A significant part of running a coworking space is getting exposure for your brand. It’s not always easy, but it’s an essential part of a coworking space marketing plan.

One of the best ways to do this is to get featured in a media publication. If you run a differentiated or niche coworking space, getting media coverage will be a little bit easier since your story will be unique and noteworthy. But that’s a topic for another article.

A benefit of being written about in an online publication is the opportunity to get links back to your website. You won’t always get a link, but even if you don’t, you will still get exposure.

Getting featured can help in a variety of ways:

1. It’s a bit of free advertising.
2. They can make you and your workspace look more credible (social proof).
3. They can help increase your search engine rankings.
4. They can help people find you naturally online.
5. They can help you to establish market positioning.
6. It becomes good content to share on social media.
7. Bonus: It feels great to have your workspace featured in media outlets!

Today I was browsing my inbox in the early hours of the morning and I opened an email by a company called HARO (Help a Reporter Out).

HARO is a platform that allows reporters to submit their topics and have people like you (experts on a topic) contribute ideas on the subject. If they like it, they will feature a quote from you in their article.

HARO describes themself as the following:

HARO provides journalists with a robust database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage.

(By the way, that’s a positioning statement above.)

Essentially the way it works is this:

1. Sign up as a source (I recommend a free account to start).
2. Receive three emails per day (5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m. and 5:35 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday).
3. Scan the email for topics related to your expertise (i.e. remote work, flexible workspaces, coworking, shared office space, productivity, commercial real estate, etc.).
4. Find the email address of the reporter (it comes listed in the email).
5. Reply to their specific questions/inquiries (think quotable snippets and bullets).
6. Provide your bio and a link to your website. You may wish to ask if they can give you a link back to your site (it doesn’t hurt to ask, right?).
7. I suggest mentioning that, “by the way”, you will feature the article (if they feature you) on your workspace’s blog, email newsletters, and social media. Promotion and clicks is what they want, after all.
8. Wait to hear back.

One request I received today was this:

IoT is the Internet of Things, and there are companies specializing it, like Wun Systems, for example.

In the workspace industry, this is becoming a driving technology. So, I forwarded this to one of my contacts at Wun Systems as well as my coworking clients in case they wanted to contribute. Then I wrote this article.

HARO won’t always request information relating to coworking, but you can still look to get featured in areas you have some level of authority and expertise in. The free version gives you access to lots of opportunities to contribute, so if you spend 20 minutes a day looking through them, you might be surprised how many you can contribute to.

If time is of the essence and you don’t want to scan emails three times a day, consider a paid plan which will screen for certain keywords and bring them to the top.

Whether you use this method or not, it’s a good idea to seek every opportunity you can to create natural backlinks to your website. I’ll share more strategies on that in a later post.

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