Get Noticed And Mentioned By Journalists

This is a typical five-minute growth hack that has the potential to seriously help your business grow. I’d advise baking this into your daily routine and you’ll be getting links before you know it.

HARO: Help A Reporter Out Growth Hack

The “hack” is using a service known as “HARO”

HARO is an abbreviation for “Help A Reporter Out” and here’s how it works. As we all know, reporters, journalists, and bloggers all need quotes and citations to validate their content.

HARO is a platform that facilitates the above, i.e. it connects you, the specialist in your niche, with them, a content creator.

If you’re successful in being referenced then you’ll generate additional credibility and often a backlink (link to your site) which is great for SEO.

For example, if you’re a Real Estate broker, and a journalist requests information (or confirmation) on a particular theory they have with regards to a rise in property prices in an area you operate in, then you can chime in with your thoughts and facts and in exchange, they’ll mention you.

Two Steps For The Hack To Work

Now, this growth hack has two parts, each part is two minutes long.

1. Create an account with HARO;
2. Set up an alert so when your niche is mentioned you can be alerted.

HARO works by sending out emails, so all you need to do is set up an alert(s) using IFTTT to convert inbound HARO email alerts to populate a row on a Google sheet.

Then, once a week or twice a week you can scan down the list to see if there’s anything worth applying to. You could very easily snag yourself a top tier authority link from a highly reputable media outlet.

The cool thing about this growth hack is that once you get one or two citations or references then you can share them with other journalists to validate your credibility and trustworthiness, and, very often, the same journalist will come back to you!

Example: Daily Mail in the UK

For those that don’t know, the Daily Mail in the UK is a massive newspaper. It had an average daily circulation of 1,134,200 copies in 2020 and millions of hits online.

I did this very trick with the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom and it worked great.

I selected the alert to “Hacker Tools” and hey presto, I got an alert for Shodan and was quoted! This was seen by thousands of people so not bad for a five-minute job.

There is another slight variation to this method which uses different tools and some creative Google Searches.

This second variation is where you’d contact journalists directly.

Here’s how: type into the search engine your competitor’s name or a keyword describing what your company does then hit the “news tab” and you’ll notice a list of the most recent related articles. Those articles are written by journalists that you could be pitched your product or service.

If you need some tools to help you find emails of journalists, here are four tools, with the last one being my favorite.

• EmailHunter.io
• Lead411.com
• AnyMailFinder.com
• DropContact.io

Once you have their email then you can try to discover their LinkedIn Profile (we cover this elsewhere using Phantombuster).

When it comes to contacting your scraped journalists I’d recommend using GMass or Lemlist. Both of these email delivery tools are also covered elsewhere in my course and book.

Another possible tool to look at is called “JustReachOut” which is a paid automation for the above.