when the audience is worth it, and judge it as advertising.

## Read next

- [Original research: the one thing a small product can publish that earns links for years](https://porteur.ai/guides/original-research-for-links): The data your product already holds, how to aggregate it safely, the shape of a study page that gets cited, and the yearly update that keeps the links.
- [The outreach email that gets a reply](https://porteur.ai/guides/link-outreach-email): One paragraph, sent to the person who wrote the page, about their page. The template, the openings that get deleted, and the single follow-up.
- [Podcasts, interviews and communities: the mentions that compound](https://porteur.ai/guides/podcasts-and-interviews-for-links): A founder's voice earns mentions a company page cannot. How to find shows worth the hour, what to say so people can find you after, and what it leaves.
- [How to get backlinks for a small product site](https://porteur.ai/guides/how-to-get-backlinks-for-a-small-site): What to build, who to ask and how to measure. A founder’s plan to earn backlinks without spam or spend, with examples and a checklist.
- [How to write a launch post people read to the end](https://porteur.ai/guides/how-to-write-a-launch-post): Use one structure that works on Hacker News, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers and your newsletter. With a worked example and the lines to cut.
- [Brand mention](https://porteur.ai/glossary/brand-mention): What brand mentions are, why they matter for a small site, how to find and measure them, and how to turn unlinked mentions into links.
- [Link building](https://porteur.ai/glossary/link-building): Link building is earning links from other sites to yours. Here is what works within Google’s policies, how to measure it, and what to avoid.
- [Referring domain](https://porteur.ai/glossary/referring-domain): A referring domain is a unique site that links to yours. Here is why the count matters more than backlink totals, how to check it, and what to do.

Paste your URL and the free check shows who links to your rivals and not to you, and which searches are within reach, in about thirty seconds. Free check: https://porteur.ai/