How to Use HARO for High-Authority Backlinks

Have you heard that HARO is dead? It's not. But it has changed. The platform most of us knew as Help A Reporter Out has been folded into something called Connectively, and the interface is different, the query volume has shifted, and the competition for every single request has gotten fiercer. Still, I landed a link on a DA 88 news site last month through this exact channel. So no, it's not dead. It's just... less forgiving than it used to be.

Key Takeaways

• What HARO Actually Is and How It Works Now
• Finding the Right Queries to Respond To
• Writing Pitches That Actually Get Selected
• The Frustrating Reality of Response Rates
• When You Do Get Placed, the Links Are Worth It
• Practical Tips from a Year and a Half of Pitching

I want to walk you through the whole thing — not the polished version people put in case studies, but the actual experience of using HARO (or Connectively, or whatever we're supposed to call it now) to build high-authority backlinks. The frustrations, the waiting, the silence, and the occasional win that makes it all worth it.

What HARO Actually Is and How It Works Now

The original premise was simple. Journalists need sources for their stories. Experts and business owners want media exposure. HARO sat in the middle and connected them. You'd sign up as a source, receive daily emails packed with journalist queries, and respond to the ones relevant to your area of knowledge. If a journalist liked your response, they'd quote you in their article and — this is the part we care about — often link back to your website.

That core mechanic hasn't changed. What has changed is the packaging. Cision acquired HARO and eventually transitioned it into Connectively, which has a web-based dashboard instead of purely email-based queries. You can still get email notifications, but the platform wants you interacting through their interface now. There are filtered views, profile-based matching, and a somewhat clunky system for submitting pitches. Some people hate the new interface. I'm not wild about it either, but I've gotten used to it, and the underlying opportunity is the same.

When you sign up as a source — which is free, though there are paid tiers — you'll start seeing queries from journalists at publications of all sizes. Some are freelancers writing for mid-tier blogs. Some work at Forbes, Business Insider, The New York Times, or major trade publications in your industry. The query will describe what the journalist is working on, what kind of expert they need, and sometimes a deadline. Your job is to send a pitch that's so useful, so specific, and so well-written that they pick you over the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other people responding to the same query. Related reading: 10 Proven Link Building Strategies That Work.

That last part is where most people quit. The response rate is genuinely low. I've tracked my own numbers over the past eighteen months, and across roughly 280 pitches, I've been quoted and linked about 31 times. That's around an 11% success rate, which is actually better than average from what I've seen others report. Some people pitch for months without a single placement. The math only works if you're consistent and if you're targeting the right queries.

Finding the Right Queries to Respond To

Here's where strategy matters more than volume. When you first open your Connectively dashboard or scan through those email digests, the temptation is to respond to everything that seems even tangentially related to what you know. Don't do that. Spray-and-pray pitching wastes time and trains you to write generic responses, which are exactly the kind of pitches journalists ignore.

What I do instead is filter hard. I look for three things in a query before I even consider responding. First, does the journalist's topic align with something I can speak about from direct experience? Not something I've read about. Not something I could theoretically comment on. Something I've actually done, measured, or observed firsthand. Journalists can smell recycled advice from a mile away, and the pitches that win are the ones with specifics that nobody else can provide.

Second, is the publication worth the effort? This sounds mercenary, but time is finite. A query from a writer at a well-known publication with high domain authority is worth spending 30 minutes crafting a thoughtful response. A query from an unnamed blog with no clear publication attached? Maybe I skip that one, or I send something shorter. You have to triage. Not every query deserves your best effort, and pretending otherwise leads to burnout.

Third — and this is the one most people overlook — does the query actually suggest there will be a link? Some journalist queries directly say something like "include your website for a link" or "we'll credit you with a link to your site." Others are vaguer. A request for a quote in a print magazine probably won't result in a backlink. A request for expert commentary on a web-published article very likely will. I focus almost exclusively on queries where a web-published link is the probable outcome.

Not everyone agrees with that approach. Some people use HARO purely for brand mentions and PR value, and they're happy to get quoted in a print publication even without a link. That's a valid strategy if your goals are broader than link building. My goals are specifically about backlinks, so I focus on that.

Writing Pitches That Actually Get Selected

The pitch is everything. A mediocre pitch to a perfect query will lose to a great pitch every single time. I've experimented with different formats, lengths, and approaches over hundreds of pitches, and I've landed on a structure that works for me more often than not. It's not a template exactly — templates tend to produce stiff writing — but it's a set of principles I follow. You might also find How to Build Links with Content Marketing useful here.

Start by directly answering the journalist's question. Don't introduce yourself first. Don't explain your credentials. Don't set context. Just answer the question. If the query asks "What's the biggest mistake companies make with remote onboarding?", your first sentence should be something like: "The biggest mistake I see is treating remote onboarding as a compressed version of in-person onboarding — running the same sessions over Zoom and expecting comparable results." Lead with substance. Journalists are scanning dozens of these. The ones that open with fluff get skipped.

After your answer, add a specific example or data point. This is what separates pitches that get selected from pitches that don't. Anyone can offer an opinion. Not everyone can say "We ran a survey of 150 remote hires and found that 68% felt disconnected from their team after the first week when onboarding was purely video-based." Specificity signals credibility. Even if you don't have formal data, a concrete anecdote from your actual experience works. "When we switched to asynchronous onboarding materials paired with weekly in-person check-ins, our 90-day retention rate improved by about 20 percentage points" — that's the kind of detail that makes a journalist's ears perk up.

Then, and only then, include a brief bio. Two or three sentences. Your name, your role, your company, and why you're qualified to speak on this topic. "Simran Sinha is the founder of [Company], where she's helped over 200 clients build backlink profiles through digital PR. She previously worked as a journalist covering the marketing industry for six years." Keep it tight. The journalist doesn't need your life story. They need enough to verify you're a credible source.

One thing I've learned the hard way: don't pitch if you can't be genuinely helpful. I've sent pitches where I was stretching — trying to make my experience fit a query that wasn't really in my wheelhouse. Those never get picked. Journalists can tell when someone is reaching, and it erodes your credibility for future queries from the same writer. It's better to respond to five queries well than twenty queries poorly.

Let me give you an actual example that worked. A journalist at a well-known marketing publication posted a query asking for real examples of link building tactics that had stopped working. I responded with a specific story about how we'd spent three months building links through a broken link building campaign targeting resource pages in the education space, and how the returns had dropped by roughly 70% compared to the same strategy two years earlier. I included the approximate number of emails sent, the response rate then versus now, and my theory about why it changed — namely that so many people had adopted the strategy that webmasters were fatigued by the outreach emails. The journalist used my response as one of the main examples in the article, quoted me by name, and linked to our site.

What made that pitch work? It was specific, it was honest (I was admitting a failure, not bragging about a win), and it included real numbers. That combination is surprisingly rare in HARO pitches. Most people send vague, self-promotional responses that read like marketing copy. Be the person who sends something a journalist can actually use.

The Frustrating Reality of Response Rates

I want to be honest about something that most guides on this topic gloss over. The response rate is bad. Not just "lower than you'd hope" bad. I mean you will send pitches into a void and hear nothing back, over and over again, for weeks at a time. It's one of the most psychologically draining parts of this strategy. This connects to what we discuss in The Complete Guide to Outreach Email Templates for Link Building.

Journalists don't owe you a response. They're not obligated to tell you they didn't select your pitch. Most won't. You send your carefully crafted response, and then... silence. Maybe two weeks later you Google the journalist's name and find the published article, and you're not in it. Or you are in it but they used your quote without a link. Or they used a different quote than the one you thought was strongest. The whole process is unpredictable in ways that can feel maddening if you're used to more controllable link building methods.

I track everything in a spreadsheet. Date of pitch, publication, journalist name, query topic, whether I was selected, whether I got a link, the domain authority of the linking site. Looking at the data helps me stay rational about it. Because when you're in the middle of a cold streak — seven, eight, ten pitches with no response — it's easy to convince yourself the whole thing doesn't work anymore. The data tells a different story. Over time, the hits come. They just don't come on any predictable schedule.

Some months I'll land four or five placements. Other months, zero. There doesn't seem to be a strong pattern, other than the general observation that queries in Q4 (October through December) tend to be more competitive because publications are doing year-end roundups and everyone wants in. January and February are sometimes quieter and easier to break through, though that could just be noise in my limited sample.

The emotional labor of this is real and I think it's worth naming. If you're the kind of person who needs clear cause-and-effect feedback to stay motivated, HARO might drive you crazy. The delay between pitching and seeing results — if results come at all — can be weeks or months. The article might not publish for a while after you send your response. You need a certain tolerance for ambiguity to stick with this long enough for it to pay off.

When You Do Get Placed, the Links Are Worth It

Here's why people put up with all of that. When HARO works, the links you get are genuinely high authority. We're talking about editorial links from real journalists at real publications. These aren't guest post links on sites that exist solely to sell link placements. They're not PBN links or comment spam or directory listings. They're the kind of links that Google's algorithm was designed to reward — organic mentions from authoritative, trusted sources.

One placement I got last year was in an article on a major business news site. Domain authority in the high 80s. The article ranked on page one for a competitive keyword in our space, and the link it passed to our site contributed to a noticeable improvement in our own rankings for related terms. I can't prove exact causation — there were other things happening with our SEO at the same time — but the correlation was strong enough that I'm confident the link helped.

The other thing about HARO links is that they tend to be very sticky. These articles live on established publications that aren't going anywhere. A guest post on a random blog might get taken down in a year or the domain might expire. An article on Forbes or Inc or a major industry publication? That link is likely to stay live for years. The long-term value compounds in a way that makes the upfront frustration easier to swallow. See also our post on Link Building for Local SEO: Strategies That Work for more on this.

And the brand exposure matters too, even though I said earlier that my focus is on links. When your name and expertise appear in a prominent publication, it builds credibility that feeds into everything else you do. People see you quoted in a respected source and they trust you more. That trust leads to more speaking invitations, more partnership opportunities, and yes — more organic backlinks from people who discover you through those placements.

Practical Tips from a Year and a Half of Pitching

I want to close out the tactical section with some lessons I've picked up that don't fit neatly into the categories above. These are the small things that have improved my results over time.

Speed matters. Queries have deadlines, and many journalists work on tight turnaround schedules. If a query goes out at 10 AM and you respond at 4 PM, you might already be too late — not because the deadline has passed, but because the journalist has already received 50 responses and has started writing. I try to respond within two hours of a query being posted. The earlier your pitch arrives, the more likely it is to get read carefully rather than skimmed in a pile of competitors.

Follow journalists on social media after you pitch them, even if you don't get selected. Building a relationship matters for future queries. If you see a journalist post about needing a source on Twitter or LinkedIn, you can respond directly. Some of my best placements came from journalists I'd pitched before and didn't get picked by — they remembered my name and reached out directly for a later story.

Don't use the same pitch for multiple queries. Even if two queries are similar, the journalists and publications are different. Tailor every response. I know it's time-consuming. I know it's annoying. It works better than copy-pasting.

Format your pitches for skimming. Short paragraphs. Bold your key point if the platform allows it. Bullet points for lists. Journalists are not going to read a wall of text. Make it easy for them to extract your best material in 30 seconds.

Track which types of queries you get selected for. Over time, you'll notice patterns. Maybe you consistently get picked for queries about content marketing but never for queries about technical SEO. That tells you something about how your expertise is perceived and where your competitive advantage lies. Double down on the categories where you win. We cover this in more detail in Building Links Through Podcasts and Interviews.

Consider the paid tier if you're serious about this. The free version of Connectively limits how many queries you see and how many pitches you can send. The paid tiers give you earlier access to queries and more submission capacity. Whether the cost is worth it depends on the value of the links you're targeting. If one placement on a high-authority site is worth several hundred dollars to you (and for many businesses, it's worth much more than that), then $19 or $49 a month for better access is an easy calculation.

Finally, don't make HARO your only link building channel. It's too unpredictable for that. Treat it as one piece of a broader strategy — something you spend 30 minutes on each morning alongside other efforts like guest posting, content creation, and relationship-based outreach. The people who burn out on HARO are usually the ones who made it their entire plan and then got demoralized when the results came in waves rather than a steady stream.

The honest truth? Most weeks, HARO feels like shouting into a canyon and listening for an echo that may or may not come. But the links you get from it are among the best links you can build anywhere. They're real, they're editorial, they're on sites your competitors would love to be featured on. That's worth the frustration. So sign up and send one pitch this week. Just one. See what happens. The worst possible outcome is that you get a little practice writing under pressure, and that's not a bad skill to have regardless.