Reinventing PR for Performance with Adrian Fagerlund, Linkby

Michelle Lomas: Hey there again. This week, we have a special Flex your Hustle Publisher Spotlight episode. What's that? It is a highlight featuring one of Commission Factory's, exciting publisher partners. It's a little shorter than the other episodes, but it's just as jam packed with great marketing nuggets. I promise.

Michelle Lomas: Linkby is a global CPC based platform that helps brands generate more long form editorial coverage across global premium publishers.

Michelle Lomas: Linkby works with more than 200 publishers across the globe. Yeah, that's right. It includes everyone from Yahoo, Daily Mail, LadBible Betoota Advocate, Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire Pedestrian, and many, many more. That's a pretty straightforward way to explain it, but there's much more to it than that as we'll find out when we talk to today's guest Linkby co-founder Adrian Fagerlund.

Michelle Lomas: You're a company that are a number of different things. Mm-hmm . If you could tell me in a couple of sentences what you are. What is it?

Adrian Fagerlund: We are the middle man in marrying the best and brightest publishers with a global pool of brands that just want good content written about their brands in a way that makes it truly scalable.

Adrian Fagerlund: And mostly measurable. Mm. So they can justify the investment and they, so they can keep coming back again and again and again.

Michelle Lomas: And so what are we talking about for a brand? Are we talking about longform articles? Are we talking about mentions in articles that mention a lot of other products? What can brands expect?

Adrian Fagerlund: It's a great question. So it's the former. So how, how do I get a dedicated content piece where say, let's do an example. Let's keep it to Pedestrian. Let's say the writer team in Pedestrian wants to write about your jewellery brand mm-hmm . So you've created this beautiful jewellery brand it's sustainably made.

Adrian Fagerlund: It's designed in Australia and manufactured in California and all these cool things that you want to talk about that sells your brand on our platform. You just let us know that, Hey, this is what's going on. This is my brand. This is what I got going on. Then that publisher. Will extrapolate that information and create a piece of content that is, exactly like their normal content. So it looks, feels, and reads like their normal content, but it will be all about your brand hitting those key notes that you've outlined in the brief. So to answer your question, it's a dedicated piece of content that is peppered with links as well, which is a little bit of a differentiator from traditional PR because here the desired outcome is exactly the same for the brand and the publisher.

Michelle Lomas: What sort of publishers do you have on your network? What sort of publishers can brands access?

Adrian Fagerlund: So we started here in Australia. We got some of our favourite ones on board. So your Broadsheets and your Urban List ones that we really vibe with, there was success there. If I put it that way mm-hmm and then it became quite easy to go.

Adrian Fagerlund: Hey, next publisher on the block. Do you also like to create great content with complete freedom in how you want to do it? No rounds of revision because it works similar to PR, uh, and there's a whole new non cannibalizing revenue line where you can effectively monetize your editorial team without having any of those long winded partnerships going on? Yes. Was the answer to most of them. So the answer is who's who in the zoo in Australia, in the UK, in North America and just recently, we launched in Singapore where we're talking to the biggest and the brightest that are also very keen, which is super fun.

Michelle Lomas: Amazing. Congrats. On the global scale,

Adrian Fagerlund: Thanks

Michelle Lomas: Not easy. Lots of hustling. I imagine.

Adrian Fagerlund: It's been so fun. Uh, I do look forward to sleeping sometime in the coming three or four years.

Michelle Lomas: Just to clarify, is there a time limit on how much this content goes up? Is it evergreen in a traditional publisher sense? How does that work?

Adrian Fagerlund: Yeah, so there's a self-service platform, even though we have support wherever you need it. Every single brief gets reviewed by our team before it touches publishers, but that brief builder, anyone could use it. I used to jokingly say in the beginning, I was like, oh, it's as easy as creating a Facebook campaign until I actually tried doing that and realized that, arguably, our platform is much more straightforward. Especially these days.

Michelle Lomas: It's not easy making a Facebook campaign.

Adrian Fagerlund: I tried it it's yeah.

Michelle Lomas: It's how do I get my targeting? Right? And then every time it pings you back at no, that's not right or this, like, it's not easy.

Adrian Fagerlund: It's time consuming as well. So we wanted to make something that literally anyone could do.

Adrian Fagerlund: You don't need PR experience. You don't need to be a content creator. You don't need to be well wor versed in performance. It's super easy. Mm-hmm . And as part of that, you also set your parameters. That's your timings, your budgets, your CPC, and that. And in when you set the timing, you said it from say, 1st of March to last of July mm-hmm

Adrian Fagerlund: And that means that that's when the content will go live and it's during that time that the publisher can seed the content. And that's what that means is that that's how any publisher gets eyeballs on a content piece. They send it out on Facebook and Twitter. They do an EDM and electronic direct mail send out.

Adrian Fagerlund: They might change the content. So it looks different and put it on another vertical of theirs. So something like that mm-hmm so they really work hard to get eyeballs from that into the content. Mm-hmm, , that's what publishers do during the campaign timing you set. However, most of the content pieces are evergreen.

Adrian Fagerlund: They last forever, because it just simply doesn't make sense for a publisher to take the time to go and take it down. Right? Yeah. And it also compromises their own SEO. So if they've built out SEO through this. They don't want to compromise that. So they just leave it, leave it.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Great. It's almost like a nice compliment to your SEO program as well then isn't it?

Adrian Fagerlund: It doesn't doesn't hurt.

Michelle Lomas: Doesn't hurt. No, I found this great quote from your co-founder Chris on a Fin Review article, which I thought was quite interesting. And I wanna talk about this a little bit and you're like processing how you built the business. It said before the lead Facebook and Google had over publishers seemed insurmountable, but now there are tons of direct to consumer brands whose return on investment on Facebook is going backwards and are hungry for more advertising channels.

Michelle Lomas: It's created a moment for publishers to reenter the conversation when it comes to contextual and mindset based targeting. I completely agree with this in a lot of sense. We've got a cookie-less world coming. Targeting is going backwards. Inflation, you know, is definitely hitting a lot of these publishers as well.

Michelle Lomas: So talk me through that process. And when you guys realized that you had something big here.

Adrian Fagerlund: Yeah, no. What? He said 100%, but I do think that it's not, we're not replacing anything. We're a new tool in the toolbox for marketers that are trying to achieve big awareness, big brand build while also having the luxury of focusing on return on investment and does that make my job easier? The fact that it's getting more saturated in that environment? Yes, but I think any clever marketer has a mix on their marketing spend.

Michelle Lomas: I really love this. Publishers have always had this tremendous impact on readers and influence, right.

Michelle Lomas: But publishers, in essence, they shape culture. They shape trends. By about 5, 10 years ago, the whole influencer scene came in and it really created such a big divide between the cost to access publishers and that influence versus the cost to access influencers in social. So it sounds to me like what you guys are doing are kind of really bridging that gap between the two and providing this incredible accessible way to access what have always been cultural influences, publishers themselves. Do you feel like this is maybe disrupting PR?

Adrian Fagerlund: I very much enjoy the act of presenting to a PR agency. What we do, because the first initial reaction is usually a little bit of panic because it is

Michelle Lomas: you're taking my job

Adrian Fagerlund: that's right, right.

Adrian Fagerlund: Yeah. But, but what they quickly realize, and, and we work with a lot of them, the noticeable ones, smaller ones, boutique ones, where they use our platform. For horses for courses it's not for everything. So one thing to keep in mind, there needs to be an action in mind as a brand. What do you want to happen here?

Adrian Fagerlund: Usually it's come in, browse our store and buy something, please. Yeah, it might be subscribed to this or download this or go to this playlist on Spotify. That can also be a, a CTA, a call to action, but it needs to have one because otherwise the publisher does all the work and they have nowhere to send someone and they don't get remunerated so it doesn't work. But there are challenges with PR. Especially now in Australia, I find there's a little bit of musical chairs going on in the publishing game. There's a lot of people changing roles. So even if you're this super connected PR person that have connections over there and over there, then that person in question moves, you gotta kind of start all over again.

Adrian Fagerlund: So for PR people to have something like Linkby where there is a financial incentive for the publisher to jump on and it's quite quick, they can use that as I guess, a silver bullet.

Michelle Lomas: I feel like what you guys do is kind of like adding something new to something that is starting to become a bit stale. You know, we're, we're talking about marketers. Who've had one or two or three different publishers on a plan for the last, like 10 or 15 years. And that's worked well for them up until this point.

Michelle Lomas: But now we are sort of going backwards in a lot of ways because the ability to target at a niche level is gone. And what you guys are doing is being able to funnel a lot of that advertising and marketing spend back into publishing, which disappeared for quite a while, because there were. what seemingly were better targeting options at a lower cost on social networks, on Facebook, on Google, et cetera.

Michelle Lomas: So it's really exciting what you guys are doing. And it, it feels like you are really reinvigorating the publishing world in a lot of ways and finding sort of a new product that takes some of the old world editorial strength and combines that with some of the new world measurement structures and thinking.

Michelle Lomas: So it's really exciting.

Adrian Fagerlund: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that's definitely the ambition and we have a second product as well. Now that we have well and truly launched in Australia, it's with Daily Mail and Refinery29 globally, and more markets coming or more publishers coming, uh, where we do look at the scale to an even higher extent.

Adrian Fagerlund: So looking at how can we get brands seen all across these sites and there's products out there that do that already. However, one could argue, who we might to say is that they feel a little bit disjointed from the actual tone of voice, the value that the publisher brings. So we've kind of looked at that and brought our second product to the market where if you're a brand and you wanna be seen at a lot across publishers, you can create a brief for us.

Adrian Fagerlund: And then those publishers that are participating in this will then feature that, uh, mini article, if you will. After the feature article. So what that means is if you go and say Urban List or Pedestrian or our media titles or something like that, you see an article that you like, you click that and then infinite scroll takes over.

Adrian Fagerlund: As in, if you scroll past that original article, another article that looks, feels and reads like that specific publisher starts. And that's where we have worked out some smarts that that's automatically fed in. And it gives you a mini article about a brand that again, feels very native to that publisher.

Adrian Fagerlund: So that's giving publishers another way to monetize their pages without necessarily giving into just complete ad chaos. Mm mm.

Michelle Lomas: I didn't prepare you for this question. This might be a hard one.

Adrian Fagerlund: Oh, try me.

Michelle Lomas: What do you think the future is of publishing?

Adrian Fagerlund: Hmm, good question. I don't know. I do think there is this continuous battle of how do we keep the lights on?

Adrian Fagerlund: How do we keep the connection with our audience? And I think being creative, just like you are in your your content creation about your, you know, ad serving or how you take money to monetize the content or whatever you might do as a publisher. Not forgetting that, you know, it's longevity play. You need to keep in mind your audience. And I think looking to products that allow you to do both meaning, create great content, potentially keep the lights on at the same time and, you know, respect your audience. I think that's the future.

Michelle Lomas: Mm. Yeah, it's been a really interesting 10/15 years hasn't it? To see what's happened to the publishing industry and you can obviously digital publishers hard to crack, but those that have are doing really well, um, more of the traditional publishers, if they haven't evolved fast enough, We've seen those brands, you know, well known Aussie brands close, and that's been really sad.

Michelle Lomas: So it's great to see people like you guys coming in and trying to offer new solutions for publishers to keep that industry going because people love it. People love to read content. They love to get it from multiple sources and it's important for us to have a wide range of different sources of information.

Michelle Lomas: So, yeah, it's really great what you guys are doing for the industry as well.

Adrian Fagerlund: Yeah, I'll take no credit, but yeah. Thank you so much. And I do feel like we, we started from solving problems that we were having. And I think continuing to keep that mindset will be very good for us.

Michelle Lomas: Well, Adrian, thank you. Thank you for joining us.

Michelle Lomas: We'll put some, some URLs in the show notes. If people wanna check you guys out and see what you guys do and good luck with your mission.

Adrian Fagerlund: Thank you. I do have an offer as well. Like if anyone's listening and they're like, You know, I, I really want to give this a try, but to your point, I don't really know what the story is, or I don't know how to shape a brief.

Adrian Fagerlund: We do offer creative services. So we have a team of experts that just help, you know, dissect what you're all about and then shape briefs that way and then set you up for success. Uh, and anyone listening, referring back to this podcast, just email us, um, just sales@linkby.com or my email, which is adrian@linkby.com.

Adrian Fagerlund: And just let us know you heard it here and then we can give you our creative services for free, and then you can get to start your journey, uh, and make your brand famous that way. Love that. Yep.

Michelle Lomas: Thanks to Adrian for the chat and check out the episode notes to find out more about Linkby including details of that offer. Now, you know more about Linkby. How about in return you give us a follow on your pod app? Maybe a rate and review too. It'll take you less than five minutes and will help us a lot.

Michelle Lomas: Plus you won't ever miss a really cool episode like that. Again, much more. Great marketing chat from interesting folks coming your way when Flex your Hustle next drops. I'm Michelle Lomas. Talk to you soon and keep hustling.