Should Pet Bloggers Be Considered Expert Resources?

by: Carol Bryant, BlogPaws' PR Manager

Answer to the lead question: YES!!!! Raise a paw if you concur. Want the world to know you are an expert or perhaps find an expert resource for your blog?

Have you heard of HARO: Help a Reporter Out? Many of the pitches contained in HARO will give you a sense how to develop a good pitch and angle. Many, however, are shining examples of how not to pitch the media. BlogPaws' community member, Kimberly Gauthier, recently landed a spot in Woman's Day magazine thanks to a lead on Help a Reporter Out. Here's the scoop:

Help a Reporter Out is basically free Public Relations. Serial entrepreneur, Peter Shankman, founded HARO in 2008 and has grown it to one of the most widely lauded social media services in the world.

For Bloggers and Reporters: If you need sources for a piece, HARO has a section for this.

For Sources: If you are a credible source who wants to lend their expertise to the media, HARO caters to you as well.

Find Sources: HARO is a great way to find sources you might not have known were in existence.

Of course, there are do’s and don’ts to writing an effective HARO query. You want your well-crafted HARO pitch to be concise, thoughtful, and response generating.

Three times a day, HARO sends out emails in a variety of topics of your choosing: everything from travel to lifestyle to fitness. Scan through these emails to see if there are any sources to match your area of expertise or you may gain ideas for future pitches.

Getting Started with HARO

Visit www.helpareporter.com and follow the very user-friendly instructions on setting up an account. When you start receiving e-mails, they will be in indexed fashion like this:

* INDEX ***

In scanning through, you can decide if any of these call-outs pertain to your level(s) of expertise. If so, follow the instructions to an exact science. For example, if you are a bank teller, consider the second query above. If you are a construction worker with no bank teller experience, do not respond. I’ve had more irrelevant responses cross my inbox from HARO queries that I lost count. However, I had just as many stellar ones that were spot-on sources for my writing assignments and blog posts.

Bloggers should be using expert sources and able to provide proper credit and attribution to all quotes and expertise gained. HARO is a wonderful resource if used properly.

Have you ever used HARO?

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Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Hi Carol,

Thank you so much for telling your readers about HARO and for writing such a detailed explanation of how our service works. We don't allow users to repost queries without the reporter's permission, so do you mind removing the query you just posted in the comments section?

Thank you again for such an excellent post and we hope your readers find HARO to be a valuable resource.

Happy New Year!

Best,
Laura

Posted by: Laura Spaventa | 01/10/2013 at 10:08 AM

Of course pet bloggers should be considered expert resources! They're the ones that have the most knowledge! They OWN the pets! Give them credit! Very interested in HARO as well!

Posted by: Emily | 01/10/2013 at 10:23 AM

Hi Laura, Thanks for stopping by and you got it! ;)

Posted by: Carol Bryant | 01/10/2013 at 11:41 AM

I am a little bit confused...is HARO just for sources to cite? I think I am going to check the site out. Thanks so much for this post Carol!

Posted by: caren gittleman | 01/10/2013 at 05:33 PM

I found this to be very interesting - especially with my news and advertising background. So I thought, what the heck, and signed up. Ha;f an hour later ... they called me to learn more about me. I was impressed!

Posted by: Lisa Richman (of A Tonk's Tail) | 01/11/2013 at 11:35 AM

*facepalm* HALF! HALF! *that's what I get for hitting "post" before checking for typos!)

Posted by: Lisa Richman (of A Tonk's Tail) | 01/11/2013 at 11:36 AM