How to Use JustReachOut to Build New Backlinks

Backlinks have always been, and probably always will be, one of the most important ranking signals for SEO. Google was built around analyzing backlink relationships and assigning links value, after all.

The question is, how do you build good backlinks? There are a million different strategies, from link bait content to cold email outreach, but one of the best methods in the current era of marketing is using a connections platform.

What is a Connections Platform?

Have you heard of HARO before?

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It was originally founded as a series of email mailing lists. Subject matter experts could subscribe to the mailing list relevant to their subject. Journalists and reporters, when they needed an expert quote or information about a subject, could go to HARO and submit a pitch, which would be included in the next email. Experts respond, the journalist has their pick of information, and the expert gets a citation and link out of the exchange.

Over time, HARO evolved. First, it changed from a series of email newsletters to a web-based platform driven by email in the background. It grew significantly, was purchased by a PR firm that was purchased by another PR firm, and HARO fell by the wayside. It was shuttered, but then one of the original HARO competitors (Featured.com) bought the domain and recreated it. So, it's back, in a similar form to how it was, but with yet another name backing it.

HARO was wildly successful, in part because it was never really paywalled or difficult to access. Competition meant you had to put your best foot forward to earn a citation.

This popularity led to dozens of other companies to make their own HARO-like services. Some specialized in individual niches, some tried to aim for higher-end clientele, some just tried to replicate HARO's success, but with some form of paid advantage for sources or extra-fast service for paying journalists.

One of those many competitors is JRO, Just Reach Out.

What is JustReachOut and How Does it Work?

JustReachOut is one of the newer variations on the theme, and actually takes things in a bit of a different direction. Instead of being a free platform where experts court journalists to earn citations, it's a lot more like a traditional PR and outreach tool. It focuses on using modern technology, including AI, to facilitate outreach.

Overall, JRO is one platform with five main tools.

JRO Journalism Outreach

The first is the journalist outreach tool. This tool allows you to start with some basic information about your niche, and seeks out journalists writing in your niche. It's sort of like a specialized search engine looking for content published in your niche, with an emphasis on identifying who wrote it and how to get in touch with them.

When you run a search, you'll see various blog posts, news articles, and other content related to your subject. You can then choose to add the specific website to your campaign. You can search using AI search, classic search, by text and title or just title, and by news or web results, to narrow your focus.

When you add a site to your campaign, the tool will give you information that it can find about the individuals in charge of the site or the niche. You can get social media links, email addresses, and pitch information for journalists in their database, and can then create and send your own pitch to them.

As an AI platform, of course, they offer AI tools to create, personalize, and compose your pitches as well. You can even let the platform handle follow-up emails as well. Since the platform tracks open rates and response rates for the journalists it emails, you can see how responsive various reporters are.

JRO Pitch Requests

The second tool is a much more standard HARO-like service, with a twist.

It works the same way. As an expert, you sign up for journalist feeds in your relevant niches. Then, you get emails with relevant journalist requests, and you can respond to them with your pitch.

What's the twist? JustReachOut doesn't have its own system for this. Instead, they gather, filter, and redistribute journalist requests from Qwoted, HARO, Featured, ProfNet, SourceBottle, and X. It's effectively like using five HARO-like services (including HARO itself) and X all at once.

You also aren't checking your email, but instead can just browse and filter the journalist requests from your JRO dashboard. You can view, hide, and respond to pitch requests right there, and even use their AI composition tools to create your pitches for you.

JRO Podcast Outreach

One of the main stand-out features of JustReachOut that its competitors don't really have is a dedicated podcast outreach tool.

If you're building your personal brand and want to appear on podcasts as a guest to be interviewed, this is a golden tool for you. It's quite similar to how the journalism outreach tool works, by allowing you to search through podcast directories for your niche keywords. Instead of journalist contact info, though, they give you info on the podcast and the hosts, and how to reach out to them for an opportunity.

I'm not actually going to talk much about this feature, though; podcasts, being an audio format, don't as often contribute to building backlinks. Some do, like in credits pages or transcripts, but these aren't as high-value as journalist articles and news posts with organic links. Podcasts can be great, don't get me wrong, but I'm talking about building links today.

JRO Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a potentially powerful technique that relatively few marketers actually make use of. The concept is simple; you find sites that link to content that is relevant to your topic, or which you have competing content for, but which the links no longer work.

Since site owners want to avoid having links that 404 or are just redirected to useless homepages, it's an opportunity to "help out" by offering your content as a replacement. And hey, you just so happen to have a relevant post right here…

The core service here is similar to journalism outreach, but without the pitching system. You identify a broken link and related opportunity, you create your pitch (or use their AI tool to make it for you), and you shoot your shot.

If the site owner is receptive, they can swap in your link for the broken link, and boom: you get a backlink. If they aren't receptive, or they just remove the link or replace it otherwise, well, you helped make the internet a tiny atom less frustrating to use.

JRO Guest Post Outreach

The final tool in the JRO portfolio is guest post outreach. This one allows you to search for a niche related to your business and get a list of publications in that niche, with their name, URL, domain rating, and other information available to browse.

You pick a promising publication and send a guest post pitch out to them. This, again, can be an email you create, or it can be AI-generated using the JRO tools. Send the pitch, manage follow-ups, and guide the process all within the JRO dashboard.

Guest posting is a time-honored way of building backlinks with organic value. It's gotten a lot harder in the age of AI when thousands of people think they can have ChatGPT whip up a good-enough guest post and get it published, but it's still possible, especially if you give each potential opportunity personal attention.

All in all, JRO's suite of tools embodies the "just shoot your shot" ethos to outreach.

What Does JustReachOut Cost?

One of the benefits of platforms like HARO is that it's free, but it also doesn't do much beyond sending you emails with opportunities. All the added features, the contact information scraping, the AI email generation and the follow-up management? That's value add from JRO.

You'll pay for it, though. JustReachOut has four tiers of plans.

Starter Outreach is their cheapest basic plan. You get 100 email sends per month (which is good; they don't want you spamming thousands a day), access to the composition AI, all of the tools above, and human-verified email addresses in their system. This helps you waste time sending pitches to unmonitored or abandoned inboxes. That all costs $147 per month.

Advanced Outreach is their second plan, and gives you 300 emails per month. You get two team members and five brands for management, too, if you're an agency representing several businesses, or just own several yourself. That bump in features costs $247 per month.

Ultimate Outreach is their highest non-enterprise plan. It's 1,000 emails per month, five team members, and ten brands. They also give you some direct training and onboarding with a "narrative building" educational session and occasional calls to help encourage you to keep things fresh. They want you to succeed when you're paying $497 per month, after all.

Finally, White Glove is their enterprise plan. It gives you a team of PR pros to do the work for you, gives you narrative-building sessions monthly, and gives you access to their internal Slack channel for customer service. It's $1,997 per month, though.

They do actually have a seven-day free trial, so you can check it all out before you commit, which is nice for a service as pricey as this.

How to Build Backlinks with JustReachOut

If you're interested in using JRO to build backlinks to your site, it's all fairly easy to use.

First, you need to sign up. You can book a demo with them if you want, or just jump in since you know more or less what you're getting.

Of the five tools, I recommend focusing on just a couple of them.

Journalist Outreach is very powerful if you use it properly, but it has the potential to put you in the spam folder if you don't.

Pitch requests are one of the most powerful tools they have on offer, and accessing pitches from five different services at once is very valuable.

Podcast outreach I find to be relatively niche compared to their other services; it's great if you want to guest on podcasts, but if you don't, you can't get much out of it.

Broken link building is a niche tool as well. It relies on site owners wanting to maintain their sites but not actually doing so, and on you having (or rapidly creating) relevant content, which is a tall order for the chance at a link.

Guest post outreach used to be far more valuable than it is now, but by this point, I feel like it's so saturated with AI pitches that it's near-impossible to stand out.

I would recommend spending the bulk of your efforts on the pitch requests and the journalist outreach.

Pitch requests are an excellent gateway to getting your opinions and content featured by journalists. These are real content creators who are seeking quotes, references, interviews, and other content. Yes, it's hard to be the one they pick, since there will be dozens to thousands of others competing for the space, but the value is the highest.

Journalist outreach is a lot more like cold contacting content creators, and can be very difficult to pull off without assistance. JRO helps by making sure you have verified contact information you can use to reach out, as well as some solid information about how likely they are to respond.

Overall, I would recommend signing up for the free trial with the intent of getting as much out of your seven days as you can.

Should You Use the JRO AI?

This is where things can get a little contentious.

Should you use JRO's AI? Some people absolutely swear by AI. Being able to click a button and generate a quick email that has the potential to get you a backlink is a compelling thought, right?

It's convenient… for you. But think about it from the perspective of the journalist.

This is a person whose email is listed publicly and verified by JRO as valid. That means they're going to be saturated. They probably comb through hundreds of emails every single day, if not thousands, and you can bet a lot of those get left ignored just based on the subject line.

It's one thing if there's a pitch and the journalist is explicitly asking for contact. For blind outreach, it's a lot harder to even have your email be opened by your target, let alone responded to favorably.

AI is also… let's say pattern-based. For something as short as an email, with a tight focus, it's not really that much different than using a basic template. I don't actually have as much of an objection here as you might expect based on some of the things I've said about LLM content in the past.

That said, I know a lot of content creators, journalists, and publishers are just kind of sick of it. And you would be too if you knew that hundreds of emails you receive every week were generated with the click of a button and had near-zero personal attention put into them.

There's a certain amount of illusion and kayfabe that needs to exist to make all of this work. It's pretty tricky, all things considered, and the illusion falls apart when the volume amps up.

If you're targeting smaller-scale and less highly-ranked sites and journalists with your outreach, and you put a bit more care into making sure your output is customized and personable, then using the JRO AI for this is acceptable. It might not get you the best possible results, but any results are fine.

For the highest-tier, most popular journalists and reporters out there, the AI probably isn't going to be unique enough or personal enough to stand out. You run the risk of being one of a dozen very similar emails that they just delete, sight-unseen.

If you want, you can start by trying the AI, and if it doesn't give you results in the first few days, you can shift gears and try more personal emails. That said, a seven-day trial is unlikely to show you much either way. It usually takes several months of effort to get real value out of platforms like these.

I do have one alternative, though: just have me do it for you. I've been using these journalist outreach platforms for years, and I know how to personalize an email to hook the reporters. You can check out my link earning and media mentions service here.

Either way, journalist outreach and pitch systems are some of the best ways to proactively build backlinks in modern SEO, so no matter what avenue you take to get them, you should be trying.