Syed Irfan Ajmal
SEO-PR · GEO · Content Marketing
The SIA Wire
Est. 2004 · Global · Friday, May 29, 2026Open for projects, Q3 2026
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§ 02About this episodeVol. XV · № 02
How to use Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to earn media coverage and quality backlinks at the same time.
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§ 04Full transcriptVol. XV · № 04
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INTRO: (00:05) Welcome to the Ask Irfan edition of the SIA Business Podcast. In each Ask Irfan episode, your host, Irfan, will be answering questions you asked and even questions you never asked.
Irfan: (00:21) Hi everyone. This is your host, Syed Irfan Ajmal. Today the question that we have is how to get publicity and backlinks with HARO. HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. HARO is like a matchmaking service which connects journalists working on different stories with the right sources and the right experts.
(00:46) These sources can provide journalists with exclusive goals and relevant tips, tricks, and information. The journalist then writes and publishes their story and that is how the sources get publicity and SEO boost via HARO.
(01:03) This all starts with journalists submitting their queries on HARO. HARO then sends about 3 email digests or newsletters each day and each of these digests has several journalists queries in them. You can then act as a source or as an expert and help these journalists respond to the query that they are working on.
(01:28) To give you an example, we have used HARO to get mentions and backlinks for my own website and those of our clients, and we have been able to get mentions and backlinks from top publications such as Forbes, Reader's Digest, Credit Donkey, Fit Small Business, DICE, Boston Commons, Furniture Today, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Databox, My Corporation, CEO Blog Nation, and many, many others.
(02:03) In one of the campaigns, our conversion rate in the very first month was actually 0%. This was probably the first campaign that we actually worked on. We had sent 40 pitches and received no links, no mentions, nothing at all.
(02:21) In the second month, what we did was that we did a review of what was wrong with our pitches. We studied reviewed the content available on the web produced by other people and other marketers and experts who have used HARO with success. And in the second month, our conversion rate actually went to 47.06%
(02:47) So, month 1, 0% conversion rate, month 2, 47.06% conversion rate. We had sent 68 pitches and we were able to get 22 backlinks with another 20 where we had received a positive response but the links were not live yet. That's because in the case of a lot of the large publications, their editing cycle is pretty long and it can take as much as 2 or 3 months before the link is actually live.
(03:16) Now let me give you a step by step example so that you can learn how to use HARO in your own marketing and PR campaigns. Let's say you run a fitness website and you want some publicity, exposure, and backlinks for your websites.
(03:31) So your 5-step simple process to be able to leverage HARO in this regard would be, Step 1, sign up at helpareporter.com, and while signing up at helpareporter.com you should sign yourself up as a source rather than as a journalist, and you should choose some relevant categories.
(03:52) For instance, the General category, the Health and Fitness category, or Business and Finance category, something like that. Now, what you will do is that you will be getting three emails every day, so you should wait for your email digests.
(04:07) These are sent around morning, afternoon and evening time as per the EST time zone, I believe. Now, depending on how many categories you have signed up for, you may actually get more than one email on each of these three times.
(04:23) So if you have signed up for just 1 category, you will get 3 emails per day. If you have signed up for 2 categories, you will get about 6 emails per day and so on. Step 3, now let's say that you find a journalist's query, who is writing an article for Forbes and who is asking whether detox juices can help with weight loss.
(04:45) Step 4, since you have a fitness website, you decide that you will be writing an answer for this query. Step 5, while writing your response, you have to keep in mind a few factors. First off, make sure that your answers are backed by research and data.
(05:04) I mean unless the journalist has specifically asked for an anecdote or your personal experience, you want to make sure, if the query is… whether there is evidence for a particular type of diet or a particular type of fitness program or something. You want to make sure that your answer is backed by research and credible data.
(05:23) You also want to make sure that the responses that you write are short but concise responses. You don't want to go on and on writing 500 word-stories or something like that because these journalists often are on very tough deadlines and they don't have the time to go through a very long passage and then find a single response that they can use in their article.
(05:47) You also want to make sure that your signature includes all your contact information. That would include your full name, your position at the company that you are working at, your company name, your company URL, which you want to be included in the article.
(06:04) And you also want to make sure that you are not attaching your picture because HARO doesn't support any attachments. Instead, what you want to do is to upload your picture to a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive and then, in your signature, in the response that you are sending to the journalists, you will include a link to that photo.
(07:04) Two bonus tips for you if you want to go ahead with using HARO in your marketing and PR campaign. Bonus tip number 1, in case of queries where the journalist has mentioned his or her name, you may want to reach out to them via Twitter and LinkedIn as well.
(07:26) And this is not going to be about you reminding them about your HARO response. I mean, if you have used HARO and you have sent your response by the deadline, they will receive it. So, the reason you want to reach out via social media is to get on their radar and to interact with them in a manner where your profile and your personality and your experience gets their attention.
(08:32) Also, speaking of HARO deadlines, one thing I forgot to mention was that you should keep in mind that in case of HARO queries, these queries… every query has pretty much a very strict deadline. So, 12 hours, 24 hours, something like that.
(09:25) So, Make sure that you respond before the deadline and you know what, even if a query has like, 3 days… even if the deadline is like, 3 days from now, what you want to do is that… in my opinion, you are better off responding right away.
(10:08) Bonus tip number 2, if you want to really get better at writing great pitches, whether it's HARO or whether you are sending a pitch directly to someone's email address, an investor or whatever. What you want to do is to install the Boomerang App.
(10:26) So, it has several free features. For instance, you will be able to see the read receipt. So, you can use that to figure out if your responses are ending in the inbox of the journalist and not getting flagged or something. And you can also set up reminders.
(11:03) So, that way you will be reminded that you have to follow up with this journalist to see if they have actually published that article and if your response is there, etc. But the best feature that I love about Boomerang is Respondable feature, which is actually a paid feature.
(11:19) Now, because Boomerang App has been used to send trillions of emails. So what Boomerang has done is that it has reviewed those trillions of emails to figure out what's the likelihood of you getting a response. And that has led Boomerang to create this Respondable feature where basically when you write up a response, you can click the Respondable button and can see what's the likelihood of your response being replied to.
(12:57) So that's it for today. We discussed what HARO is, how you can use it as a source to get publicity and get backlinks for your company or your brand. We also discussed the 5-step process that you can use to leverage HARO for publicity.
(13:58) So, I hope this helped you today, and I would love to know if you start using HARO after listening to this podcast or if listening to this podcast improves your ability to send great pitches and get more positive responses for your pitches.
(14:14) And that's it for today. If you have any further questions in this regard or any other relevant topic, do send them to me. Thank you so much. See you next time.
OUTRO: (14:25) Got any questions about content marketing, SEO, startups or something totally different, or weird, or fun? Share them with us and we will answer them in the next Ask Irfan episode.