Why Thought Leadership is the New PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
Overview
On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Amy Rosenberg—seasoned PR strategist, agency founder, and author of “A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits, and PR Leaders.” Amy demystifies today’s PR landscape, explains why digital PR is now vital for Google and AI visibility, and shares her practical approach to integrating thought leadership, content, and social media into campaigns that actually move the needle for brands of any size.
About the Guest
Amy Rosenberg is a veteran PR strategist and agency founder with decades of experience helping organizations of all sizes build visibility, credibility, and real-world results. She is the author of two books about PR, and a go-to resource for business owners and PR professionals seeking honest, actionable guidance in a rapidly changing media landscape.
- Website: amyrosenberg.com
- LinkedIn: Amy Rosenberg
- Resources & Blog: PR Marketplace
- Book: “A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits, and PR Leaders”
Actionable Insights
- You don’t always need PR—start by building a solid online presence and content base before layering in media outreach.
- Modern PR is more than press releases; it’s about thought leadership, digital media coverage, and leveraging those wins for SEO and AI search visibility.
- High domain authority media links are essential—these are trusted by both Google and AI and provide lasting credibility.
- Thought leadership is not just for CEOs—start with strong blog content, pitch expert articles, and build step by step.
- Podcasts are a powerful and efficient PR channel that drive backlinks, content, and allow leaders to practice their message.
- Social media should be systematized—pick your platforms, create rules for content sharing, and always tag media and partners.
- PR impact can be measured: use tools like Muckrack to connect coverage with Google Analytics and tie PR wins to business goals.
- If you’re starting from zero, a monthly blogging program is the best place to begin—then layer in PR as your strategy and resources grow.
Great Moments (with Timestamps)
- 00:55 – Do You Really Need PR?
Amy explains why sometimes it’s best to start with your online presence before pursuing PR. - 01:51 – PR and AI Search
Why digital PR and authentic media coverage are now crucial for Google and AI visibility. - 03:40 – What is PR in 2025?
Amy demystifies modern PR—from media relations to crisis comms and strategy. - 05:46 – PR and SEO
How high authority media coverage drives both search and credibility. - 07:16 – Thought Leadership for All
Practical steps for building authority, even if you’re not a well-known CEO. - 10:29 – The Power of Podcasts
Why podcast guesting is a high-ROI PR move for content and reputation. - 12:49 – Social Media Systems
How to systematize content, media tagging, and reputation management. - 14:29 – Measuring PR
How to connect PR wins with analytics and business outcomes. - 17:39 – The Best First Step
Amy’s advice: Start with monthly blogging, then layer in PR and keep your marketing calendar organized.
Insights
“You don’t always need PR—focus on building a solid online presence and content before going after media.”
“Authentic media coverage and thought leadership now drive both SEO and AI search visibility.”
“Podcasts are high-authority PR: great for backlinks, content, and practicing your message.”
“Systematizing your social media is key—pick platforms, create rules, and make your media wins visible.”
“You can measure PR’s impact: connect wins to real business results with analytics and clear goals.”
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John Jantsch (00:01.496)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Amy Rosenberg. She's a seasoned PR strategist, agency founder and author with deep expertise in building visibility and credibility for organizations of all sizes. We are going to talk about her latest book, A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits and PR Leaders. So Amy, welcome to the show.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (00:28.578)
Hi, thanks for having me.
John Jantsch (00:30.912)
So you cover a lot of ground on the book. mean, it's something that's called a practical guide is usually pretty broad. I mean, traditional media relations, obviously SEOs in there, AIs in there. What are the most common misconceptions basically when it comes to PR that you see businesses still having in 2025?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (00:55.96)
Well, I'm gonna laugh. If people still think that we need to do press releases, that's like an old misconception that like people should actually be over that by now. But mainly, this is gonna be funny. You don't always need PR. That's kind of the thing. So here's the thing. And that's the whole book title, practical. We need to be practical about things. We don't need to do everything. And sometimes we can do PR. Sometimes we can do a press release, but.
We need to kind of like think about it first and get things organized first. And actually, we need to have ideally a nice online presence first. And then we can go and do some PR. And right now, PR is actually helping with AI search. So showing up in AI. So the old story used to be, PR helps with SEO, which is showing up in Google.
John Jantsch (01:43.47)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (01:51.544)
But now, well, we still want to show up high in Google. And we can do that through digital PR. And I can talk about how. But now, apparently, PR is very important for AI search. But of course, I'm going to have to dig into that because nobody is using that AI.
John Jantsch (02:08.066)
Well, I think there's no question that the AI crawlers, if we're going to call them that, are really looking at trusted media sources to get a lot of their information. there's no mystery, I think, in why that's become more important.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (02:26.284)
Yeah, and so it's always been a mystery to talk about PR because it, well, it's PR people actually like to make it very mysterious. So what I tried to do with my first book and then also now my second is to demystify it. So the first book is for PR people because I started to see a lot of them actually weren't trained and there's kind of a right way and a wrong way to do things. And oftentimes when we have rules,
that kind of helps us in a hard field and it kind of gives us some guidelines to stick by. But as I finished that book, I was thinking, well, this book is really possibly not helpful for business owners because, well, I'm giving a little bit too many examples that the PR people need. And so this book, like five years later, six years later, is much more streamlined, stripped down on the media relations tactics.
really actually leads with thought leadership and how thought leadership, it's always been a part of PR, but now thought leadership is really the key to getting up higher on Google and AI.
John Jantsch (03:40.366)
All right, I want to come back to that. But I think part of the confusion is, you know, in the old days, before we had all these digital platforms, it was really more of a, it was very much a relationship game. was, know, who you knew at the publications because they were very gated. You know, how you could spin a story in a way that was meaningful to a journalist. You those were the real skills. But then all of sudden, you know,
We've got Facebook, or we've got blogs, and we've got Reddit, and we've got all these other things that essentially can be lumped into PR. I mean, how do you help people kind of say what PR actually is?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (04:19.138)
Well, good question. And I love that because it's I do. Honestly, I kind of do want a little bit of silo or separation. We can take a PR campaign and we can transform it into content to anything. Right. But PR typically is like you're saying the media relations aspect. But also there's a lot of more sometimes some strategy in there.
some crisis comms, some crisis prep. So sometimes we'll know we can pick out our negative aspects and get organized around those and then actually not necessarily spin it, but kind of look at the positive side of our negative aspects and put the stories around those.
John Jantsch (05:09.422)
So you already mentioned SEO and I'm seeing a lot of SEO folks, know, it used to just be, we could get keyword rankings by doing X, Y, and Z all day long. That's how it worked. And I've seen certainly a lot of them say that's not working so well anymore. And I see a lot of SEO people talking more about PR, not as a siloed practice, but as a part of SEO now. And then you make that case certainly in the book.
Do you have an example of where integrating SEO or really thinking like PR as a core component of SEO made a measurable difference?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (05:46.788)
Well, I feel like right now I'm the worst salesperson ever and I'm the one that will never tout my profession too much because it's a little salesy. But a lot of SEO people have been saying that PR is the actual driver of authentic links. So here's the thing, Google knows when you're buying links, sometimes. So you can kind of like forget,
John Jantsch (06:06.222)
Yeah, totally.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (06:16.792)
sponsored articles sometimes, depending. And then we just need to get our clients, if we can, ourselves on high domain authority websites. And the media actually has a higher domain authority than other websites. So not only are they more credible, well, some media, more credible in the public's eye.
they're more credible in Google's eyes. So if you're showing up in Google, then ideally you would show up in an AI chat box as well. But I mean, that to me is a little nebulous. I feel like more research needs to be done on that. you don't get, anyway, you don't get all of those links that you don't get to review in AI. So it's just gonna get really much more strategic and thoughtful. And that is...
really what PR people are good at.
John Jantsch (07:16.28)
So talk a little bit more about the, the idea of thought leadership. put, know, certainly there's, there's certain types of businesses, certain types of industries. makes a ton of sense, know, nonprofits. certainly makes a ton of sense. Do you feel like that, that needs to be, a strategic component of just about every business? mean, not just that person that's like, I'm, know, I'm this well-known CEO with a book and blah, blah, but just like every business almost has to have like.
their version of an influencer that is, you know, that's seen in the media.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (07:51.788)
Yeah, it would be great if they could. let me just back up a little bit. So thought leadership, so B2B media or thought leadership type of media, that's an easier way to do PR. It's easier to get results for that. So often we are not looking at relationships. We are looking at streamlining. want, because we can't make relationships with everybody. So we need to have good ways to scale our PR campaigns.
John Jantsch (08:02.926)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (08:18.07)
And so when we're doing thought leadership, that's positioning a person, whether it's an article or on the stage, we are streamlining everything because you're getting a lot more value actually in Google's eyes because it all ties back to, I don't know if you know the acronym EAT, I'm gonna mess about, but that's what thought leadership is, is EAT, which is the
John Jantsch (08:41.08)
Sure, of course.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (08:47.46)
what Google looks for. have human reviewers and they're looking for anyone that's writing on a topic to have experience, authority, trust, and there was another one. don't remember. Two T's.
John Jantsch (09:00.406)
It's the other E, the other E they add is expertise. So it's experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And so that's where obviously the media plays a big role, but also being able to say, I did this thing rather than telling somebody how to do it. Case studies, things of that nature have become really.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (09:04.06)
thank you.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (09:20.374)
Yeah, and I just want to add that we don't, we need to kind of start somewhere, right? We don't need to start. A lot of people get really tripped up over thought leadership because first of all, I mentioned this stage. Well, a lot of my clients are shy and they are running companies, they're CEOs and they're busy. know, who really has time to go out and do a lot of speaking engagements, right? So sometimes we will do that, but often we start, you got to start somewhere again. So we start with
content and this is where we're doing great blogs from the CEO and then we're taking that and turning it into a press article and then the press Article can run ideally on a high domain authority website and then our CEO doesn't have to go anywhere like for us We're really all about efficiencies, too. So and I feel like my clients they don't Maybe they don't have time to to get on a stage or
or they don't want to. So that's where this kind of like practical approach to public relations comes in.
John Jantsch (10:29.518)
How do you, I'm going to go through a couple of categories or a couple of platforms, should say, or channels, maybe is a better word, and relate them to PR. You know, I, I, you know, we're on a podcast today, recording this. I happen to think podcasts is amazing channel for thought leadership, for exposure, for backlinks, for content creation that really is not a huge lift for a lot of people, you know, to come and do those. How do you work podcasts or being a guest?
more specifically on a podcast into your overall PR world.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (11:03.46)
Good question. So first of all, they are huge for building domain authority or for getting SEO because, know, so often what we will do is podcasts are part of the whole thing. So we really get detailed with our media lists and this is where we have all of our lists, but we do outline DA. So to tell you the truth, before I decided to do, well, thank you for having me on the podcast.
John Jantsch (11:30.294)
Yeah.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (11:31.34)
I looked and you have a good DA, you have a really good like 54, which for my agency, I'm at like 20 something and I'm a small agency. So you are great. And then the media, they're around 80 to 100. so we look at that and then for some clients, again, they don't wanna be too, they're busy, we don't wanna bug them. And so we will vet.
John Jantsch (11:45.582)
in 70s, 80s, yeah.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (12:00.258)
where we replace them, and then we will also think about it as a way to practice our talking points. So this is where, again, starting somewhere. So if we do wanna go and do a speaking engagement, we do need a little visibility first to get our client accepted. So we start with podcasts, actually. And then sometimes, again, podcasts are more efficient to just keep doing those.
John Jantsch (12:07.597)
Yeah.
John Jantsch (12:23.052)
Mm-hmm.
John Jantsch (12:30.168)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so let's jump to another one. Social media. think for a lot of PR people, it's kind of a double-edged sword from a reputation standpoint. how do you view or how do you advise clients to, work social media into their overall marketing slash PR type of plans?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (12:49.496)
Well, again, I don't want to say again because I've never said this before, but I noticed that you do a lot of systems work. so we can't busy people, especially myself. We can't do anything without systems. So and so it might not be quote unquote strategic, but we need to get things done. And we do need some visibility on some of the platforms, not all of them. So we'll look at a client will think, OK, on what platforms do you want to
should they be on and then we will create kind of rules around how often we will post about something and a rule would be for example three posts per blog post and then another rule in different writing right you have to write the post differently and then another rule would be at least one if not two posts per media hit and we have to do those because
we have to thank the media and tag them. So anyway, so we have those systems and oftentimes we were a PR firm. So a lot of PR people will say, well, you do social, that's your job. You shouldn't silo it. Well, okay, but here's the thing. Sometimes people just hire us for PR and then we notice they're not doing social and we might need them to because we're looking at a crisis down the road. So we need some positive social now.
John Jantsch (14:16.077)
Mm.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (14:18.252)
And so we will just kind of say, okay, here's our system. This is what we're doing around this social and kind of get it done.
John Jantsch (14:29.74)
So PR, I know you're going to have an answer for this, but I got to set it up this way. know, PR is often looked at as, you know, as a nice to have, you know, you can't measure it. doesn't, it doesn't drive sales necessarily. How do you get a client over that or how do you actually prove to them that the PR is valuable?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (14:50.308)
Well, again, I just love your questions. Well, like I said, I'm the worst salesperson ever. So I don't. I don't fight people. don't have. Nobody has time for that also. And then also, in a way, they might be right. We have to look at the budget. It's all about your budget and your bandwidth. So some clients we can't we can't work with everybody. That's why we wrote. I wrote the book. But also we would like to work with.
And it doesn't matter what we want. It's who is ready for a PR and who's not. And it's gotta be somebody who you've gotta get your stuff together first, which is your base, which is content, I think, in this day and age. We've gotta have like a nice kind of streamlined thing going so that you're in the groove. We've gotta feed the beast. Then we can layer in some PR. And then we can put PR again on a program.
John Jantsch (15:31.821)
You
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (15:46.69)
where we can look at it like we have goals. They could be almost like sales quota goals, but for PR or content where we say, okay, we're gonna just, we're gonna do one campaign per quarter and that might just be enough. And we just have it all scheduled out so that we're not feeling like we're missing something. But we can't really, we're trying to measure our results, right?
So we do have a great database called Muckrack that is our software that connects with our clients' Google Analytics. And so we can track, like, hey, we have this online school. So we can track where our coverage landed in terms of the location. And we can track the enrollment for the school by location. So you can get really granular with that.
John Jantsch (16:19.681)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (16:45.326)
But at the end of the day, we're all working together as a marketing team in-house, you know, marketing team. And we're not going to say it was from the PR.
John Jantsch (16:54.958)
Yeah, right. So, all right. People listening today, we've been kind of all over the place talking about PR, SEO, a little bit about AI, content, social. If somebody's out there and they're thinking, you know, I need to do more in this, I mean, is there a single most important thing they can focus on, say, the next six months in your view? If somebody said, hey, I want to get the most out of it. And again, I'm not saying, I mean, maybe the best thing they can do is hire you.
But, you know, short of that, are there things that you're telling people that, you need to either stop doing this and start doing this, you know, over the next six months that you think would move the needle the most?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (17:39.204)
So if you're really just not doing anything, I would just say try and get yourself on a monthly blogging program for SEO. So then you might not consider that PR. But once you kind of get that going, then you can look at like the marketing calendar and kind of think about how when you can do some PR, when you can do some proactive PR. And if you look, I have a...
calendar on my website that is free. need to make sure that you can access the link, but it has, you could fill out your marketing calendar and I call it marketing, but a lot of it is PR. But to be clear, PR looks a little different these days. It's not a press release per se. It's an article or this, that, and the other. So if you're interested in learning more, there's a lot of great resources.
John Jantsch (18:28.354)
Yeah. Yeah.
John Jantsch (18:38.296)
Well, so where would you invite people to kind of find? I know we're going to have links. We have a link to your blog and PR resources. I see. So are there, is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about the book itself?
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (18:52.196)
Well, I'd love if they would like to connect on LinkedIn. And I'm doing a lot of posts there about PR. And then, yeah, if they want to go to the resources section, and it might actually be under Marketplace on my website, you can buy books there. But also, we have other things there that are free, like a bunch of videos that can walk you through the process.
John Jantsch (19:21.196)
Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.
Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (19:29.336)
Yay, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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