How to Use HARO and Connectively to Earn High-Authority Backlinks

What HARO and Connectively Are and Why They Matter for Linkbuilding

HARO — an acronym for Help a Reporter Out — was for more than a decade the standard channel for journalists at outlets like Forbes, The New York Times, and Business Insider to find expert sources for their stories. In 2023, Cision, the platform's owner, began migrating it to Connectively, a system with a refreshed interface but the same underlying logic: journalists post open queries, experts submit pitches, and if a journalist selects a source, the citation — often accompanied by a link to that source's website — appears in the published article.

From an off-page SEO perspective, this represents a concrete opportunity to earn editorial backlinks without negotiating with a site editor or paying for placement. The link appears in a journalistic context, typically on sites with high Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA), and the anchor text is chosen by the journalist, which reduces the risk of over-optimization. That said, success rates are low without a structured process: competition for each query can be intense, and journalists make their selections quickly.

This type of tactic falls under what the industry calls digital PR: building authority through genuine media coverage rather than direct placement agreements. To understand how it fits within a broader plan, it's worth reviewing how to build a linkbuilding strategy step by step, which details link acquisition channels based on a site's profile.

How Connectively Works, Step by Step

Registration and Profile Setup

Access to Connectively is free in its basic version. Upon registering, the platform asks for profile details: name, company, areas of expertise, and website. This profile is the first thing a journalist sees when deciding whether to look into a source, so it's worth filling out with accurate, verifiable information — job titles, prior publications, or industry credentials. An incomplete profile undermines the credibility of any pitch, regardless of its quality.

Once inside, users set up category-based alerts covering areas such as technology, business, health, finance, and marketing, among others. Connectively sends a digest of active queries in those categories, typically three times per day. The paid version offers real-time alerts and access to more queries per month, which can make a meaningful difference in competitive categories where strong pitches arrive within the first two hours.

How to Read and Filter Queries

Each query includes: the outlet where the article will be published (when the journalist discloses it), the general topic, the specific question, and the response deadline. Before drafting a pitch, it's worth evaluating three variables:

• Genuine topical relevance: the response should come from someone with direct experience in the subject. Submitting pitches in areas where there is no verifiable credential is wasted time and damages the profile's reputation.
• Publication authority: not all queries merit the same level of effort. An outlet with DR 85 justifies more thorough preparation than one with DR 20.
• Available time: if the deadline is less than two hours away and the pitch requires research, it's better to skip it. A generic pitch sent on time is worth less than a well-crafted one submitted late.

Structure of an Effective Pitch

Journalists review dozens of responses per query. The structure that tends to work is: brief credential → direct answer to the question → specific data point or perspective → closing with name and title. There is no universal formula, but the digital PR community broadly agrees on what gets responses discarded quickly: introductory paragraphs that don't answer anything, generic claims without backing, and pitches that read like marketing copy rather than expert commentary.

A HARO or Connectively pitch is not a press release. It is an expert answer to a specific question. If the journalist has to go looking for the answer within the text, the pitch has already lost.

Recommended length varies with the complexity of the query, but 150 to 300 words is typically sufficient for most cases. Some digital PR specialists suggest adding a link to a relevant owned resource at the end — a guide, a study, a use case — as long as the pitch doesn't turn into self-promotion.

Digital PR as a Linkbuilding Channel: Scope and Limitations

What Types of Sites Can Benefit from This Tactic

Connectively and similar digital PR tactics are most effective for sites that can demonstrate verifiable expertise: consulting firms, SaaS companies with documented use cases, professionals with a public track record, and agencies with reference clients. For an e-commerce site with no prior editorial positioning, pitch conversion rates tend to be low because journalists don't find enough backing to credibly cite the source.

In the Latin American market, adoption of these platforms is less widespread than in the United States or the United Kingdom, which has two implications: there is less competition for queries in Spanish, but there are also fewer Spanish-language queries available. The highest-impact opportunities remain predominantly in English, which requires the team or spokesperson to be able to respond in that language with technical precision.

For technical niches like B2B software, this tactic can be combined with other sector-specific approaches. Linkbuilding for SaaS: how to build authority in a technical niche covers complementary strategies for that type of company.

What Digital PR Does Not Replace

Digital PR via HARO or Connectively generates editorial backlinks, but it does not replace other link acquisition sources. The scale is limited: a dedicated team can realistically earn between 2 and 8 mentions per month with consistent effort, which is not enough to build a diversified backlink profile within a short timeframe. It also offers no control over anchor text, the section where the link appears, or whether the outlet ultimately includes the link or only cites the name.

This tactic is best viewed as a complementary channel within a broader strategy that also includes, for example, outreach for linkbuilding with niche site editors, or placements in specialized publications through guest posting.

Common Mistakes When Using These Platforms

Responding to Queries Outside Your Area of Expertise

This is the most common mistake. The availability of queries in broad categories like "business" or "technology" leads to pitching on peripheral topics simply because the deadline seems manageable. Journalists quickly detect when a source lacks real depth on a subject and discard the pitch, which builds a history of low acceptance rates on the profile.

Sending the Same Pitch to Multiple Queries Without Adapting It

Reusing text without customization is an immediate signal that the response is not genuine. Each query has a specific editorial context and an angle the journalist already has in mind. A pitch that doesn't connect with that angle — even if it contains valid information — is not competitive.

Not Tracking the Process

When a pitch succeeds and an article is published, it's important to log the earned link, verify it points correctly to the site, confirm the link attribute (dofollow or nofollow based on the outlet's policy), and document what type of pitch worked. Without this tracking, there is no accumulated learning to improve the success rate in future rounds.

Relying Exclusively on This Tactic

For the scale reasons mentioned above, anyone building their linkbuilding strategy solely on Connectively or HARO will face months with zero results and difficulty projecting backlink profile growth. Digital PR is a layer of editorial authority, not the structural foundation of a link-building campaign.

How to Build a Sustainable Digital PR Process

Define Spokespersons and Areas of Expertise

Before activating alerts in Connectively, it's worth mapping which people within the organization can respond to queries with verifiable credibility and in which specific topics. A logistics SaaS might have two or three experts: the CTO for supply chain technology queries, the sales director for e-commerce queries, and so on. Routing responses by area avoids generic pitches and improves acceptance rates.

Establish a Review Cadence

Without a routine, opportunities are missed. The best queries receive pitches within the first few hours. A functional process typically includes reviewing alerts in the morning, evaluating relevance in 10–15 minutes, and drafting the pitch in the same session if a valid opportunity exists. In small teams, this task can be assigned to a specific person with clear filtering criteria.

Build a Base Pitch Library

Even though each pitch must be customized, maintaining reusable text blocks — spokesperson credentials, use case descriptions, proprietary verifiable data — speeds up drafting and ensures consistency. This library should be updated every quarter to reflect changes in the company or newly available data.

The logic of systematizing the process is the same that applies to cold outreach: without controlled scale, the tactic doesn't pay off. For those building their first workflow for media outreach, guest posting: how to do it, where to publish, and what risks it carries offers a complementary framework for link acquisition in specialized publications.

Metrics for Evaluating Channel Performance

The success of a digital PR campaign via Connectively is not measured solely by the number of backlinks earned. Relevant metrics include:

1. Accepted response rate: the percentage of submitted pitches that resulted in a publication. A rate of 5–15% is reasonable depending on the competitiveness of the categories.
2. Average DR of publishing sites: not all earned backlinks carry the same value. Segmenting by domain authority allows you to assess whether the effort is going to the right outlets.
3. Link attribute (dofollow vs. nofollow): many high-authority outlets use nofollow as editorial policy. This does not invalidate the mention — it carries brand value and referral traffic — but it must be factored in when measuring direct SEO impact.
4. Referral traffic from cited outlets: an editorial backlink in a publication with its own audience can drive meaningful traffic beyond its authority value.
5. Average time per accepted pitch: including time invested in the metric helps calculate the real cost of the channel and compare it against other link acquisition tactics.

Digital PR through HARO and Connectively is a valid channel for earning editorial backlinks from authoritative publications, provided you have genuine expertise to offer, an agile response process, and calibrated expectations about the scale of results. It does not replace other linkbuilding tactics, but it delivers a type of link that is difficult to obtain any other way: editorial, contextual, and from sites that rarely accept direct placement agreements.