When I first started collecting online press appearances for my clients and for myself (when the internet first came to be!), we believed that the links to these videos, articles, and interviews would live on forever.
Today, we know that’s not the case; Websites and online magazines go out of business, and media outlets are constantly updating their sites which may cause broken links. If all you have access to is a link, you could risk losing its content when that link is broken. Often that content is very validating and should be coveted and shared indefinitely.
The Benefits of Keeping Your Own Copies
Consider your revenue streams. Why redirect your customers to someone else’s webpage, when all of your revenue streams are on your site? Keep users in your conversion funnel — and make sure to credit the sources properly.
Use it or lose it. You may have links to places your business has appeared in the media — which is great, and so wonderful for you! However, if you don’t have your own copy of your latest interview or TV appearance, a broken link means you lose it forever.
The Best Ways to Collect and Save Copies of Your Coverage
First of all, it goes without saying that you should have permission to post someone else’s content. Bloggers and news outlets do benefit when you link to their content and will appreciate you valuing their permission enough to ask. Most often permission is granted with enthusiasm and credit should always be given.
If they say yes (yay!), there are a few ways that you can repost their content while giving them credit (and as always, please try to respect any process that they may request you follow).
Articles and Text Interviews
Copy content and paste it into your blog. Make it clear that you’re quoting or posting someone else’s content. If you’re posting several sentences, use the block quote feature of any blog editor to set the text apart from everything else on your page. Another option is to take a screenshot of their article, complete with their headers and branding, which can expand to a readable size on your site. You can even embed a PDF version of your appearance using this WordPress Plugin (Here’s an example of one of Lisa’s Huffington Post articles).
TV and Video
If you’re lucky, a news outlet or blogger who has featured you may be able to share the actual video file with you for you to embed. See if you can include the file on your own blog or YouTube channel. If they are unable to provide one, but you have permission to use the video, use a free YouTube or Vimeo clip converter like this one, or pay for a program such as Camtasia, which allows you to record straight from your computer screen on both Mac and PC (depending on what version of Windows you have, you may be able to record audio too).
Radio or Podcast
Ask if you can receive the audio file of your airtime. If you have your own podcast, ask if you can share some of your interview there. You can also embed the file on your website using a podcast plugin or by uploading it to your media library.
We like the Repost App for allowing users to easily repost the Instagram posts they like, while easily and visually giving credit to the original post. Repost will even copy the original caption to your clipboard so that you can easily include it in your post.
Don’t forget: Save everything to your hard drive — with backups.
Kindly note: We don’t like to refer to ourselves as “experts”, but we do take great pride in sharing our business advice, distilled down from our extensive research and (often) mind-blowingly frustrating experiences we’ve endured and learned from. We try our best to create a clear and humble approach to good business tactics that you and your teams can understand and turn into effective and productive revenue streams. We are actual, real people and look forward to supporting you in any way we can, whether it’s on the topic of this post, or other business development and marketing communications you may be involved in, or considering. We are proud of the services we provide; if you don’t see what you’re looking for, just ask us – we also take pride in being super responsive!
