Clienting #41: Gyi & Kelly Talk Outreach, Links, and HARO

On this episode of Clienting, Gyi and Kelly answer former guest Rob Schenk's questions on journalist outreach, HARO, and conferences.

Outreach

• The first rule of journalist outreach- you have to have a story!
• When doing outreach, the creative aspect is super important- don't make a journalist have to work for the story, give it to them.
• Journalists are people too- they want to know that you have more to offer than "I'm a lawyer and have things to say." Engage with them over time, "I'm here to help you cover this issue."
• Demonstrate expertise by showcasing examples from your experience. 
• Have a few outreach templates for this, which you can easily find in a Google search. Search for "PR Journalist Outreach Tools"
• Twitter: Search for subjects and people in your geographic area. 
• Focus on local reporters that cover stories related to your practice area and make sure they include your law firm website and/or your name. 
• Go where your audience is- if your audience is local, stick to local or industry-specific. 
• HARO - Help A Reporter Out, is a network for reporters and sources to find one another. You can register yourself as an expert and seek out the source requests. 
• Think about building a landing page for your lawyer outreach and speaking bio. You could include links to articles and quotes from articles here that you may not always want to, or be able to, include on your law firm website.
• Make sure to include the source material, your quote, your links, and everything needed for the article in your outreach. 
• Use Mention and Google Alerts to keep track of links and mentions where they may not link to you. Many sites now have a no-link policy.

Conference Advice 

What matters? The format, the speakers, and you. Are you participating? Who are the speakers? What are the topics? What is the format? Workshops allow you more engagement with the experts, so if you want to dive in, focus on those. 

• Legal Conferences:
  • ABA Techshow - this year will include a Marketing Technology track
  • AAJ - Their mid-year (Winter) conference includes a marketing track
  • National Trial Lawyers Summit
  • Crisp Gamechanger conference
  • Clio
  • PILMMA 
  • LabCon - Lawyerist
• Marketing Conferences: Get outside of legal if you really want to learn marketing. You only get a legal perspective from a legal marketing conference.
  • BEDLAM
  • MozCon
  • Ungagged
  • Inbound
  • Brighton SEO
  • Searchlove
  • State of Search - DFW SEM
  • PubCon
  • Engage - PDX SEM

If you want to learn something, go on the internet. If you also want to meet people, have more engagement, create a referral network- go to a conference.