7 HARO Do's and Dont's That'll Improve Your Response Rate
Spoiler: What we share about the use of attachments will actually blow your mind!
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This week’s topic: A Look at HARO From the Writer’s Point of View
In our April Top Tier Talk, we had a lot of people asking about HARO. We ran out of time before we got to answer this one, so we thought we’d address it and do a deep dive here. P.S. A lot of this applies to Qwoted too, which is another popular tool that journalists love to use for sourcing.
First, know that more often than not, when you’re responding to a HARO query, we’re receiving 50-300 responses for each query. So you automatically have a lot of competition for our attention, which means your pitch needs to be compelling and deliver exactly what we ask for to be considered.
And not only are we getting responses from professional publicists like yourselves, we’re also getting responses from bloggers, influencers, small business owners, authors, and other random people … and they aren’t all always great at sending quality responses. A lot of them are just looking for backlinks to their websites and are entirely off-topic, which is a huge waste of our time. So know that we’re already pretty grumpy by the time we’ve read the first terrible few submissions to our query and now our inbox is being FLOODED with absolute garbage.
Side note: This is why so many writers started their own Substacks … so we could cultivate our own list of publicists to send our calls for pitches to and avoid HARO entirely. Now, we rarely use HARO (only when we’re totally desperate) and can safely say we’re all much happier with the targeted pitches we get via Substack.
Of course, there are still plenty of journalists relying on HARO, so we understand why that’s still a hot topic. The good news about all the garbage we receive? All that junk can help make your perfectly prepared pitch stand out from the crowd (and it’s why we offer Pitch Perfecting Workshops). Here are our best tips:
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