The difference between an earned link and a bought one, said plainly
Digital PR and paid placement produce the same-looking thing: your brand name on a masthead with a link. They are not the same asset, and one of them is a risk.
An earned link means a journalist decided your data was worth citing. No money moved. The link is editorial, it's do-follow by default, and it passes authority because Google's whole system is built on the assumption that editorial citations mean something.
A paid placement means you paid for inclusion. That's advertising, and there's nothing wrong with advertising — but Google's link spam policy is explicit that a link acquired for payment must carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Plenty of Indian publications will sell you a do-follow anyway. If your last agency delivered eight national placements in a month at a flat rate, you almost certainly bought them, and they are sitting in your backlink profile with no disclosure on them.
Where the story comes from: three weeks, your own data
Nobody covers a company because it exists. They cover a number they can put in a headline. The good news is that most businesses are sitting on one and have never noticed — pricing you quote every week, a support queue, an onboarding funnel, a booking pattern that shifts by season.
Here's the sequence, and what we need from you at each stage.
- Week 1 — the data hunt. A 90-minute session with whoever owns your numbers. We look for something you can publish without exposing a client, then pressure-test whether a business editor would care. Most of what we look at gets rejected here. That's the job.
- Week 1, end — the headline test. We write the headline the journalist would write. If it isn't interesting as a headline, no amount of design saves it, and we go back to the data rather than forward to the deck.
- Week 2 — the asset. The analysis, the charts, a page on your site holding the full dataset, and a press release that reads like a news story instead of a company announcement. The on-site page matters: it's what late coverage links to, months after the news cycle ends.
- Week 3 — pitching. Named journalists, individually. Personalised first lines, the data attached, an offer of a spokesperson for comment. Then follow-ups, which is where most agencies quietly stop.
- Weeks 4–6 — coverage and the report. Live URLs, link attributes, what got picked up, what got ignored, and an honest note on what we'd change if you run a second one.
Which desks we pitch, and what a realistic outcome looks like
The target list depends on your sector, but it's usually built from four groups: the business desks at the national dailies and their digital arms, the startup and tech press, the trade title that covers your specific industry, and the regional business press in the cities where you operate.
For a B2B or D2C brand in India that typically means names like Economic Times, Mint, Business Standard and Moneycontrol on the national side, Inc42, YourStory and Entrackr in startup coverage, plus whichever trade publication your buyers actually read. Naming them here describes the target list. It is not a claim that we have placed you, or anyone, in any of them.
On volume: we build a list of 80–150 named journalists per campaign and pitch every one individually. What lands is a low single-digit number of placements in a good campaign. Syndication can multiply that — one pickup on a wire-carried title sometimes reproduces across regional editions — but syndicated copies are usually the same story on the same network and we count them separately so the number doesn't flatter us.
We won't quote you a hit rate as a promise. It moves with the strength of the data, the news cycle that week, and whether a bigger story broke on Tuesday. Anyone quoting a fixed rate is quoting a number they don't control.
- Good campaign: three or more relevant do-follow links from publications your buyers read, plus a data page that keeps attracting citations for a year.
- Acceptable campaign: one strong placement and a handful of trade pickups. Still cheaper per link than most agency link building.
- Failed campaign: zero coverage. It happens. You'll get the full pitch log, the replies, and our read on whether the data was weak or the timing was.
What ₹1,75,000 buys, and what it doesn't
One flat fee per campaign, GST extra, invoiced at kickoff. No monthly minimum, no lock-in, and the data asset is yours whether or not anything lands.
| Included in the campaign fee | Not included |
|---|---|
| Data design: what to ask, what to measure, how to make it defensible | Any payment to a publication for coverage |
| Analysis of data you already hold, or fielding of a survey you own | Third-party research panel costs, quoted separately before you commit |
| The full asset: press release, on-site data page, charts | Video production, event work or design retainers |
| A named media list of 80–150 relevant journalists, shared with you | A promise of coverage in any named publication |
| Three weeks of individual pitching and follow-up, thread visible to you | Ongoing monthly PR — this is a campaign, not a retainer |
| Spokesperson prep: the three questions you'll be asked and how to answer | Crisis PR, reputation management or takedown work |
| Live-URL report with link attributes, plus what we'd change next time | Broadcast or print-only mentions with no link, unless you ask us to chase them |
Second campaigns, and when we tell you not to run one
A second campaign is the same ₹1,75,000. We don't discount it, because the work isn't smaller — new angle, new list, new pitching cycle.
The one exception: if the second campaign runs a fresh cut of a dataset we've already built and validated, the data-build stage largely disappears. In that case we scope it and quote it lower before you commit, rather than publishing a discount here that we can't honour for every case.
There are two situations where we'll tell you to skip it. The first is if the first campaign failed on data quality rather than luck — running the same weak number at a different angle wastes ₹1,75,000 twice. The second is if your site can't hold the authority you're about to earn. Sending national links at a site with broken canonicals and a crawl problem is expensive plumbing. Fix the technical foundation first; the links will still be available in two months.
What we guarantee on a PR campaign
We guarantee the work: the list gets built, every name on it gets pitched individually, every follow-up gets sent, and you can read the entire thread. If we pitch fewer than the agreed number of journalists, we refund the difference. That's a promise about effort, and effort is the only part of PR anyone actually controls.
We also guarantee the measurement. Your referring-domain count and branded search volume get frozen on day one, and the 90-day report is against those numbers rather than against a screenshot of the best week.
Where the company guarantee sits — trailing-90-day qualified organic leads frozen at kickoff, beaten within 90 days or we keep working free — is on the SEO retainer, not on a one-off campaign. A single PR campaign is too blunt an instrument to carry a leads guarantee, and pretending otherwise would be the same overclaiming this page exists to argue against.
What we will never guarantee: a named publication, a specific journalist, or a ranking position. See what we charge across services if you're comparing this against the retainer.