mattgratt's Posts on the BuzzStream Blog Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:24:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 232036770 Lesson 4: Finding New Opportunities with BuzzStream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzstream-university-lesson-4-finding-new-opportunities-with-buzzstream/ Tue, 05 Dec 2023 20:27:09 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2675 What You’ll Learn Today In this lesson, you’ll learn how to find new opportunities – like product review opportunities, guest post placements, resources pages, and more – using BuzzStream Discovery and BuzzStream’s prospecting module.  Then you’ll qualify them, and finally add them to your BuzzStream project – where you’re ready to take action on them. Table of Contents Step 1: Determine Your Goals Step 2: Define Your Prospect Opportunities Finding new opportunities using BuzzStream Discovery Step 3: Type in your search Step 4: Filter through your list Step 5: Qualify your prospects Finding new opportunities using the prospecting tool Step 3: Create Queries Step 4: Test Your Queries Step 5: Add Your Queries to BuzzStream Step 6: Go Get a Drink Step 7: Analyze Your Results Step 8: Qualify Your Prospects & Accept, Reject, or Blacklist Them   Step 1: Determine Your Goals Before you start looking for placements and marketing opportunities, take a step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to build your brand?  Then you want to focus on being anywhere with a taste-making audience and a big reach. Are you trying to build links for search engine visibility? You’ll want to get guest posts across the middle-level sites and focus on getting links to the right pages on your site. Are you trying to drive direct, immediate sales?  Then you’ll want to go after product reviews and other things that feature your products heavily. Example: Let’s use an example: We’re trying to drive search engine visibility for a company that makes data analysis and statistics software. (The company’s website already has a lot of search-optimized pages and long tail content, so more quality links will help their site gain more organic traffic.) Step 2: Define Your Prospect Opportunities Now that you […]

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What You’ll Learn Today

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to find new opportunities – like product review opportunities, guest post placements, resources pages, and more – using BuzzStream Discovery and BuzzStream’s prospecting module.  Then you’ll qualify them, and finally add them to your BuzzStream project – where you’re ready to take action on them.

Table of Contents

 

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

Before you start looking for placements and marketing opportunities, take a step back and think about what you’re trying to accomplish.

Are you trying to build your brand?  Then you want to focus on being anywhere with a taste-making audience and a big reach.

Are you trying to build links for search engine visibility? You’ll want to get guest posts across the middle-level sites and focus on getting links to the right pages on your site.

Are you trying to drive direct, immediate sales?  Then you’ll want to go after product reviews and other things that feature your products heavily.

Example:

Let’s use an example: We’re trying to drive search engine visibility for a company that makes data analysis and statistics software. (The company’s website already has a lot of search-optimized pages and long tail content, so more quality links will help their site gain more organic traffic.)

Step 2: Define Your Prospect Opportunities

Now that you know what you’re trying to accomplish, you can begin to define what promotion opportunities you’re looking for.

You might find it helpful to write a sentence or two about the different types of opportunities you’re looking for.

For example, some promotion opportunities are:

  • Online Marketing Blogs that Review Tools and Have Highly Engaged Subscribers
  • Sites with Strong Readership in Affluent Moms and Post Infographics
  • Gadget Blogs with a DA > 30 that Have Give-Aways
  • Travel Blogs that Accept Guest Posts and Allow Rich Anchor Text Links

If you write down what sort of promotional opportunity you’re looking for before you start prospecting, you’ll find the whole process becomes much easier.

Returning to our example, the best opportunities, in this case, are going to be highly curated pages on authoritative domains – things like libraries, government sites, university sites, and other high quality industry resources.  The best pages won’t have too many other links, but because these pages often form the seeds of future resources pages and lead to second degree links, anything that’s curated and relevant will be effective.

Finding new opportunities with BuzzStream Discovery

Why use Discovery?

BuzzStream Discovery gives you access to BuzzStream’s database of influencers to easily find bloggers who write about topics that are relevant to your pitch. To find relevant bloggers, simply search a keyword or phrase. No knowledge of query-writing needed.

Step 3: Type in your search

Once you’ve opened BuzzStream Discovery, type in your keyword. For our example, I’ll type in “data science.” Note you have some advanced operators you can use while searching in Discovery. They are:

  • Site – Find influencers who write for a specific website. Example, site:mashable.com
  • Intitle – Search content with a specific title or headline. Example, intitle:guide
  • Inbio – Search through authors with keywords in their bios. Example, inbio:content
  • Name – Find authors with a specific name. Example, name:”Paul May”
  • Twitter – Find authors related to a specific twitter handle. Example, twitter:paulmay
  • Quoted search – Quote your keywords if you want to search our database for that combination exactly. You can also apply this to our other advanced operators. Example, “link building guide”

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Step 4: Filter through your list

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Now you have a list of influencers who have written about your keyword. In this case, BuzzStream found 399 pages worth of bloggers who write about data science. As great as that is, it’s also way too many to go through. That’s why we’ll want to filter our list down using the filters on the left of the screen.

Since we need authoritative domains in this example, we’ll filter for influencers who write for websites with a domain authority of at least 40.

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Now we’re only seeing influencers who write about data science for authoritative domains.

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If you have additional criteria like number of Twitter followers, or minimum update frequency, you can continue filtering down your list. Otherwise, it’s time to start digging in.

Step 5: Qualify your leads

Now it’s time to do our research and add the best leads to our database.

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For every influencer who appears in your Discovery results page, you’ll see:

  • Name
  • Twitter handle
  • Twitter bio
  • Domains they write for
  • Categories that they write for
  • Location
  • The last three articles they’ve written that address the subject you searched for, as well as how many times those articles have been shared on social

If you can tell that an influencer is a good fit with this information, you can click the Add to project button to add them to your database.

If you’d like to learn more before deciding, you can click on View full profile.

screen-shot-2016-11-16-at-2-32-05-pm

Here at an influencer’s profile, you’ll be able to see and search through all of the content they’ve written, as well as see how engaged their audience is, and how active they are.

In the Footprint tab, you’ll find a list of all of the domains they’ve written for, how many times they’ve written for them, and, on average, how many shares they get per post.

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In the Network tab, you’ll see who an influencer is influenced by (the green dots), and who they influence (the blue dots).

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One way you can use this tab is to look up an influencer who you already have a relationship with, see who they influence, then reach out to them, being sure to name-drop the original influencer.

Once you’ve read through an influencer’s profile, you can add them to your project if they’re a good fit, then continue working your way down your Discovery results page.

Finding new opportunities with the prospecting tool

Why Use Prospecting?

While importing curated lists like the lists from Alltop is a good start, sometimes you’re looking for specific opportunities – like infographic placements or product reviews.  Curated lists often aren’t the best way to find specific types of opportunities that align with your content & linkable assets.

Instead, you can use BuzzStream to look for the unique patterns – called ‘footprints’ – these opportunities generate, and find great untouched gems.

Searching for footprints and using prospecting queries is a key difference between experienced and amateur link development professionals – typically professionals make heavy use of prospecting queries to save time and source otherwise hidden opportunities.

Step 3: Create Queries

Now that you’ve figured out what you’re looking for, you can create a prospecting query to find it.

Good prospecting searches consist of two elements:

  • Keywords, which will return a specific subject – examples include “motorcycle” “east asia travel”, and “frugal”.
  • Footprints, which are a specific pattern a type of opportunity creates – examples include “inurl:infographics” “’Write for Us’ AND ‘Become a Contributor’” and “intitle: (keyword) reviews”.

Sometimes these can be intermingled – and sometimes queries can have just footprints, or just keywords, but until you become a prospecting query ninja, think of them as having both parts.

It can take some time to get used to writing good prospecting queries – it’s both an art and a science.  As you write more queries and view their results, you’ll get better and better, and eventually become a prospecting ninja.

How to Select Your Keywords

Use keywords related to the sort of opportunity you’re looking for.  Often, you’ll find it more valuable to ‘niche down’ – and instead of looking for ‘travel blogs’, look for something more specific like ‘budget travel in SE Asia’ or bloggers enthusiastic about ‘intermittent fasting’ instead of ‘weight loss and fitness’.

Think like a marketer and ask yourself, “What words would this person use to describe themselves? How would they pitch their blog to someone else in their niche?”

For example, while you might think of someone as a ‘mommy’ or ‘daddy’ blogger, they might describe themselves as a parenting blogger. So you’d use “Parenting + Dad” as your keyword phrase.

One issue that trips up new prospecting query creators is looking for  transactional keywords, rather than trying to find placement opportunities. For example, someone building links for a car insurance site will plug in “Car Insurance” instead of “Car Maintenance inurl:category/guest”.

Searching for transactional keywords largely finds competitor sites, who are unlikely to link to your search landing pages.

How to Select Footprints

Footprints are patterns indicative of the opportunities you’re looking for. For example, having many posts with ‘INFOGRAPHIC’ in the title means the site posts infographics.

Another example is URL structures of popular content management systems – if a blogger hosts a lot of guest posts, they may have a section on their site where the URL section matches “category/guest” or “author/guest”, so you can look for sites that have both your keywords and these structures.

Advanced Operators

One helpful tool in creating footprints are:

These are called Advanced Operators, and they tell Google (via BuzzStream) to look for a specific pattern, like words in the title of an article, or in the url.

There are lots of advanced operators, and many new ones are found as old ones are depreciated.  For a full list, check out the Advancer Operators for Web Search reference or the Search Operators list on GoogleGuide.

Some of the most useful advanced operators for prospecting are:

  • Inurl: This operator shows you only results with that specific phrase in the URL.  If there are common URL patterns around your opportunities, this is a great query to use.
  •  * (asterisk): The asterisk is a ‘Fill in the blanks’ character.  (MORE)
  • Intitle: This operator brings back words from the title of the article – it can be useful for finding review and giveaway opportunities.
  • Boolean Operators: OR, -, AND: Sometimes you’ll find yourself looking for opportunities where the name coincides with something else on the internet – like looking for a an opportunity that shares a name with a song.  You could use Boolean operators to specifically exclude the name of the band, or specifically include another keyword so you could find relevant opportunities.

Creating great queries is both an art and a science – and practice definitely makes perfect.

Lists of Footprints

BuzzStream has a link building query generator tool that can be good for generating ideas and potential queries.

Some of our favorite footprints are:

  • Guest Post Queries
    • KEYWORD inurl:category/guest
    • KEYWORD “Write for Us”
    • KEYWORD Become a Contributor
  • Product Review Queries
    • COMPETITORPRODUCT intitle:Review
    • COMPETITORPRODUCT comparison
    • COMPETITORPRODUCT ratings
  • Contest Queries
    • KEYWORD contest intitle:submit
    • KEYWORD giveaways intitle:submit
    • KEYWORD sweeps* intitle:submit
  • Content Promoter Queries
    • CATEGORYKEYWORD “round up”
    • CATEGORYKEYWORD “of the week”
    • CATEGORYKEYWORD “Links of the week”
    • “Daily Recap” CATEGORYKEYWORD
    • “Post roundup” CATEGORYKEYWORD
    • “Blog Roundup” CATEGORYKEYWORD
    • “Posts of the day” CATEGORYKEYWORD
    • “Posts of the Week” CATEGORYKEYWORD
  • Resource/Links Page Queries
    • KEYWORD inurl:resources
    • KEYWORD intitle:”other resources”
    • KEYWORD “helpful links”

Resources for Queries

There are tons of query resources out there on the internet – you can find some great queries through some of these query generators:

These posts have some great queries and tips:

Returning to our example, I’m looking for data analysis and statistics resource pages.  So I’ll start by trying some queries like:

Data analysis resources

Statistics resources

Data analysis inurl:resources

Statistics inurl:resources

 

Step 4: Test Your Queries

Test your queries before you add them to the prospecting module.  Do they return good opportunities?  OR do you see a lot of spammy junk?  If it looks like the query returns good results, go ahead and proceed to the next session: using BuzzStream to run your queries.

You should plug each of your queries into Google and take a quick look at the SERP – does it look like it’s full of good opportunities?  Or do you wonder if your query is working?

If it doesn’t look like your query is working, take some time to reformulate it before you plug it into BuzzStream.  Often it’s easy to get queries wrong, especially with advanced operators  – a misplaced space or colon can be the difference between a great query and an ineffective one.

In the data analysis example, I notice that the ‘Data Analysis Resources’ queries don’t seem to be generating the same quality of results as the statistics queries, so I’ll remove those.  I also notice that a lot of sites seem to be using the phrase “Data Science” so I’ll add that keyword to my footprints.

Step 5: Add Your Queries to BuzzStream

Now that you’ve created and tested your queries, it’s time to have BuzzStream do the work of running them, deduplicating them, and gathering metrics for you.

In your BuzzStream account, click on the Add Websites dropdown.  Then select Create New Prospecting Profile under Link Prospecting:

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This will open the Add New Prospecting Profile Screen:

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Start by naming your prospecting profile.  It can be helpful to add a number to it – so you might want to call it “Fashion Guest Posts #1” or something similar – so when you need to try new queries you have some differentiation.

Next, copy your queries into the Prospecting Searches box:

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Prospecting Settings

You can select from these optional settings.

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Country

You can choose which country’s results you’d like to target.  (This uses the GL= parameter on Google.com)

Retrieve New Results Weekly

BuzzStream can re-run these searches every week and send you the new results.  If you’re looking for opportunities as they emerge, this can be really useful.  (For example, if a blog writes about your competitor or reviews a partner product, you’ll be alerted.)

Send Notifications When New Results Are Discovered

This option determines who the digest email is sent to – if a specific team member is in charge of ongoing work on a campaign, you can have them sent the results.

In this example, the stock settings are fine, so go ahead and hit Save, and BuzzStream will do its work.

Step 6: Go Get a Drink

At this point, BuzzStream is going to collect a bunch of information for you, so it may take a couple of minutes. This is an excellent time to treat yourself to a soda, a cup of coffee, or something more exotic (e.g., a shirley temple, a scotch and water, a glass of buttermilk, a white russian, a jaegerbomb, a sasparilla, a flaming dr. pepper,…well, you get the idea).  You choose the drink…we’re not ones to judge.

Once you’re back, press refresh, and you should see the results BuzzStream found for you.

Step 7: Analyze Your Results

You should see something like this:

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BuzzStream has:

  • Performed these searches and gathered the top 40 results
  • Deduplicated results and collated them by website
  • Found contact information like emails, Twitter handles, phone numbers, and Facebook pages
  • Gathered SEO Metrics like Domain Authority and PageRank

All while you were away for a couple of minutes. Not bad, right?

If you’re having trouble finding your results, you can find the results from each of your Prospecting Profiles under the Link Prospecting menu in Add Websites:

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-2-20-43-am

Step 8: Qualify Your Prospects & Accept, Reject, or Blacklist Them

Now that BuzzStream has run your queries for you, it’s time to look through these opportunities to see if they’re good opportunities that will help accomplish your goals.

What Makes a Site Qualified?

Whether a site is qualified or not ultimately will depend on your goals and what sort of opportunities you’re looking for.

Some factors many people use for qualification are:

  • Is the site well-designed? Or is it hastily thrown up from a stock template?
  • Does the site seem to be run by real people with names and interests? Or is it operated by admin, who might be a robot?
  • Does the site have a social following on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, or another network appropriate for its vertical?
  • Does the site have a strongly relevant audience (if you’re trying to deliver sales or build your brand in a specific segment) ?
  • Does the site have certain SEO authority metrics, like a Domain Authority above 30?
  • Does the site sell paid links, link to a number of irrelevant sites, link to bad neighborhoods, or participate in other questionable SEO practices?

If you want to know more about link qualification, some resources you might want to check out are:

Qualifying Prospects and Adding Them to Projects

Sites found through the prospecting module aren’t added to your BuzzStream project until they’re marked as approved.  Until then, they sit in the Prospecting Module.

To mark a prospect as qualified, click the ‘Thumbs Up’ icon. By contrast, you can reject a prospect by selecting the ‘Thumbs Down’ icon. You can also Blacklist prospects, which means they’ll never appear in prospecting results again.

screen-shot-2016-11-17-at-2-22-30-am

 

And that’s how you find and qualify new link opportunities with BuzzStream.

Still have questions? Ask a BuzzStream Expert by emailing us at support@BuzzStream.com.

Good Work!

You’ve made it through all four BuzzStream University lessons – great job.

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Prospect Faster & Do Smarter Outreach with the BuzzMarker for Chrome https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzmarker-for-chrome/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzmarker-for-chrome/#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:00:11 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=3054 Today we’re excited to announce the BuzzMarker for Chrome. We’ve reinvented the BuzzMarker as a Chrome extension – and now you can take your BuzzStream account with you, everywhere you go on the web. If you’re anything like me, you want to start playing with it already. You can download the BuzzMarker for Chrome and start using it now.  You can also download it from the Chrome Web Store. With the BuzzMarker for Chrome, you can: Easily Add Websites, People, and Links to BuzzStream, Without Ever Leaving The Site You’re On Know What (and Who) Your Team Knows Flip Through New Opportunities from Lists & Prospecting Tools, Keeping Only the Best Ones Adding People, Links, Websites, and Notes Now it’s even easier to add people, websites, and links to your BuzzStream account. Like the original BuzzMarker, you can add sites to BuzzStream with one click. With the BuzzMarker for Chrome, you can also add links, people, notes, and tags. And you can do it all on one screen, while you research the site, so you don’t have to switch between different windows or tabs. You can view current contact details from the BuzzMarker, too. You can look at your team’s email and social history with websites, check out bios and contact info, figure out which projects the contact is in, and look through author bios to find the best person for outreach. You can update and add notes, authors, and links as needed. And again, you can do it all without ever leaving the site you’re on. Know What Your Team Knows Often you’ll find a great prospect site and learn the hard way that someone else on your team has already been in touch with that person, often for another project. This can lead to embarrassing mistakes. Imagine what could happen if you knew […]

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Today we’re excited to announce the BuzzMarker for Chrome.

We’ve reinvented the BuzzMarker as a Chrome extension – and now you can take your BuzzStream account with you, everywhere you go on the web.

If you’re anything like me, you want to start playing with it already. You can download the BuzzMarker for Chrome and start using it now.  You can also download it from the Chrome Web Store.

With the BuzzMarker for Chrome, you can:

  • Easily Add Websites, People, and Links to BuzzStream, Without Ever Leaving The Site You’re On
  • Know What (and Who) Your Team Knows
  • Flip Through New Opportunities from Lists & Prospecting Tools, Keeping Only the Best Ones

Adding People, Links, Websites, and Notes

Now it’s even easier to add people, websites, and links to your BuzzStream account.

Like the original BuzzMarker, you can add sites to BuzzStream with one click. With the BuzzMarker for Chrome, you can also add links, people, notes, and tags. And you can do it all on one screen, while you research the site, so you don’t have to switch between different windows or tabs.

You can view current contact details from the BuzzMarker, too. You can look at your team’s email and social history with websites, check out bios and contact info, figure out which projects the contact is in, and look through author bios to find the best person for outreach. You can update and add notes, authors, and links as needed. And again, you can do it all without ever leaving the site you’re on.

Know What Your Team Knows

Often you’ll find a great prospect site and learn the hard way that someone else on your team has already been in touch with that person, often for another project. This can lead to embarrassing mistakes.

Imagine what could happen if you knew about that relationship in advance – the exciting opportunities you could find by leveraging your entire team’s outreach history.  The BuzzMarker for Chrome lets you do exactly that.

You can see your team’s history with a website or person, simply by clicking on the BuzzMarker for Chrome.  You can check whether websites and people are in other BuzzStream projects and view your colleagues’ history with those influencers, all from the extension.

Now you can also use the BuzzMarker’s contact highlighter to view lists and see which opportunities are in your BuzzStream project already, which ones are in another project, and which you haven’t contacted yet – so you never spend time with a site someone else on your team already knows.

Faster, Better Prospecting

There are tons of great tools out there that provide excellent lists of marketing and outreach prospects. With the BuzzMarker for Chrome, it’s easy to browse through those opportunities and pick the best ones.

The BuzzMarker’s contact highlighter can help you quickly figure out who your team already knows and which opportunities are new, saving you hours of research.

And with the new list browser, you can flip through results from the prospecting tools you know and love – everything from Google SERPs to link data tools like Open Site Explorer and AHrefs to new players like BuzzSumo – to find great opportunities quickly and efficiently.

Ready to dig in? Set Up the BuzzMarker for Chrome.

Not convinced yet? We beta tested the BuzzMarker with some of the best in the industry. Check out what they had to say:

 

Jon Cooper Circle

“I had been waiting a long time for a new feature from Buzzstream, one of my favorite link building tools (if you follow me, you know how much I love it), and they finally released it today. I’ve had to contain my excitement while beta testing it, but now that it’s live, it’s scaled my entire prospecting workflow [through it].”

Jon Cooper, PointBlankSEO

GaelBreton

 

“I’ve been using Buzzstream to build relationships successfully for the past 2 years. With the chrome extension, my efforts are turbocharged and I can visually see who is in my network and add those who aren’t in my database on the fly.”

Gael Breton, Authority Hacker

BillSebald

“The BuzzMarker has gotten more dynamic with this extension. It has more on-demand functionality, allowing you to add contacts and prospect information through appearing in the browser. It’s even more powerful in the search listings themselves. I’m not one for change, but this was a great one easily leading to better efficiency. Easily one of my top SEO extensions.

Bill Sebald, Greenlane SEO

“My favorite thing about the new Buzzmarker is that it lets you do everything you need while still on the same tab. I have so many pages and tabs open a day that I honestly start to lose track. With the Buzzmarker you can keep it open as you explore the whole site. The BuzzMarker can then search for contact info on those pages you’re exploring while you look for the contact info that isn’t clickable. It’s like having a clone of yourself doing double the grunt work.

Alyse Ainsworth, SEO Gadget

 

If you have a BuzzStream account, you can download the BuzzMarker for Chrome and start using it today. And if you don’t yet have a BuzzStream account, you can sign up for one here.

Please let us know what you think – drop us an email at support@buzzstream.com, leave a comment, or tweet us @BuzzStream. We read every single message, and we’d love to hear from you as we continue to make BuzzStream more powerful.

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How to Use BuzzSumo & BuzzStream to Find Content Promotion Opportunities https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzsumo-buzzstream/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzsumo-buzzstream/#comments Fri, 17 Jan 2014 11:58:15 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2926 Finding great opportunities – particularly in verticals you aren’t deeply familiar with – is one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of content promotion and link building process.  Enter BuzzSumo – a new tool that makes this process a little easier. It’s a great fit for BuzzStream users, especially those who are looking for opportunities to build links and get found through tactics like infographics, guest posts, giveaways, interviews, and more.  (BuzzSumo and BuzzStream are not affiliated in any way, beyond a mutual desire to help marketers.) In today’s post, I’m show you how to use BuzzSumo with BuzzStream to (achieve content promotion and get great placements and ultimately ring the cash register.) Introducing BuzzSumo: a Powerful Content Placement Prospecting Tool BuzzSumo is a neat, relatively new tool that helps marketers find highly shared content, along with influencers in specific areas.  While there are tons of tools to find influencers on Twitter and other networks, BuzzSumo has some unique features that enable you to find not just people, but content promotion and placement opportunities quickly and easily. An Example Project: Using Content Marketing to Build Awareness and Links in a Specific Niche For example, let’s say I’m launching a new company that makes smart crock pots. (Sort of like Nest for Crock Pots. As it turns out, Belkin has announced plans for these.)  In this scenario, I’ve done some market analysis, and I’ve found out that people that follow the paleo diet use crock pots, tend to be early adopters, and like playing with new technology.  An addressable market interested in my offering? Awesome. This will be a great ‘head pin’ market (see ‘Crossing the Chasm’ for more on vertical-by-vertical strategy.) As part of my launch, I want to: Guest post on relevant paleo blogs with crockpot recipes. Place […]

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Finding great opportunities – particularly in verticals you aren’t deeply familiar with – is one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of content promotion and link building process. 

Enter BuzzSumo – a new tool that makes this process a little easier. It’s a great fit for BuzzStream users, especially those who are looking for opportunities to build links and get found through tactics like infographics, guest posts, giveaways, interviews, and more.  (BuzzSumo and BuzzStream are not affiliated in any way, beyond a mutual desire to help marketers.)

In today’s post, I’m show you how to use BuzzSumo with BuzzStream to (achieve content promotion and get great placements and ultimately ring the cash register.)

Introducing BuzzSumo: a Powerful Content Placement Prospecting Tool

BuzzSumo is a neat, relatively new tool that helps marketers find highly shared content, along with influencers in specific areas.  While there are tons of tools to find influencers on Twitter and other networks, BuzzSumo has some unique features that enable you to find not just people, but content promotion and placement opportunities quickly and easily.

An Example Project: Using Content Marketing to Build Awareness and Links in a Specific Niche

For example, let’s say I’m launching a new company that makes smart crock pots. (Sort of like Nest for Crock Pots. As it turns out, Belkin has announced plans for these.)  In this scenario, I’ve done some market analysis, and I’ve found out that people that follow the paleo diet use crock pots, tend to be early adopters, and like playing with new technology.  An addressable market interested in my offering? Awesome. This will be a great ‘head pin’ market (see ‘Crossing the Chasm’ for more on vertical-by-vertical strategy.)

As part of my launch, I want to:

  • Guest post on relevant paleo blogs with crockpot recipes.
  • Place my crockpot infographics on blogs that appeal to the paleo audience.
  • Give away products and get reviews where the numbers make sense, based on audience size and conversion rate estimates.

All of these activities will also result in links, which will eventually help my site rank for relevant terms. But until search demand catches up with the awesomeness of my crock pots, I’ll have to go out and generate demand.

Using BuzzSumo to Source Opportunities

Now that I’ve outlined my assets and understand what I’m trying to accomplish, I can go out and source some opportunities.

Normally to find opportunities like those, I would create a number of prospecting queries, and spend a great deal of time looking through SERPs and vetting opportunities.  It’s not quite hunting for a needle in a haystack, but it is time consuming and requires some expertise and experience.

By contrast, I can use BuzzSumo, and find some opportunities quickly.  I won’t generate as extensive a list as I would if I used several tools and spent many hours researching, but as far as getting a pretty good list in a few minutes, it will work well.

BuzzSumo is a particularly good tool for implementing the ’10 in 10 minutest’ test Paddy Moogan talks about in his book (paid).   If you can’t find several good placement opportunities for your newest content idea quickly with BuzzSumo, it might be time to go back to the drawing board before you commit too many resources to production and promotion.

Now let’s look at how I’d use BuzzSumo to find those opportunities.

Finding New Content Promotion Opportunities with BuzzSumo: Step by Step

Step 1: Navigate to app.buzzsumo.com.  I’ll see something like this:

buzzsumo intro screen

Step 2: Select what sort of opportunities and time frame I’m looking for:

In my case, I’m looking for infographics placements, guest posts (in this case, usually guest recipes), and giveaways.  I’ll cast a pretty wide net for timeframe – anything in the last 6 months will work.

So, I’ll select those options from the bar on the left:

image of filters

Step 3: Add my keywords

Now that I’ve selected what kinds of opportunities I’m looking for, I’ll add some topical keywords to help me find the right kind of paleo diet sites.  Always remember, the keywords that hold content promotion opportunities are typically very different than the SEO keywords I’d try to rank for.

BuzzSumo needs synonyms to bring back a decent number of opportunities, so I’ll go ahead and add some related categorical terms, in this case:

search terms

(You can generate these synoyms through a variety of methods, but the quickest and dirtiest way is probably looking at the similar searches at the bottom of the Google SERP.)

Step 4: Press ‘Search’ and Watch the Magic Happen

Now BuzzSumo will return a screen full of results for me:

screenful of results

I can sort them by whichever social network is most important to my audience, which in the case of the crock pot example is Facebook. So I’ll sort my results by Facebook shares:

sorted results

And now I have list of opportunities sorted by social traction! Excellent.

Step 5: Click Thru and Add These Opportunities to My BuzzStream Account with the BuzzMarker

The simplest way to then get these great opportunities into my BuzzStream account is to click on them, and then use the BuzzMarker, BuzzStream’s Bookmarklet, to automatically add them to my account.

using buzzmarker

BuzzStream, as always, gathers contact information, metrics, and recent content, so I can start deciding what to offer to each blog, research it further, and start my outreach.

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Measuring the Impact of Content Promotion & Link Building https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/measuring-impact/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/measuring-impact/#comments Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:43:43 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2809 One of the biggest challenges link building and outreach professionals face is measuring the results of their work and connecting them to revenue. Today we’ll look at how you can measure the impact of outreach, link building, and content promotion across multiple dimensions, including referral traffic, brand lift, search engine performance, and direct sales. Why is Measurement Important? Effective measurement not only allows you to show the fruits of your labor to your manager/clients, but enables you to effectively lobby for future investment. Business cases can be built based on previous success rather than generic platitudes about great content. Additionally, without measurement, it’s difficult to form hypotheses for future improvements. You might notice things like “Despite strong Twitter traffic, our piece didn’t generate many new Twitter followers for our brand,”, and form a hypothesis like “In our next content piece, we’ll try to use CTAs with Twitter Web Intents to increase our Tweets -> New Followers and Traffic -> New Followers ratio.” Measurement is only valuable if you take action based on that data – be it organizational action or marketing action. Otherwise, metrics are an exercise in vanity, not data-informed marketing. Showing the ROI of Content Creation and Outreach Content creation and outreach can be a very effective set of tactics, but it can be difficult to show their results. While traffic and pageviews are simple to measure, they reflect only one part of the value of the value of creating excellent material and placing it (or links to it) on other sites. This content + outreach combo delivers value far and above those pageviews (especially when benchmarked against ad impressions or something similiar) due to not only the increased fundamental value of those pageivews – where potential customers aren’t just being yelled at but actively engaging with content […]

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One of the biggest challenges link building and outreach professionals face is measuring the results of their work and connecting them to revenue.

Today we’ll look at how you can measure the impact of outreach, link building, and content promotion across multiple dimensions, including referral traffic, brand lift, search engine performance, and direct sales.

measurement image

Why is Measurement Important?

Effective measurement not only allows you to show the fruits of your labor to your manager/clients, but enables you to effectively lobby for future investment. Business cases can be built based on previous success rather than generic platitudes about great content.

Additionally, without measurement, it’s difficult to form hypotheses for future improvements. You might notice things like “Despite strong Twitter traffic, our piece didn’t generate many new Twitter followers for our brand,”, and form a hypothesis like “In our next content piece, we’ll try to use CTAs with Twitter Web Intents to increase our Tweets -> New Followers and Traffic -> New Followers ratio.”

Measurement is only valuable if you take action based on that data – be it organizational action or marketing action. Otherwise, metrics are an exercise in vanity, not data-informed marketing.

Showing the ROI of Content Creation and Outreach

Content creation and outreach can be a very effective set of tactics, but it can be difficult to show their results. While traffic and pageviews are simple to measure, they reflect only one part of the value of the value of creating excellent material and placing it (or links to it) on other sites.

This content + outreach combo delivers value far and above those pageviews (especially when benchmarked against ad impressions or something similiar) due to not only the increased fundamental value of those pageivews – where potential customers aren’t just being yelled at but actively engaging with content that’s somehow related to your brand.

So let’s start by looking at the impact of all of these activities from a 10,000 foot view: What does link development impact?

Good link development and content promotion can achieve the following outcomes:

  • Drive referral traffic
  • Increase Search Engine Traffic for a Specific Page
  • Improve Domain Wide Search Engine Visibility 
  • Grow Brand Awareness in Target Markets
  • Create Social Mentions and Shares
  • Drive Sales/Leads/Other Conversion Actions from the Above Increases in Visibility

So let’s dive into how to measure these things. In these examples, we’ll concern oursleves mostly with Google Analytics and Google search impact – if you use another analytics product or target other search engines extensively, you can apply the same foundational principles, but the actual execution of the measurement will be different.

We’ll go through each of these outcomes and their measurements in detail:

Driving Referral Traffic

This is by far the easiest thing to measure, or so it seems.

In Google Analytics, cruise over over to the ‘Referrals’ section. (It’s under ‘Traffic Sources’, in the ‘Sources’ dropdown.) Then, look for the domain that’s linked to your site in the search box at right, and see how much and what quality traffic it’s sending.

 

referral traffic from content promotionThe other part of referral traffic is the so-called ‘dark social‘ – referral traffic without a referrer, coming from things like email clients and IM sharing.  This is best measured through looking at direct traffic to landing pages, in the direct traffic report in Google Analytics.

Email Opt-Ins, Cookie Pool Growth, and Other Permission Marketing Assets

This is relatively easy to measure, provided you’ve tracked out your micro-conversions as custom events or goals in Google Analytics. (If you haven’t, you should get on that.)

Simply select traffic that uses your content piece as a landing page (hint: advanced segments are awesome), and look for events or goal completions.

If you have a retargeting platform (here at BuzzStream use AdRoll and only have good things to say), you can create a segment for the piece of content you’re promoting to see how many new visitors are added to your cookie pool from your compaign.  

Improving Search Engine Results for a Specific Page

Now let’s look at measuring search traffic.  Google doesn’t make it easy to do this in a perfectly causal way (IE you can’t say ‘this link led to this traffic increase’), but you can measure it and show value through after-the-fact correlation.  As with anything involving correlation, it doesn’t equal causation, so take this data with a grain of salt – there can be other things going on that improve search performance:

still not causation, nope, really, still

If you’re creating external links to an SEO landing page that ranks for some phrase, there are two approaches to measuring the search engine results increases, best done in unison.

You can measure:

  • Ranking improvements on search terms that the promoted page ranks for using a rank tracking tool like Moz or Authority Labs
  • Google Traffic to a given page before/after a link is placed
  • Improvements in Search Engine Impressions and Clicks to a URL from Google Webmaster Tools

You can find this last metric by filtering by URL in the ‘Landing Pages’ report, under ‘Search Engine Optimization’, if you’ve linked that site’s Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools together.

Improving Search Engine Results Site-Wide

The next benefit to measure is increases in site-wide search sessions, based on domain authority.

Given Google’s shall we say, reticence to enable access to great data, there’s a couple of approaches to take here, each with advantages and drawbacks:

Google Analytics Search Sessions

You can view search sessions, site-wide, before and after you launched your content (and, if you promoted it properly, basked in the influx of links and mentions you received.)

We see a 5.58% increase in search sessions from the two weeks before from a comparable period after the post:

google analytics sitewide sessions

Google Webmaster Tools

You can also measure this through site-wide clicks and impressions in Google Webmaster Tools.  Because Google Webmaster Tools seems to report randomly chosen impression data for terms you’re on the 100th page for, take this data with an entire shaker of salt, and look to confirm any increases here with increases in other areas.

Leads, Sales, & Other Conversion Actions

This is, of course, the big one. Why we do these things in the first place – to ring the cash register, either directly, or with the help of a sales team.

These are easy to measure if you’ve set up your conversion goals correctly in Google Analytics – just look for the number of leads captured or sales gained in your Goals column.

Improving Brand Awareness

This one is far trickier to measure. Basically there are no easy ways to measure brand awareness. You can take surveys in your target audience (traditionally difficult and expensive, still somewhat, but rapidly declining) or you can look at proxies for brand recognition, like direct traffic or brand searches.

In this case, we’re looking for an improvement in a brand’s position in their minds – often for people who aren’t yet customers.

While it’s difficult to measure any positions in people’s minds without mass MRI scans (which I assume is outside your budget and tolerance for creepy futuristic things), you can get an idea through our favorite database of intentions, Google Search.

You can start by looking for increases in branded search volumes in Google Trends. If you have a big brand, this will be less useful than if you have a smaller brand where you can really move the needle through content and outreach.  However, this data is not particularly fine-grained, and often you’ll lose the impact of say, an individual infographic or ultimate guide against a successful PR campaign.

Winning the Conversation

If your audience is on Twitter, it can be valuable to measure a rise in mentions, through a tool like Topsy.  To make this more relevant, you can also measure the Twitter mentions of your brand versus a competitor or two, through a tool like Topsy Analytics:

topsy

This report shows how you’re winning ‘the online conversation’, which can either be a big deal, or unimportant, depending on your industry.  In this case, I can see that an AMA on Inbound.org helped BuzzStream get more ‘share of online voice’ than one of our competitors. 

Google Suggest for Names of Pieces of Content

If you’re creating ‘big content’, a great indicator that you’ve been successful is when people search for that specific piece of content. You’ve become important enough to merit an entry in the database of collective intentions.

You can do this by using Google and not hitting enter or using UberSuggest:

 look at all that content marketing success

Putting It All together

Before you ever start building your content or promotion strategy, you should come up with some goals. And based on those goals, you can create measurement criteria. (If you haven’t gotten your analytics package set up to track these goals, this is a great time to get this in place.)

Then, you can choose a portfolio of metrics – probably around some blend of the factors above – to measure your success. Often a portfolio approache can neutralize the weaknesses of any individual measurement method, thus getting your closer to quantifying things that are difficult to measure.

Conclusion

Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” I, Matt Gratt, offer a less notable but perhaps more actionable aphorism: “People that show a measurable impact on business impact keep their jobs.”

These are just some methods – marketing measurement is an incredibly complex topic, and the growing panorama of ways for people to express their voices creates a new world of measurement opportunities. This article isn’t’ meant to be the final word in this – How do you measure the impact of your link building, content promotion, and outreach?

(Photo credit)

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How to Structure a Link Building Campaign for Maximum Impact https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-structure-a-link-building-campaign-for-maximum-impact/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-structure-a-link-building-campaign-for-maximum-impact/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 12:01:29 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2487 Structuring linking campaigns can be tough.  There’s so much contrary advice on the internet – Make big content! 301 redirects! Guest post! Make friends! Promote Your Content! And the list goes on. Most of these tactics will work – up to a point, where you’ll hit the point of diminishing returns.  However, how you structure your campaign – and what you do first – can lead to you to a campaign with a tremendous ROI, or a difficult and troubled effort. In the past, you might’ve used a large number of directory submissions to start your campaign, followed by other mechanical ways.  These days, you’ll want to embrace a strategy that’s based on audience development and digital PR, in a larger bid to develop great authority and a good reputation. There are ways to structure these campaigns where you find yourself running up a wall, instead of starting a fly wheel and carefully picking up all of the  low hanging fruit before advancing to high quality . Nothing Attracts a Crowd Like a Crowd – Nothing Attracts Links like Links In 2004, Mike Grehan wrote a now-famous essay, “Filthy Linking Rich”, on the tendency of well-linked sites to organically gain more links and make new competition impossible.  As Grehan put it: So, the “filthy linking rich” get richer and currently popular pages continue to hit the top spots. The law of “preferential attachment” as it is also known, wherein new links on the web are more likely to go to sites that already have many links, proves that the scheme is inherently biased against new and unknown pages. PT Barnum allegedly said ‘Nothing Attracts a Crowd Like a Crowd’ – and nothing draws links like links.  (The other thing you can learn from this is essay is people have been complaining about link […]

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structuring a link building campaign

While you may have all the pieces to run link development campaigns, putting them together is crucial.

Structuring linking campaigns can be tough.  There’s so much contrary advice on the internet – Make big content! 301 redirects! Guest post! Make friends! Promote Your Content! And the list goes on.

Most of these tactics will work – up to a point, where you’ll hit the point of diminishing returns.  However, how you structure your campaign – and what you do first – can lead to you to a campaign with a tremendous ROI, or a difficult and troubled effort.

In the past, you might’ve used a large number of directory submissions to start your campaign, followed by other mechanical ways.  These days, you’ll want to embrace a strategy that’s based on audience development and digital PR, in a larger bid to develop great authority and a good reputation.

There are ways to structure these campaigns where you find yourself running up a wall, instead of starting a fly wheel and carefully picking up all of the  low hanging fruit before advancing to high quality .

Nothing Attracts a Crowd Like a Crowd – Nothing Attracts Links like Links

In 2004, Mike Grehan wrote a now-famous essay, “Filthy Linking Rich”, on the tendency of well-linked sites to organically gain more links and make new competition impossible.  As Grehan put it:

So, the “filthy linking rich” get richer and currently popular pages continue to hit the top spots. The law of “preferential attachment” as it is also known, wherein new links on the web are more likely to go to sites that already have many links, proves that the scheme is inherently biased against new and unknown pages.

PT Barnum allegedly said ‘Nothing Attracts a Crowd Like a Crowd’ – and nothing draws links like links.  (The other thing you can learn from this is essay is people have been complaining about link acquisition and how big sites have an unfair advantage since 2004.)

Start at the Beginning

When I think about link building activities, I put them into five buckets:

–          Reclamation – Activities where the link is already there, but you’re not getting credit for it.

–          Link Demand Harvesting – These are pages that exist to link to sites like yours, but don’t yet include your site

–          Links Utilizing Pre-Existing Relationships – Where you don’t have to make new friends, and get links from folks you already know.

–          Links Requiring New Relationships – Links where you must make new friends. 

–          Links Requiring Both New Relationships and Large Amounts of New Content – Links that require new friends and lots of great content.

You can also think about these criteria through a series of questions:

  • Do I have to ‘build’ a link?
  • Do I have to persuade someone to do something they were not already inclined to do?
  • Do I have to make a new friend?
  • Do I have to make new content?

link harvesting v link demand gen slide

 

Start with the Easy Stuff

Whenever you start a project, you want to start with the easy stuff to build up your audience and link popularity before you tackle the big projects.  This will both give you a base to work with, and often the people you meet and relationships you build as you take care of the easier link opportunities (links on resource pages, etc.) will be interested in your larger, content-heavy projects like guest posts, interactive content, and more.

Additionally, if you can show your boss or clients wins and increases in organic traffic and sales for initial activities, it will be easier to get buy in on bigger projects in the future.

The Beginning, a Very Good Place to Start

I recommend starting link building projects with link reclamation. There are lots of great descriptions of link reclamation processes around the SEO blogosphere – basically the process consists of finding links to 404’ing URLs on your site, and either 301 redirecting them a resolving URL, or asking a webmaster to change the link’s destination. 

These people have already linked to you, so little persuasion is required.  Additionally, most webmasters who have intended on linking to you are open to fixing links.  (And if they don’t respond, you can always 301 redirect the URL to the most appropriate URL on your site.)

If the motto of salespeople (from the Glengarry GlennRoss) is “always be closing”, link development professionals should “always be building relationships.”  When you approach a webmaster about fixing a broken link to your site, think about building a relationship.  You may want to approach them in the future about guest posting or placing an infographic.

 And even if you’ve already received a link from that site, and thus are less interested in future links, they may have other sites, or friends with sites.  I recommend you store all of your contacts in a database like BuzzStream so you can sort them when opportunities arise.

The Next Step: Resource Pages

Once you’ve reclaimed your existing links, through 301 redirects or asking nicely, it’s time to move on to building new links.  The place I like to start is with resource and links pages.  (I don’t mean those ‘link exchange’ pages from the 90s – I mean legitimate resource pages like this one, this one, or this one.)

Most of these pages are curated in an attempt to provide visitors a great resource – so if you have a great resource, you can get it added to these pages by asking nicely.

And as I’ve written about before, often people build lists for their own site from other resource pages, so these links can often lead to second degree links – some on quite authoritative sites.

Again, Always Be Making Connections.  Lots of these curators are in a position to work with you in the future.

Mine Your Own Business: Finding Influencers on Your List

Many link development professionals start hitting up strangers at this point.  While this approach certainly can be effective, often these people are targeted by hundreds if not thousands of link development folks, and considerable effort is required to stand out and be different.

A better approach is starting with website owners who already want to hear from you.  You already have a big list of these – you just may not know it.  If you have an email lists or a social following, it’s very possible you already have a list of webmasters and bloggers who’d be happy to hear from.

You can mine your email and Twitter lists for bloggers and online influencers to work with.  These people want to hear from you – they are, after all, on your email list.  Many of them may even be customers.

If you start with them and build relationships, you can gain exposure you couldn’t get through cold emails.  Additionally, bloggers know other bloggers.  If you work with a blogger who’s already interested in your company successfully, you can ask them if they know anyone else who might be interested in the same review or guest post opportunity, and get a warm introduction.

Mining Your Twitter Account

This method was originally discussed by Wil Reynolds at Mozcon 2011.

Effectively the process is:

  1. Gather a List of Your Twitter Followers (from Twitter API or Simply Measured)
  2. Grab a List of the URLs Associated with Your Twitter Followers
  3. Remove Sites Like Pinterest, Etsy, YouTube, Facebook, and Other Non-Opportunites
  4. Use the SEOMoz Mozscape API (or BuzzStream) to Grab Link Metrics for Each Site
  5. Compare These to a List of Your Linking Domains from Your Favorite Backlink Tool
  6. Start with the High-Authority Sites, and Work Your Way Down

Now you have a list of bloggers who already want to hear from you and your company.  Keep in mind you’ll still have to vet the list manually (or use the BuzzBar), as some of your Twitter followers will be competitors or vendors, and not great opportunities.

Mining Your Email List

You can also mine your email list, just like you mined your Twitter account.

To do this, follow essentially the same procedure, except start by using the FullContact API to attach social profiles to your email records.  Then apply the same procedure – using the Twitter API, grab the URLs attached to each of these social profiles, and then sort by domain authority and prepare for outreach.

If you have interesting data you can attach to your email records (for example, what kind of product the blogger purchased), you can add that to your database and segment your outreach based on that information.

Making New Friends: Guest Posts and Product Reviews

Once you’ve reclaimed links, found resource pages, and mined your permission marketing assets for influencers, then it’s time to start using conventional link building processes like guest posts and product reviews. 

We’ve written about effective guest posts before – try to be the kind of guest poster bloggers want to introduce to their friends, rather than the kind they don’t want to invite back.

Big Content + Big Outreach: The Final Stage

Now that you’ve built relationships and exhausted all the low-hanging fruit, it’s time to employ big content and big outreach.

Whenever you do big content, set a release date, and work with influencers in advance.  We’ve all been a part of content marketing failures, and these can be prevented using ‘Lean Startup’ style audience feedback.

In this case, the big content is even easier because you already have so many influencer relationships.  Because you pulled in a lot of links already, I recommend aiming high here as far as distribution goes (aka Mashable or whatever the equivalent in your vertical is) and aim for a strong multiplier effect across paid, earned, and owned media.

Conclusion: Always Be Making Connections

As you go through this process, remember: people, not websites, have the power to make links.  Keep building your ‘little black book’ of bloggers as you execute your campaign, and you’ll find that your ability to build links grows over time, rather than reaching a point of diminishing returns.

Photo Credit: 1

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How to: Get Links on Resource Pages https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/resource-page-links/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/resource-page-links/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:30:26 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2427 Links and resources pages are one of the oldest uses for the web – and an excellent link opportunity. Today’s post will focus on improving your techniques for getting links on links and resource pages. Why Get Links on Resource Pages? Although deeply out of fashion, these links can be excellent for search engine optimization authority building.  They typically don’t send much traffic, but they have many benefits: They Often Lead to More Links Bloggers who make lists often draw from these pages in making new lists, meaning they’re “links that build links”. I’ve found that the appearance of a site in a list on Quora (or other Q&A sites) will often lead to more links on other sites down the road.   They’re Often Linked to From the Top Level, Flowing Lots of PageRank Many of these ‘Links’ or ‘Resources’ pages are in the top-level navigation of sites, and will stay ‘high’ in the site structure – as opposed to blog posts, which get buried over time.  While the value of traditional (as defined in the 1998 paper) PageRank is debatable, links from these pages flow a great deal of it.   They Can Lead to Category Page and Other ‘Deep’ Links You can often get links to category pages, individual resource pages, and other ‘deeper’ pages from links and resource pages, instead of just home page links.  If you are working with larger sites (especially ecommerce sites), links to these category level pages can be pivotal in ranking the lowest level pages – like product pages.   Some of These Are Really Excellent Links Some of these links are really excellent – like this page on the FuelEconomy.gov site.  Many of these pages are maintained by government or university organizations, and other high authority organizations. They’re Easy to […]

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Links and resources pages are one of the oldest uses for the web – and an excellent link opportunity. Today’s post will focus on improving your techniques for getting links on links and resource pages.

library hero

Why Get Links on Resource Pages?

Although deeply out of fashion, these links can be excellent for search engine optimization authority building.  They typically don’t send much traffic, but they have many benefits:

  • They Often Lead to More Links

Bloggers who make lists often draw from these pages in making new lists, meaning they’re “links that build links”. I’ve found that the appearance of a site in a list on Quora (or other Q&A sites) will often lead to more links on other sites down the road.  

  • They’re Often Linked to From the Top Level, Flowing Lots of PageRank

Many of these ‘Links’ or ‘Resources’ pages are in the top-level navigation of sites, and will stay ‘high’ in the site structure – as opposed to blog posts, which get buried over time.  While the value of traditional (as defined in the 1998 paper) PageRank is debatable, links from these pages flow a great deal of it.  

  • They Can Lead to Category Page and Other ‘Deep’ Links

You can often get links to category pages, individual resource pages, and other ‘deeper’ pages from links and resource pages, instead of just home page links.  If you are working with larger sites (especially ecommerce sites), links to these category level pages can be pivotal in ranking the lowest level pages – like product pages.  

  • Some of These Are Really Excellent Links

Some of these links are really excellent – like this page on the FuelEconomy.gov site.  Many of these pages are maintained by government or university organizations, and other high authority organizations.

  • They’re Easy to Find

 These pages tend to be easy to find through either co-citation analysis or prospecting queries, which are relatively easy and scalable.

How to Source Resource and Links Pages

Let’s take a look at two methods of finding these pages:

Co-Citation Analysis

Co-citation analysis is the fine art of analyzing links in common between competitor sites to find new link opportunities.

Basically the process looks like:

  1. Get the backlinks from several competitor sites, or simply sites in the same space from your favorite backlink database
  2. Use some Excel or SQL magic to merge these databases and find pages that link to multiple sites
  3. Go through the pages with common links, and look for good opportunities

The key here is to find actively maintained pages – often news articles and the like will link to multiple competitors, but you won’t be able to get a link added to the page.  This is also a good way to find resource pages.

If you’re not a spreadsheet junkie (and who could blame you), SEOmoz has a ‘Competitive Link Finder‘ tool that works well – especially with BuzzStream.

Prospecting Queries

Prospecting queries are a favorite tool of link builders everywhere.  They use the advanced operators in Google along with, in Garrett French’s words, Market Defining Keywords, to source opportunities by vertical and type.

Queries like: 

  • MDKW inurl:links
  • MDKW inurl:resources
  • “useful links” MDKW
  • “helpful links” MDKW
  • MDKW intitle:”other resources”

Are great at finding resource and links pages.

How to Pitch for Resource Page Links

Now that you’ve found an appropriate page, it’s time to track down the curator and pitch them on your content.

  •  Remember People Curate Pages, Not Info@

In your search for contact information, it will usually be easy to find an “info@” or “contact@” email address.  While these can work (and I have seen these get links on high authority sites, like the above-mentioned fueleconomy.gov), they’re suboptimal.

If you can, track down the person who’s responsible for maintaining the website and the resources on it.  At libraries and government sites, this is often a Web Librarian or Content Manager.  Use the staff directory (very common for public organizations) or LinkedIn to find the person in charge, and reach out to them directly.

  • Understand the Purpose of the Page

Every page has a purpose.  Sometimes the page exists to provide a comprehensive resource to library patrons.  In that case, you want to pitch based on the authority of your resource and expert commentary it provides. 

By contrast, if a page exists to provide readers useful tools, let the curator know how useful your tool is – how many people have used it, and the high quality of its results.  

Align your persuasive triggers to the purpose of the page, and you’ll have a strong pitch.

  • Follow Up

These curators get besieged daily with emails asking for links – and most of the emails (and the resources they’re pitching) are bad.  You may have to try back a few times to get the link – or even go ahead and give the curator a call.

Always check to make sure they haven’t added the link before you follow up – often these curators will add your link without telling you, and then you’ll find yourself with a very awkward conversation.  (Shameless plug – BuzzStream does this for you through its link monitoring system.)

And that’s how you can better get links on resource pages.  What tips and tricks do you use to get these great links?

(Opening Photo Courtesy Paul_Lowry under Creative Commons)

 

Every page 

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Creating Data-Driven Content: the Step by Step Process https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/creating-data-driven-content-the-step-by-step-process/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/creating-data-driven-content-the-step-by-step-process/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:32:02 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2315   Data is the new content. Don’t believe me?  The most popular political journalist in the United States is writing computer models, not spending time with campaigns. And that’s just one example.  Using data to tell an interesting story is one of the most compelling ways to drive attention, links, and shares to your site. For example, Mint.com and OKCupid, both incredible examples of effective content marketing, both used a mixture of data analysis, data visualization, story telling, and promotion to gain significant mindshare in two very different markets – finance and dating.  Now pricing data up-and-comer Priceonomics is writing a highly popular blog featuring articles that analyze their own data. But data journalism and visualization is tough – and this means it hasn’t been incredibly overused yet.  There are still outsized returns available in data-based content marketing.  And today I’m going to show you how to do some data analysis to make your own data-based blog posts, visualizations, and more. Step 1: Go Find a Data Set To do data-driven content you’ll need data. Fortunately, there are many places you can get great data: Your Own Data If you are lucky enough to work for a company that can generate it’s own data, you’re in luck.  This is especially true for pure-play web and ecommerce companies, especially those that by their very nature, collect a lot of data.  Your own data is usually the best data, because only you have it, and any analysis you do will support your company’s core differentiation. Even if you think you don’t have interesting data, you probably do.  Do mac users prefer different articles than Windows users?  Do Chrome users buy different products than IE users?  You can get stats like this from your web analytics platform with a little bit of analysis. […]

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Data is the new content.

Don’t believe me?  The most popular political journalist in the United States is writing computer models, not spending time with campaigns.

And that’s just one example.  Using data to tell an interesting story is one of the most compelling ways to drive attention, links, and shares to your site.

For example, Mint.com and OKCupid, both incredible examples of effective content marketing, both used a mixture of data analysis, data visualization, story telling, and promotion to gain significant mindshare in two very different markets – finance and dating.  Now pricing data up-and-comer Priceonomics is writing a highly popular blog featuring articles that analyze their own data.

But data journalism and visualization is tough – and this means it hasn’t been incredibly overused yet.  There are still outsized returns available in data-based content marketing.  And today I’m going to show you how to do some data analysis to make your own data-based blog posts, visualizations, and more.

Step 1: Go Find a Data Set

To do data-driven content you’ll need data. Fortunately, there are many places you can get great data:

Your Own Data

If you are lucky enough to work for a company that can generate it’s own data, you’re in luck.  This is especially true for pure-play web and ecommerce companies, especially those that by their very nature, collect a lot of data.  Your own data is usually the best data, because only you have it, and any analysis you do will support your company’s core differentiation.

Even if you think you don’t have interesting data, you probably do.  Do mac users prefer different articles than Windows users?  Do Chrome users buy different products than IE users?  You can get stats like this from your web analytics platform with a little bit of analysis.

Public Data

If you don’t have data, there are numerous places you can find some to analyze and get down with OPD (other people’s data).  Look for “(KEYWORD) Data Sets” on Google, and start your search from there.  Alternatively, here are some of my favorite data sources:

You can either run your own Google Consumer Survey (which are really quite accurate compared to professional polling), or use some of the data they release.

This is one of my favorite sources, especially looking for anything linguistic.  With the Google Ngram viewer, you can analyze the occurrence of words in the Google Books corpus over time.

For example, you can learn that startup was predominantly hyphenated until 1998, when it became dominantly used as one word, around the time of the first dot com bubble.

Government Data

The US government also releases a great deal of data on their data portal at Data.gov. This includes everything from life insurance data, to geographical data, to food pyramid and earthquake data. This is a great source for mashing public data up with your data.  For example, if you wanted to compare spending by state in your ecommerce store to income per capita by state, you could grab the state income data here.

Other Data Resource Sites

Distilled’s Mark Johnstone wrote a fabulous post about finding link-worthy data on SEOmoz, which contains many excellent sources.  He also shares some useful tips on constructing your own web scrapers, which is an excellent and highly differentiating approach to gathering data.  There’s also a website called Gapminder that shares numerous data sets.

Example

I’m going to walk you through the process of creating data-driven content out of a data set in this post.  In this case, I’ve found an awesome set of data about movie genre and profitability, called “Most Profitable Hollywood Stories” from Information is Beautiful.

 

Step 2: Look for Angles & Ask Some Questions

Notice how step 2 isn’t “Analyze your data” or “Go make some graphs and tell people how much like Nate Silver you are.”

The number one mistake people make with these efforts is they don’t start with questions, or an angle.  They just go ahead and visualize the data set, and wonder why people don’t find it more interesting.

I start by asking myself, “If I put together these fields, what interesting stories could I tell?” and “What other data could I mash these up with to show some fascinating conclusions?”

Sometimes I go ahead and write headlines based on these analyses – if it makes a great headlines, chances are it will make a fascinating visualization.

(You might go down some blind alleys with these – so be thoughtful and come up with a few different ideas.  It’s very possible a fascinating headline or correlation will not be borne out by the data – don’t write that article. Not only will it damage your personal credibility and your client or company’s brand, it will not get traction and spread.)

Example

Let’s take a look at the data.  It has fields like:

  • Film
  • Year
  • Studio
  • Rotten Tomatoes Score
  • Audience Score
  • Plot Type
  • Genre
  • # of Theatres in Opening Weekends
  • Box Office Average per US Cinema
  • Domestic Gross
  • Foreign Gross
  • Worldwide Gross
  • Budget
  • Market Profitability
  • Opening Weekend
  • Oscars Won

Of a few hundred films from 2007 to 2011.

Now, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do with just this data set:

–          Is there any relationship between how much money a film makes and how much people like it?

–          Are highly profitable films necessarily good?

–          What genre of film is the most profitable?

–          What ‘Story’ archetype is the most profitable?

–          If I had $1 million to make a movie with, what should I do to maximize my return?

You can also add other data sets:

  • Director and Actor information from IMDB
  • Film Ratings (G, PG, etc)
  •  A Number of Religious Organizations give Films ‘Morality Scores’

There’s some really fun data analysis opportunities here, like:

–          Which directors are the most profitable?  Who’s the Yankees (big, expensive, successful), and Who’s the Oakland A’s (lean and efficient) ?

I’ll take a relatively simple approach: What story archetype is the most profitable?  If you find $10 million dollars on the ground, what sort of film should you go shoot?

Step 3: Analyze Your Data

Now it’s time to analyze your data.  If you have a relatively small amount of data, you can use Excel or your favorite spreadsheet program.  If your data numbers into the millions of rows, you’ll start to need more robust tools like R, SPSS, or SAS.

Analyzing data to find trends and valuable insights is an entire separate art and science than creating data-driven content.  I recommend the book  Data Analysis with Open Source Tools by Phillip K. Janert or any introductory statistics textbook to learn elementary data analysis.

Example

To start the analysis of my data set, I’m going to drag everything into a Pivot table.  (This isn’t the best approach, but it will work for my purposes.)

Next, I’ll look at all of the films in profitability on aggregate.  The most profitable films (in total gross as a percentage of budget) of the last few years are:

  1. Paranormal Activity – 1311200%
  2. Fireproof – 6693%
  3. Insidious – 6467%
  4. Paranormal Activity 2 – 5916%
  5. Paranormal Activity 3 – 4037%
  6. The Last Exorcism – 3692 %
  7. Juno – 3082 %
  8. The King’s Speech – 2849 %
  9. Black Swan – 2533%

Just in this data alone, there are a number of interesting observations:

–          Horror movies are incredibly profitable

–          The Paranormal Activity franchise is the Oakland A’s of movies – in terms of return on capital, it is by far the most profitable of anything done in the last 5 years.

–          Making a film with strong niche appeal on a limited budget is a much stronger strategy to generate return on invested capital than to create an expensive blockbuster.

Next, I’ll drag all of my films together into a chart and try to understand profitability by story type:

(I’m going to exclude Paranormal Activity 1 from this calculation because it’s such an outlier. I’ve also removed some outliers on the low end, because foreign gross data was unavailable and thus skews the data set.)

(In case you’re wondering, the Wretched Excess films in the dataset were Black Swan, Hesher, J. Edgar, Limitless, Solitary Man, and There Will Be Blood.  Monster Force is both horror movies (Saw, Paranormal Activity), and some action movies (Xmen, Cowboys versus Alient, etc.)  All of the plot types are defined in various screenwriting articles.)

Wretched Excess is the most profitable on average, but also highly variable and a small set with the average buoyed by Black Swan.  Monstrous Force is also very profitable, but the most variable.  By contrast, Fish Out of Water films (like the Lincoln Lawyer or Meet Dave) were consistency profitable with much lower variation than the other story types.

Step 4: Create Your Scaffolding

Once you have some idea of the direction you want to go with your content, you can start creating a scaffolding.

A scaffolding should answer questions like:

–          What is the content about?

–          What’s your angle?  Why will it appeal to people?

–          Will you need graphics or copy?

–          Will you need a designer or front-end developer to create the page the content will ‘live’ on? Or will it go on your blog or CMS?

These can include wireframes, mockups, or outlines of content.

Example:

Using my profitability data, I’m going to create a piece called “MoneyBall for Movies”.  It will focus on the films, genres, stories, and people that maximize profitability with limited budget.

I’ll help people understand what drives movie profitability – usually films that become very popular in specific audiences (like religious or horror fan communities) that are made for extremely little money.

I’d include copy about the most profitable films, genres, and stories, as well as data visualization.

Step 5: Visualize Your Data and Write Your Copy

Now it’s time to write and make graphics.

Writing About Data

Most of the best instruction for this kind of work comes from the world of data journalism – here are some great resources:

–          The Data Journalism Handbook

–          Investigating Data Journalism on the O’Reilly Radar

–          5 Tips for Getting Started in Data Journalism on Poynter.org

Data Visualization

While it’s always best to make your own visualizations by hand (using help from a designer or developer), you can create visualizations quickly with a number of different tools.

–          IBM’s ManyEyes

–          Tableau Public

–          The R Project

–          Google Fusion Tables

Jon Cooper has also put together a useful list of data visualization tools.

Example:

I’m not going to write any great copy or make any awesome visualizations here – sorry.  But lots of other folks have done great things with the Hollywood Stories data set – here’s some inspiration for you:

FilmStrips by Tom Evans

Hollywood Data Explorer by James Fisher

Confluence by Harshawardhan Nene and Kedar Vaidya

Step 6: Promote Your Content

If you look at some of the awesome visualizations in step 5, you might notice that many of them haven’t attracted a lot of links or tweets.  This is terrible, because a lot of them are great.

For example, Confluence has 4 linking root domains and 3 Tweets, 5 Plus Ones, and 9 Facebook likes (via SharedCount and Open Site Explorer.)  This is a beautiful, powerful visualization tool, but it didn’t attract attention all by itself.  If you want your data-driven content to get seen by the world, linked, and shared, you need to promote it.

Promotion Tips:

  • Make sure the originator of the data set knows you analyzed it.  Often these organizations will share your work.
  • Many great news outlets (like Fast Company, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times) have data visualization editors, data journalists, or columns featuring data-based work.  Reach out to them and let them know about your new project.
  • Reach out to bloggers that cover both data visualization and the topic of the data.
  • Consider using paid social media like Reddit Ads and StumbleUpon Paid Discovery.  These services are great for getting users with “see interesting things on the internet” intent, and often spread the content they find across their network.

Example

In the “Moneyball for Movies” example, I can reach out to economics bloggers, movie bloggers, and Hollywood ‘inside baseball’-type bloggers.  I can also reach out to horror movie bloggers, who might like to know their preferred genre is the most effective use of a dollar of movie-making capital.

I’d also advertise on StumbleUpon Paid Discovery, targeting both movie-related and data-related channels, and try to get some social traction.

El Fin

There you have it – now go forth and analyze.

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Improving Link Building Response Rates With Persuasive Psychology https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/improving-link-building-response-rates-with-persuasive-psychology/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/improving-link-building-response-rates-with-persuasive-psychology/#comments Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:27:28 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2104 One of the most frustrating parts about link development is low success & response rates. While this has many causes – including poor prospecting methods, low quality sites, bad timing, and more – it is often due to poor outreach email construction. Most people don’t send persuasive emails. They just ask for a link. This is a particularly extreme example from Rand Fishkin, but this is about how persuasive the average link building email really is: From Rand’s Presentation at LinkLove 2012 Boston Persuasive, personalized messages get dramatically better response rates than the standard, “I see you have a website. I’d like a link – can you hook it up?” Better Link Building through Science Fortunately, persuasion has been studied for years, and many experiments have been done. The 10,000 pound Gorilla of persuasion studies is a book called “Influence: Science and Practice”, written by Professor Robert Cialdini, the Regents’ Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. In ‘Influence’, Dr. Cialdini writes about 6 persuasive triggers: • Reciprocation • Commitment and Consistency • Social Proof • Liking • Authority • Scarcity Let’s look at these principles one at time and see how we can leverage them to improve our link development effectiveness: Reciprocation: Give Before You Get What is It? Reciprocation is our collective human tendency to feel a debt towards people that give us things. We then reciprocate once someone has done something good by use. The Proof: Dr. Jenifer Kunz (of West Texas A&M) did an interesting study in 1994: Send Christmas Cards to strangers. And she discovered that strangers will send Christmas cards back, even if they’ve never met the sender. This is reciprocation at work. (Interestingly, she found the greatest response rate was between senders called ‘Dr.’ and blue collar receivers.) By contra-example, Sam Walton (founder […]

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One of the most frustrating parts about link development is low success & response rates. While this has many causes – including poor prospecting methods, low quality sites, bad timing, and more – it is often due to poor outreach email construction.

Most people don’t send persuasive emails. They just ask for a link.

This is a particularly extreme example from Rand Fishkin, but this is about how persuasive the average link building email really is:

bad link building emails

From Rand’s Presentation at LinkLove 2012 Boston

Persuasive, personalized messages get dramatically better response rates than the standard, “I see you have a website. I’d like a link – can you hook it up?”

Better Link Building through Science

Fortunately, persuasion has been studied for years, and many experiments have been done.

The 10,000 pound Gorilla of persuasion studies is a book called “Influence: Science and Practice”, written by Professor Robert Cialdini, the Regents’ Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.

In ‘Influence’, Dr. Cialdini writes about 6 persuasive triggers:
• Reciprocation
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

Let’s look at these principles one at time and see how we can leverage them to improve our link development effectiveness:

Reciprocation: Give Before You Get

What is It?

Reciprocation is our collective human tendency to feel a debt towards people that give us things. We then reciprocate once someone has done something good by use.

The Proof:

Dr. Jenifer Kunz (of West Texas A&M) did an interesting study in 1994: Send Christmas Cards to strangers. And she discovered that strangers will send Christmas cards back, even if they’ve never met the sender. This is reciprocation at work.

(Interestingly, she found the greatest response rate was between senders called ‘Dr.’ and blue collar receivers.)

By contra-example, Sam Walton (founder of Walmart), famously never let a purchasing agenct take so much as a handkerchief from a purchasing agent, ensuring reciprocative tendencies never drove up his prices.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

Give your prospect something before you ask for anything – preferably multiple times.

For example, if you’re going to launch an ebook about flyfishing at the end of the month, include all of the blogs you’ll eventually reach out to in a ’20 Best Flyfishing Blogs’ post, your ebook promotion request will go much further.

Liking

What is It?

People are more likely to agree to requests from people they like. There are many ways to increase likability – physical attractiveness, similarity, repeated contact, and association with other liked objects.

The Proof:

Researchers have shown that attractive people are thought to be talented, kind, honest, and intelligent – often without basis. Attractiveness has a ‘halo effect’ that extends to other areas.

Similarity also creates liking. This is known as ‘intergroup bias’ in psychology, and creates increased success rates in direct marketing and other persuasive situations.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

Highlight things you have in common with the author or site owner. (Don’t do this in a fake way, “Funny you have a website. I also have a website!”, but rather dig in, and find complex opinions or preferences you have in common.

Engage with influencers through comments, through Twitter, through email, and any other way they might respond (and not find creepy) to create familarity. Then ask for a link as a friend or peer – not a stranger.

Commitment & Consistency

What is It?

Once people have agreed to do something, or agreed to some principle, they’ll perform to it, even when they would be disinclined to do so otherwise.

After people have made a decision, in retrospect, they think it was a better idea.

Cognitively, we see things we’ve agreed to as good choices, even if there is obvious evidence otherwise.

The Proof:

One study, originally conducted in 1975 and repeated in 2009, presented a familiar scenario: someone sitting on a beach blanket left their radio (later, ipod) and walked away, and another researcher came along and ‘stole’ it.

In one test set, the radio’s owner said nothing to their beach neighbors – none of them intervened. In the other test set, the radio’s owner asked their new beach neighbors to “watch my things” – this one change produced a 95% intervention rate, often chasing the ‘thief’ down the beach.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

Before you have a piece of content, ask influencers what they think of it. If they like it, ask them to share it with their audience.

Follow blogger’s ‘Guest Blog for us’ or ‘Write for Us’ rules. They’ve already agreed to have you – and you’ve complied with their rules. Mention this.

Social Proof: Everybody’s Doing It

What is It?

We use other people doing something as a heuristic for whether doing something is valuable. When we see “Over 1 Million Served” in front of a McDonald’s, we’re persuaded that McDonald’s is great.

According to Cialdini, “We view a behavior as correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.”

The Proof:

Studies have found that simply showing shy, introverted pre-schoolers videos of other children interacting normally with crowds can radically change behavior.

Furthermore, Milgram, Bickman, & Berkowitz experimented with having a single person on a sidewalk in a busy street look upward. More than 80% of passerby lifted their gaze to the same empty spot.

Social proof can even help people overcome and ignore physical pain: a study from 1978 showed people who would otherwise find electric shocks painful did not when there was someone else in the same room receiving the shocks and finding them bearable.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

If you’re guest blogging, mention the number of social shares your last guest post got. If 1500 people shared it, it couldn’t be too bad.

If your site gets lots of traffic or does lots of business, let the link prospect know. Share positive metrics about your site and increase your credibility.

Authority

What is It?

We believe what authorities tell us. Doctors, CEOs, Presidents, celebrities, and more, all have undue influence over us. Titles, clothing, social status, and other factors can all create this feeling of authority.

The Proof:

Many studies, the most famous the Milgram Experiment, have verified this.

One of the most interesting concerns peer-reviewed medical journal papers. 12 papers that were previously published by professors from prestigious universities in a medical journal were copied and resubmitted, but with the professional affiliation changed to the “Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential.” Nine were accepted for review, and only one was accepted for publication.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

If your site has been blessed by authorities in your space – on the consumer web it might be Martha Stewart, while in the IT world it might be Gartner – mention that in your link request.

If other prominent blogs (like Mashable or TechCrunch in technology) have mentioned your product or your site, let your link prospect know you’ve been covered there.

If an executive in your company is well known and famous in her field, ask her to use “rel=author” markup on her posts, so her picture will appear in Google’s search results, making your site’s content even more authoritative.

Scarcity

What is It?

We disproportionately value scarce things – even when they have little or no value.

The Proof:

Stephen Worchel and his team conducted an experiment about the psychology of scarcity: they asked consumers to try two cookies and rate them for taste and quality. However, in one test, their bag had ten cookies, and in the other, it held only two.

Consumers rated the scarcer cookies more desirable, more costly, and a better value.

For a more modern example, consider reality television programs like the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, and (my personal favorite) Flavor of Love. Otherwise normal people become incredible objects of desire after being made scarce and competed over.

How Link Builders Can Use It:

PR professionals have been offering exclusives to influential publications for years. Link builders can do the same thing – offering exclusive samples, interviews, and other content to choice publications.

If you’re giving bloggers samples or inviting them into a blogger program, you can limit the number of seats available, creating scarcity and exclusivity.

Stacking Persuasive Principles

While these principles used invidually are persuasive, when they get stacked together, they can become something incredibly powerful.

For example, think of a Tupperware party with a limited supply of an incredible piece of Tupperware. Everyone wants it, and the hostess has graciously provided you with wine and hors d’oeuvres. Now your friends are buying the items, and there’s only two left… Can anyone say no in this situation?

Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s lawyer and investment partner) called situations like this – where multiple cognitive biases intersect – “the lollapalooza effect.”

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Using these triggers, especially together, can create great influence. However, keep in mind that many people, especially marketers, are very familiar with these concepts and do not necessarily appreciate their use.

Do not use them irresponsibly – they can cause resentment and major PR backlash, resulting in not only you not getting your link, but damage to the brand you’re working for. Make sure you always use these concepts truthfully.

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Enterprise Link Prospecting: Scalable Ways to Source Link Opportunities https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/enterprise-link-prospecting-scalable-ways-to-source-link-opportunities/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/enterprise-link-prospecting-scalable-ways-to-source-link-opportunities/#comments Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:44:18 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2062 Link prospecting is straightforward. Find a site you can get a link from, find a relevant page, or figure out how to make one. But scaling link prospecting across hundreds of landing pages, multiple sites, and thousands of link partners, is challenging. Qualities of Enterprise-Level Link Prospecting Processes High-scale link prospecting processes must be: Scalable – Your processes have to be able to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of qualified link prospects as rapidly as possible. Additionally, other members of your team should be able to execute your prospecting process – there’s no ‘great man/woman theory of scalable link development.’ Scalable link building is a team sport. Measurable – Is this tactic generating effective link targets? How many links returned from this tactic, upon further vetting, become good potential link partners? What is the ratio of overall prospects to qualified prospects to links received? Fungible – Can the tactic be used across a variety of verticals and clients, or is it only good in one area? While one-off tactics can be helpful, if you’re promoting a portfolio of sites or a variety of clients, you want fungible tactics you can combine into a scalable link sourcing strategies. In our work at BuzzStream, we’ve seen a variety of link building teams approach this problem in many different ways. Here are some tactics we’ve seen teams implement that are scalable and can be applied to different verticals with ease: Social Prospecting Brand Social Account Prospecting Social prospecting in your own social accounts is a very good place to start. Rather than starting with cold relationships, those people like your company and are predisposed to link to you. The basic flow of social account is prospecting is: Find your company’s social accounts. Use an associated API, crowdsourced labor, screenscraping, or an intern to […]

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Prospecting for Links

Link prospecting is straightforward. Find a site you can get a link from, find a relevant page, or figure out how to make one.

But scaling link prospecting across hundreds of landing pages, multiple sites, and thousands of link partners, is challenging.

Qualities of Enterprise-Level Link Prospecting Processes

High-scale link prospecting processes must be:

Scalable – Your processes have to be able to generate hundreds, if not thousands, of qualified link prospects as rapidly as possible.
Additionally, other members of your team should be able to execute your prospecting process – there’s no ‘great man/woman theory of scalable link development.’ Scalable link building is a team sport.

Measurable – Is this tactic generating effective link targets? How many links returned from this tactic, upon further vetting, become good potential link partners? What is the ratio of overall prospects to qualified prospects to links received?

Fungible – Can the tactic be used across a variety of verticals and clients, or is it only good in one area? While one-off tactics can be helpful, if you’re promoting a portfolio of sites or a variety of clients, you want fungible tactics you can combine into a scalable link sourcing strategies.

In our work at BuzzStream, we’ve seen a variety of link building teams approach this problem in many different ways. Here are some tactics we’ve seen teams implement that are scalable and can be applied to different verticals with ease:

Social Prospecting

Brand Social Account Prospecting

Social prospecting in your own social accounts is a very good place to start. Rather than starting with cold relationships, those people like your company and are predisposed to link to you.

The basic flow of social account is prospecting is:

  • Find your company’s social accounts.
  • Use an associated API, crowdsourced labor, screenscraping, or an intern to grab a list of their followers/fans/whatever the kids are calling them these days.
  • Make a list of the websites your followers/fans have associated with their profiles.

Now you have a list of websites associated with people who are interested in your brand and what you have to say. Many of these people might link to your site, especially if you ask nicely, send them a sticker or other swag, or give them some content to post.

  • Take your list of sites, and remove ineligible domains like Facebook and Google Profiles.
  • Sort them by order of DA, PageRank, or your other favorite link authority metric.
  • Reach out to the blogs on your list, make friends, and ask for the link or mention.

Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive has created a step by step walkthrough of this process for Twitter. It’s extensible to any sort of network where you have a social presence, be it MySpace or any niche social network.

Social Search-Based Prospecting

The other type of social prospecting is using some form of social search to find people talking about link opportunities. This can take a couple of forms:

  • Phrases like ‘guest post’ or ‘new guest post’ can tell you which sites actively accept guest posts.
  • You can use tools like FollowerWonk to identify influencers on social networks that might talk about your market & product.

SEER Interactive’s Ethan Lyon created a spreadsheet to identify guest post opportunities on Twitter automatically, but you can scale this method to any searchable social network.

iAcquire’s Mike King has talked about using FollowerWonk for influencer identification & outreach.

List-Based Prospecting

List-based prospecting is one of the simplest and most effective prospecting techniques.

Basic List Scraping

List scraping is my next go-to method of prospecting once social options have been exhausted. It is one of the simplest:

  • Find a list of sites in your vertical
  • Copy the list
  • Remove the sites that have already linked to your site. Also remove irrelevant sites.
  • Reach out to the remaining sites on your list

List Scraping Tips and Tricks

Finding good lists can be challenging. Both Alltop.com & Invesp.com curate lists across a large variety of verticals that can form the basis of prospecting lists. Additionally, the Google query “List of [KEYWORD] Blogs” can typically source handcrafted lists.

You can use the Scraper Chrome Extension to take these lists and put them into Google Docs with two clicks. (I originally learned of the Scraper extension in this post from Justin Briggs.)

Enterprise-Level List Scraping

Each of the blogs you get back may have another series of blogs it links to. By scraping these lists into a master list, you can get a tremendous list of publications in your area of interest.

  • Start with your initial list (AllTop and Invesp are both good places to start.)
  • Go through that list, and find either ‘Resource’ pages, ‘Links’ pages, or Blogrolls.
  • Scrape those lists (using the Scraper Chrome Extension or the BuzzStream Blogroll Scraper.)
  • Assemble these into a master list and remove duplicates.

This technique will give you a very, very large list of relevant sites and blogs, appropriate for guest posting, interview outreach, and other techniques.

Prospecting Queries

Prospecting queries are perhaps the strongest link building technique. They also have the biggest learning curve.

Prospecting queries use a ‘footprint’ – be it a URL structure, a piece of text, or the name of a competitor – to find link opportunities.

The particularly excellent part about query-based prospecting is that if Google returns a site for a query, Google might find the site relevant for that given query. This implies that the link on that page will help your rankings more than a link on a random page, because Google judges it relevant.

Constructing Prospecting Queries

Prospecting queries begin with an opportunity type & a keyword:

Some opportunity types are:

  • Infographic/Data Visualization Placements
  • Guest Posts
  • Links/Resource Pages
  • Reviews of Competing Products

Many of these opportunities have distinctive URL or title structures.

For example, if a site has a guest post category and is using WordPress, these posts will have “category/guest” in their URL. Accordingly, you can use the INURL: search operator to find relevant guest posts:

example prospecting query

Allintitle:

  • This operator looks for text in the title of a post. It’s useful for finding competitor reviews and interview opportunities.

Inurl:

  • This query looks for specific text strings in the URL.  While not incredibly useful by itself, combined with a knowledge of the default settings of content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, it can become very useful.

~ (the Tilde)

  • The Tilde tells Google to search for synonyms AND the word following the Tilde. (EG “~College” also covers synonyms like University and Institute.)  It can be helpful for broadening your keyword queries.

 

Queries for Different Opportunities

While there is a large universe of prospecting queries, here are some of our favorites.
Note: All caps terms in brackets mean that the bracketed keyword should be replaced by your keyword in the query.

Guest Posting

Guest Posting Prospecting Query
Guest Posting Prospecting Query
Guest Posting Propsecting Query

Infographics

Infographics prospecting queries
infographics prospecting queries

Resource & Links Pages

links page prospecting queries

links pages prospecting queries

Reviews

product review prospecting queries
competing product reviews

Prospecting Query Automation Tools

Prospecting queries tend to generate some less relevant, lower quality sites, especially deeper in the results. This creates a cycle of “Click on Link – Click around for a while – Go Back to SERP – Repeat.”

You can become more efficient by ‘batching’ – first gather all of the results of the prospecting queries, then look through each one and qualify it, then find contact information, and begin engaging.

To harvest a large number of prospecting results in the first step, you can use:

 

Backlink Analysis

Backlink analysis is my least favorite prospecting method because it frequently returns links that are impossible to obtain.

For example, your competitor raises money from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures and gets a link on AVC.com. You could not get this link from any marketing or SEO activity. (If you can think of a way to get this link, please leave a comment or email me.)

Often links uncovered will be quite old, and reflect a different era of linking on the web. Because 2000-2008 linking behaviors are structurally different than 2008-now linking behaviors from the twin forces of web commercialization and social media, it is incredibly difficult to replicate old links. Often webmasters no longer maintain those older sites, and, short of illegal activity, the links cannot be acquired.

That being said, in many cases (especially when your competitors are executing their own SEO strategies), backlink analysis can be incredibly effective.

Executing Backlink Analysis

(If you want, you can use multiple link graph sources and dedupe the links to generate a particularly accurate link profile.  To take that a step further, you can use scripts to check for the existence of each of the links on the pages, ensuring completely accurate link data.)

  • Now that you have many competing site’s link graphs, merge them together into a massive table.  I like to use VLOOKUP in Excel to do this, but you can also do it in MS Access or MySQL if you have a large data set.  (For Excel Tips & Tricks, I highly recommend Distilled’s Excel for SEO guide.)
  • Now I have a giant table of linking URLs.  I like to create a new field for # of common competitors each URL has.  (For example, if a page linked to six sites in my space, it would get a six.)  I sort by this field, with the highest first.
  • I remove every URL that links to my site from my list.

Now I have a prioritized list of URLs to contact.  You can then prioritize them by your favorite link metrics.

Once I have my giant list, I like to go through and classify them as “attainable” (eg – I can feasibly get this link through some sort of Marketing or PR activity) or “unfeasible”, where I cannot.

Further Resources

(Prospector Image Credit)
What prospecting methods do you use?

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The 4 Stages of Enterprise Link Development Maturity https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/the-4-stages-of-enterprise-link-development-maturity/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/the-4-stages-of-enterprise-link-development-maturity/#comments Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:00:48 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=2033 Here at BuzzStream, we talk to a lot of different groups about the structure of their link development organizations and how this structure supports their work.  With all of Google’s recent changes, we’re seeing companies change their link building playbooks and restructure their link building organizations. I’ve been putting a great deal of thought into this lately and I’ve created a model about how organizations approach link development.  I see organizations do different activities with different teams, measure them differently, and receive fundamentally different results.  I think having a model is helpful because it helps link builders understand where their organization stands, and ultimately, where it can go with link development activities. (I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts about this – is this in line with what you’re seeing in the world of SEO and link building ?  Feel free to leave a comment, tweet me (@MattGratt), or drop me an email (matt @ buzzstream) and let me know what you think.) I’ve put together this model of how organizations approach link development: I separate the maturity of an organization’s link development efforts into four stages: Stage 1: Automated Link Building These companies use automated link development techniques – link wheels, public (and occasionally private) blog networks, and mass commenting. At Stage 1, companies are most focused on the raw number of links obtained. Because all links aren’t created equal, often they’re led astray into viewing sheer number of links as a success metric. Risks – Google and other search engines are actively depreciating these links through updates like Penguin.   – Once these links are placed, it is often very difficult to remove them.  (This has become a major problem for many publishers after the Penguin update.) – Major brand damage can occur from commenting (see this recent post […]

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Here at BuzzStream, we talk to a lot of different groups about the structure of their link development organizations and how this structure supports their work.  With all of Google’s recent changes, we’re seeing companies change their link building playbooks and restructure their link building organizations.

I’ve been putting a great deal of thought into this lately and I’ve created a model about how organizations approach link development.  I see organizations do different activities with different teams, measure them differently, and receive fundamentally different results.  I think having a model is helpful because it helps link builders understand where their organization stands, and ultimately, where it can go with link development activities.

(I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts about this – is this in line with what you’re seeing in the world of SEO and link building ?  Feel free to leave a comment, tweet me (@MattGratt), or drop me an email (matt @ buzzstream) and let me know what you think.)

I’ve put together this model of how organizations approach link development:

link building maturity model

The Four Stages of Link Building Maturity
(Feel free to use this chart in PowerPoint presentations or on your website,
but please include an attribution link to this page.)

I separate the maturity of an organization’s link development efforts into four stages:

Stage 1: Automated Link Building

These companies use automated link development techniques – link wheels, public (and occasionally private) blog networks, and mass commenting.

At Stage 1, companies are most focused on the raw number of links obtained. Because all links aren’t created equal, often they’re led astray into viewing sheer number of links as a success metric.

Risks

– Google and other search engines are actively depreciating these links through updates like Penguin.  

– Once these links are placed, it is often very difficult to remove them.  (This has become a major problem for many publishers after the Penguin update.)

– Major brand damage can occur from commenting (see this recent post in Talking Points Memo or this post on PopeHat.)

Benefits

– This sort of link building is unequivocally cheap and easy.

– It can be effective, even after Panda and Penguin, if used as part of a mix with higher quality links, and the SEOs involved are exceedingly careful about anchor text ratios. (It’s worth noting that the value of these techniques is likely to continue to depreciate in the future.)

– Automated links can be very useful during reputation management campaigns.

 

Stage 2: Brute Force Link Building

Harkening back to the earliest days of link-based search engines, this link development is brute-force based, and consists of a large number of unpersonalized (or slightly personalized) emails. Typically they involve offers of reciprocal link exchanges or ask for a listing in a directory. (This type of link building produces the “Dear Webmaster” email.)

PageRank is the goal, and higher PageRank is better. People practicing this sort of SEO ignore factors like link placement, and often purchase footer links, sidebar links, etc. 

While these efforts can work (especially if the company has a great site), it is resource-intensive, it can be expensive, and hit-rates are low. There is also the risk of brand damage with these outreach tactics – recent incidents involving high-profile link building agencies purchasing links should serve as an example.

Moreover, as SEO becomes more competitive, these companies risk finding themselves outranked in the SERPs by companies implementing strategies based on content and differentiated value rather than their ability to send a large number of emails.

Risks

– The biggest risk with this style of work is lack of effectiveness – often companies doing this work contact a large number of link partners and their emails never get opened.

– Links that are easy to get this way are often from free directories and similar sites, and are vulnerable to filtering and depreciation.

Benefits

– Easy to Outsource

– Does not necessarily create the same ‘Penguin’-type risks of large numbers of unremovable links with completely unnatural anchor text, as humans are placing the links.

Stage 3: Personalized Content-Based Outreach

Stage 3 practices modern, personalized outreach, often publicizing linkable assets. Often these link development teams consist of content creators – usually writers – and outreach specialists, who look more like PR people than traditional SEOs.

More advanced practitioners build relationships with their link partners, and think long term. Less advanced link builders view each campaign as a ‘one-off’ and re-invent the wheel every time.

These teams use slightly more advanced metrics like Page Authority, Domain Authority, # of outbound links, cache date, etc. and looks at link placement as well. (More advanced Stage 3 organizations know about the Reasonable Surfer Patent.) They have advanced concepts of link diversity and use a variety of techniques (resource outreach, broken link building, infographics, guest posts, and more) to develop links.

However, these organizations silo SEO – making SEO its own set of activities rather than integrating it into broader marketing functions. While both Stage 3 and a Stage 4 organizations guest post, the Stage 3 link builder goes for the link, while the stage 4 link builder goes for the brand value, the referral traffic, the social shares, and the link.

This stage has the biggest level of diversity. At one end of the spectrum, Stage 3 link builders send email blasts to bloggers about guest posts, while more advanced stage 3 link builders have networks of relevant contacts they tap for higher quality placements. Simple Stage 3 organizations use low-quality infographics to “just go build links”, while more advanced companies invest heavily in content that’s highly relevant to their customers.

Most advanced SEO agencies operate at this level, as do many enterprise SEO organizations.

Risks

– If done poorly, links can have little relevance and risk future depreciation.

– These methods have a high level of execution risk – many of these methods simply don’t work when done poorly, and don’t work consistently.

– Organizations outsourcing this work to agencies or consultants must be deeply involved with its execution. Some agencies and client organizations have trouble managing this collaboration, leading to poor results.

Benefits

– Sustainable links that will continue to pass value and improve search rankings.

– If done effectively, these methods should lead to an increase in direct traffic, referral traffic, and social mentions in addition to SEO results.

Stage 4: Integrated Strategic Link Development

In these organizations, SEO is critical to the business (often carrying a P&L), and link development is a priority. These organizations have link development groups that divide work into different stages and function like a well-oiled machine.

The biggest difference between a Stage 3 and a Stage 4 organization is strategy. Stage 3 organizations go out and guest post, do broken link outreach, and generally acquire links, but the content, SEO, and outreach groups are not tightly integrated. Often stage 3 organizations act according to the directive “Well, we need some links, so go build some links,” while stage 4 organizations take strategic actions based on data and business goals.

In Stage 4 organizations, link development begins with SEO analysis. SEO managers or analysts conduct opportunity gap analysis and discover where critical links to earn rankings can be obtained. They then strategize with a creative team and a content team to understand what content and which relationships will lead to those links. The content team begins creating, while the outreach team begins building relationships. When the content is pushed live, outreach begins, and results are carefully measured.

Much of this work has value far beyond SEO – this kind of integrated content marketing/influencer engagement also has branding, referral traffic, and social benefits.

Stage 4 organizations typically use multi-touch attribution to understand the entire customer path and how it often begins with search. They use link monitoring tools to understand their link profile and get ahead of search engine algorithm updates. They may also use an enterprise SEO platform to measure and monitor their progress.

Another mark of Stage 4 organizations is the compartmentalization of the outreach process – often stage 4 organizations automate prospecting, and use crowdsourced labor pools like Mechanical Turk to discover contact information. Then the outreach itself is assigned to a more sophisticated specialist on the team.

Organizations with this level of sophistication are rare. This sort of sophistication is typically found in search-based lead generation companies or the most advanced web companies.

Risks

– At this level, the largest risk is investment into taking aggressive position in SERPs that are later pushed below the fold by Google’s own products. (For example, the launch of Google Advisor into the credit cards space.) This shrinks the total share of clicks available in the organic results, and decreases the ROI from even the most advanced content marketing and search engine marketing techniques.

– Getting Social, SEO, PR, and Content organizations to speak each other’s language and work together is really difficult. It requires forward-thinking executives and a great deal of expertise in project management, organizational design, and communication.

– Teams at this level of sophistication are difficult to recruit and retain.  They are also expensive.

Benefits

– SEO/Social/Content marketing becomes a significant competitive advantage to the organization as they do things that are very difficult to copy and acquire links other organizations simply can’t.

– Companies working at this level can see a brand lift as well as meaningful increases in direct traffic, referral traffic, social audience, and media coverage from their content marketing successes.

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