Survey and study reports are an incredibly popular tool with PRs, link builders and journalists. Used well, they generate challenging and disarming news stories for readers to consume. For clients, they can garner huge amounts of media coverage as well as authoritative backlinks when journalists and bloggers link to the original data source.

But for every survey that gets published, many more sink without a murmur. Why? Simply because they're obviously too self-serving, they don't follow rigorous survey design - and they don't ask questions that are specifically designed to gather 'newsworthy content'.

Surveys are very much two-a-penny but the most enterprising examples often get placed on a front page or lead a website's coverage. So what can you do to escape these painful pitfalls and produce a survey that will catch the attention of even the most jaded of reporters?

That's what we'll cover in this post. We'll talk to four survey authors who have earned great coverage - and great media backlinks. And we'll go behind the editor's desk to talk to a generous journalist who promises to tell PRs and link builders how to be 'king or queen of all they survey'.

1. KruzeConsulting.com hit their target niche exactly

Healy Jones, VP Marketing, at Kruze Consulting conducted what she said was the largest study of venture debt professionals undertaken. Such a survey on paper might not set the pulse racing but it was comprehensive and spoke to the needs of our fast-growing, tech-minded community "Our survey captured over 85% of the firms in the market," says Jones. "When we published the survey over a year ago we got some great press - including TechCrunch, which is very important in the startup niche that we serve."

Here's the piece on