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I’ve practiced Do-It-Yourself PR since 2007 when I quit my job and moved across the country to Silicon Valley to learn how to build a bootstrapped startup.

I used DIY PR to:

• scale a startup from 0 to 40M pageviews and get acquired by Google
• launch and grow a PR coaching program that has helped 800+ companies (from 108 countries!) get press
• help countless startups and entrepreneurs get press and rank #1 on Google Brian Dean of Backlinko, Culture Amp,  Pipedrive, Noah Kagan, etc.) 

PR is HARD. The key to success is creating a strategy that will quickly gain authority and credibility for your brand. JustReachOut specializes in this like no one else.

There is a fundamental flaw in the PR agency model when it comes to startups and small businesses seeking press:

1. The outreach tactics are outdated. PR agencies favor the quantity vs. quality approach. Typically, a generic pitch is sent to a long list of publications within a specific industry. Average response rate is 2%. 
2. The tactics used are difficult for the startup clients to learn and replicate in house.
3. Bootstrapped businesses that are still looking to show their proof of concept struggle to afford wildly overpriced agencies.
4. The ROI is not great for a small business.

As a result, I founded and built JustReachOut, a PR software platform that is intended to amplify the voices of startups in their infancy and early years, regardless of how scrappy they are.

Today, JustReachOut supports entrepreneurs and marketers who are looking to personalize their outreach efforts, target the most relevant podcasters, journalists, bloggers, refine their pitch-writing skills, and generally get a better idea of how to incorporate PR elements into a holistic marketing strategy—because operating your PR, content, and SEO strategies in silos won’t be nearly as effective as housing it all under one roof. 

We’ve had over 5,000+ customers to date since I founded the company in 2014.

Here are some of the case studies.

What’s incredible about this is that PR is so hard; for many of our customers, it has felt like an extremely expensive experiment only to learn that they really don’t have time to dedicate to the task.

Your visibility and authority are crucial in our crowded media landscape. If you can produce compelling ideas, turn it into content that your audience would lick up off the (recently swept) floor, pitch that story successfully, and build the right community or funnel to nurture this interest, you’ll see people begging for more.

We’ve managed to work with so many people who are willing to learn how to do their own PR and they know it’s going to be a slog.

It’s harder than outsourcing these duties to an agency, but in the long run, it’s more effective, it’s more authentic, and it’s way more fun to test things and break prevailing thoughts on what is considered pitchable.

When it comes to Do-It-Yourself PR outreach there are different types of outreach and different tools you can use in our platform. Here is an video overview of all the tools and use cases for each one:

 

 

Click on each use case and corresponding tool below to check out the video demo:

1. Press Opportunities Outreach
2. Journalist Outreach
3. Podcasts Search & Outreach
4. Broken Link Outreach
5. Guest Post Outreach
6. Unlinked Mentions Outreach
7. Personalized PR Action Plan & Strategy Builder
8. Academy/PR Training w/ over 15+ video lessons

Curious about pricing? Head over to our detailed pricing breakdown!

 

Journalist Outreach

Instead of one big giant list of journalists, our platform finds journalists who have recently covered a topic you are pitching. You then compare your pitch to the search results, looking for any specific details omitted from the articles that you could add to enhance it. We call this a relevance gap, you are pitching something they forgot to include in their story.

JustReachOut finds the most relevant journalists for you and allows you to create customized and highly targeted campaigns for each journalist and publication. You can use our PR software to search for journalists in any language and even connect your Gmail or Outlook account for outreach. 

 

Press Opportunities Outreach

Press Opportunities are requests and questions journalists and podcasters send out each and every day when they write their articles. This is one of the easiest ways for you to get featured in the press – all you have to do is respond to them! 

Check out our interview with a customer and our guide on how most of our customers use this feature, it includes a very handy template you can use when answering a journalist’s ask.

 

Podcast Outreach

Pitching yourself to be a guest on a podcast does not have to be a shot in the dark. Our tool finds the specific episodes of podcasts where they talked about a topic you know a bit about but forgot to mention the one thing you can talk about.

Focusing on this relevance gap can be the perfect approach for getting their attention. We provide pitch templates for you to edit and submit a request to be a guest on their show. Here is how it works:

Find Broken Links & Outreach

There are broken links all over the web! Guess what? You can alert the broken link owner of the problem and in turn ask them to change it to point to your website and you’d be doing them a favor!

SEO gurus like Brian from Backlinko, Tim from Ahrefs and Matthew from HubSpot have praised our Broken Link tool for the quick value add of getting links but also for the easy and approachable way to help fix the broken links of the world.

How it works:

1. Enter a keyword into the search
2. We crawl the top 100 pages of search results which rank on Google for this keyword
3. We find broken links from these pages
4. We record the broken links, the source URL, the target URL, the type of error, etc.
5. We create a handy report with this information for your PR outreach
6. You use this broken link email template to reach out to the sites listed to ask they update their broken links with your fresh content!

 

 

It’s important to do some research to figure out exactly which topic would yield the most broken links out there. Here is how to do the research:

Guest Post Outreach

Our new and improved Guest Posting feature allows you to:

• Find the most relevant blogs and publications related to your industry
• Get their contact information
• Submit your guest posts directly to them through our pitch engine
• Use our templates to improve your guest post submission

 

 

Find Unlinked Mentions & Outreach

Finding all the blogs, publications, podcasts, and testimonials where you are referenced but not linked is HARD WORK! Especially if you need to find their email address and compose and email asking for a link.

Our Unlinked Mention tool makes it crazy simple to do this at scale every single day!

 

 

Personalized PR Action Plan & Strategy Builder

 

Most businesses dabble in PR out of necessity. They do not have a specific strategy or a week by week action plan of what they need to do. Our new tool builds a personalized week by week list of tasks for you as well as gives you a prescription of which PR outreach tactics will work best for you.

 

Academy and Training 

It’s been about eight years since we launched JustReachOut, to date we’ve had 5,000+ content marketers score amazing press coverage and build links and mentions on a regular basis through our platform.

We’ve learned a lot and we’ve decided to share it all in our JRO Academy. The JRO Academy features over 15 video lessons full of hidden gems that cover topics like how to:  

• Get noticed by influencers
• Personalize your subject lines and pitches
• Exponentially increase your response rate
• Create a solid PR action plan

And a whole lot more!

 

Give the new JustReachOut a try now!

Integrating our strategy and tactics with our product has long been a dream for us. Yeah, we know, we’ve got a lot of work to do. But until then, help us help you.

Shoot us a note and share your biggest struggle with gaining authority and credibility for your brand.