When it comes to quick link building wins using HARO and #journorequest (Twitter) is very effective. It definitely should be a part of your Digital PR plan.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a great thing when it comes to tracking journalists and publishers’ requests. So what to do to use this platform to get coverage for your brand or client?

The first step is to sign up to HARO, it’s free and you don’t need to check the site every minute for new requests. You simply get an email every morning, afternoon and evening with the latest requests, their summaries, and deadlines.

If you can help, you reply to the request. And if your pitch, comment, advice or tip is successful, you’ll hear from the journalist, either requesting more info or letting you know that it’s published.

What’s best about it? Every single journalist will ask you to include name and URL – so there’s always a link guaranteed.

#Journorequest

You can either track this hashtag on Twitter (but that means you need to look at these all the time, or potentially set up IFTTT for – if anything is tweeted with #journorequest you’ll get a notification – which I did on my phone and it works really well). Or you can sign up to Journorequest there is 30-day free trial and then there is a small fee involved.

It’s worth it, as you get relevant requests from journalists using this hashtag to your email, so you don’t need to keep checking Twitter.

I’ve done a little test and tracked the number of HARO and journo requests I replied to in the past couple of weeks.

And the results? I replied to seven journalists’ requests and five of them secured coverage for my clients – and one for myself!

Here is my example. A journalist from inews tweeted asking for quotes for her article about going freelance. Well, that’s quite relevant to me so I replied.

The Tweet

The email

And here is the coverage

 

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