Ya know what’s cool?
When you don’t have to do outreach.
When you don’t have to spend hours and hours and hours getting journalists, and influencers, and hosts to take notice of you so you can expand your reach or get a few backlinks.
When these people instead reach out to you.
Believe it or not, this is a very common problem.
There are lots of people who don’t want to manually do outreach or spend money on staff to do outreach for them.
In fact, this is such a common problem that many tech companies have raised and made millions of dollars trying to solve it.
AND this is such a competitive market, that plenty of these companies are free or at the very least inexpensive.
So in this article, I’m going to share three of these companies.
I’ve used many many many over my career.
These three are among my favorites.
1. HARO
Anybody who’s been doing SEO long enough knows this tool.
HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and it was one of the first of these publications <> source/guest tools.
Over the years, I’ve used it to get myself and my brands into literally the biggest publications on the planet.
I recently used it to get one of our startups into Healthline, immediately bringing the startup onto Page 1 of Google for one of our bottom-of-funnel keywords. This then immediately began bringing us users from Google.
Here’s what HARO looks like:
My two tricks for HARO:
- Respond to a query or two a day for a month (it’s only on weekdays).
- Don’t use AI to write (having human-written responses is an easy way to stand out and be valuable (journalists can usually tell what’s written by AI)).
Oh – HARO is free too 🙂
2. Featured.com
I received this email a few weeks ago:
I responded.
It was easy.
I paid nothing for this.
Featured.com is the rebrand of Terkel, which worked very well for me.
You fill out a profile, then you get sent journalist queries based on the keywords in your profile. The best thing to do here is to put several keywords in “Job Title” for the topics you want to be known for. Separate the keywords by an “&.”
Featured.com even gives you this “Keyword Matching” preference for emails. This way, you get notified when there’s a journalist query in your exact niche.
Unlike HARO, which is completely free for unlimited use, Featured.com is freemium. It’s free for up to 3 responses a month.
3. PodMatch
I’ve used this to go on a ton of podcasts and get links from them.
PodMatch uses AI based on the contents of your profile to match you with hosts who’d be interested in what you have to say.
You get three matches a day.
Either hosts reach out to you (happens to me often), or you message your matches on PodMatch. Because PodMatch picks matches for you – you have a high conversion rate.
PodMatch is the only one on this list that has no free tier. For a freemium alternative, you can use MatchMaker.fm, which is about 25% as effective as PodMatch.
For more, I wrote a full guide on how I get on podcasts as a guest.
Recap
So, to recap.
HARO is GOAT. It’s been so effective for me over the years in getting press and backlinks.
Featured.com is easy. It takes a few minutes to make a profile and then you get notified when a journalist in your lane needs a quote.
PodMatch is GOAT for podcasts – which also is an effective way of getting backlinks.
