For a small business owner, PR campaigns are tough. It’s hard to reach out to reporters on your own and going through an agency is expensive. Help A Reporter Out is an easy way to get a boat load of opportunities to get published, and it’s free.
By signing up for the service, you are offering to become a source. Reporters that need a subject matter expert will forward their requests to Peter Shankman, who organizes them and forwards them on to sources. You can sign up to receive the requests here.
The only problem with HARO is the volume. A typical email could contain about 30 inquiries and they’re sent 3 times a day. You may only be interested in 1 in 100 topics so it presents a real information overload problem.
Luckily, Gmail’s filtering rules are perfect for sorting through mountains of information. Here’s how I’ve set up a filter to send me relevant requests:
1. Sign up at helpareporter.com with a gmail address
2. Create a new filter in gmail that looks for “shankman” as the sender
3. Create keywords to identify the inquiries that are likely to be relevant
4. Skip the inbox, apply a label (‘HARO’ will work) or forward it on to a different email address.
(If your RSS reader supports authenticated feeds, you can even turn that gmail label into an RSS feed and read it there. Google Reader does not have that option.)
Once you have the right email message, it’s easy to ctrl+f to find the appropriate query. Gmail even highlights the term that triggered the filter. As always, be take care when reaching out to these reporters and make sure you can really contribute good info. This could be your opportunity to build a relationship with a valuable contact in your industry.