If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner looking for media attention and you haven’t heard of “HARO,” you can view this post as my early holiday gift to you. HARO, an acronym for Help A Reporter Out, is a publicity service created in 2008 by public relations expert Peter Shankman. Shankman started HARO as a Facebook page where journalists, writers, and bloggers posted daily PR opportunities for anyone to access and respond to. The service quickly grew into a serious business, with a user base too large for the social media platform so Shankman switched to a daily email list. Over the last seven years, I’ve been scanning HARO emails for PR opportunities for my company and myself, and I’ve had a ton of success.
You can too. Anyone can sign up, and HARO subscribers get three emails a day, five days a week, filled with queries from reporters from top news outlets like Forbes, CNN, ABC, Entrepreneur, INC and many more.
The past few years have completely changed the world of public relations. The days of paying a PR firm a few thousand dollars (or more) each month to get your company press are coming to an end. Thanks to social media and people like Peter Shankman entrepreneurs can be their own PR agency. We have tools at our fingertips to generate buzz online, and thanks to HARO, reporters come to us.
When I started using the service back in 2009, I would be disappointed on weekends or on holidays when the emails wouldn’t come. Each day I scanned the HARO email first thing in the morning, at mid-day, and as the day came to an end. Reading an email that contains an average of 50 press opportunities, three times a day, may sound an excessive—or a waste of time—but HARO is organized to make it easy to find PR opportunities. Emails are organized by categories like Biotech and Healthcare, Business and Finance, Education, Energy and Green Tech, Entertainment and Media, General, High Tech, Lifestyle and Fitness, Travel and sometimes International.
On days when I don’t have time to read the entire email, I always make sure to scan Lifestyle and Fitness and Business and Finance. Queries are time sensitive, and I quickly realized that the faster I responded to a query, the better chance I had of being contacted by the reporter.
Back in 2005 when I launched The Fresh Diet, I was familiar with web development, and I had taken courses in graphic design and HTML, but my advertising and PR experience was limited. To build The Fresh Diet, I had to figure out the marketing and, more importantly, public relations games quickly. Competing in the diet industry, going up against the Nutrisystems and Weight Watchers of the world, I had to use my limited resources to create the impression we were bigger than we were. One-way to do that was to have a good PR strategy. By 2008 I had garnered some good PR for our young company but most of it was local.
Luckily, in March 2008, only months after expanding from South Florida to New York and Chicago, Phil Lempert the Supermarket-Guru featured us on ABC’s The View. There was The Fresh Diet cooler bag sitting next to Nutrisystem’s shelf-stable food and another famous frozen brand. Our fresh food stood out and the media exposure was worth millions of dollars but I needed to figure out a way to continue that momentum. Then I found HARO.
Thru HARO, my company and I have received exposure in many top media outlets in the world. From USA Today to CNN Money to INC and even this NY Times article written just last month, I have been able to secure great media mentions for The Fresh Diet simply by using this great free tool. Over the years my company hired at least three PR agencies that we paid a total of almost $100,000, but I can honestly say that HARO performed better at zero cost. Finding HARO was a big reason why The Fresh Diet and I had such great PR success.
If you think HARO can help you or your business I strongly suggest you subscribe to their mailing list. Make sure you read the rules and research best practices for responding to queries. HARO can help you find leads, but PR is a tricky business and should be a part of your general marketing strategy. And remember that social media plays a huge part in today’s PR strategy, so once you do get a great piece in the news make sure to share it with your networks. Also keep in mind that national press is great but if you don’t have a way to benefit from it—for example, if you are a local restaurant—you are better off waiting until you can reap the most benefits.
When you’re a passionate entrepreneur with a great story, telling it directly to a reporter is a fantastic thing. If a reporter or writer is looking for a source for a story that I feel I can play a part in, I quickly reply with an unscripted reason why I am the best candidate. HARO worked for me because no PR agency employee could tell my story like I could. So if you decide to give HARO a whirl, I recommend that you do the talking yourself.
