- In this video, you're gonna discover
exactly how to build high-quality,
authoritative backlinks to your site
using HARO, also known as Help a Reporter Out.
This is one of the best websites out there right now,
if you wanna drive more links to your site
and build your website's authority,
and it doesn't cost anything to use.
In fact, recently it's actually landed me
some DR70 and DR80 links
to my own affiliate website.
By the end of this video,
you will discover exactly how to do that yourself
using my 3 Step Blueprint.
But, before we jump in,
please make sure you subscribe,
smash a like on the video
and don't forget to leave any comments,
if you have any questions about HARO and Link Building.
By the way, if you're not familiar with HARO,
or Help a Reporter, as it's also known,
this is basically a website where journalists
will post on there certain article opportunities,
and they're looking for research, and feedback and opinions
from people who own websites and can provide
a credible opinion on a certain matter.
For example, a journalist might go on there
and they might say, "Hey, I'm looking for
"experts to express their opinion
"on the best way to meditate in the morning."
Then, you as a website owner, could reply to that,
and if you're featured,
if your opinion is featured in the article,
then you could receive a backlink to your site.
Some really high-authority websites
use this site as a way of getting sources.
For example, you can see
where it says Fox News, Mashable,
some really big publications
that you can get a potential link to.
It's a great way to get PR.
The reason that journalists are using this is
because they wanna have social proof of their articles,
so they wanna make sure it looks well-researched.
For you, it's win-win, because you provide your opinion,
you spend some time creating that,
and then you get a backlink to your site in return.
This is a really big website,
so they have like 800000 sources, 55000 journalists,
and there's loads of great media opportunities on this site.
If you're looking for exclusive backlinks,
and some of these you will not find
if you're doing outreach.
You can only get it from PR.
This is a great website to do that.
Now, if you're not signed up already,
simply go to signup on helpareporter.com,
and from there you can sign up, create an account.
Super easy to do, and it's completely free, as well.
Then once you're signed up,
you'll see a preferences section here in your account.
You can basically select
which opportunities you wanna receive,
and these will be sent to your email inbox.
You'll receive them every day.
You can choose which industries
you wanna get link opportunities from.
You can say, "Okay, I want links from
"general sites, travel opportunities,
"lifestyle and fitness articles
"and business and finance,"
whichever ones you wanna get.
The thing I'll say about this is that, basically,
if you wanna get featured on a site like this,
you have to know something about the topic.
You really wanna pick out
the industries that you know a lot about,
that you feel confident about speaking,
because that's where you're gonna get features.
Also, for link building purposes,
you wanna make sure that the links you get back
are from relevant sites, and therefore,
only go for the sites that you wanna be featured on.
Unless they're extremely high authority,
you wanna make sure the backlinks you get
are very relevant and related to
the industry that you work in.
You signed up to HARO.
You're gonna receive email updates
with all of the featured queries
that you can respond to
and potentially pitch for a link.
The problem is that most of these
won't be relevant to your site,
especially if you're in a very specific niche.
What I recommend is filtering your Gmail,
so that you only get the HARO pitches
that are related to your site.
For example, you can type in HARO here,
plus, and then whatever keyword you're going for.
Here, let's say, for example, we're going after meditation.
Then, you've filtered down all the emails
that are relevant to HARO queries for your site.
Now what we're gonna do is click into
an example HARO update.
This is an email breakdown
of all the potential featured opportunities
that you can pitch and get a link to your site.
Let's see, scroll down.
You can click on these, and you can see
there's over 40 here, over 50 here,
so there's loads of opportunities.
Whatever niche you're in,
there's gonna be potential link opportunities.
They might not come every, single day,
but there will be some for you.
Then you can see a breakdown of each HARO opportunity.
You can see, for example, here
it's in the lifestyle and fitness.
That's the email that you should be contacting to pitch.
Sometimes they don't reveal the specific media outlet,
but then you can also see the deadline.
This is when you need to reply to the HARO response
to get a link to your site, and if you
go outside the deadline, chances are
you're not gonna hear back from that reporter.
Before you start firing off pitches,
make sure that you check the requirements
of each opportunity.
For example, here they wanna make sure that no one's
posting or pitching a product or service.
Here you can see,
they're looking for fashion designers,
so people with actual fashion design experience.
Quite often, don't just shoot off the opportunities.
Make sure that you check the requirements first.
Make sure you can meet them,
cause, chances are, if you don't,
you may not get featured.
You wanna be as sufficient as possible
when you're pitching for HARO.
Next up, as well, I'd also recommend
looking at the media outlet,
making sure that they're a high-authority site
that you're gonna want a backlink from.
If they're a random outlet that you've never heard of,
maybe they're really low DR,
they don't get any traffic to their site,
is it really worth your time
pitching for that opportunity?
Personally, I'd say no,
and that's why I recommend only going
after the really high-authority sources.
For example, Huffington Post,
that's a really high DR potential backlink
that you'd get to your site.
Therefore, it's definitely worth your time
pitching for this opportunity,
if you wanna get a backlink from them.
When you're responding to these HARO queries,
I'm gonna give you a few tips
to make sure that you save as much time
and get as many backlinks as possible.
The first thing that I'd recommend
is making sure that you only send
two to three paragraphs maximum,
because journalists get so many responses,
you don't need to write like War and Peace here.
You can just keep this short and concise
to save the journalist time
and make sure that your answer
isn't just a load of drivel,
and that it gets straight to the point.
Next up, when you're replying to HARO responses,
make sure that you look as credible
and professional as possible,
because first impressions really count here.
If there's loads of grammar
or spelling mistakes in your response,
then journalists are less likely
to feature you in their article,
which means you'll get less links back,
so you have to be quite careful about that
and double-check everything before you send the response.
I'd also make sure that when you do send a response,
make sure it's really unique
and completely out of the box
compared to other people's responses,
because that's gonna make sure you stand out,
and, therefore, you're gonna get more links to your site.
The other thing is, as well, that
when people are answering these HARO queries,
they're probably gonna be googling
the keyword rewrite in the top search result,
and, therefore, most answers are gonna look the same.
If you write something unique,
you're really gonna stand out
amongst a sea of other responses.
The final step that I recommend is
tracking all the responses that you get
and making sure that you track them,
so that you can see conversion rates,
what links have come through and your success so far.
For example, you might ask yourself
how long is it gonna take to get a HARO link back,
and the answer is that it could be a month,
it could be a week or it could be six months.
Especially, if you're going after
really high-authority websites,
chances are, they're gonna have a long
editorial waiting list of articles to publish,
and, therefore, it might take three
or even six months before you get a link back.
For example, one of my friends,
he applied for a HARO opportunity on Washington Post,
and he did get the link,
but he only got it six months later.
That's something you have to be prepared for.
That's why I also recommend
tracking your responses on the spreadsheet,
so you can see your success so far,
and you can see which links are live
versus which responses you went after
but you didn't get a link back.
Just to show you how easy this whole blueprint is,
here you can see,
this is a pitch I sent into Thrive Global
on October the 28th.
You can see that the link was published.
It's a DR 84 link, so it's pretty high-quality,
high-demand and something you, probably,
wouldn't normally get from outreach.
You can see this was published a month later,
on November the 20th,
and it's a really high-quality link.
It's DR 84.
This website gets over 413000 organic traffic a month.
It's just so easy.
To send the response like this,
it's just one paragraph.
It's very simple, very concise,
straight to the point.
Only took about two minutes to write.
That is how easy it is
to land high-quality links with HARO.
So now you know exactly how to build
high-quality, authoritative backlinks to your site
using this 3 Step Blueprint.
It's very easy to do.
It doesn't take a lot of time.
It's free to use, and it's very easy
to just rinse and repeat this process
and build almost as many high-quality backlinks
as you want to your site.
Thanks for watching.
Let me know if you have any questions about HARO
or Link Building, in the comment section below.
Don't forget to leave a like on this video
and subscribe, if you want more tips
on Link Building and HARO.