Growth PR: where affiliate and PR meet in the AI era, with Kaila O'Connor

Kaila O'Connor spent a decade in B2B public relations before moving into affiliate and starting her own business around what she calls Growth PR. On impact.com's Partnership Economy Podcast she explains how publisher placements pay back, how she reads AI and Google shifts, and how to structure deals.

In this episode

• She pitches brands on search intent and tells them about 70% of sales from these publishers are new customers, in a channel that tends to be the most profitable on margin (5:24, 5:36, 5:45).

• Articles published in 2020 can become "passive income" if you keep the editor relationship and give them a reason to keep your product in the roundup (6:52, 7:01, 7:17).

• She is settling on "growth PR" as the label, with affiliate PR and performance PR laddering up to it (8:29, 8:42).

• She urges clients to fund hybrid or paid deals with publishers whose audiences already convert, including newsletters, and has seen only about a 2 or 3% decline so far (13:20, 13:42, 15:34).

• The conversation covers guaranteed earning minimums for publishers; her own tip is to start with CPC links, then swap them for CPA links after the campaign (18:10, 22:43, 22:59).

• She calls 2020 to 2023 a gold rush; after a Google algorithm change a top revenue driver can drop $30,000 a month, which is resetting what good performance looks like (25:14, 25:33, 25:50).

Episode from The Partnership Economy Podcast by impact.com, published on YouTube.