Gratis HARO-verkeer: hoe ik heb 1.394 bezoeken en 238 e-mailabonnees van hun dagelijkse nieuwsbrief

Vandaag ga ik een weinig bekende verkeersstrategie onthullen die ik vrij onverwacht heb ontdekt.

Tot mijn verbazing was deze strategie zo effectief dat ik niet alleen 1.392 bezoeken aan mijn blog kon sturen, maar dat 238 daarvan mijn e-mailabonnees werden .

Wil je weten hoeveel het kostte?

Nou ... Absoluut niets. Het is helemaal GRATIS!

Dus, wat is het geheim?

U hebt waarschijnlijk al gehoord van de Help A Reporter (ook bekend als HARO) -website (ik heb erover gesproken in mijn artikel  Hoe publiceer ik uw blogposts )

Voor degenen die niet weten, is HARO een bron die u kunt gebruiken om PR voor uw bedrijf te krijgen op invloedrijke mediasites, variërend van Huffington Post tot CNN .

HARO stuurt je vragen van verslaggevers en bloggers die op zoek zijn naar bronnen om hun expertise, toptips en casestudies te delen.

Het is grappig:

Tot nu toe gebruikten de meesten van ons deze dienst om voor de ogen van de verslaggevers te komen en hopen te worden vermeld op de grote publicaties waar ze voor schrijven.

Begrijp me niet verkeerd - dit is nog steeds een zeer effectieve strategie, die u kan helpen duizenden bezoekers naar uw site te leiden.

Maar wat als ik u vertel dat u uw site kunt promoten bij meer dan 800.000 marketing- en PR-professionals?

Klinkt interessant?

Laat me je dan iets laten zien ...

HARO Newsletter Hack: 1,394 Visits and 238 Email Subscribers

Looks impressive, right?

And the funny part is that all this traffic came from HARO’s daily newsletter (and some other similar service providers, but I’ll talk about those a bit later) and it was 100% FREE!

Do you want to know how I did that?

Then keep reading.

How It All Got Started?

Few weeks a go I created the Press List:

(Click the button below if you want to check it out)

Press List is a curated database of 257 journalists where I share their contact details.

I’d like to emphasize that all these contact details are publicly available so there’s nothing illegal.

But since it’s a requires a lot of hard work to get all of them into one place it became very attractive to others.

So…

After I created this lead magnet, I started to think about the best way to promote it.

I have opened my article about the blog post promotion (believe me or not, but despite the fact that I have written it myself, I’m still using it as a cheat sheet every time I’m promoting something from my blog) and my eyes stopped at the tip #55:

Here’s what I thought:

People who’re subscribed to HARO as sources are mostly PR and online marketing experts who’re looking to get in touch with real journalists.

So, Press List would most likely be something that would help them to solve just that problem!

Then I remembered, that sometime ago it was possible to buy sponsored links at the top of their daily newsletter.

Since I already subscribe to their newsletter, I went to my inbox to analyze some of their most recent emails.

Here’s what I found:

I analyzed some more of their emails and found that this is not the only one with an internal live link.

As you see, there are people who’re are submitting source requests together with links to their personal articles.

What a smart idea!

That was something I definitely wanted to test on my own.

The Process of Getting Featured in HARO’s Daily Newsletter

Here’s what I did:

I signed up to HARO as a journalist and submitted a source request, which looked like this:

I received a notification a few hours later:

And then… It went live!

My request appeared in the next HARO email together with a clickable link.

What Were the Results?

The very first email sent me 275 visits and 69 email subscribers.

Not the biggest numbers considering that HARO says it has about 800,000 sources, but you should also consider the fact that you’re competing with about 20-100 other requests in one email.

And there are not so many ways to stand out, except with your request title.

But HEY! It’s still a free traffic that converts!

Scaling the Campaign

After such success I decided that I need to go further.

So, went to look for other similar services to try the same thing.

After some research, I found a few nice alternatives that could be tested too:

• Journo Requests
• Source Bottle
• Pitch Rate
• Response Source

Unfortunately, Response Source didn’t work for me at all, but all other sources proved to be worth the time investment.

I was testing this strategy for about 2 weeks with different pitch requests and in total I have received 1,394 visits and 238 email subscribers from all platforms combined:

From my experience, with each email that is sent you can expect to get about 100-300 visitors from HARO, ~30-50 from Journo Requests and ~20-30 visitors from Source Bottle.

Additional Tips

• Your website must have an Alexa.com ranking of one million or less. I know, it’s a strange requirement and in my opinion it’s not accurate, but HARO is very strict on this.
• Your pitch request has to look professional.
• Make your links look relevant to the request you’re sending.
• Use Google UTM campaign builder + bit.ly. This way you’ll be able to track traffic and conversions each newsletter sends your way.
• Don’t spam – otherwise this opportunity will get closed very soon.

I hope this was useful.

Let me know in the comments below how it worked for you and what results you achieved.

P.S. Don’t Forget About the GrowthPack

If you’re looking for more web promotion opportunities, I suggest you to check out my recently updated Growth Pack.

(Click the button below to download it)

Leave a Reply

7 Comments on "Free HARO Traffic: How I Got 1,394 Visits and 238 Email Subscribers from Their Daily Newsletter"

 newest  oldest  most voted

Natalia

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I tried that same strategy, but it didn’t work because their policy is that the source website needs to be of specific DA, so my site didn’t pass. Bummer. But I didn’t check what DA requirements they have, so maybe it’s something achievable for me.

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4 months ago



Marius Kiniulis

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Hey Natalia,

I didn’t heard anything about Domain Authority, but I know that they’re requiring to have an Alexa lower then i million

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4 months ago

Dew Smith

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Can’t wait to try this out! But what was your UTM building strategy for this?

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4 months ago

bharathi

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Good tactic, indeed. I never thought that we could use HARO this way. Between, did you make use of the quotes/tips provided, into your blog, as promised?

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4 months ago

Darleen Prangue



Hi Marius,

You are a very courageous guy. How dare you share this strategy for free? hahaha

It seemed that Haro worked for you so well. I expected that traffic can be blooming but also getting more than 200 email subscribers, that’s a thing. I think that happened because you have such a great desing and you share a lot of insights such as this one.

Again, thanks a lot for this great share.

Cheers,

Darleen.

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2 months ago

Stefan Alexander

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Hi, Marius! I love using HARO, and has been great for me lately. I’m using it to promote my brand by answering questions that I receive in the newsletter. I never actually thought of using HARO in the way you outline. It’s pretty smart actually. But HARO has some specific rules as to which websites they promote in the newsletter. And I’m also wondering about the quality of the traffic you get from HARO. It is worth testing for sure. Thanks for this guide!

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1 month ago

Shafi Khan

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I was planning to use this strategy and then saw the strange requirement of Alexa rank. Would try it later.

Thanks for the detailed instructions and tips. Cheer!

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1 month ago