HARO, or Help A Reporter Out is a great way to connect with journalists looking for expertise to include in their content.
Essentially, they’re looking for certain insights from experts to include in their content and that’s where you come in.
You: Provide expertise or your insights on a topic, depending on their query.
They: Include you in their article, link to your website, showcase or promote your business.
Win-win.
Now, let’s cover what this means for your brand in more detail and how you can use HARO to promote your business.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- How to use HARO to promote your business (top 5 benefits to keep in mind)
- 4 Main steps to start using HARO today
Using HARO For Brand Recognition and Promotion
BuzzSumo studied media and pitching by analyzing about 600K journalists. Here’s what the survey revealed:
- Journalist content is 2.76x more engaging. It lands 315 engagements on average, while non-journalist content only attains 114.
- Marketing is the top industry to most likely benefit from journalist mentions.
- Nearly 40% of brand alerts had at least one journalist mention. About 5% of total brand mentions came from a journalist. Almost 25% of the journalists that featured brands included a link.
Now, it makes more sense to include journalistic outreach and HARO as part of your content and link-building strategy.
Not only does it help you build relationships with journalists, but this strategy also helps you gain media coverage and build links for SEO.
Now, there are many different ways you could go about this, but as the title suggests, we’re going to be using HARO (Help A Reporter Out) for this
All you have to do is sign up for a HARO account and respond to journalists’ queries.
However, when it comes to using HARO to promote your business, it’s all about your pitches.
Your pitches should be unique, relevant, and valuable to get noticed by these reporters.
These journalists might quote you in their articles and link to your business website. And that goes a long way for your business.
Let’s take a look at what this means for your business.
Using HARO for business promotion: 5 main benefits
Here’s how you can leverage HARO for brand recognition and business promotion:
- Get mentions: By pitching to journalists, your business can get mentioned in top online publications like newspapers, magazines, and blogs. These mentions can boost your brand awareness and attract new customers.
- Earn backlinks: You can leverage HARO as part of your SEO and link-building strategy. By answering journalistic queries and pitches, you earn backlinks from their sites to you, once they publish the content. This, in turn, boosts your DA (Domain Authority) and allows you to rank higher on Google.
- Boost SEO: Link building is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. When journalists include your addition or insights in their content, they’ll link to you and you’ll likely rank high on the search engine results page (SERP). That translates to a boost in online visibility and growth in traffic.
- Increase traffic: With higher search engine rankings, you rank higher and gain an increase in traffic. As more people visit and go through your website, you’re likely to convert some of them into paying customers. The same applies to getting mentioned and earning backlinks on journalists’ articles.
- Expand network: By using HARO, you get to grow your network, connect with, and network with journalists in your industry. So, in addition to gaining backlinks and promoting your business, you can also gain some referrals within your industry.
Now, let’s take a look at what using HARO might look like in practice.
4 Main Steps To Use HARO To Promote Your Business
As mentioned above, using HARO is a great way to promote your business and collaborate with journalists on the platform.
But here’s the thing:
According to Cision, two in three journalists say that the pitches they receive are irrelevant.
Meaning, you can’t just use ChatGPT to submit low-quality insights.
For the most part, you need to base them on your insights, unique experience, or otherwise give value that’s not surface-level.
Here’s how you can use HARO to promote your business and take your digital marketing efforts to the next level:
1. Become a credible source for HARO stories or articles
HARO allows you to promote your business if and only if it gets mentioned in the journalists’ articles.
To achieve this, you should become a credible source of information for media personnel. This way, journalists will be confident enough to quote you in their stories.
When creating a HARO account, ensure you select your areas of expertise to receive only queries you specialize in. Likewise, only respond to questions if you are a subject matter expert (SME).
Lastly, the trick of the trade is to write an effective HARO pitch that converts. These pitches should be:
- Relevant to your niche.
- Provide a new angle.
- Show real expertise.
- Short and simple.
- Quote-worthy.
Also consider what makes YOU different from other candidates.
Look back on and draw on your:
- Past experiences.
- Unique insights.
- What makes you different.
- Your achievements and results.
- What you wish you knew
2. Build relationships with journalists
The ultimate goal of your journalist outreach campaign is to get mentioned in publications and earn backlinks.
However, there’s one other vital aspect of your campaign: building relationships with journalists.
While getting featured in their content is always nice, you’ll want to keep and nurture that relationship, beyond HARO.
Some business owners, digital marketers, or PR professionals don’t go the extra mile once their pitches get quoted.
They don’t establish rapport with them so every interaction becomes transactional only. It’s best to establish good relationships with the journalists so that you can continue to be a source for their stories.
It’s a win-win for both parties!
Here’s what you can do to develop relationships with HARO journalists:
- Express gratitude to journalists for featuring your business.
- Share their published articles on your social media channels and other online platforms.
- Keep in touch with them and follow up later on.
3. Repurpose your content submitted for HARO responses
HARO connects over 800,000 sources with more than 55,000 journalists globally.
However, the journalist outreach competition has become tighter than ever. Journalists receive two to three hundred responses for each query; only 7% of these pitches get mentioned in published articles.
As such, be aware that most of your pitches won’t get quoted.
However, just because a journalist on HARO might not use it, you can still repurpose it to promote your business.
You can turn those brief pitches into pieces of content, such as:
- Blog posts.
- Infographics.
- Social media updates.
- And more.
Repurposing your content shows that you are true to your words.
It justifies that you are an expert on the subject. You can use these articles to promote your business on your website, blog, and even social media accounts. That way, your efforts don’t get wasted and will pay off in the long run!
4. Monitor successful mentions and links for your HARO responses
If you want to get the most out of your HARO pitches, you should be tracking your replies.
See what kind of replies get published, what doesn’t, and what your success rate looks like.
Doing so allows you to understand which topics and strategies work best for promoting your brand. Then, you can tweak your pitching approach to ensure success in the future.
Let’s take our case study on pitching HARO, for instance.
We involved writers with at least two years of HARO writing experience.
These writers sent 50 pitches each: half sent ASAP and the other half five minutes before the deadline. It appears that early pitching has a slight edge over pitching late.
Here’s the key takeaway: If you can respond within an hour, you’ll most likely get ahead of the HARO competition.
But the point of the matter here is to monitor your HARO responses and make the necessary changes in your strategies. That will make a massive difference in your journalist outreach campaign.
Final Words
To recap, HARO is a powerful tool you can use to promote your business.
However, consider implementing the four proven ways for leveraging the HARO platform recommended above. With these, you can increase your chances of your pitches being mentioned in major publications.
Not only will you establish your authority in your industry, but you’ll ultimately grow your business.
So what are you waiting for?
Start using HARO today to promote your business!
Take advantage of Jolly SEO’s Do-for-you HARO and consultancy services. Our expert guidance and proven strategies will help you craft pitches that get noticed and drive quality backlinks. Contact us today!
