How does one guy come up with an idea to help others and turn that into an insane empire that continues to grow exponentially and receives rave reviews and word of mouth that most of us would die for?
Don’t ask me, ask Peter Shankman. He’s the one who has taken his passion for helping others, and keen understanding of building relationships and PR and turned it into something pretty amazing in ‘Help a Reporter Out,’ affectionately known as HARO.
The man who told me and others 9 short months ago, that the press release would be dead in 36-months has issued a press release with some amazing figures and that simply cannot be ignored. The man builds community every time he sends an email. Now how many people can lay claim to that? I wish I could, but I can’t…and community building is my thing!
Here’s an excerpt from Shankman’s site, detailing this monster growth:
In August 2008, there were 1500 journalists using HARO, sending out 650 queries per month to about 20,000 sources.
Today, there are 30,000 journalists who have used HARO, sending out more than 3000 queries per month to over 80,000 members.
And here’s an excerpt from the official press release:
The number of advertisers for HARO’s free-for-both-subscribers-and-journalists service skyrocketed 3900% from August 2008 to August 2009. The HARO staff rose 400 percent in the past year. (in Non-PR-speak, that means we hired four people.) Revenues over the past year have leaped from $15,000 as of August 2008 to just over $1MM as of August 2009 with advertising inventory on HAROs already sold out for 2009.
Congrats to Peter and HARO. Peter is a very down to earth, fun guy. He wrote the foreword for my book, in the midst of all that he has going on with HARO AND he answers my e-mails.
It doesn’t get any better than Peter. I look forward to seeing what you do with HARO next.
BTW, you can see the full release on Peter’s site Shankman.com.
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August 19, 2009 at 2:44 am
Grant
I used to get the HARO emails etc, but the volume became overwhelming and the signal-to-noise ratio so skewed that I eventually unsubscribed — so I opted out from the HARO “empire.”
Kudos to Shankman’s success, but my time is too valuable to spend it sifting through 20+ emails per week on the off chance that our domain of expertise might be mentioned.