Using “Help A Reporter Out” To Find Experts

Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, is a PR and journalism platform. Journalists or users registered as media outlets can submit calls for sources for their story ideas, and experts and brands can pick and choose to email various prompts via an email newsletter that HARO sends out several times per day.

The platform is a powerful tool for journalists, but often ignored is its enormous potential for up and coming bloggers and content producers. For example, instead of faking your expertise on a topic and risking losing credibility, you can submit a call for sources to HARO’s newsletter and have external experts weigh in with their advice and stories.

Not only can you use this to write engaging profiles of one particular brand, you can also aggregate many responses to create a large, varied, content-rich posts that offer a range of perspectives and information that would be hard to replicate with your own knowledge or independent research.

If that’s not enough of a reason to convince you to reach out to sources via HARO for your next post, consider this: Recruiting just one source to be part of your story doubles your promotion team. Get another source involved? Boom, your promotional force just went up again.

Most of the time, anyone reaching out to be featured in a story will be looking for exposure, which means they will also be happy to tweet, share, and shout out about your post once it goes live and you send them a follow-up email with a link to it.

Sounds pretty great, right?

To get started, you’ll need to make an account on HARO and register as a media outlet. At this point, you’ll be able to submit a request for sources through their online form. In this form, you’ll be able to put your contact information, along with a title and description of the project, where you can list out any special requirements, exclusions of what types of pitches you do not want, etc. Be detailed here, so that you can pre-filter the responses you receive and not have to worry about being flooded with irrelevant information.

At the same time, leave your request open and general enough that people won’t be afraid to get ahold of you if they think they can offer an interesting twist on your topic – you never know what great story you might get the exclusive scoop on.

Above, be polite to those you interact with, and always follow up with requests. If you are known to ignore incoming pitches, people might start to ignore your requests when they see them in the HARO newsletter email, effectively shutting you out of sources who may not have been right for one post, but have something great to offer down the road.

When following up with offers that you are interested in using, make sure you’re clear in your expectations and ask for any clarifications or details that may have been left out of someone’s original pitch. Other than that, enjoy your newfound blogging resource!

Why You Should Break Away From Title Conventions In 2016

How many times have you read a lame “5 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line!” title, clicked through, and the been disappointed to find the same old generic, rehashed information on the other side?

If you roll your eyes whenever these titles come up in your Facebook feed or from some marketer’s Twitter account, you’re not alone. Unfortunately for marketers looking to take the easy way out, millions of other people are feeling the same way and are becoming immune to the type of clickbait titles that have dominated marketing communications for way too long now.

In the near future (actually, now), no one is going to be clicking on cheesy, cringe-worthy headlines that mask lackluster, uninspired content. Instead, you should be working to standout with your titles in other ways to help draw people in without misleading them. Of course, step one is to make sure your content is up to par; no great title or thumbnail image can lead to the conversions you’re after if you don’t have great words waiting for readers on the other side. Be valuable, be useful.

Next, consider tossing out additional hyped up adjectives and adverbs for statistics. Many of the most successful content marketing triumphs to pop up in 2015 were case study types which could boast a specific change in a variable in their title.

For example, the popular Groove blog wrote an article with a title along the lines of “How we raised our traffic by 12,267% with zero advertising.” It’s just about as enticing as a marketing blog post title could possibly be because it gives you an exact statistic that you can hold the author to.

By the way, that blog post really is excellent and outlines a bunch of free traffic generation methods that the company used to, no kidding, give an insane multiple-thousand percent increase to their traffic numbers in an impressive amount of time.

You should consider also making your titles platform specific. For example, WordPress has plugins which allow you to display different title and description tags for certain social networks. For example, if you know that Facebook shows only the first 70 characters of a link title and LinkedIn shows 110, you can create custom titles that fit those exact lengths and make the most of you allotted characters on each platform.

Titles which are native (made for) a platform will without a doubt perform better in terms of clickthrough and reader interest. Futhermore, platform specific titles can help you create clever synergies between the titles and preview images shown on each network, which can go a long way toward making your homegrown marketing efforts look more professional and thought out – and that’s never a bad thing!

Basically, titles still need to deliver clickthroughs and intrigue readers, but the way in which they accomplish these goals is going to need to be more genuine and helpful going forward. Working together to eliminate crappy content and titling is just one way to make audiences less skeptical of content marketing, which makes things easier on the rest of us, doesn’t it?

The Elements Of A Successful Content Marketing Piece

Content marketing: The creation of written, video, audio, or other content by a brand with the goal of garnering an audience or attention and establishing authority within a market.

Content marketing has proven, over the last couple of years, to be outpacing its more traditional media buy and advertising counterparts in terms of engagement with audiences and, ultimately, conversions. That said, not everyone gets it right, and some people have yet to start actually creating a content marketing plan for their brand.

Today, we’re going to go over a few ways you can audit any content marketing piece before you put it out in order to give it the best chance of success.

Make sure your target audience really, truly cares.

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make with content marketing is that they use their content as an extended ad for their product or service. The content itself delivers little value to the reader and doesn’t actually set them up to be any more knowledgeable on a topic or in a better position to solve their problems than before they read it.

Content marketing is about giving, and as such you should always place yourself in your target market’s shoes while writing. Ask yourself questions like:

– If I was in this market, would this content be useful to me, or does it just sound like someone trying to convince me to buy something?

– Is this genuinely interesting?

– Is this written like it’s honest and coming from someone who is knowledgeable on the topic?

Can it make it big?

Take into considerations the elements that make a piece of content go viral or stand out from the rest in terms of how much it gets shared around with others. In content marketing, learning to leverage your existing audience to spread your work exponentially to their own contacts and followers is key. In general, a few key items will help you achieve this with a piece of content:

– A title that is intriguing and clicky, but stays true to the content that’s on the other side.

– A piece that shows so much work, care, and time that it stands out as a resource above all others. For example, this is why list articles super high counts (i.e. “120 ways to share your content!”) often get shared 1,000’s of times – hard work shows.

– Have you designed imagery for promotion? Posts with images catch attention and perform substantially better, so you’ll want to design thumbnail images for social sharing even if your content itself is not visual (a written piece, etc.).

Can you hustle?

Content marketing is a numbers game, and those numbers are, largely, hours. Not only will you put in hours to create content that resonates and delivers, you’ll need to think about your distribution strategy.

This means manually posting to Facebook groups, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. Develop a distribution plan by starting broad and then narrowing in on the channels that are delivering results after a few releases. Most likely, this is a multiple month long process, but content marketing in general is playing the long game. Good luck!

4 Free Internet Marketing Tools You Should Already Be Using

Software tools that help marketers pop up every single year, and now at a far more rapid pace than ever before. Luckily more and more of these tools are taking on a freemium approach, meaning that marketers have access to better tools without spending much (or anything at all!).

Let’s take a look at some of the tools you can be using for free, right now, to boost your business.

Canva – an incredible free design software that purports to make anyone a designer. To be fair, it’s not far from the truth; Canva is a drag and drop editor filled with thousands of free images, backgrounds, and elements that you can piece together, resize, and recolor, along with text elements, in order to make some seriously snazzy logos, content images, and more.

You can use premium elements for $1 each in any design, but it’s fairly easy to create professional looking images without ever using a paid element. Plus, Canva allows you to upload your own photos and incorporate them into your designs, further eliminating the need to pony up any cash for your design needs.

Unsplash.com – In need of stock images? This site is one of the best royalty free, no BS sites you can find for stock images that are actually free to be used for any purpose – even commercial! Unsplash uploads a limited number of new images each week, but it’s been around for a while so there’s a healthy batch of material up there at this point.

Unsplash doesn’t have everything, however, and you might have trouble finding images of people in various scenarios (though there are many useable office/work environment type photos). Where Unsplash really shines is in environmental, landscape, and architectural images, so if those will work into your material, you’re definitely in luck!

Infogr.am – Inforgram allows you to quickly and easily create infographics for your business. You’ll be able to create a number of free infographics per account, and then you have to pay to create more. If you’re really strapped for cash, you could theoretically create more than one account to garner more free creations.

Infographics are a hugely popular information consumption format right now, and it’s no wonder why: Infographics are able to quickly and easily demonstrate complex concepts and figures visually. Because so much of the world learns well from visual input, and infographics keep people from having to skim through writing and research to pull out statistics and talking points, infographics can get shared like crazy.

Buffer – For many delving into social media for the first time for their brands, their barrier to entry is either not wanting to pay for software to manage many platforms, or for not having the time to even manage a couple on their own. Buffer is a platform that allows you to schedule social media posts across multiple channels at once, and you’ll be able to do it all for free if you’re only managing a few different platform. If you’re looking to manage a whole bunch of channels at once, however, you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription.