DEV Community: Steven Snell

Digital PR isn't dead, but most of what gets called digital PR now is just cold outreach with a nicer name

Steven Snell — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:16:28 +0000

An email landed in my inbox last week with the subject line "Digital PR opportunity for your site." I opened it because I'm curious about how these things are written now, the same way you might slow down for a fender bender.

It was three sentences. The sender loved my recent article (they didn't say which one). They had a piece on their client's blog that would be "a perfect resource" for my readers. Would I consider adding a link? That was it. No story, no angle, nothing a person would want if you stripped the link out of the request. Just an ask wearing a blazer.

I get some version of that email a few times a week now. Most of them use the phrase "digital PR" somewhere, and almost none of them are doing digital PR in any sense I'd recognize.

What the term used to buy you

Years ago I worked on a campaign for a client in the personal finance space. We had a genuinely interesting internal dataset about how people in different age brackets actually budgeted, not what they said they did in surveys. The whole job was turning that into something a journalist would want to write about on its own merits. We built the angle, cleaned up the numbers, wrote a tight summary, and pitched reporters who covered money and behavior.

The links came, but that was almost a side effect. The reason it worked is that we handed writers something they could use. A hook. A stat they hadn't seen. A reason for the piece to exist that had nothing to do with our client's SEO goals.

That's the version of digital PR I still believe in. It's slow, it's expensive, and it fails a lot. You spend real time on the story before you send a single email, and even then a lot of journalists ignore you. When it lands, though, you've earned something. A mention in a publication whose domain you could never buy your way onto, sitting next to a data point that was worth publishing.

How the label got hollowed out

Here's my honest read on what happened. "Link building" started to sound spammy, because a lot of it was. Google spent years telling everyone that buying and trading links was against the rules, and the phrase picked up a smell. So the industry needed a cleaner word for the same budget line, and "digital PR" was sitting right there, borrowed from an actual discipline that predates any of this.

The rebrand worked a little too well. Now the term covers everything from a genuine data-driven media campaign down to a mail-merged request to swap links, and everything in between calls itself the same thing. When a word stretches to cover that much ground, it stops meaning anything. The good practitioners get lumped in with the person sending forty identical emails an hour, and the person sending forty emails an hour gets to borrow the credibility of the good practitioners. Everybody loses except the second group.

The tell is whether there's a story

You can usually spot the difference in about four seconds, and it comes down to one question. Is there something here a journalist would actually want, or is the link the whole point?

Real digital PR leads with the thing worth covering. The pitch is built around a story, a survey nobody else ran, an angle on a trend that a reporter can turn into 800 words without doing your job for you. The link is the natural consequence of being useful, not the reason for the email.

Cold outreach dressed up as PR leads with the ask. You can feel it. There's a compliment that could apply to any site, a vague claim that some page is a "great resource," and then the request. Strip out the flattery and you're left with "please link to me." No story. Nothing a person would take if the link weren't attached.

A second tell is whether the email required any research. Did they read the thing they're complimenting? Could this exact message have gone to a thousand other sites with the URL swapped? If the answer is yes, it doesn't matter what they call it. It's a numbers game with a PR costume on.

Where I've landed on it

I'm not here to say digital PR is fake or dead. The good version is more effective than almost anything else I've seen for earning links that hold their value, precisely because it's hard and most people won't do the work. That's the whole point. The difficulty is the moat.

What frustrates me is watching a useful discipline get diluted by people who kept the label and skipped the labor. They figured out that "digital PR" opens more inboxes than "link exchange," and they were right, and now the term is worth a little less every month because of it.

So when I see "digital PR opportunity" in a subject line these days, I assume the worst until the email proves me wrong. Usually it doesn't. Occasionally one does, and those are the people I actually write back to.

If you do outreach for a living, I'm curious where you've landed. Do you still call it digital PR, or has the term gotten too muddy to be worth using? And if you're on the receiving end like me, what's the tell that makes you delete on sight?

The SEO advice of the past ten years doesn't work the way it used to

Steven Snell — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:02:32 +0000

I still remember the spreadsheet. Keyword, search volume, difficulty score. Pick the keyword, hit the target density, write the meta description, done. I built entire client strategies around that sheet for years, and it worked well enough that I never questioned it too hard.

I opened an old version of that spreadsheet last month while helping a client plan content for the fall. Half the columns didn't matter anymore. Not in a dramatic, the-sky-is-falling way. Just quietly, the way a tool stops getting used and you don't notice until you go looking for it.

The keyword still matters, the strategy around it doesn't

I'm not going to tell you keywords are dead. People still type words into search boxes, and Google still uses them to figure out what a page is about. That part hasn't changed.

What's changed is everything I used to do around the keyword. Density checks feel almost silly now. Nobody's counting how many times "best content management system for small business" appears on a page, least of all an AI model summarizing five sources into one paragraph. It's reading for meaning, not repetition. Stuff a keyword in five times and you're not helping your odds, you're just writing worse.

I used to treat the first 100 words as prime real estate for the primary keyword. These days I treat them as prime real estate for the actual answer. Those aren't always the same sentence anymore, and that distinction is doing a lot of work I didn't used to think about.

Backlinks matter less

For most of the last decade, if you'd asked me the single highest-leverage thing a freelancer could do for a client's SEO, I'd have said links without much hesitation. Get mentioned somewhere credible, get linked from a real site in your niche, and rankings would follow eventually.

Links still count for something. I'm not throwing that out. But I've watched pages with a thin backlink profile show up in AI-generated answers ahead of pages that would've dominated the old rankings, purely because the thin page answered the actual question faster and more clearly. That would've been almost unthinkable to me in 2018.

The thing that got more valuable, not less: being right

The skill that's mattered most through this shift isn't a new one. It's accuracy. Old-school SEO tolerated a certain amount of fluff, because a human skimming a page for the gist of it would forgive some padding on the way to the good part.

An AI system summarizing your page for someone else has no patience for that. If a claim is vague or unsupported, it either gets skipped or, worse, misrepresented in the summary. I've had a client's page get quoted by an AI answer tool with a stat that was technically in the article but stripped of the context that made it accurate. That's on us as writers as much as it's on the tool. If the sentence can't stand completely on its own, it's going to get pulled out and used that way regardless.

I've started writing every important claim as if it might get lifted out of the page entirely and shown to someone with zero surrounding context. That's a much higher bar than "does this read okay in the flow of the article," and it's changed how I structure paragraphs more than any algorithm update ever did.

What I've actually kept

Clear headers. Direct answers near the top instead of three paragraphs of throat-clearing before the point. Writing for a specific reader with a specific problem instead of trying to cover every angle of a topic in one piece. Those habits predate any of this AI search stuff by years, honestly. They were just good writing practices that happened to also be good SEO practices, and now they're good AEO practices too. The label changed. The underlying skill didn't.

What I dropped was the mechanical layer sitting on top of that: the density targets, the exact-match keyword phrasing, the strategy meetings about anchor text. That stuff feels like it belonged to a different internet.

I don't think anyone fully knows what's coming next here, and I'm skeptical of people who talk like they do. But if you're a writer wondering whether ten years of SEO knowledge is now useless, I don't think it is. I think about a third of it quietly expired and nobody sent the memo. The rest was just good writing wearing an SEO costume, and it turns out that part travels fine.

I Started Charging a Late Fee. Here's What Actually Happened.

Steven Snell — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:55:56 +0000

I sat on that clause for almost a year before I added it.

Not because I didn't know how. Adding a line to an invoice template takes five minutes. I sat on it because I kept picturing the conversation where I'd actually have to bring it up, and every version of that conversation in my head ended with a client quietly deciding I wasn't worth the hassle anymore.

The client who finally pushed me over the edge was a marketing agency I'd worked with for almost two years. Good work, decent rates, the kind of relationship you don't want to mess with. Except twice in six months, my invoice slid to 45 days. Not because they couldn't pay. Their accounting person told me, almost cheerfully, that they "batch vendor payments at the end of the month, sometimes the next month." I was a vendor. I was also apparently optional.

So I added a late fee. 1.5% per month on anything past 30 days, spelled out right on the invoice template, nothing hidden in fine print nobody reads. I didn't send an announcement or a policy update email. I just changed the invoice and figured whoever noticed would notice.

The agency never said a word. Their payments got faster, actually, which felt like proof the delay had never been about cash flow in the first place. It was about priority. I'd been at the bottom of a list, and a late fee moved me up it without anyone having to admit that's what happened.

Here's the part I didn't expect. The first time I actually had to invoke the fee wasn't with them. It was with a much smaller client, someone I'd worked with for maybe three months, on an invoice for less than a thousand dollars. Payment hit day 40 with no response to two follow-ups. I added the fee to the next invoice, a small line item, and sent it without much of a lead-up.

I got an email back within an hour. Apologetic, a little defensive, paid within the day, fee included. And then, a few weeks later, that client quietly stopped booking work with me. No confrontation, no bad review, just a slow fade. I'll never know for sure if the fee did that. Could've been budget, could've been a dozen things that have nothing to do with me. But the timing was close enough that I've thought about it more than I'd like to admit.

That's the trade nobody tells you about when they recommend late fees as some kind of freelancing hack. The fee itself is almost beside the point. What it really does is force a decision you've probably been avoiding: are you willing to lose a client over money you're owed? Because you might. Not always, not even usually in my experience, but sometimes. And if the answer is no, not even once, then the clause on your invoice is just decoration.

I want to be honest about something else too. I didn't enforce this evenly. The agency, the client with more leverage over my income, got a fee that quietly did its job without me ever having to say a word about it. The smaller client got the same fee and a much more direct hit to the relationship. Same policy, wildly different outcomes, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Bigger clients have more to lose by treating a vendor badly and more systems in place that just process a fee without anyone taking it personally. Smaller clients feel it. They notice. It becomes about them, even when it isn't.

Would I recommend it? Mostly yes, with a caveat I didn't expect to have. Put the fee on your invoices. Say the number out loud in your head before you send the first one with it attached, so you're not surprised by what it feels like. And don't assume it works the same way on every client just because the math is identical. A percentage doesn't care about context. People do.

What it actually gave me wasn't extra money. I've collected maybe a few hundred dollars in late fees over the past year, which is nothing. What it gave me was a floor. A number that says, past this point, waiting on me stops being free. I didn't have that before, and I spent a long time pretending I didn't need it.

Does anyone else actually enforce their late fees, or is it more of a deterrent that sits on the invoice and never gets used? I'm curious how many freelancers have a policy versus a practice.

The SEO Advice I Give Every Client, Whether They Ask For It or Not

Steven Snell — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 19:36:08 +0000

A client asked me last month if I could "get the keyword density up to around 3%."

I hadn't had a client ask for something like this in quite a while. Keyword density stopped being a meaningful metric so long ago that Google's own people have publicly rolled their eyes at it, more than once. But it's still floating around out there. Write "SEO tips" fifteen times in an 800-word post. Bold the keyword every time it shows up. Cram the exact search phrase into the H1, the first sentence, and the meta description like it's 2011.

I get why it sticks around. SEO advice ages badly, and most business owners have better things to do than keep up with what actually changed. So I end up giving the same rundown a lot. Here's the version I wish I could hand to every client before we start.

What still actually works

Search intent beats keyword matching. Google got good at understanding what someone actually wants, not just matching the words they typed. If someone searches "best CRM for small teams," they want a comparison, not a page that says "CRM" forty times. Writing to satisfy the intent behind a search does more than any density trick ever did.

Structure makes or breaks scannability. Headers that actually describe what's in the section. Short paragraphs. Lists where a list makes sense, not because lists are trendy but because some information is genuinely easier to scan that way. A reader who can find the answer they came for in ten seconds is a reader who sticks around, and that behavior signal matters more than most people realize.

Freshness is underrated. Updating an old post with current information, current examples, and a new publish date often outperforms writing something brand new from scratch. I've watched a two-year-old article climb back up rankings after a thirty-minute refresh more times than I can count.

Internal linking done by someone who's actually read the other pages. Not an automated plugin suggesting links based on keyword overlap. A person who knows which article genuinely helps with which question, linking the two together in a way that makes sense for the reader first. Search engines pick up on that structure, but it works because it's genuinely useful, not the other way around.

None of this is a secret. It's just less exciting than a hack, so it gets buried under a decade of advice that promised a shortcut.

The AI search wrinkle

Here's what's actually changed things for me lately, and it's not the four points above. It's how many people are getting their answers from AI tools instead of a traditional search results page at all.

A survey from Clear Spark Digital found that 76% of Americans now use AI tools to find information at least weekly, and 48% do it daily. That's not a niche behavior anymore. It's close to the default.

What that means for content writers is a little counterintuitive. The instinct is to start "writing for AI," whatever that's supposed to mean in practice. What I've found actually works is closer to the opposite. AI tools pull from content that's clear, well-sourced, and structured around a real answer to a real question, which is the same content that's always ranked well with human readers. Chasing some separate AI-specific formula tends to produce worse writing for everyone, including the AI.

The clients who ask me to optimize for AI search specifically are usually surprised when my answer is "keep doing the stuff that makes the writing good." It's not a satisfying answer if you're hoping for a new lever to pull. But it's the honest one.

Where I push back

I'll admit I'm skeptical of a lot of the "write for AI" content flooding my feed right now. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is repackaged SEO advice from five years ago with "AEO" stapled onto the front, sold as something new. If a tactic wouldn't have helped a human reader in 2020, adding "AI" to the description doesn't make it work now.

What I tell clients instead is simpler and less marketable: write something genuinely useful, structure it so people can find what they need fast, keep it current, and link it up with the rest of your site in a way that actually makes sense. That advice hasn't needed an update in years, even while everything around it keeps changing.

What's the outdated SEO advice you still hear the most? I have a running list at this point, and I'd love to compare notes.

What eight years of freelancing taught me about pricing

Steven Snell — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:21:35 +0000

The first time a client said yes to a quote without hesitating, I felt sick.

This was early on. I'd sent over a rate for a batch of articles, my palms were actually sweaty over the email, and the reply came back in under an hour. "Sounds great, when can you start?" No pushback, no negotiation, nothing. I should have been thrilled. Instead, I sat there doing the math on how much more I could have charged, and I knew, the way you just know sometimes, that I'd priced it too low. His enthusiasm was the tell.

That queasy feeling taught me more than any pricing guide ever did. If a client says yes instantly and happily, you were cheap.

I've been freelancing for about eight years now, all of it writing and content work, most of it solo from a spare room in my house. I've priced my work a dozen different ways over that stretch, and I've gotten most of them wrong at some point. So here's what I actually believe about pricing, after enough scars to have earned an opinion.

Per-word pricing quietly punishes you for getting better

I started out charging by the word, like a lot of writers do. Five cents a word, sometimes six if I was feeling brave. It felt safe because it was easy to explain and easy for a client to say yes to. A 1,500-word article costs this much. Clean. Predictable.

The problem showed up slowly.

The better I got, the worse that model treated me. Early on I'd pad a piece to hit a word count because more words meant more money, which is a genuinely insane thing to be incentivized toward as a writer. Then I spent years learning to cut. Learning that the sharpest version of an article is usually the shortest one that still does the job. And every ounce of that hard-won skill made me poorer, because a tight 900-word piece that took real judgment to shape paid less than a bloated 1,400-word one I could have written half-asleep.

Think about how backwards that is. I was being paid the least for the writing I was proudest of. The stuff that took a decade to be able to do fast, I was billing at a discount, because "fast" showed up on the invoice as "fewer words."

Per-word pricing isn't evil. For high-volume, low-stakes content where a client mostly needs bulk, it lowers friction and keeps things simple, and I still use it occasionally when the work genuinely fits that shape. But if you're any good, and you're getting better, it's a model designed to leave your best skills unpaid.

Price the project, not the input

The shift that changed my income was boring to describe and terrifying to do. I stopped quoting the input and started quoting the outcome.

Instead of "this is 1,500 words at my per-word rate," it became "this article, delivered, researched, edited, and ready to publish, costs $X." One number for the whole job. What the client is buying is a finished thing that solves their problem, and they mostly don't care whether it took me two hours or six to get there. Frankly they shouldn't. My speed is my business.

The first time I quoted a flat project fee, I nearly talked myself out of it three separate times before hitting send. It felt like I was getting away with something. The number was higher than my old per-word math would have produced for the same piece, and my brain kept whispering that the client would notice and be offended.

They weren't offended. They just said yes and paid it.

That's the part nobody warns you about. The resistance isn't out there in the market. It's in your own head, and it's the thing you have to get over before anything else improves. Clients aren't sitting there with a spreadsheet of what a paragraph should cost. They have a budget, a problem, and a rough sense of whether you seem worth it. Your job is to name a number that reflects the value of the finished work and then let them react to it like an adult.

Say the number and then shut up

Here's the smallest tactical thing that made the biggest difference, and I'm slightly embarrassed by how long it took me to learn it.

When you give a price, stop talking.

For years, I'd quote a number and then immediately keep going. "It's $2,000, but I can be flexible, and I know that might be a lot, so if the budget's tight, we could maybe scope it down, or..." I was negotiating against myself before the client had said a single word. I was so uncomfortable with the silence after a price that I'd fill it by discounting.

The silence after you name a number belongs to the client. It's theirs to sit in and respond to. Every time you rush to soften it, you're telling them the number wasn't real. So now I say the price, and then I wait, even when the pause stretches long enough to be uncomfortable. Especially then. That discomfort is just the feeling of not undercutting yourself for once.

Raising your rates is a filter, and that's the point

A few years in, I raised my rates by a chunk that scared me, fully expecting to lose clients. And I did lose a few. But the ones who left were, almost without exception, the ones I was quietly relieved to be rid of. The nitpickers, the scope-creepers, the person who wanted three rounds of revisions on a blog post about accounting software.

The clients who valued the work stayed, barely blinked, and I was suddenly doing less work for more money with people I actually liked. A higher rate does some of your client-screening for you before you ever get on a call.

I wish I'd raised them sooner. That's the honest summary of most of my pricing history, actually. Every good move I made, I made about two years later than I should have.

So I'll ask you, since I'm still learning this myself: what's the pricing mistake that took you the longest to unlearn?

Time-blocking mostly failed me. Two pieces of it saved my week anyway.

Steven Snell — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:53:34 +0000

Last spring I opened the same draft six times before noon and never finished a single paragraph.

I'd open it, read the last line I wrote, get pinged on Slack, answer the ping, remember an unsent invoice, check email, close the tab, and start over forty minutes later. By lunch I'd been at my desk for four hours and produced nothing I'd want to show anyone. I was busy the entire time. That was the worst part.

I'd been reading about time-blocking for a while, mostly from developers and makers who talked about it like it had reorganized their brains. So I gave it a real shot for a month. Not a casual "I'll try to focus more" shot. A full, color-coded, plan-the-night-before shot.

Here's what happened, including the parts that didn't work.

The version I thought I wanted

Every evening I mapped the next day hour by hour, with drafting blocks in blue, editing in green, and admin dumped into a dull gray that felt appropriately punishing. Calls got their own color. I even blocked lunch, which in hindsight tells you something about the state of mind I was in.

The first three days were fantastic. I felt like I'd cracked something. I sat down at 9, the calendar told me exactly what to do, and I did it. I remember texting a friend that I'd finally figured out how to work.

Then week two showed up, and it brought reality with it.

Where it fell apart

The trouble started with other people. An interview I'd blocked for 45 minutes ran to 80 because the source was great and I wasn't about to cut him off to protect a calendar. A client sent edits at 11am that needed turning around same day, which flattened the two blocks I'd carefully arranged for the afternoon. My schedule assumed a world where nothing moved, and my whole job is basically a series of things moving.

Then there was my own energy, which flatly refused to read the calendar. I'd scheduled deep drafting for 2pm because that's when I had a free stretch. At 2pm I have the mental horsepower of a houseplant. No amount of blue on a calendar fixes that.

The interruptions and the energy dips were both annoying, but the guilt is what actually killed the ambitious version. Every time a block slipped, I felt behind. A missed block sat there on the screen like evidence. By day ten I'd turned a productivity system into a small daily machine for feeling bad about myself, and that's the fastest way to quit anything.

So I quit. Most of it, anyway.

What actually stuck

I didn't go back to the six-abandoned-drafts morning, though. A few pieces of the experiment survived, and they're still with me almost a year later.

One protected block, and only one. Every morning from roughly 9 to 11 is for drafting, and nothing else gets to live there. No calls or email, and none of the "quick questions" that are never actually quick. The change that made this work was mental. I stopped treating the block as a deadline I had to hit and started treating it as a container I got to fill. Some mornings I write 1,200 words in it. Some mornings I write 300 bad ones and delete most of them before lunch. Both count, because the block exists to protect the conditions for writing. The word count was never the point of it.

Everything else on my day stays loose. That was the trade I made. I gave up trying to control the whole calendar in exchange for defending two hours of it like my work depended on it, which it kind of does.

Batching the shallow stuff. Email, Slack, invoices, and the small administrative sludge that used to leak into every hour now get one window late morning and one in the late afternoon. Outside those windows I close the tabs. Not heroically. I just close them. The first week felt like letting a phone ring. Now it feels like the most obvious thing in the world, because almost everything that lands in those channels can wait two hours, and not one person has ever noticed the delay.

The batching did something I didn't expect. It made the shallow work faster. When I answer twelve messages in one sitting I'm in a completely different mode than when I stop drafting to answer a single one, and I get through the pile in a fraction of the time.

Naming the block by the work, not the clock. This is the small one, but it saved the whole approach from collapsing a second time. I stopped writing "9:00 to 11:00" on things. My drafting block is just called "draft," and it moves. Most days it's the morning. On a day with an early call it slides to the afternoon. Because it's defined by what it is instead of when it happens, a shifting schedule doesn't break it. The block just relocates.

If you're starting tomorrow

Don't block your whole day. That's the mistake I made, and it's the version of time-blocking that looks great in a screenshot and falls apart by Wednesday.

Pick one block. Protect it like it's a meeting with someone you'd hate to disappoint. Batch your small stuff into a window or two so it stops colonizing your good hours. Then let the rest of the day stay a little messy, because it's going to be messy anyway, and fighting that just stacks guilt on top of the mess.

The color-coded fantasy was never going to survive contact with a normal week. Two protected hours in the morning and a couple of email windows did.

What about you? If you've tried blocking your day and bailed on it, I'm curious where it broke down for you, because I suspect the interruptions get most of us long before the discipline does.