Case Study: How Amy used Sourcee to secure a backlink in OK! Magazine (DR 74)

I'm Amy, a personal trainer who specialises in pregnancy and postnatal fitness.

Under the brand of No Sweat Mama, I run local, in-person community classes in addition to online courses to help women maintain their fitness throughout pregnancy and beyond.

It's all about the Keywords

After signing up to Sourcee you land on the keyword page.

The keywords you enter dictate the type of requests you will be notified about. If ANY of your keywords are present in a new request, you will get a notification.

I set about doing a brain dump of all the keywords relevant to me, and my business, and came up with the following:

I then let Sourcee do it's thing.

Requests incoming

I think my niche is particularly good for journo requests as I got lots of requests flooding into my inbox.

Here's a sample of some of the hits that I have had:

That's not to say that they were all relevant to me but it was a good sign that Sourcee was working correctly.

A super relevant request comes in

On 13th April I received a notification that the following journo request had been tweeted:

As you can see, it matched two of my keywords and is a perfect request for my expertise.

I clicked on 'Respond Now' and got taken to the response page.

I quickly drafted a response and posted it to the journalist as a direct message via Twitter. That can all be done through the Sourcee app.

Shortly after, I received an email from the journo to arrange a call.

The call

On 18th April, I had the call with the journo. She was super nice and the call lasted less than 20 minutes.

At the end of the call I was asked to send in a few pictures which I did by sending a link to a folder on my Google Drive (it's best not to send attachments - you can find out why in this guide to responding to #JournoRequests).

Going live

I was told on the 20th May that the article was going live and you can find it below:

Fitness and pregnancy: 'I continued cycling until 38 weeks pregnant and my baby was fine'

From my experience, the turnaround time from initial input, to an article going live, varies a lot. This one took just over a month, which is pretty long.

You can normally expect articles to be up within a few days, but if the content is evergreen, the publication date can be pushed into the future, as was the case here.

Wrapping up

I've had experience before of earning backlinks through #JournoRequest on Twitter and PR Facebook groups before.

But that was when I had the time to dedicate to constantly scouring the platforms for relevant requests, all day, everyday.

I just don't have the time or, frankly, inclination to do that anymore.

So Sourcee is perfect. It gets rid of all manual scraping and only notifies me with requests relevant to me.

Plus, I can now get to the front of the queue.

I've had a quick look at the original tweet from the journalist and they still had replies to the tweet days after they posted it.

Thanks to Sourcee, I was able to get a response to them within 20 minutes, it could have been quicker if I had acted on the notification as soon as it came in.

While I can't be sure being quick secured me a slot, it certainly can't have hurt!

My top tip - Tweak keywords

It's important to keep an eye on your keywords.

I noticed I was missing plurals for some of my keywords and I probably missed out on a few requests because of it.

Also check Sourcee's list of requests for new keyword inspiration and make sure to add them in.