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Posted on by Lisa Chapman

Need More High Page Rank Backlinks?

Citizen Journalism for SEO and website traffic

Citizen Reporter Sites – Overlooked Marketing & SEO

If your SEO Plan embraces a content marketing strategy, this is one tip that you just don’t want to miss. Find out how to repurpose your press releases and expand beyond the standard online press release sites. Gain valuable ‘link juice’ (SEO value) and increase traffic to your site.

Citizen Journalism Boosts Your SEO and Page Rank

Citizen reporter sites are often overlooked. But they are important to online marketing for a few very good reasons;

  • Content marketing:

    If content marketing is one of your primary online social media marketing strategies, you want to post content in as many places as is appropriate – especially if those places also have accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. The social media attached to them increases their traffic, thereby indirectly increasing eyeballs on your content.

  • Create another ‘spoke’ for your ‘hub’:

    Think of your primary website as the hub, with all of your other online ‘properties’ as spokes (where properties = all sites that carry a backlink to your primary website). These spokes actually serve as doorways for traffic into your hub website. One primary objective of your social media marketing is to create as many credible spoke properties as possible that act as doorways into your website. The more spokes you have, the more people will find you. And they will be those who are more likely to be highly interested in you, not just browsing.

  • Increase your backlink juice:

    These spokes not only help us get found in the literal sense, but the ‘right’ ones also help increase our page rank so that Google sees us as important. If we have backlinks from high ‘page rank’ sites, then some of that high page rank ‘link juice’ gets passed to us. Enough of those is very important to increase our own page rank, thus getting higher position on Google’s search results page. So when we have a higher page rank, we’re more likely to show up on page one Google. Thus more people find us in the indirect sense.

  • Google “Your URL”:

    All these sites that carry your content and backlinks should show up in the search results. Just the sheer volume of sites will be impressive, and will give searchers the impression that you’re credible. Especially if you’re on a PR site like this one: www.ireport.cnn.com – it’s a CNN property (with a page rank 8 of 10 – VERY high).

Why Citizen Journalism?

Citizen Journalism sites are coming into their own, and rightly so. It’s the citizens of any location who are at the scene even before an event breaks. And they have the technology in their pocket or purse to record the event with audio and photo documentation. Citizen Journalism sites often give an event deeper coverage than traditional media.

List of Citizen Reporter Sites

So where should you look for more opportunities to post on citizen reporter sites? Here is short list that is generally applicable to most any story (PR = Page Rank):

iReport: PR 8 – http://www.ireport.cnn.com CNN iReport is probably about as mainstream a platform as citizen journalists can access.

Examiner: PR 8 – http://www.examiner.com/ Launched in 2008, Examiner.com is a dynamic entertainment, news and lifestyle network that serves more than 20 million monthly readers across the U.S. and around the world.

WikiNews: PR 8 – http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikinews is an off-shoot of Wikipedia, and as with the online encyclopedia, Wikinews is a free-content, collaborative platform.

DigitalJournal: PR 6 – http://www.DigitalJournal.com is a media outlet that sets out to find originality, fresh perspectives and an understanding of the context of events around the world.

NewsVine: PR 7 – www.newsvine.com Newsvine is a collaborative news website, owned by msnbc.com.

NewsParticipation: PR 3 – www.newsparticipation.com News Participation is a fairly new online community aimed at citizen journalists.

Now awaken the sleeping reporter within you and go after that news angle to your story!

If you finished reading this post, others will too, so take 5 seconds (!) to share on Facebook, Twitter or your favorite social scoop. Thanks!

For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.

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ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:

Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals – both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their brand, attract their Target Audience, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert them into Buyers. You can reach her via email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at: