Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nStep #3: Set up your HARO outreacher for success<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The third step, though, that you’re going to want to run shortly after you’ve posted your job listing and you’re starting to screen candidates is you’re going to want to set up your HARO outreacher for success. There’s a few things you need to do here. The first thing that I did was I set up a secondary email for myself on my main domain that wasn’t my primary email that responses could go out from. And then from there I went onto HARO’s website and then I set myself up as a potential source and then selected the sort of niches or industries that were related to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What that did is that it set up notifications for my new secondary email to receive new HARO pitches that were coming out. There’s a ton of other websites like Source Bottle, as well as Help a B2B Writer that might be useful depending on what you’re looking for, but just be on the lookout for different places where you can be a contributor. And then from there, set up your secondary email to get those sorts of emails. The other thing that I recommend you do in order to improve the deliverability of your responses is to go ahead and sign up for three to four industry specific newsletters in your space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason you should do this is because you just set up a new email account. So you need to have some inbound emails also coming in to this email. And so in order to do that, those sorts of newsletters can be a great way for you to regularly be getting trusted content that’s coming into your email inbox, and it’s showing in general that you have both an inflow as well as an outflow coming out of your email inbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You don’t want to be caught in a situation in which your new secondary email is having deliverability issues because Google or whatever your email provider is, is thinking that you’re spamming people because everything is outbound in terms of the sort of email flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last thing that I recommend you do is that you create a simple documentation detailing the login information of your secondary email, as well as you share a quick bio and headshot of yourself. This is going to be really valuable because what’s going to happen is when your HARO outreacher is ready to go, they are going to want to set up your email signature to make it easy for you to have a link to your headshot, as well as your bio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That way in the case where they are responding on your behalf, it’s going to be really easy for the other end for the person that’s looking for a source to quickly copy your bio or headshot and work it into their posts. And so that’s really useful and it’s a key sort of thing that a lot of the experienced HARO outreachers are going to ask of you just because it’s how you can get a higher overall acceptance rate to these sorts of sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aside from the secondary email, as well as setting up your bio and your headshot, the last thing you need to do is you need to set up a tracker for your HARO outreacher. I’m going to show you an example of my HARO outreach tracker, just so that you can get a better understanding of how I track things in my system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pretty much the high level is I have a column for who answered the HARO query. That way I know who on my team needs to get paid for certain things. I have which profile is being used in order to have the response. I also have the different questions in place. That way nobody on my team is answering the same thing that somebody else on my team answered. I also have exactly what day it was received as well as what day of week it was as well as what day we actually sent it out was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From there, I like to have a column that essentially breaks down whether or not it was an accepted sound bite for the respective person I was looking for a source. And I also go ahead and put in the link URLs as well as domain rankings of these respective sites. I like to also differentiate between no follows and do follow links for my own tracking. But essentially what I do is I then just have my HARO outreachers submit this on a 25 per week milestone basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then I pay them out as they submit things in batches of 25. So what you can see here is that just from this very first milestone, this was a super successful milestone. 25 responses were sent out and you can see that from this respective effort, I got seven links during this first batch, and that’s a really great success rate, a 28% success rate here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And even though not all of them were do follow links, a good number of them were actually do follow links. So you can see here that I have 1, 2, 3, 4 do follow links of these seven in this first batch. And so this has been the high level process that I’ve taken. And then what I’ll typically do is I will gradually scale up my teams in which I’ll have two or three HARO outreachers, all working across variety of different secondary email accounts so that we get enough pitches out for the people that are looking for sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Step #4: Give your HARO outreacher active feedback<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
So the fourth step that you’re going to want to take when it comes to HARO outreaching is you want to make sure that you are giving people active feedback and that you are tracking the results. You noticed how I set up this tracker here, but essentially you want to make sure that as you’re ramping people up in the first week or two, that you’re giving them guidance in terms of what sort of HARO pitches they should be responding to as well as which ones they should be ignoring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, I had a couple instances in which my HARO outreacher was answering things in the pet niche, which I’m not even in. And so I told him to ignore those going forward. It’s going to take some sort of calibration time period for your HARO outreacher to understand what is relevant to you as well as what is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ideally, what you’re looking for is you’re looking for domains that are related to your own niche, that you can build up the authority for your respective site. And so this is something that does take some time, but I found that over the course of about a week or two, I was able to get in sync with my HARO outreacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Your mileage may vary, but regularly give feedback and also tell them when they say something that is something that you wouldn’t say, because that is really important feedback for them to then be able to craft towards your sort of voice as well. When it comes to tracking results, I recommend that you just have your outreacher update the tracker as it comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s what I do with my outreachers. And then what I’ll do is at the end of every single week, I will pay them out for their milestone as well as take a look at all the new links that have been accumulated and see whether or there are any bonuses that I need to pay out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Digging into the results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
If we go ahead and take a look at this respective HARO outreacher, I can go ahead and look at some of the filter views I’ve set up here and you can see that just from this sort of work, what I have seen is that I have gotten 13 direct links or mentions. 12 links one of them is a mention, but from this batch as well, what you will see is that if I go ahead and filter by do follows in this time period, I’ve gotten seven do follow links. And these are great due follow links in which the domain ratings are 51, 60, 71, 71, 48, 67 and 71.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you were just to get this from other sources, whether that’s paying for backlinks or even just doing more cold outbound outreach for backlinking, it would’ve taken a while to get these sorts of results. But you can see that all of these results were accumulated within about a two-month time period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so that’s a really great outcome for some of the work here, just because a lot of these responses were sent out in the middle of May, sometimes in the early June. And then here, you can see how they’re getting accepted throughout the month of June. So this has been a really successful campaign because I’ve even gotten some really high domains, like 94s and 91s..<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, these have been no follows and I’ve gotten no luck in terms of asking them to change it to do follows, but still it’s something in which this was an effort that didn’t take all that much work for me to set up and start seeing results from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Step #5: Scaling the team<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
And that leads me to the fifth step in the process of hiring HARO outreachers, which is where you’re going to want to scale the team. At this point, you should have gone ahead and hired somebody who’s working really well. And you’re going to want to scale the team once you start experiencing success. In my particular example, I’ve gone through six milestones with this HARO outreacher. And with those six milestones, they’ve been 25 pitches each that means that I’ve paid $750 in base salary for this respective HARO outreacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then in terms of bonuses for the 12 links, what I’ve paid is a couple hundred dollars more. All in, if you look at it, I’ve paid maybe a little bit more than a grand to this HARO outreacher. From this sort of work, I have gotten 12 links, seven of which have been due follow links and five of which have been no follow links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if you just go ahead and assume that I paid bonuses for all those due follow and no follow links of $30 or a little bit more, sometimes, let’s call it that I’ve spent $1,200 for seven do follow links. In this particular example, I know that I’ve accumulated seven white hat quality backlinks that have cost me roughly $171.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is really cost-effective, especially in the broader scheme of things. When I know that I am doing it my way and not necessarily relying on potentially some gray hat or black hat techniques to achieve these results. So once you start to see these sorts of success metrics, this is the time to then bring in a second HARO outreacher and then start to scale up to 50 pitches a week or 75 pitches a week and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel<\/a> to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how we can take data from a free tool like SEO data viz, and then feed them into a bulk keyword analyzer to then get a good sense of which sort of ideas we want to prioritize as well as start creating content for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n