How to Master HARO for Free PR and Easy SEO Wins

Greg Heilers is the Sorcerer in Residence at Sourcery, a HARO pitching platform for editorial link building that helps business leaders increase brand awareness and find their audience. He is also the Co-captain of Jolly SEO, a company that provides SEO, content marketing, and backlink services to businesses of every size.

Outside of the office, Greg volunteers as an Ambassador for Pionero Philanthropy, an organization that matches philanthropic businesses and individuals with Guatemala-based causes. In his free time, Greg is also an avid gardener and hiker.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Greg Heilers discusses the ins and outs of HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Greg and Mark Daoust talk about the benefits of using HARO’s free service: PR, backlinks, roundtables, and more
• How to optimize your time and expand your network when using HARO
• Why do some companies and publications maintain a “no linking” policy?
• The secrets to creating an eye-catching pitch headline on HARO
• Greg’s tips for crafting a perfectly timed and concise response
• Greg explains his companies’ DFY and DIY services

In this episode…

Are you looking for a way to put your hard-won expertise to good use? Do you want to be featured in esteemed publications like Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur, and more? If so, this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast is for you!

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a free service that connects specialists like you with reporters or journalists who need expert sources. The benefits of using HARO are innumerable: expanding and diversifying your network, becoming a guest on popular podcasts, and, of course, growing and scaling your business. However, HARO is full of experts — so how can you make yourself stand out from the crowd? HARO expert Greg Heilers is here to share his tried-and-true strategies for growing your presence and scaling your business through HARO today.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Mark Daoust sits down with Greg Heilers, the Sorcerer in Residence at Sourcery and the Co-Captain of Jolly SEO, to discuss all things HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Listen in as Greg reveals the many advantages of using HARO’s platform, the ins and outs of complicated backlinking policies, and his best-kept secrets for crafting a persuasive pitch that will help you grow your company in no time. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Greg Heilers on LinkedIn
• Sourcery
• Jolly SEO
• Quiet Light
• The Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• Mark Daoust
• Mark’s email: [email protected]
• Joe Valley
• HARO
• “HARO Backlink Decay: A 2-Year Case Study”
• Peter Shankman

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. By providing trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations, your Quiet Light advisor isn’t your every-day broker—they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on their website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light is offering the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hi, folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Mark Daoust  0:29

Alright, welcome back everybody to the Quiet Light Podcast. This is Mark Daoust. I am joined by Greg today from Jolly SEO. I’m really excited about this podcast because his service is something that I’ve been familiar with for a super long time called HARO or Help a Reporter Out. I think some of us here will know what that is, others won’t we’ll go over that. For those that don’t necessarily know what that is. But his company specializes in HARO pitches. He’s currently doing over 4000 pitches a month, which is absolutely bonkers. It takes a team of about 45 contractors to do all those pitches, which is super exciting. We’re going to crack open some of the secrets to make HARO a little bit more effective for you and how you can use us. Obviously, for those that are buying businesses, breaking into HARO and getting that free PR that you can obtain through HARO is a great tool to scale up your business rather rapidly and a very quick win. And it can also be used on that sell side as well. Building up value in the business being able to show press and everything that goes along there. I’m excited to get started with this before we do just a quick reminder, this is brought to you by Quiet Light Brokerage. We’ve been helping people exit their online businesses for the past 14 years since 2006. We work with Amazon FBA, SaaS, content based businesses. And we’d really love to talk to anybody out there who is early on in that process wants to get evaluation just to understand what the value of their businesses It doesn’t matter if you want to sell it or not. That’s fine. We would never push anybody to sell. But if you are interested in getting a valuation of your company, please reach out to us you can fill out a evaluation form on our website, or just email me [email protected]. Alright, with that out of the way, Greg, thank you so much for coming on.

Greg Heilers  2:05

No, thank you for having me, Mark. I appreciate it.

Mark Daoust  2:09

Alright, let’s start at HARO 101. What is HARO, let’s let’s talk about that first.

Greg Heilers  2:14

HARO is an amazing platform owned by Cision. The people who bring you PR Newswire, I’m sure many familiar with SEO and PR know what a PR is a press release. It’s the same company they snapped HARO. It was founded by a guy named Peter Shankman. And essentially what it is, is that the lingo here is journalism sourcing service. So what that means is journalists are out there looking for their sources, sources, US experts, business owners, consultants are out there looking for some exposure, the platform exists for journalists to come in and say I’m working on this article, I need an expert, not just any fluff an expert to weigh in. And then it’s up to us to sift through all the opportunities, but to deliver three times daily to your email inbox, and pick what you actually fit and provide value to these journalists. And it’s, as he said, use the word bonkers, but that’s kind of how I describe the whole ecosystem. It’s free. You don’t need to pay, there is a premium version, we frankly don’t use it. And, you know, HARO is monetized off of it’s in newsletter ad I feel like they’re doing okay, they have over a million subscribers. It’s not a secret anymore, but it’s still a very effective, very effective.

Mark Daoust  3:36

And I’ve been, I’ve been receiving HARO notifications for Quiet Light been around for 14 years. So probably 12. Right. I’ve been on their list for a really, really long time. Now, I’m only on a couple of their lists. Do you know offhand? Just to give some context here, right? If you are a SaaS company providing some financial software for businesses, you really don’t care about talking to a reporter who wants to do something for a landscaping magazine. Right, that wouldn’t be of interest to you. So HARO organizes things in silos in different categories for different reporters. Do you know offhand how many categories of newsletters they have?

Greg Heilers  4:18

I think it’s eight or nine, you can of course, check receive all and the general can sometimes be a bit of a melting pot, you know, people just throw them in a grab bag, but most people like that Fast Company would gravitate towards business and finances one category, and tech is another category. And then you’ve got all kinds of niche lifestyle. There’s education, there’s government, those are, you know, when you get all the way down to government, they’re not very populated on a day to day basis. Although if it’s relevant to you, the good news is, there’s a lot less fish in the pool too.

Mark Daoust  4:57

Yeah, and then two to three emails per day. And what’s in these emails?

Greg Heilers  5:03

Yeah, and these emails is everything from Wall Street Journal, you know, New York Times through Business Insider, Forbes, what everyone wants for social proof through what we call industry publications like a business.com, Business News Daily. And then you keep going, and you go through niche blogs, and then it gets into the anonymous section. Now these people didn’t make the cut with their Alexa ranking. So they submitted their opportunity anonymously. To be quite honest. In the HARO space, there’s differing opinions, we currently don’t hit those. But I think that’s mostly because we’re providing a service. Our clients want a certain caliber, they tell us specifically, look, we’re not going to target below this. We don’t have to get into the details of our stuff that’s on our website. But if I was a DIY person, I might check those out, too. There might be some good stuff in there.

Mark Daoust  6:05

Yeah, let’s let’s talk about the benefits real quick of HARO. And again, HARO is a free service. So what I love about the fact that you’re on here, I know that this is you doing this service for people, and I get it and I’ll get into why I get that being a decent service, or markable service a little bit. But this is something anybody can do. And frankly, anyone who owns a business should be subscribed to these newsletters because it’s free PR so and free LinkedIn opportunities, many of these cases. So let’s talk about some of the benefits of it. You already mentioned some of the publications, New York Times, Forbes, you know, named the publication, at some point, they’ve used HARO on that reporter side. What other opportunities can somebody get, besides maybe just a juicy link from a business.com or interesting publication? Are there other opportunities? Like video or or?

Greg Heilers  6:54

Yes, yeah, there’s all kinds of one hour roundtables, you know, podcast, books, newspapers, you know, we, I, you’re right, I tend to focus hyper on what’s relevant to our company. And you’re so right, there’s so much else going on there. Besides the social proof, and on the PR side, there is the backlinks Of course, there’s also the leverage that gives you you talked about what that could mean, if you’re trying to sell we’ve had two clients, and just the two years we’ve been operational that that have been acquired. And I’m coming close to asking them to write a feature about them, because I’d like to know just how instrumental we could have been in that. I mean, they’ve been in some good publications. So you know, it’s still articles, but you can leverage these differently than you could end your backlink. Yeah,

Mark Daoust  7:45

I think the proof of concept I know, we’ve done this with listeners that we bring to market, right, we’ve had some clients that have been featured with Oprah. And I mean, that’s kind of on their headline. And it’s not so much something that’s, I mean, it changes the revenue projection. If you’re featured on Oprah, Oprah, whom everybody would like to be featured by because of the the name and the talk about the master influencer there. It just gives credence to this as being a brand worth paying attention to and potentially acquiring. And so there’s there’s that aspect, right? It’s if you get featured in a New York Times post, if you get featured in Forbes, if you get featured in your name, the publication, especially if it’s industry specific, it shows a certain acceptance of your brand is not just being this startup internet based business or startup brand here today, gone tomorrow. So I think that’s one of the big benefits of it. What are the benefits? What would you talk to if I’m a client here asking about it as far as HARO just in general. There’s the SEO side, anything else that I’m missing?

Greg Heilers  8:52

You know, I focus a lot, you know, we’re an SEO service. If you really want to dive into the SEO, I just briefly, I would say, you need to be careful when you get into what they call backlink building. And you can buy a lot of backlinks that would hurt your site, long term. And so that’s actually a huge benefit of HARO. Not just that it gives you links, but the quality of links. Because again, you’re not paying for these links, you’re not begging for these links, you are contributing your expertise. And if they so choose, a journalist may be able to give you a link. So the quality is totally different from anywhere else. But outside of SEO and PR, those are the you know, the social proof side of PR. those are those are the main things that I look at HARO for it’s, you could reverse engineer it and use it as a crowdsourcing tool if if you want it to, I’ve seen people do that. That could be another play. We’ve we haven’t done that, but you could use it that way.

Mark Daoust  9:53

I’ve actually used it that way. In the past. It’s been it’s been useful. I’d wanted to do some things Would you like a crowdsource piece, right best tips on whatever and I put it out there. And I got some great feedback from that and some great sources. Let’s talk about managing the time. And I also wanted to crack into, you know how to be most effective because anyone that’s used, HARO has had that empty pitch, where if nothing comes of it, and I think there are two areas of frustration, I think for most DIYers, those that are doing it on their own. One is just keeping up with it write three emails per day. And you know, if you’re in the business and finance category, you can have 10, 15, 20 different requests per day. And, you know, it seems like 20 of them don’t match out of 20, or maybe one does, out of all of that. And so there’s kind of like a hunting mission that you’re on. And then the second is, is actually making sure that the time that you put into your response gets read, and potentially accepted. And you only take so many times of failures, where you’re like, is this really worth my time? So let’s talk first about the the organization and digesting these, your group I’m sure has a team that is just reading every single one of these imaginings up against your clients, but for the DIY, or do you have any tips on how they can manage this a little bit more efficiently? Or is it just something that they need to do?

Greg Heilers  11:16

Yeah, and it depends, of course, on your goal, you know, we’re focused on SEO. So we’re also analyzing each one by its SEO metrics. And we also focus on does it what is the linking policy of these websites, quite frankly, to the give do follows nofollow unlinked mentions, and that’s why we built our saas. So internally, we do have a team, we do sort these by, there’s SEO metrics, and what value they provide with SEO. Of course, some clients want the PR value. So we focus on that, what I would say as the DIY or if you’re not going to use our SaaS we’re about to launch, then what you should hit first, of course, is the deadline, just so you know. HARO cuts off all pitches after deadline, you don’t need to use your valuable time looking at anything past deadline. Right above that requirements. Remember, these are real journalists and marketers writing real articles, they really do want to fulfill the requirements listed there. So they will say clearly who they need a C suite or someone like that. And finally, going back to the top of any HARO query, I would look at the publication. And then, you know, the summary is what’s going to grab your attention, first of all, but start diving into the detailed questions. And seeing, you know, as you mentioned, not every pitch is even going to get opened. Quite frankly, if you’re talking about like Forbes and Business Insider opportunities, hundreds of media pitches for each opportunity. So we could talk about some advice on headlines, and you know, subject lines, the most valuable thing I can say is, make sure your subject line and your first sentence references your authority. So talk about why you’re relevant to this piece. You know, if it’s a piece talking about selling a business, you’d have to say, in my 14 years working in a brokerage selling online businesses. I mean, that’s what they want to see. That’s not the whole answer. But that’s the first tidbit to get them interesting.

Mark Daoust  13:24

Yeah, I want to really dig into that topic here in a minute. But I wanted to just key in on something he said, and that is not all these publications will actually link back to you. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, right? I’m not going to name names here. But I was recently interviewed for a publication very kind of one of those headliner publications that you want to shout and be like, hey, look, who just interviewed me, that’s pretty cool. Only to find that they have a no linking policy. And, you know, in all fairness, they interviewed a bunch of companies, and none of them were linked. You know, you know, I did what what any responsible SEO minded person would do, and I asked for the link, and I said, Now our editorial policy is not to say, Okay, thank you, you know, and I still believe that those those organic mentions have some value for for the company, but you have to know that going in. Do you guys have any resource like that on your site? I know, you said you have a lot of information on the site. Have you ever published like who links and who doesn’t?

Greg Heilers  14:18

So what we have done at our SaaS Sourcery at that linksourcery.com. We have published two years study on what we call backlink decay. And some of this was originally they were do follow and then they got flipped to nofollow or unlinked or maybe the page for afford. So we publish that. And that’s available. And instead of publishing regular updates, that’s more or less what our status idea is, is our internal knowledge. And granted, this is freely available knowledge. You know, you could study a website, figure out, inspect links do they give to follow nofollow? This isn’t stated anywhere in their policies, but it’s also Just our daily updated experience. So you better believe when we’re sending out that many pitches, we’re looking at what comes back. And so we keep track of what comes back. And that’s built into our SaaS that we’re releasing. So yeah, but it won’t be a catalog per se, it’ll be each opportunity that becomes available will have that next to it just as an indicator. This usually gives a do follow usually gives no follow.

Mark Daoust  15:30

Awesome. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit, you started talking about headlines. So let’s let’s go through the mind of the reporter here and they need these sources. That’s why they’re using HARO right there, they’re looking for a source on a particular topic, they have a question that they’re looking for answers. But then you get to, like you said, the big hitters, and they’re going to get hundreds, if not 1000s, they already said there’s over a million subscribers. So we can just go through, you know, do the math, if you’re if you’re thinking here, everyone that’s listening, I know you you were good at math, we could have 1000s of pitches within a short amount of time. Let’s talk about standing out a little bit. Your first tip was the headline, talking about the headline and saying, address the question specifically in the headline, and how you answer that. I’m gonna put you on the spot. And if you can’t answer this right now, that’s fine. Do you have an example of what that might look like?

Greg Heilers  16:23

Yeah, and so you know, our writer, director, he literally any, you know, all of our team came up through the ranks, I myself have sent a couple 1000 of these pitches. But as time goes on, other people get more experienced. So I’ll tell you his advice. It’s actually as simple as copy paste the summary from the opportunity and in HARO, because he has heard explicit feedback from journalists, that that’s how they search their inbox to wade through their inbox, because these journalists are getting cold pitch all day, not even just through HARO, but getting cold pitch. So when they are like, Alright, I’m ready to deal with the onslaught, they’ll they’ll search their inbox for what they listed on HARO. So that’s one, I never did that, to be honest, mine was cite your title, so like CEO, on and then kind of modify that, that opportunity summary? You know, immediate, I always started with the C suite title, if that’s accurate, you know, whatever is accurate. For me that that should jump out, rather than I’ve been on the receiving end, like you, we’ve we’ve crowdsource some content ideas. And, you know, rather than some, like, I’d like to talk to you about I mean, what, like, you’re never gonna open that as a cold email, right. So that that would be my angle. And that similar to what I told you in the intro sentence is like immediate reference, your depth of experience or relevant experience,

Mark Daoust  17:57

you know, it’s funny, the longer I spend in the online world, the more I realized that developing products, especially for the online audience, and pitches, and everything else is really about how simple Can you make it for everybody, right? Twitter successful because it’s simple, in its foundation is all about simplicity. And this is the same thing, if somebody has been bombarded with even, it doesn’t have to be 1000s. If they’re hit with 50 responses, that is a monumental number of emails to wade through, forgetting to do so in depth. So stand out in a way that that somebody can check it. I love that tip of copy and paste the request, you may modify with CEO or founder on copy and paste right at that point of what that is. That’s a fantastic tip. All right. Next, the response. Obviously, some of these requests, say looking for 400 words or more. Some of them don’t say give any guidance at all, in light of no guidance for a length of a response. How long or how much time should we be given because in some cases, I’ve responded to somewhere, I’ve been like, Hey, here’s everything. And you know, I craft this nice 4040 minute long email where I’m thinking really deeply about the problem. There’s probably a bunch of people beating me to the pitch in that time. And then there’s others where I’ve been like, hey, this person’s busy, I’m going to do three, three or four sentences. Where’s the sweet point of this sweet spot for you guys? As far as the length of the response? And what should go in that response?

Greg Heilers  19:20

Yeah, and real quick, you also mentioned someone beating you to the punch, I just wanted to touch on the timing. Of course, the consensus is the faster the better. And and I respect that it makes sense inherently, the sooner this thing goes live that that person will see them rolling in. I have to say, for a year and a half freelancing, this you know, the freelancer mindset is back work as much as possible. I was literally organizing them by deadline and my draft in my drafts. And so that that means by nature, I was hitting them as late as possible, actually. And I had a one in four and a half conversion ratio. So it wasn’t amazing, but It was it was good, right? And so just as counterbalance, you know, of most of our team is directed early, early, early, fast. But I just thought I’d throw that out there that perhaps if you come in at the tail end, it’s also worthwhile because if you think about it, you’re going to be top of inbox to it’s just a hunch, I don’t know that being in the mid range, we say is, is helpful. But back to your very important question. You made the right statement, it’s about making it easy. We call it cut and paste, double or copy, paste, double. So you’re delivering quotes that are going to end up in articles, you’re you don’t want to write the article, you’re going to be slotted into an h2 that was either already planned out, or they came up with after they read your pitch. And so but either way, they’re going to fit you in there. So sometimes it’s a block, quote, but rarely, at least at the best publications, it’s rarely a blockquote. So what we advise is internet style writing like two sentence paragraphs, you don’t want four or five, six sentence paragraphs, you want 15 word sentences, and what you can do for each paragraph, it’s okay to get into, like you said, if there’s no guidance, it’s okay to get into the two to three ideas in one email. But I would separate them by paragraph and maybe even bold the first sentence of each paragraph so that each idea is clearly labeled, where I got it wrong was almost treating that as a header, but that ruins the cut and paste, quick cut and paste. I used to advise everyone do like a three to five word, summary bolded before each set paragraph, but that ruins the user experience, so to speak, on the receiving end. So that’s how I would do it. Keep it short, segmented, you don’t want walls of text. Now, if you do get the instructions, that’s a different story. If you get seven questions, and it’s from a mom and pop blog, and you’re like, I don’t care, then maybe you answer two or three. And forget the rest. Just pretend you never saw them. Or if it’s Business Insider, maybe you spend 40 minutes and go for broke. And maybe you’re gonna be the one that spent 40 minutes. Yeah.

Mark Daoust  22:24

There’s so much good in here. By the way. I am so happy to hear you talk about internet copywriting. For those that are not familiar, there is a style of writing on the internet that is unique to the internet. And if you talk to any classically trained writer, they will hate it. Because it’s hard to write and these one to two sentence paragraphs. But if you look at the best copywriters, they don’t write in big blocks. Because people don’t read online, they scan. And so you want to be you want to be broken up into these, these shorter sentences. I know my cmo who’s going to be listening to this podcast because he listens to all the podcasts, he has to do that that’s part of his work. He’s going to hear this sorry. He’s gonna be rolling his eyes because he and I have had to go rounds of that. Not that he’s not on board with it. But he deals with writers and trying to get writers to write in a style all the time as well, which is which is tough. So that’s,

Greg Heilers  23:14

that’s probably the toughest as a DIY, it’s really important. It’s easy to be like I understand these guys said it. I personally wrote 1000s of articles copyrighted like 10 million plus words before you know this, this is the start of the career. It took a long time to conform. I’m not saying for better or worse that internet content is always like the peak of civilization, right? If you’re using this platform, though, you need to fit in and that’s what they’re looking for.

Mark Daoust  23:45

I mean, let’s let’s let’s be realistic here the internet now speaks in emojis. I don’t think that we are at the height of we’re we’re one step above hieroglyphics. Yeah. Returning back to our roots. Okay, you use that your success rate was one in four and a half, which is my hardest question written out personally, personally not for your firm for the DIY, or what is a good success rate? What should they be expecting going in? If if they try this a little bit, you know, in following some of these principles, and then for professional writing these what would be a good hit rate?

Greg Heilers  24:17

Yeah. Probably for the DIY er, and you should be happy with a one in 15. If you’re not a pro writer, if you’re a pro writer, you should be hitting like one in eight. Our crew is around one in 12. And it’s a little disappointing when in 13, but we do have to hit the highest quality. And so that’s what I’d say. Can I just add, you know, I know we’ll run out of time at some point before I forget. When you’re about to DIY this, you have to know there’s a delay between when you send your pitch and when something goes live. So it’s 24 hours all the way up to five months. I had a Business Insider last year for Greg go live And it was I pitched it in January when live in May. So that’s just the way it goes. So don’t get discouraged when you send 25 pitches. And you’re like, I know these guys said one in 15 is not true. The others, even worse aspect is 90% of your wins, they’re never going to notify you if they’re out there somewhere. We have a whole team dedicated to what we call them, the link hunters to hunting through the internet matters to us, because we want to build our service. You know, it’s PR and SEO, but for the DIY, you should, you could do some hunting yourself. But also just my main message is don’t don’t give up early when you don’t get a flood of positive reinforcement. These are freelancers on the other end, they’re not spending their time emailing you back and forth.

Mark Daoust  25:47

Yeah, and you know, I think there’s some theories and some techniques that I’ve seen where when you do get these publications, like my first earned mentioned was with Entrepreneur, right? It was that sort of scenario, it took a really long time, we had the promise for it to happen. It was like six or seven months, it was really frustrating.

Greg Heilers  26:05

Especially your first one, you’re like, yeah, is this viable, six or seven months. So for six or seven months, you’re still trying, but you’re losing heart as

Mark Daoust  26:14

well, this was this was their traditional PR firm. So I wasn’t just going through HARO with this one. But it was I mean, we had done a lot of work for this piece to get published in Entrepreneur and it just took forever to get out. But for that link counting, you know, the one thing to consider, I know some people will push some paid traffic in the direction of that belief that it helps the SEO, I’m sure smarter SEO minds, the mind would would maybe argue as to whether or not there’s a benefit there. But if nothing else, there’s a recognition of seeing your name again. I was a contributor for Entrepreneur for a long time and often said, I got almost no traffic from Entrepreneur, but I want a lot of business because I was a contributor, right? Yeah, so alright, that’s, that’s really good to know. Last question, want to ask them this. And then we’re going to be out of time here. This is this has been really, really cool. And I want to talk a little bit about what you’re doing as well. But the creativity side of it, I’ve found in working with different people with that maybe have gone through and called some questions for me is that they see an opportunity where I don’t in question, and maybe I just look at it as it doesn’t really fit for me. But then, you know, PR professional might look at it differently and say, Well, what about doing from this angle? How much does that play into what you guys are doing as well? And I guess it’s not so much a tip for the do it yourselfer? You know, I would just tell the do it yourself or, you know, don’t don’t discount opportunity. Really think about it. I would imagine you guys have gotten pretty creative with some of these pitches.

Greg Heilers  27:39

Yeah, the beauty of having I mean, we now work with 80 plus clients is some want very niche relevant opportunities, some are wide open. And so the wide open ones are really fun. Because we do know personal details about our clients, we can talk about their past their work life philosophy, you’ll see opportunities all the time about interviewing tactics, or you know, just you can dive in to any facet of life. If you’re really curious about getting creative, you should not close out those other sections of the horror newsletter just because they don’t fit your business niche. Then, as you mentioned, in SEO, there’s a whole debate on is relevancy important. So some people don’t think it is some people do and be careful with whatever you do, if that’s important to you, but for our writers we have we have an onboarding survey and then you know, there are clients though, we’re trying to represent them while we can always reach out and ask. It can be really fun. Being in a service business, as many of you know, also can be pretty constructive environment at times. Sometimes it’s do not get creative. So yeah, there’s there’s a lot of room to play in horror though, especially if you’re DIY. I know if you looked up Greg Heilers. There’s a lot of different quotes out there from about a range of different topics.

Mark Daoust  29:08

Yeah, I was so you are obviously you’re a DIY er but you are also a DFY done-for-you service. And you’re doing this for clients and that the reason I bring this up is because as I mentioned, I’ve been on the list of HARO for 12 years I think the last HARO email I looked at was probably a year ago, because I’ve grown blind to them. And you know, as a CEO, Do I have time to look at these three emails per day and do pitches and stuff like that it can be difficult to to constantly be mining that and so that’s where a service like yours comes in place. Just tells her quick you have a deal done for you DFY? acronym, acronyms, servers, but then you also have a SaaS service as well for the DIY or the person doing it for themselves. Can you just quick Tell me about both of those

Greg Heilers  30:00

Yeah, I mean, the DFY is is pretty straightforward. What we’re doing is going through all these opportunities, matching what you’re relevant to, and you know, like a PR service where we’re the ones doing the heavy lifting here, we, you know, definitely if an interview opportunity arises on a big name, platform, and the client has told us, they’re open to it, that’s them, that’s not us, we can’t do that for you, you know, you’re going to be the one on the TV show or the whatever it is the DIY, the idea is to take that newsletter, which we love, and make it a little more accessible, flap SEO metrics do like email or slack based keyword alerts, you can pitch from on platform. And again, that linking policy, and so that’s, that’s the real idea behind there is it enables the DIY or to have the same leg up our internal team has, it was a quite a debate whether we want to release that or not. And I think ultimately, it’s going to serve the ecosystem better, the journalists are going to get more relevant pitches. Now, we’re definitely not enabling anyone to do templates or anything like that, which, for the record, I advise against, and so it’s a, it’s a really wonderful space to be in.

Mark Daoust  31:13

That’s awesome. I think this is one of those areas that if you talk to, you know, 100, internet CEOs or founders 100 will tell you that they really should be doing this more than probably 100 are not doing it to the amount that they should because it we know it exists. It’s been around forever. But sometimes we don’t necessarily see the result of the work. But it’s getting those those mentions that are really important for our business, it can have just innumerable benefits for business, SEO, brand recognition, everything right, that validation everything. Where can somebody learn more about you, Greg or your company?

Greg Heilers  31:52

Yeah, I mean, I’m on LinkedIn, Greg Heilers, and you can look up jollyseo.co, or linksourcery.com both of which feed into each other. We’re, we’ve got our own little Facebook group about earned media if you want to learn more, it’s just tip sharing discussions, that kind of thing. So I’d love to connect, feel free to reach out anytime and and Mark, thanks for having

Mark Daoust  32:17

thanks for coming on. I love this topic. It’s a lot of fun to talk about this talk about something that it’s been around for a while and I know it can really help a lot of people out if they start to take advantage of some of this information. Thank you for being so open with sharing some of these tips as to having a better success rate on HARO. And yeah, let’s stay in touch.

Greg Heilers  32:36

Cool. Thank you guys.

Outro  32:39

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light Content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at podcast@quiet light.com. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.