How to Use HARO for Publicity & More! (Part I)

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Getting mentioned in the right publication can mean the difference between living hand to mouth and having more work than you can handle. But, public relations is expensive.Sourcing journalists who write about your industry, figuring out what they want to hear and then pitching them takes a lot of work. An experienced PR firm will cost you thousands of dollars a month which is a higher entry point than most small businesses can afford. But! There is a solution. Helpareporter.com is a publicity resource every small business can use.

Help a Reporter Out, commonly known as HARO, is referral service that puts journalists in touch with sources. HARO was started as a Facebook Group by PR guru Peter Shankman in November, 2007. It has since grown to its own website with almost 30,000 journalists and writers submitting over 200 queries a day to over 100,000 sources. HARO was recently purchased by software company Vocus. On his blog, Peter Shankman assures us that HARO will remain a free service and that “We’ll have a kick-ass infrastructure, which will allow us to grow HARO better than ever before. Different countries. More lists. Breaking news queries! You name it. It’s gonna be an AMAZING ride.”

HARO is free but it does require a time commitment. When you sign up as a news source, you get 3 emails a day with a couple of dozen queries in each one. Although the subject line of each HARO email starts with [HARO] which is designed to make them easy to filter into a separate folder, many of the requests are time sensitive so it’s best read them as soon as possible.

How can HARO afford to be free? Each HARO email starts with a paid advertisement about a product or service. Advertising in the masthead of HARO costs $1500. So at 3 emails a day, $4500 a day for a service that is largely automated is a pretty nice passive income stream.

After the masthead, there is a list of the latest queries by industry including:
Biotech and Healthcare
Business and Finance
Education
General
High Tech
Lifestyle and Fitness
Public Policy and Government
Travel

The title of each query contains a one line description and the media outlet. Media outlets can include major print publications, well known websites and blogs, book authors and lesser known websites, blogs and social networks. If the source says “Anonymous” you’re probably dealing with a major news outlet like the Wall Street Journal or Good Morning America.

When you click on a item in the list, you are taken to the expanded description of the query which includes the journalist’s name (unless anonymous), the publication, the due date and a brief description (50 – 100) words of what they are looking for. The description also included an anonymized email address where you can send your reply.

When you come across a query you think you’d be a good source for (and I’m confident you eventually will), keep in mind they are probably getting dozens of not hundreds of responses. If they don’t get back to you don’t take it personally. Also, keep your replies short and to the point. DO NOT promote your products or services. Focus on what you know and how you can help them. This is definitely one of those situations where self-promotion will blow up in your face.

In my next post about HARO, I will show you some other ways I use HARO to find resources and build relationships online.

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How to Find Your Customers Online: A Case Study

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

The hardest part of building an online audience is getting in front of new people.  Tapping the existing audiences of websites, bloggers and experts is probably the easiest way to get in front of new people. That’s why I’m constantly telling prospects and clients “You need to figure out where your target markets hang out online and be there.”  People quickly see the wisdom of this approach.  But, the hard part is figuring out exactly where people are hanging out online.

A few weeks ago, I did a seminar about the basics of internet marketing.  In it, I asked the attendees to define their target markets.  One target market that emerged was stay at home Moms and it was news to most of the group that “Mommy Bloggers” are a serious force to be reckoned with online.  Just a week later, the New York Times had an article “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy Building My Brand” about a Mommy Blogger boot camp.

Frankly, if I were trying to reach stay at home moms and new moms, I could build a marketing campaign off this article alone.  By doing some data mining, I was able to collect a couple of good statistics, a bunch of blogs and some marketing ideas.

What Should You Look For?

Before I tell you what I learned, I’ll start with a list of questions I keep in mind as I do data mining for a client.

Questions to ask as you mine blogs for data:

-         Can I follow them on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube?

-         Who follows them? Should I follow their followers?

-         Are the ads on their blog a good source of info?

-         Could I advertise on their site?

-         What products do they review?

-         Would they let me interview them for my blog?

-         What do I have to offer or share that might make them want to interview me?

-         Are there any individual blog posts I should comment on?

This particular article was a gold mine.  It’s rare to come across a single article this helpful but it does happen.  Here’s what I gathered and why it’s helpful.

Juicy Statistics:

One of the hardest parts of writing memorable copy is gathering statistics.  I keep an eye out for them when I’m reading the paper, watching the news or toodling around on the internet. I keep them in a Word doc for future use.  Here are a couple I pulled form this article.

“According to a 2009 study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, 23 million women read, write or comment on blogs weekly.”

“According to eMarketer, advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007.”

Blogs with Readers:

It’s not hard to find blogs. The hard part is finding blogs your customers actually read.  That’s where an article like this is helpful. You know the writer did some research and in some cases includes helpful facts about the blogs.  The following is a list of the blogs I culled from the article and some helpful tidbits about them.

hipasiwannabe.com

Written by Jill Smokler whose blog helped her get a full time job with Nickelodeon’s ParentsConnect.com social-networking site.  Her blog gets about 36,000 page views a month. When you go the blog you see that it accepts advertising and the ads are a good source of info too.

dialmforminky.com

Her About page has a list of blogs she follows which is a good source of other blogs.

mommyologist.com/

She sank some serious change into her blog template! This tells me she’s no amateur. She has 326 Friend Connect followers. Could be worthwhile to check them out.

mayhemandmoxie.com/

This blog and a few others link to the site www.thesitsgirls.com/ which has over 1500 Friend Connect Followers. The number of Friend Connect Followers and the content tells me it’s a hub site that will be another good source of information.

momfluential.net

This blog looks like a news hub and could be a good source of ideas for topics stay at home moms are interested in beyond the usual.

resourcefulmommy.com

Run by Amy Lupold who spoke a the Boot Camp. If you can find a resourceful angle to what you’re offering, you could have an “in” on this site.

Now What Do You Do?

Before you get all excited and start firing off emails to blog owners about what a great opportunity you have for them, just stop.  Doing so could quite possibly be fatal to your marketing efforts. Bloggers with a good readership GET PITCHED ALL THE TIME and just about all of them have horror stories.  If you are tempted to ignore this advice and email them any way, spend a few minutes reading The Bad Pitch blog.  If professional screw up this badly and often, imagine how easy it is for newbies to do.

Plenty has been written about how to pitch to bloggers. I won’t go into detail about it here but PRoBlogger has some helpful advice here:
How to Pitch to Bloggers – 21 Tips.

But, before you’re even ready to contact bloggers you have homework to do.

• Read the blog for a while. Get a sense of the tone and the comments.
• Make a list of the topics they write about and “angles” they take.
• Take an inventory of your existing content (articles, white papers, videos, etc.) that might be of interest to them.
• Make a list of existing content you could tweak or new content you could create that would be of interest to their audience.
• Then, make or teak that content. You’ve got to have your ducks lined up before you contact bloggers.

I know this sounds like a lot of work and it is but it gets easier once you’ve got a solid toolkit of content to pull from.  Keep in mind that it only takes a few well placed mentions of your business or product to become the next overnight sensation.

I could easily spend another 10 or 20 hours mining the sites in this article but why deny you the fun?

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My Two Cents: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

Monday, March 15th, 2010

At the end of November, I hired my lil-bro to burn all my CD’s to a hard drive. He’s really good at this kind of stuff and needed the bucks so it seemed like a good idea. Burning all my CD’s to a hard drive has two benefits: 1) I can make a few bucks selling them after the fact and 2) I won’t have to look at them collecting dust in my living room.

It is now March and lil-bro has been incommunicado for over 2 months. I’ve emailed him twice and all I got back was the sound of crickets.⁽¹⁾ Considering he has over 5k worth of my music collection, I felt it necessary to bring in the big guns – aka his Mom.

Fortunately for me, lil-bro lives with his mother who is easily the most responsible person on the planet. Normally I would eschew parental involvement but like I said, he’s been incommunicado and has over 5k worth of my music.

Yay Mom. She put a fire under his butt and as of today assures me lil-bro is burning CD’s like crazy. ⁽³⁾ The whole kit-and-caboodle should be in the mail within a few days.  But, I still haven’t heard from lil-bro and I’m kind of bummed.  If only to tell him I’m not mad; I just wanted a status update.

TAKE AWAY: Even if you think a client is pissed, COMMUNICATE!

How hard is it to send an email that essentially says “I’m working on it”?  Chances are your customer isn’t as mad as you imagine. And for sure they’re less pissed off today than they will be next week.

Granted “my dog ate my homework” only works once and if you’re a terminal excuse maker you will fail at being a business owner but if I’ve learned anything from working with clients virtually, email updates go a LONG way to making customers happy; especially when projects take longer than you think. A little information goes a long way to preventing clients from filling in the blanks with the worst case scenario.

So. When you screw up and blow a deadline, admit it. Admit it as soon as possible, as accurately as possible and tell them how you will make it right. In the long run you could quite possibly wind up with a happy client.

Foot Notes:

(1) I didn’t call him because I don’t have his cell # and no one ever answers the house line. Why they keep it? I don’t know.

(2) I’m no newbie to project management. I offered him a bonus to complete the job by the end of January.

(3) Sorry Dude. Really didn’t want to bring your Mom into it but hey, you’ve got all my tunes!

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When Good Marketers Go Bad: Another Segment in an Ongoing Series

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

I just listened to one of the worst teleclasses I’ve ever heard.  What was particularly shocking was that it was done by someone well known in the PR field. (No. I’m not going to name names for reasons soon to be obvious but if you email me I’ll tell you.)

People expect that in a 60 minute teleclass you’re going to talk for 45 – 50 minutes then take questions.  This is important for two reasons.

Problem #1: Asking Questions Throughout the Teleclass vs. Questions at the End

When people are in listening mode, they aren’t thinking of questions to ask you in the next 30 – 90 seconds. Asking if there are any questions every 3 – 5 minutes is annoying and leave a lot of uncomfortable dead air.   Solution: If you’re going to ask questions through out have some plants (people on the call ready to ask pre-determined questions). Also, in your promotional copy tell people you’re going to take questions throughout the call so they have time to think of stuff.

Problem #2: Listening Mode vs. Discussion Mode

Taking questions throughout a teleclass requires Discussion Mode which means we all get to hear what’s going on in the background of each attendees life. It’s surprising how noisy many people’s lives are. One is bad. Imagine how much worse it is when there are 6 attendees with serious background noise.  Unfortunately, they are usually the last to realize they’re the problem so it pretty much ruins the call for everyone.  Solution: Don’t do discussion mode unless people know up front that it will be discussion mode and people will need to mute themselves. Also, tell them how to mute themselves in the call in directions.

P.S. If you’re going to charge $67 A MONTH for a press release template, be sure to communicate the value other than it shows you where to put your business name, address, website and email.  I can get that info for free with a simple web search.

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Take the Time to Write Well!

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Today I came across an article in Search Engine Land’s Strictly Business column that annoyed the hell out of me.  Not because I disagree with the point the author was trying to make. If I understand her correctly, I whole heartedly agree! I’m annoyed because the article was so poorly written the very important point she was trying to make got lost in bad writing! (you can read the article here. )

I believe that the overall point of the article is “When there is a mis-match between the key words you are targeting on a web page and the overall tone of the page copy, that web page won’t yield the results you expect. Here’s what you can do to fix it.”  I can only assume this was the point the author meant to make because at no point does the author tell the reader what point she is trying to make.

The Major Mistakes Made
1. The author breaks the Golden Rule of Copywriting which is “Tell the reader what you are going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell the reader what you told them.”

2. The other major mistake the author makes is that she doesn’t write like she would speak.  See the example below. Would you speak like this?

Bad Writing:
Considering that, it is important to first gain clarity about the issues affecting performance before prematurely changing your keywords. Otherwise, you might find yourself “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” when you toss keywords that seem to be underperforming.

Moreover, be mindful that changing keywords can greatly affect your visibility in the search results. Given that it takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve visibility on certain keywords, you need to consider whether or not any keywords changes are worthwhile

Plain English:
Changing keywords can have a big impact on your rankings and traffic.  You need to know what issues affect performance before you change the keywords you target.  Otherwise you run the risk of “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

I could go through the article and give you more examples but I’m willing to bet at least 95% of the people reading this article bailed out before the author got around to explaining how to solve the problem.

Who’s to Blame?
I know how much guts it takes to put your work out there on the web. I don’t blame the author for this poor writing. I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt and I’m willing to bet that if the author set this article aside for a few days then ran it through the crucible one more time she’d be able to boil it down to the good stuff.

Who do I blame?  I blame the editors at Search Engine Land who should have read this with both eyes instead of just looking for an article to publish in this week’s column.

This could have been a really good column that generated links. Instead the author and the editors punted and missed a good opportunity. No wonder why people think social media doens’t work.

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