You Don’t Have To Sacrifice Quality for Quantity
Follow These Simple Steps to Have Subject-Matter Experts Email You
Within marketing, “content is king.” Quality, however, is equally important.
It can take a long time to create something of value, so I utilize HARO to find experts. Once I have high-quality content, I repurpose it to produce quantity.
If you are looking for subject-matter experts for either your podcast or blog, follow these simple steps to have experts appear in your inbox:
1. Sign up for HARO (it’s free)
Please do read all of the journalist guidelines. You can view them here.
2. If you haven’t already, sign up for Medium (it’s also free)
Why? Well, unless your website has an Alexa.com ranking of one million or less (check here), creating a Medium publication and using a canonical link to your website is a little hack. In general, even if you don’t use HARO, I still recommend creating a publication on Medium and posting content to both your website and Medium (more on this another time).
3. Make it easy for the source to skim
A query with clear guidelines will help you find the best-suited sources.
4. Double-check the query
Make sure your requirements are easy to understand and respond to.
Once you have scheduled your query, sit back and relax.
HARO will send you an email for each pitch, which can quickly crowd your inbox. To keep things organized, you can create a separate email folder for incoming sources. After the deadline, look over all of the pitches and decide which ones are best suited for your article.
Basic HARO Etiquette:
1.Once your article or podcast is live, email your sources with the link and thank them for their time.
2.If your source notifies you of a problem with their section of the article, fix it right away and have them look over it again. Being kind always wins.
3. Should you build a good rapport with a particular source, you can ask your source if they would like to hear about similar opportunities in the future.
4. Be sure to tag your sources when you post to social media. Sometimes they will reshare the post on their social platforms.
Overall, this content strategy helps with distribution (experts often share work they are cited in) and it also creates high-quality content that can be recycled down the road.
A few examples of what it can look like to recycle your high-quality content to different social platforms:
Instagram:
I created a mini-guide with some of the suggestions mentioned in the article and use the last page to share where they can read the rest. This took time, but it’s important to create content that adds value. To date, this post has been saved 50 times.
This visual uses the same information as the post above, but the content is bite-sized and has been reframed.
Twitter (I turned the same information into a thread, but you can also tweet single quotes from each expert to post more frequently):
It’s not that hard to recycle quality content, which makes it possible to post often and post things that add value.
If you found this to be helpful, you can find me on Twitter. I am always happy to answer questions.
Interested in creating a high-quality blog series on autopilot? Hit the “follow” button at the top. I will be writing about this topic next.
