5 Lessons I Have Learned As A HARO Journalist

I have been working long and hard on my book Lead The Stampede which will be coming out in the summer. A big component of many business books is the examples of others. In order to get examples to add to my book, I decided to use HARO. Ever since submitting my query, I was able to learn a lot about HARO. These are the five lessons I learned from submitting that query. Some apply specifically to HARO while others apply to everyone in any business.

1. Early bird gets the worm. The first person who submits a response to your query goes on the top of a giant list, and the late person who submits a response to your query goes on the bottom of the giant list. Early people get seen first (but don’t worry, I view all of the applications).
2. It’s okay to ask for help. Instead of searching for people one by one, I decided to use HARO in order to spread the word. In the end, I got close to 20 qualifying responses in a day!
3. Include a link to your blog. I choose to identify “www.marcguberti.com” as the media outlet. By doing so, people were able to see the entire URL. Traffic to my blog almost doubled that day, and my blog traffic did not see a one hit wonder. The extra traffic stuck around.
4. Find multiple avenues for free quality traffic. Using HARO helped me get more examples to add to Lead The Stampede. HARO also increased my blog traffic. HARO just became another avenue for me to get free quality traffic.
5. Be patient. When I sent out my first query on HARO, I did not know what to expect. My first HARO query was sent out in the morning, and I got 1 response within 30 minutes. Then, it slowed down. I ended up with 5 responses in 4 hours. Once the afternoon came along, I ended up getting more responses and was up to 20 before the end of the day. Patience pays off.

Those are the 5 lessons I learned when I sent out my first query on HARO officially making me a HARO journalist. For those of you who have received many HARO emails, you can find my query in the Business & Finance morning section sent out on March 8, 2014.

Have you used HARO before?