I wouldn’t say it’s a complete waste of time, but I’m not sure it’s as good an investment of time as it was previously, for a couple of reasons:

1) HARO is more widely known now, so the number of submissions is likely to increase as more agencies/businesses look to use it as part of their link building strategy. Even with the perfect pitch, you might be overlooked because of the sheer volume of submissions.

2) This is something I’ve seen with a few submissions in recent months. Some ‘journalists’ are not journalists, but are actually looking for newsletter signups/account creation on their sites, and making inclusion in the ‘article’ conditional upon signing up for their service/newsletter etc. Especially common when the publication is listed as Anonymous. Devalues the whole process a little, and I raised this with HARO but they said it doesn’t violate their ToS.

In summary: I think HARO definitely still has value if you can get the right pitch to the right outlet, but we’re not seeing it as the opportunity it was 12/18 months ago.