If you work in PR or marketing in the travel industry, as we do at the Tartan Group, I’m sure you have seen a lot of requests come through for comped trips. This is something we love putting together for great journalists. It gives the journalist an opportunity to see the property, gives us a chance to form a relationship with them as we plan their trip, and hopefully we will both get a story out of it.
I'm Sorry, Your Blog Is Not Worth a Free Stay
Determining a journalist’s merit used to be quite easy. They might write “Hello James, I work for Condé Nast and I would like to visit your hotel.” That’s an easy yes!
It gets a little more challenging with smaller publications, but we can rely on tools such as Cision, Meltwater, Muckrack, and LinkedIn. You can normally get some decent third party information on the publication.
Unfortunately with websites this is much harder. As the head of digital strategy, I’m often asked to determine the worth of a website or blog. This system is not perfect, so if you have some tips I would love hear your opinion on how I do things.
I received this email last week:
Subject: URGENT: Press Feature – Long Beach Lodge
Dear James,
I hope all is well. My name is name and I am the press officer and senior producer for publication name (website.com) in New York. I am writing as our magazine’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Editor’s Name, would like to visit The Long Beach Lodge from June 14th through June 17th (3 nights) in an effort to feature the hotel as “the best” and only wilderness hotel to stay at in luxury properties in the Tofino, Canada area.
We are a luxury travel and lifestyle platform with a high monthly user number (over 450,000 visitors) ….
Editor’s Name
Press Relations/Senior Producer
Company Name
Domain Name
On the surface this is a fairly typical email. The things I note are the domain, the names of everyone involved, and the monthly user number.
First thing’s first. A basic Whois search of the domain to see how long it has been around and where it’s registered to.
Domain was registered in 2010, and the names match. Looking good so far!
If a site passes this first test I will do some digging on the page itself. I try and click on a large number of pages to figure out if the structure of the site makes sense, if there are any broken links, or when the last update was. This site has none of the social media links working and the “Media Page” was last updated in 2013 and is “coming soon”… not a good start.
The next step is to figure out if a link from this website will pass on any link juice from an SEO perspective. I like to use Moz.com but there are many other services that can help with a backlink analysis such as AHREFS. On Moz we will go to the Open Site Explorer and put the domain in.
These stats are not good. I will not be getting any link juice from this. The most troubling stat is 13 links from 3 root domains. That means there’s only 3 websites out there that value this website enough to link to it. Not a good sign.
I’m starting to question the traffic of 450,000 hits per month…
Let’s compare the site in question to another site: The Times Colonist, our local Victoria, BC newspaper. Cision has a traffic estimate of 307,000 hits per month (our website in question is not listed in Cision, another strike against them).
That’s what a website of this size should look like! A nice healthy authority with lots of incoming links with lots of social shares. I find it very doubtful that a website claiming to be 1/3 larger would have such a poor link profile.
Now I don’t want to write them off yet, maybe they have a huge online influence that I’m just not seeing so let’s dig into their social media profiles.
This is the Instagram profile of the “creative director” who earlier referred to himself as the “senior producer and press officer.”
Not impressive.
Here’s the “founder and editor in chief”
Not good. But maybe they have a big twitter account?
Ugh… LinkedIn?
That won’t work. Pinterest?
Come on!
We did not approve this press trip.
The next day we receive the exact same letter but addressed to another one of our clients:
Subject: Press Feature – Nimmo Bay
Dear James,
I hope all is well. My name is name and I am the press officer and senior producer for publication name (website.com) in New York. I am writing as our magazine’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, Editor’s Name, would like to visit Nimmo Bay from June 14th through June 17th (3 nights) in an effort to feature the hotel as “the best” and only wilderness hotel to stay at in luxury properties in Canada.
We are a luxury travel and lifestyle platform with a high monthly user number (over 450,000 visitors) …..
Editor’s Name
Press Relations/Senior Producer
Company Name
Domain Name
Needless to say we responded in the same way to this request. The next day we heard from a destination marketing organization that we work with that had also received the same email… They are making the rounds.
We get requests like this all the time. It’s unfortunate as there are many great online outlets that we love working with. There are others who are misrepresenting themselves and hurting the whole industry of online travel journalists and bloggers. 
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn and is republished here with permission.
Editor’s note: At MatadorU, our online travel media school, we’ll teach you how to create meaningful media around press trips and other assignments.