I think it’s safe to say that no one has anything new to add to the WFH productivity hacks school of thought. I don’t care what your angle is, I guarantee you aren’t bringing anything new to the table.

Seriously.

No one cares if you’re “team full face of makeup” or “team pyjamas”.

Your tips on meditating in the morning and finding the time for a quick workout between Zoom meetings are probably going to slip by unnoticed.

Why?

Because we’re all too busy panic-refreshing Twitter and the BBC.

So before you start listing your 15 tips for staying productive while working from home, try this instead.

HARO for freelancers

Head to Help A Reporter Out and sign up as a source. You’ll have the option to choose which newsletters you would like to receive. Check all of them.

Now wait.

At some point in the day, your inbox will fill up with enquiries from staff writers, freelance writers and bloggers from a wide range of publications. The majority are looking for experts like you to weigh in on specific topics and themes.

(Some queries are just bloggers brazenly asking for free shit. Ignore those.)

But if you spot a relevant one, you can quickly respond with your two cents and a little profile. You may end up being quoted as a source in a big news story.

Shit, your name could be Oprah Magazine.

Oprah!

This is just one of the reasons HARO is so great for freelancers and small business owners. The range of queries available on a daily basis means you won’t have to wait too long for something from your niche to crop up.

Why is this better than publishing your own blog post?

Instead of wasting an entire afternoon grappling with your thoughts about the importance of separating your work and your home life, you could spend a fraction of this time crafting a few considered responses for someone else’s story.

You’ll probably get a link back to your website (Hello, SEO) and you get to humble brag about it on Twitter. You get to boost your profile and position yourself as a person who gets quoted in articles like it’s nbd.

As a small business owner, you have bigger things to worry about right now than the state of your blog. So save your work from home tips for another time, and find a less labour-intensive way to boost your profile.

I’m not saying you should give up on writing blogs forever, I’m just saying there’s more than one way to get your name out there!

UPDATE: Just to show you exactly how it works, I submitted a query on the 1st May as an experiment. Today, I was told my quote was used in an article on Outwit Trade. The website has a DA of 68 and a PA of 24.