Gracelyn Tan Ladd's Posts on the BuzzStream Blog Thu, 16 May 2024 18:30:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 232036770 The Advanced Guide to Multichannel Influencer Research https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-find-influencers/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-find-influencers/#comments Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:28:07 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=5240 Gone are the days where you could just find semi-relevant people, ask them to promote you, and call it a day. Need proof? Look no further than the experiment Josh Hardwick posted at the ahrefs blog. He used the traditional spray and pray approach to ask people to tweet his content, and ended up with a 9.8% conversion rate. 9.8% may sound pretty good, but considering how much effort Josh poured into it and how little it furthered his relationships with these influencers, he concluded it wasn’t worth it. Instead, he said we should focus on approaching only the influencers with the most reach. The ones with actual audiences. And on building long-term relationships with them, instead of sending them one-off, transactional messages out of the blue. But before we can start building those relationships, we need to figure out who to build them with. In this 5,000-word guide, we’re going to walk through, step by step, six workflows you can use to find the most relevant influencers who have the largest reach. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to start building the kind of long-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with the right influencers. 1. Use Your Traffic Referrers’ Connections with BuzzStream Discovery Birds of a feather flock together, right? So why not find top influencers connected to who’s already sending traffic your way? Not only will this make reaching out to them easier (since you have a mutual contact), but it’s likely they’re in a niche that’s relevant to yours and have similar levels of sway in their company as your current traffic referrers. To do this, first go to Google Analytics, look at your Referral report, and get that list. Now it’s time to look up each referrer in BuzzStream Discovery, and use their metrics as a […]

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Gone are the days where you could just find semi-relevant people, ask them to promote you, and call it a day.

Need proof? Look no further than the experiment Josh Hardwick posted at the ahrefs blog. He used the traditional spray and pray approach to ask people to tweet his content, and ended up with a 9.8% conversion rate.

9.8% may sound pretty good, but considering how much effort Josh poured into it and how little it furthered his relationships with these influencers, he concluded it wasn’t worth it.

Instead, he said we should focus on approaching only the influencers with the most reach. The ones with actual audiences. And on building long-term relationships with them, instead of sending them one-off, transactional messages out of the blue.

But before we can start building those relationships, we need to figure out who to build them with.

In this 5,000-word guide, we’re going to walk through, step by step, six workflows you can use to find the most relevant influencers who have the largest reach. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to start building the kind of long-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationships with the right influencers.

1. Use Your Traffic Referrers’ Connections with BuzzStream Discovery

Birds of a feather flock together, right? So why not find top influencers connected to who’s already sending traffic your way? Not only will this make reaching out to them easier (since you have a mutual contact), but it’s likely they’re in a niche that’s relevant to yours and have similar levels of sway in their company as your current traffic referrers.

To do this, first go to Google Analytics, look at your Referral report, and get that list.

Now it’s time to look up each referrer in BuzzStream Discovery, and use their metrics as a benchmark for our new influencers.

The BuzzStream Discovery database of influencers is pretty hefty. Kristen Vaughn at KoMarketing found 44,000+ influencers for one client using Discovery, so it’s important to arm yourself with some expert tips when it comes to searching through BuzzStream Discovery.

To find influencers’ Discovery profiles, you can either look them up by name, or by website using:

name:“Name” or site:domainname.com.

Once you find them, check out their Footprint to see how many Twitter followers they have, and also look up their Domain Authority.

In this case, we see that Rand, who’s already sending traffic to our site via Moz, has 385K+ Twitter followers, and a Domain Authority of 94.

So as I’m looking for new influencers, I can use these metrics as a benchmark to make sure my new influencers are up to snuff.

However, Rand and Moz are pretty exceptional in their stats, so it would be worth looking at the other traffic referrers to get a good feel for what our average traffic referrers look like (not just the phenomenal ones.)

Next, I’ll look at Rand’s Network tab to see who he’s connected to.

Influencers can be connected in BuzzStream Discovery either by influencing others, or being influenced by others. Either connection works for our purposes of finding similar people with similar reach.

Now it’s time to click through the different connections and look at their footprints. We want to make sure they have a large enough audience, write for websites with high enough DAs, and get enough social shares.

Dan Shure is on Rand’s web, so let’s click into his profile to learn more about him (outside of the fact that he taught us how to find content ideas that will naturally earn links):

Here, we see not only how many followers Dan has on Twitter, but which websites he’s written for, how many times he’s written for them, and how many shares he receives on average when he writes for those websites.

If you’re unsure whether an influencer writes for websites with high enough domain authorities or if they’re getting enough shares, compare them to influencers who are already referring traffic to your website.

In this case, although Dan doesn’t have as many Twitter followers as Rand, Dan writes for high domain websites and gets more social shares than Rand does. So I’ll definitely add Dan to my list of top influencers to reach out to.

To keep track of my top influencers, I’ve created a BuzzStream project.

You could also keep track of your top influencers in a Google doc, with the same information like website, domain authority, number of Twitter followers, and so on. Just don’t forget to include which influencer led you to them if you found them using the Network tab.

Once you’ve pulled all of the influencers connected to the influencers who already send traffic your way, look over your list and get familiar with the general range of Twitter followings and domain authorities that your influencers have.

Looking at the list above, I can say I’m looking for influencers with Twitter followings of at least 2k and domain authorities of at least 40.

Now that I have those ranges, I’ll go back to Discovery and start searching by keyword.

In this case, I’ll search for the topic “outreach” and filter by:

  • Twitter followers: At least 2k
  • Domain Authority: At least 40
  • Active: In the past year
  • Categories: Marketing or Business

From there, I’ll get list of even more top influencers who I didn’t find in my initial Discovery search. Here’s an example of one:

Since she (and all of the influencers listed under her) fit my influencer requirements, I can add them to my list.

When I asked Josh Hardwick how he identifies top influencers, he said that part of his process involves, “checking their tweets to see what they generally tweet about, their website, etc. Make sure they’re likely to care about what you want to show them.” So if we wanted to be extra thorough, we can pop into her Twitter profile and take a look around.

He also recommended running profiles through Twitter Audit if you want to make sure their followers are legit. As he put it, “there’s no point wasting time pitching to those with fake followers.”

Now that I’ve finished combing through BuzzStream Discovery and doing a little extra research, I can move on to finding influencers using BuzzSumo.

2. Use BuzzSumo to find influential authors and sharers

BuzzSumo is such a good tool to use when trying to find influencers that you’ll see it pop-up in various forms throughout this piece.

One of the best aspects of BuzzSumo’s database is its ability to provide influencers’ retweet average, which is how many retweets an influencer gets, on average, for every tweet they send out into the world.

BuzzSumo did a study on the impact of influencers who had retweet averages above two, and they summarized their findings as follows:

  • Posts that were shared by one person with a retweet rate of more than 2 received 30% more shares.
  • Posts that were shared by three people with a retweet rate of more than 2 received over 100% more shares.
  • Posts that were shared by five people with a retweet rate of more than 2 received nearly 300% more shares.

With that in mind, let’s dig into using BuzzSumo to find some top influencers.

  1. Use the Most Shared tab

The Most Shared tab can help you find content that’s taken off, as well as look at other writings by the same author, and sharers of that content.

Let’s say I want to find influencers in the ecommerce space, specifically around conversion optimization, so I plug “ecommerce conversions” into BuzzSumo, and check out my results.

Automatically the articles are sorted by total shares, and the headlines all look relevant. From here, I’ll click on the authors and see what else they’ve written, determine whether it’s relevant, and note how widely shared their content is.

Let’s take a look at Maddy Osman’s articles to see if she might be a good influencer.

Although Maddy may not write frequently about ecommerce conversion, she does write highly-shared content. Based on her well-shared articles about Chicago, she would be a good option if ever I needed a Chicago-based SEO or ecommerce expert.

I’m not sure I would consider her to be an ecommerce conversion optimization influencer, but it would make sense to cite or share her high-performing article if I wanted to boost my own credentials in that area.

We’ll then repeat that same process for the rest of the authors and identify the influencers among them, adding them to my list and bolstering my database. But we’re not done with BuzzSumo just yet.

Sharers can be influencers too

Now that we’ve combed through the authors for influencers, it’s time to check out the sharers of these articles to gather even more influencers.

We’ll return to our list of article results, choose an article, view the sharers, then click into a sharer’s profile to see if they regularly share relevant content.

Here’s one that seems like he would be a good fit:

This influencer definitely shares relevant content, and his 57.6K Twitter followers are a nice plus as well. However, his retweet average is slightly above one. It’s a good average, but not as ideal as the retweet average of two that we discussed earlier.

So in this case, I would add him to my list, but would still keep my eyes peeled for influencers with higher retweet averages to maximize my efforts.

Alright, that covers the Most Shared tab in BuzzSumo, so now let’s look at the Influencers tab.

  1. Using the Influencers tab

BuzzSumo’s Influencers tab helps you search through Twitter users’ bios, and find Twitter users who have shared specific content. A couple of filters and aspects differentiate this search from what you’re able to do with BuzzStream Discovery. The differences boil down to these filters:

And the retweet averages we talked about earlier.

Another big difference between these tools is that they look at different parts of influencers’ past activity. If you want to look for influencers based on their recent Twitter activity (like having tweeted in the last 3 months), BuzzSumo has that capability. However, if you’re looking for influencers based on when they’ve published content (like having published an article within the past month), you’ll need to use BuzzStream Discovery.

Now that we have that distinction out of the way, let’s walk through an example of how to use the Influencer tab.

Continuing on with our topic of conversion optimization, I plug “conversion optimization” into BuzzSumo’s influencer tab, then filter my results to exclude companies (since I want to build relationships with specific people), and include only influencers who have tweeted within the past three months so I know they’re active.

Now I can gauge which influencers I’d like to add to my list, taking into account Domain Authority and retweet average. If I want to be extra sure they’re a good fit, I can always view the links they’ve shared to double-check.

Once I’ve done that for all of the promising-looking influencers who have retweet averages of at least two, I’m officially done scraping BuzzSumo for influencers. We did it! But we still have work to do.

3. Use subreddits to find community-approved experts

Subreddits are a great place to find experts who can help you write content that will resonate with the members of an active and relevant community. With the right content and the right subreddit, you can get a backlink and traffic from a brand new audience.

Now, Reddit backlinks are a little tricky in that your link will initially be no follow until your thread passes a certain threshold of upvotes.

For example, this link post in r/vegan is a do follow:

As you can see, there’s no no-follow parameter, just reddit’s click tracking parameters.

It’s not known the exact number of upvotes you need for your link to become a do follow, but the guesses are somewhere between 5 and 10 upvotes.

In addition to the backlink, you can get your Reddit expert’s feedback on your content and include a quote from them in your piece. They may even share it on Reddit for you if you managed to get them to fully bought in.

To find and work with influencers on Reddit, our first step is to find the right subreddit. So let’s do that.

How to find a relevant and active subreddit

If you’re not sure if your niche has an active subreddit, you can use Redditlist to search through subreddits, see how many subscribers they have, and how much they’ve grown. (You could also use Reddit itself, but Redditlist has a nicer UI. Sorry, Reddit!)

Here’s a snippet for the results I got when I searched “vegan” in Redditlist.

Once you find an active subreddit or two that fits your niche, plug it into BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer and see what questions are being asked on that subreddit. Continuing with our vegan example, I get results like:

Now if you’re following along with me and plugging all of these searches into BuzzSumo, you’ll notice we have a TON of categories and questions. A couple of things we want to remember about Reddit (for those of us not steeped in it):

  1. The higher upvoted a thread is, the closer to the top it’ll be, and the more people will see it.
  2. Karma is subtracted over time, so the older a thread or answer is, the higher the likelihood that its karma has been reduced and thus its visibility reduced.

With that in mind, we want to look for recent questions to find influencers who are actively participating in and respected by the community.

To do that, we’ll look to the left menu and select Filter by Date > Past Month. (If you don’t get any results for past month, try selecting Past 6 Months.)

Now that we’ve made sure the questions are timely, it’s time to dig into the individual questions.

The timeframe filter has narrowed down my list quite a bit. It’s actually very convenient, since I won’t need to parse through a ton of questions to find my influencers.

I’ll start by clicking on the first question and looking at it on Reddit.

I can see that it was submitted only 4 days ago, and has a score of 171. By looking at r/vegan’s front page, I can see that a thread with as low of a score as 80 can reach the front page, and therefore this thread could have reached the front when it was posted, so there’s a fair chance a top contributor saw it and responded.

To find that minimum score for the specific subreddit you’re targeting, browse its front page and then keep that number in mind as you click through the questions the Question Analyzer shows you.

Now let’s look at the responses to this particular question.

Content of the answers aside, right from the get-go we’ve found a user who has interesting things to say and was met with wide approval from the community (and has a surprisingly benign username for a Reddit user), RubyRedCheeks.

Now let’s do a quick check on their profile to make sure they actually hold some sway.

And they do indeed. By looking at their profile, we can tell two things off the bat:

  • They have a fair amount of karma (in this case, 2,730 post karma and 4,700 comment karma)
  • Their past couple posts have been in the vegan subreddit
  • They signed up 10 months ago

Now when looking at karma, Sebastian D. Anderson, CTO at redditpromotion.com has a good reminder for those of us hunting for influencers on Reddit:

“If someone has lots of karma–either link or comment–that means that user has contributed popular content to the site. Note that it might not be “good” content, but it was nonetheless upvoted.”

The karma numbers for this user are pretty high, which is great, but I still need to scroll through their post history and keep an eye on where they tend to post and what they’ve been posting in order to determine that they’re a good influencer.

Like Sebastian warned, there’s a chance this user participated once in r/vegan, got lucky with one response, and never posted in r/vegan again. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be an influencer with real reach in the vegan subreddit or vegan community at large, so I could rule them out.

However, when we look at this profile, we see pages and pages of quality posts in the vegan subreddit, as well as in other vegan-related subreddits, and in more general subreddits with posts arguing in favor of a vegan lifestyle.

Yup, this one’s a vegan influencer for sure.

If we’re still unsure, we can use SnoopSnoo to confirm which subreddits a user posts in the most, and which subreddits they have the most karma in.

Just a warning though, you’re going to learn a lot about your influencer. Maybe too much. It could get a little creepy if you brought up any of their demographic info without them bringing it up first, so use this info carefully.

So we’ve entered their username in SnoopSnoo, scrolled down to their Activity Across Subreddits chart, and selected the “karma” radio button.

In this case, RubyRedCheeks’ Activity Across Subreddits chart looks like this:

Bingo. We’ve found ourselves an r/vegan influencer. We’ll add them to our BuzzStream project, Google doc, or list.

We can then repeat this process for other widely-upvoted responses, and for the other questions BuzzSumo showed us to find even more influencers with reach. The more the merrier.

Don’t forget the mods

Now that we’ve found the active members of the community, let’s not forget to look at the already-established leaders of our relevant subreddits: the moderators.

Moderators are pillars of their community. They often have high karma, actively post and respond to threads in their board, and act as the peacekeepers and rule-enforcers of the subreddit. Participants of their subreddits generally take their word seriously, and moderators know their community, and could even lead you to other members who have similar amounts of influence. All in all, they’re a good friend to have around.

The vast majority of subreddits list their moderators somewhere in their right hand panel. In r/vegan, it’s at the bottom and looks like this:

Just because someone is a moderator, however, doesn’t mean they’re a vocal member of the community, or that they’re entirely focused on the subreddit they moderate. Some moderators are much more laid back in their approach.

Because of that, it’s worth clicking through the moderators profiles to see how invested they are in their subreddit.

In this case, let’s look at M4124124.

Not only does M4124124 have a good amount of karma, but they’re also moderators of two other vegan subreddits. (In case you’re wondering, r/raw is a subreddit dedicated to raw vegan eating, though occasionally people will post wrestling clips as well.) M4124124 would definitely be a good influencer who I’d add to my list.

Once I’ve added M4124124, I can move through the rest of the moderator list, and then I’ll be finished with finding influencers on Reddit.

4. Use forums to find even more community-approved influencers

Forums can be a place to find anything from influencers you can build relationships with, to traffic that converts, though recently they’ve been catching some flack. Richard Millington at FeverBee has been researching forum usage trends, and stated that he’s seeing “broad declines in use of forum platforms with some notable exceptions,” like gaming.

However, Wil Reynolds recently tweeted that he has a client who gets over three million per year in assisted conversions from forums. So look at what sites are referring traffic to yours, and if one of them is a forum, you may be in an industry that’s immune from this trend (at least for now.)

If you’re not sure whether your niche has active forums, it doesn’t hurt to do some of the searches below, take a peek at what’s out there, and decide for yourself.

How to find relevant forums

To find industry forums relevant to our niche, we’re going to do some Google-fu. Make sure you have your MozBar turned on so you can see the domain authorities of all of the forums appearing in your search results. If their Domain Authority is way below yours, they may not be getting much traffic to then pass along to your content, and a backlink wouldn’t be very beneficial, so you can already rule them out.

Here are some Google searches to try when looking for forums in your niche:

  • (your niche here) forums
  • “powered by vbulletin” (your niche here)
    • (Tip: Add “top posters” to this string to find exact influencers. Hats off to Wil Reynolds for this tip!)
  • “Xenforo”|“phpBB” (your niche here)

I’d recommend trying out each one of those searches and throwing all of the URLs in a list somewhere. Using the third search, for example, I was able to find this result:

When I just search “vegan forums,” the above result doesn’t rank. However, it’s an interesting angle on the niche I’ve been searching on. I could easily write a targeted pitch to vegan fitness enthusiasts, loop in one of their valued community members with a quote or some feedback, and get in front of a whole new (and probably shredded) audience.

Once you have your list of active forums, upload it to BuzzStream or make note of them in your spreadsheet with their domain authorities in case we need to prioritize them later on.

How to determine how active the forums are

There are tons of message boards and forums that are basically ghost towns, so we need to do our due diligence and make sure the communities we find are worth investing in.

You can use BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer tool to search the forum by filtering by “Past month” to get a snapshot of some activity, but if you don’t get any results, don’t think that means this forum is down and out for the count.

Instead, visit the site and take a look around. Oftentimes, forums have information like stats and who’s online at the bottom of their sites.

Here’s an example from one of the forums I found using those Google searches from earlier.

Although I didn’t get any results when I used BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer, I do see active users and active threads.

Many forums also feature how many times a thread has been viewed, as well as how many replies they’ve received.

From here, it’s up to you whether you think the number of views and replies are worth the investment in the community you’ll need to make.

How to identify top influencers in forums

When it comes to finding influencers in forums, this is another good time to hunt down the mods, and look for flair indicating someone’s been around for a while.

Also look for pinned threads and check out the author, since they’re likely a major forum influencer.

Finally, pop into some of the active threads and see if any of the contributors have a tag testifying to their old fogey-ness, or an impressive number of posts.

Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Although her post count isn’t huge, Emma is a Senior Member, so she merits looking into.

If a member looks like they could be a good fit, most forums will show you other posts by that same member. Feel free to take a look and make sure they’re actually contributing quality responses to the discussions, opposed to something like “um ok lol” over and over again.

If they pass the post quality test, you can add them to your list, along with any moderators or authors of stickied threads who actively participate in the community’s discussions.

Another forum-like resource to look at: Mighty Networks

You can also search in Mighty Networks (thanks to Amanda Orson for mentioning it!), which is similar to most forum platforms, except it’s much more mobile-focused. If your audience or your influencers are big on using mobile, it’s worth doing a quick search in Mighty Networks to see what’s out there.

When I searched for vegan communities in Mighty Networks, I noticed that it didn’t seem as well-populated as some forums or subreddits, but my impression is that it would be better suited for topics more closely related to business.

If you don’t find any networks that fit your niche, you can also try looking in the Mighty Networks Mighty Creators group, though success may vary.

The Mighty Creators group is a group of self-identified “entrepreneurs, artists, and activists.” You can search through member bios, posts, and events to find individuals relevant to your niche.

For example, here’s what I got when I searched “vegan” in the Mighty Creators group:

Not only do I see members who have included “vegan” in their bios, but I also see any conversations that mention it, and I could further research any influencers who have responded in it.

5. Use your Twitter followers to find influential friendlies

If you have an active Twitter account, you can comb your own followers for influencers who already like you. This existing relationship will make outreach much easier later on, and it’s nice to benefit from the network you’ve already built.

First, download your followers from TwitterFollowers.me by entering your Twitter handle.

Open your csv and filter through your followers’ bios so you only see the ones that contain a relevant keyword. In this case, I’ll filter for the followers who have “vegan” in their bio.

Now that I’ve filtered down my list of followers, it’s time to head back to BuzzSumo, enter my followers’ handles in the Influencers tab, and see whether they have a retweet average of at least two.

In the case of my first follower, Vegan Revolution, they have a retweet average of three, so I could throw them onto my list.

And again, if I want to make sure their followers are legit, I can use Twitter Audit.

Repeat that process for as many followers as you’d like, adding the ones with enough reach to your BuzzStream project or Google doc. And just like that, you’ve just mined your followers for influencers.

6. Use “side” influencers to approach your audience and other influencers from a different angle

Side influencer marketing, as described by Melanie Sazegar in this Inbound thread, is “reach[ing] out to the software platforms who serve influencers or the influencer’s target market (which should be the same as your own target market).” It’s a way to further bolster your reputation with your audience by working with someone your audience already knows and likes, and it signals to other influencers that you’re a trustworthy brand.

To see an example of this in action, let’s look at Evil Queen candles. They specialize in hand-poured, vegan candles with a lot of personality. (And they also smell amazing.)

If we were head of Marketing at Evil Queen candles, and we were taking the traditional influencer marketing approach, we’d likely look for vegan beauty bloggers or maybe lifestyle bloggers, probably female, probably very sassy, with large followings who would want to mimic their buying choices.

However, if we use the “side” influencer marketing approach, then we’ll want to want target either:

  1. The platforms these vegan beauty or lifestyle bloggers use (ie: Instagram, WordPress, maybe an app like VSCO cam)
  2. Brands who serve the same target market as Evil Queen does, and has some sway with them

In their case, Evil Queen decided to go with option two, and partner with Derrick Freske, a portrait, commercial, and lifestyle photographer based in Los Angeles with over 325K followers on Instagram.

Together, they created a bundle on the Evil Queen site that includes a photography-inspired candle, a Derrick Freske Lightroom preset, and an exclusive photo print.

As a result of collaborating with Derrick, Evil Queen increased their website traffic by about 30%, and increased sales by 7%. Both brands increased their exposure to their target consumers, while also reaching new audiences by borrowing from each other’s.

Speaking with Ida Sofia, founder of Evil Queen candles, she mentioned that she preferred working with brands (AKA side influencers) over lifestyle bloggers and models, saying:

“A collaboration with a similar brand with an audience of only 10k may do more good than a model with a following of 100k, just because of audience relevance.”

That means, when choosing side influencers, matching your target audience with your side influencer’s target audience is definitely key.

Additionally, Ida recommends working with side influencers who have followings that are at least double your following’s size. For example, Evil Queen has about 12k followers on Instagram right now, so she prefers to work with side influencers with followings over 20K to make the collaboration worth it for her.

How to find side influencer ideas

All of the tactics we’ve discussed in this post can be used to find side influencers instead of traditional influencers, assuming you have an idea of what platforms your influencers use, and what other brands may attract the same target market you do.

However, if you’re not sure where to start when it comes to finding side influencers, you can start with these tactics.

1. Ask your customers

Ask your ideal customers what other platforms they use in addition to your own. If you hear a certain brand or service repeatedly mentioned, you’ve just found yourself a side influencer.

Using BuzzStream as an example, I know that many of our outreach experts also use BuzzSumo, so if we wanted to reach even more outreach experts, it would make sense for us to do a joint webinar with BuzzSumo. (Which we’ve done in the past.)

2. Look at your popular blog content

You can also look through your old blog posts, see which posts have garnered the most attention, and find influencers who are connected to the experts you featured in those posts.

For example, one of our most popular blog posts is How to Create a Winning Content Promotion Plan by the lovely Stephanie Briggs. I can look her up in BuzzStream Discovery, use her network to find other influencers who our audience might like, and add them to my list.

3. BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer

Don’t forget how handy BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer tool can be for brainstorming! For example, if I were an SEO agency and I wanted to target ecommerce stores, I could type “seo” into the Question Analyzer and look at the different categories of questions to see what ecommerce site owners are concerned about.

As I skim through my question categories, I see things like Magento, Shopify, WordPress, Flipkart, promote, and price.

The first four categories would be good examples of brands who would be good side influencers.

The second two categories give me further ideas for partnering with someone who specializes in promotion or pricing in the ecommerce realm. And now that I have these categories, I can plug them into BuzzStream Discovery or BuzzSumo to find exact influencers who I could start building relationships with. Side influencers galore.

Conclusion

If you want to spend your influencer marketing time wisely, you need to find influencers with real reach, and eventually build strong, long-term relationships with them.

The good news is that there are a ton of ways to find influencers who have said reach. Whether you’re leveraging tools, your network, or your influencer’s connections to find more influencers, don’t forget to keep track of your influencers in a way that will make it easy for you to reach out to them later on.

Finding the best influencers may not be easy, but it’ll be worth it. By doing all of this work on the front end, you’re giving any content you’re promoting a fighting chance. So go ahead and start building your list, and then those relationships. Your future content-promoting self and your future friends will thank you for it.

Want to learn more about how you can get better results when working with influencers? Then sign up for our upcoming webinar on how to get 10X the buzz with hyper-targeted influencer outreach.

The post The Advanced Guide to Multichannel Influencer Research appeared first on BuzzStream.

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The Comprehensive Guide to Pitching HARO Successfully in 2017 https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/haro/ https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/haro/#comments Wed, 23 Aug 2017 17:05:08 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=5217 You probably know what HARO is. You may have even responded to a few of the emails. But here’s the real question: Is responding to HARO queries worth your time today? And if it is, how do maximize your efforts? In 2008, PR guru Peter Shankman would regularly receive requests from the press looking for sources on everything from professional gardeners to Fortune 100 CTO’s. Peter compiled all of these expert requests, and started sending a daily summary email to his massive subscriber list of PR pros and experts. And thus, Help a Reporter Out, or HARO was born. HARO’s list has only grown in subscribers since then. But even with that kind of growth, you can still catch the attention of journalists if you act quickly, and arm yourself with the right knowledge. In this guide, you’ll get the answers to the following questions (that are also quick links if you want to jump to that section): What basics about HARO do I need to know? How can I tell if responding to HARO inquiries is worth my time today? Subscribing to HARO: Should I use the free version, or go for a paid subscription? How can I sort through and manage the flood of HARO requests? And get: 9 Tips for Rocking HARO: Lessons from a writer who’s received 10,500+ Pitches Your HARO pitch pre-send checklist A game plan for what to do after the pitch Bonus Material: Get our 21 point checklist for Outreach Let’s dive in. HARO Basics: What do I need to know about HARO? 1. HARO emails are sent three times daily at the same times According to Laura Spaventa, a longtime HARO editor, HARO emails are sent at 5:45 am, 12:45 pm, and 5:45 pm (EST) every day. However, since the list is so large (HARO […]

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You probably know what HARO is. You may have even responded to a few of the emails.

But here’s the real question:

Is responding to HARO queries worth your time today?

And if it is, how do maximize your efforts?

In 2008, PR guru Peter Shankman would regularly receive requests from the press looking for sources on everything from professional gardeners to Fortune 100 CTO’s. Peter compiled all of these expert requests, and started sending a daily summary email to his massive subscriber list of PR pros and experts. And thus, Help a Reporter Out, or HARO was born.

HARO’s list has only grown in subscribers since then. But even with that kind of growth, you can still catch the attention of journalists if you act quickly, and arm yourself with the right knowledge.

In this guide, you’ll get the answers to the following questions (that are also quick links if you want to jump to that section):

And get:

Bonus Material: Get our 21 point checklist for Outreach


Let’s dive in.

HARO Basics: What do I need to know about HARO?

1. HARO emails are sent three times daily at the same times

According to Laura Spaventa, a longtime HARO editor, HARO emails are sent at 5:45 am, 12:45 pm, and 5:45 pm (EST) every day.

However, since the list is so large (HARO had over 100,000 members in 2010), the time you actually receive your email will be staggered either slightly earlier or later.

2. It’s not a quick fix

If your goal is a big traffic and conversion boost in the short term, you’re better off investing elsewhere.

Yes, some businesses have experienced massive success from a HARO placement, like in this instance as told by founder Peter Shankman:

“HARO once helped a bakery stay in business. Was 08/09 during the bad economy – they were close to going out of business – they got a story in a major national daily featuring them – They wound up getting tons of business and weathered the storm.”

However, for the vast majority of businesses that use HARO, this kind of dramatic, life-altering bump isn’t going to happen.

Instead, think of HARO like a slow process. It takes time to refine your pitching skills, get familiar with different journalists, and, if you’re in a very specific niche, wait for a relevant request to crop up.

3. It’s free, but you can pay per month for some extra benefits

HARO works on a freemium model, meaning they have their free service, as well as the ability to pay for a subscription to reap additional benefits. More on this in another couple of sections.

How can I tell if HARO is worth my time?

With so many things you can be doing on any given day to improve your domain authority, is responding to HARO requests really worth the time and effort?

Chad Reir at JotForm did an interesting experiment where him and his team prioritized responding to HARO queries for a whole year, with the end result being (spoiler alert) that they earned 119 mentions from all of their efforts.

However, he goes on to say that a vast majority of these mentions weren’t relevant to their industry, and visitors driven to their website from these mentions were very difficult to convert.

Their experience really drives home some key points you should know when determining whether HARO is right for you:

  • Yes, there are a lot of requests, what with three daily emails being sent and all. But most of them won’t be relevant to you.
  • If you opt to respond to every query you happen to know about, regardless of relevance to your company or brand, you may get placements, but don’t expect to reap much traffic or many conversions.
  • Your best bet is to only respond to queries that are relevant to your company and your target audience, and for which you meet all of the writer’s requirements.

Response time is of the essence

In Peter Shankman’s Growth Hackers AMA, someone asked him what PR strategies are most effective nowadays, since the asker was under the impression that HARO was too big to be useful anymore.

Peter responded with some ideas, then closed with:

“HARO still works, by the way, if you’re super-quick.”

So you’ve heard it from the man himself. Response time is critical to a successful placement. As you’ll hear from Ritika in a later section as she breaks down HARO from the journalist’s perspective, writers often have tight deadlines and quick turnarounds, so the faster you can give them what they want, the better.

What does this all mean for you? For starters, for HARO to be worth your time, you’ll need to be able to check the HARO requests as soon as they get to you, and, if you find a relevant request, be able to put together a response soon after.

If your schedule isn’t very flexible, or you know you won’t be able to set aside time around the email send times, then HARO may not be worth looking into for now.

Look at your goals

When it comes to whether it’s worth your time to sift through HARO requests, it ultimately boils down to this: What is your goal for responding to HARO queries?

If your goal is increasing brand awareness, investing time in HARO could work because as you get placements, your brand name will be seen by a much larger audience. However, increasing brand awareness is a pretty nebulous goal, and difficult to tie to revenue.

If your goal is to supplement your other link building activities, HARO could be worth it too. It’s likely that any journalist who cites you will also throw a backlink your way. And if they don’t, you can always ask nicely once the article is published.

If your goal is to find more journalists to make contact with, this too might make HARO-ing worth it for you. Responding to HARO pitches is similar to doing targeted outreach, except you’re trying to stand out in a sea of competitors in a short time frame. If you can catch their attention in a HARO pitch, then you know you’ve really caught their eye and can start building a solid relationship on that impression.

Now, if your goal was to invest several hours a day in HARO-ing in order to improve your SEO (similar to the JotForm experiment)? Well, I wouldn’t recommend it, and neither would they.

Subscribing to HARO: Should I use the free version, or go for a paid subscription?

We know we have options when it comes to subscribing to the HARO email list. But what do you gain from subscribing to a paid plan?

According to the HARO plans page, benefits range from being able to more easily filter for specific keywords, making the sorting process easier, to getting earlier access to requests than the free audience.

However, you don’t have to look far to see success stories with the HARO free service.

So long as you know when the emails are coming out (and that is around 5:45 am, 12:45 pm, and 5:45 pm Eastern time every day), have a way to quickly filter through the requests, and a template put together for your responses, you probably don’t need to look into the paid options unless you’ve already had proven success with HARO, want to increase it, and are in a very competitive niche.

Note: I haven’t found anyone who’s written in much detail about their experience using a paid HARO subscription, or whether the paid subscription was quantitatively more effective for them in getting placements. (And if so, by how much.) If you have experience with a paid HARO subscription, let us know in the comments below. I’d be super interested to hear you thoughts.

How can I sort through and manage the flood of HARO requests I’m going to get everyday?

Let’s be honest here. You’re going to have to read through a lot of irrelevant HARO posts to find the requests that you can act on.

Unless you have lots of clients in many different niches, monitoring HARO can feel like reading through all of the For Sale ads on Craigslist to find a kayak. (That is, mildly brain-numbing and prone to inducing a general feeling of hopelessness.)

Instead, set up an email filter to catch the relevant queries, and disregard the rest.

How to set up HARO email filters in Gmail

First, go to your Settings by clicking on the gear in the upper right corner, then selecting Settings.

From here, use the top nav bar to click Filters and Blocked Addresses.

You’ll now see a list of all of the email filters you’ve created. Scroll down to the bottom (which may take a while if you’re like me and ruthlessly sort your emails) and click Create a new filter.

Now it’s time to specify your filter. Fill in the From field with the HARO list email address, haro@helpareporter.com, and add any keywords that are relevant to your company or brand that you think reporters would need an expert in.

If you’re focused on your local footprint, be sure to include your location in your list of desired keywords.

Lastly, see your filter in action and make some final selections.

Make sure to select Never send to spam as part of your filter, because HARO emails occasionally do end up there.

When it comes to how or where these emails appear in order to best suit your working style, you can approach this multiple ways.

1. Put them in a label/folder

You can create a HARO label, apply that label to all relevant HARO queries, and have them skip the inbox so it doesn’t set off a notification and clog your normal inbox.

Then, around email query sending times, you can comb through your folder or do a quick search like this:

The positive side to this approach is that it won’t interrupt your normal workflow. The potential downside is exactly that as well. HARO requests are super time-sensitive, so you don’t want too many hours to pass before you respond. If you’re super-focused on a task at hand, you may forget to check your HARO label and miss an opportunity.

2. Automatically delete any non-relevant HARO emails, and send the rest to your inbox

Another option you can consider is to not send HARO emails to a folder/label, but to create a filter that simply deletes non-relevant emails. Simply fill in your keywords, separated by a | (AKA an “or” function in Regex) in the Doesn’t have field, then in the next window, check the box next to Delete it.

Once you’ve done that, the only HARO emails that will appear in your inbox will be ones that include one of your keywords, so you know there’s something relevant in there.

3. Why not both?

You can always combine the label/folder approach and the auto-delete approach by creating two filters: One that deletes irrelevant HARO emails, and one that sorts any HARO email that gets through into your designated HARO folder, further streamlining your HARO request perusal process.

How to create HARO email filters in other providers

If you don’t use Gmail, fear not! Most email providers today provide some form of email filtering.

For quick reference, here are guides on how to create email filters in:

9 Tips for Rocking HARO: Lessons from a Writer Who’s Received 10,500+ Pitches

The following section was written by Ritika Puri. Ritika is a data-lover and marketer turned entrepreneur and writer who works with content marketers to build lead pipelines, and has written for Forbes, The Next Web, Business Insider, and American Express OPEN Forum. 

Help a Reporter Out. From a writer’s perspective, it’s the best of times and the worst of times for the exact same reason—you meet tons of people.

Personally speaking, I’ve met some amazing entrepreneurs, business leaders, PR professionals, and other contacts through the platform. At the same time, I receive dozens of irrelevant pitches per day, and quite candidly, these messages drive me nuts because I have no choice but to ignore them (and that’s a really rude thing to do).

From 2012 to 2015, I was pitched more than 10,500 times. I know this number because I had one of my team members count every single response to every single query that I’ve ever submitted. Out of this batch, there have been a few hundred pitches that have really stood out. They were relevant, on-point, unobtrusive, and truly helpful in speaking to my goals.

stats 1

In reading roughly 60% of my HARO pitches (I read as many as I can), I’ve recognized the following trend: almost every single person who pitches me is genuinely thoughtful and obviously working hard to make their clients and teams happy. I very rarely see bad apples, and I have immense respect for people seeking coverage: almost everyone has a great story to share.

But when I receive more than 100 responses to a single query, how do I pick the 3 or so people who I choose as interviewees? In answering this question and providing some transparency into my process, my hope is that I can empower you to deliver your best pitch.

stats 2

After reading thousands of HARO pitches, here are my best tips:

1. Focus on the story, not the interviewee’s bio

I receive countless HARO pitches with source bios that are 2-4 paragraphs long. I know your interviewee is amazing, but when I’m scanning hundreds of pitches, it’s very easy for me to get lost in the details. Ideally, I’d love to see a one-sentence bio, max—one that allows me to quickly scan the person’s vantage point and experience.

What I love, however, is when PR pros send me a sneak preview into the candidate’s interview: a few sentences, or paragraphs, that clearly demonstrate what the person has to say. This information allows me to decide whether an in-depth interview is worth it: thoughtful, to-the-point comments yield thoughtful, to-the-point interviews.

Ellie Pitch

I care about what the interviewee has to say and am less concerned with how many patents the person holds or how many 30 Under 30 awards that he or she has won.

2. Stick to HARO’s system

Like the rest of the world, I’m buried under avalanches of email. I receive hundreds of messages per day and send upwards of 50-80.

Almost daily, someone sends me a really amazing HARO pitch over email, and I end up forgetting about it. Why?

HARO is my tool for keeping query responses organized. I log in when I’m ready to filter through responses, which I usually do in batches. If I receive a direct email—no matter how amazing—I’ll likely ignore it (see amazing pitch example that I accidentally ignored below).

missed opportunity

Having heard from thousands of PR professionals, I can empathize with why they’re hunting down my direct contact information. They think that I’m more likely to see and remember something that hits my main inbox.

Receiving so many emails, however, I need a system for organizing PR requests— and it’s not my brain. It’s HARO’s interface.

As an additional sanity check, I also maintain a separate inbox where all of my HARO communication goes. I make sure to read as many of these messages as possible. It’s easier for me to organize than filtering through my main inbox.

inbox

Rest assured that your messages are being seen, and I’m less likely to see them when I filter through the details in a systematic way. I’m actually more likely to ignore messages that end up in my main email inbox.

3. Keep your journalist relationships strong

I’m always thrilled when I see a familiar face and PR rep on HARO. There are a dozen or so amazing publicists with whom I’m in touch, and I can honestly say that I wish this list was longer. I’ve met many in person and some have even, out of the blue, referred me to clients.

I love getting to know PR pros because I know that I can ping them when I’m in a pinch. I also love when PR pros get to know me because they consistently share stories from relevant clients. It’s a beautiful, symbiotic thing.

The takeaway here? In your HARO pitches, mention whether you’ve worked with a journalist on a story before. This simple action will jog your recipient’s memory and kickstart a conversation. Show that you’re paying attention. We’re listening, and good journalists appreciate the thoughtfulness.

4. Answer the question in a direct way

I receive many one-liners asking whether I’d like to talk with a particular interviewee.

The short answer? I don’t know, because these pitches fail to provide enough detail for me to make a decision. I end up ignoring these threads as a result.

In all of my HARO queries, I include a specific question or set of questions that I’d like answered. The best responses I get are ones that answer these prompts directly. That way, I can make a quick, in-the-moment decision about whether to follow up. All of the information that I need is right in front of me, and I can send a quick, focused, and constructive email reply.

The end result is a great process on both sides, from start to finish. From the get go, no details are left to the imagination.

5. Keep the process low-touch

Many PR pros who pitch me will assume that I want to hop on a 30-minute call. Running a business, I’m on 5-9 hours of calls oneasy day, and I do not want to schedule more calls. In some situations there are extenuating circumstances: the topic is confusing, or my interviewee needs the guidance of a live q&a—that’s totally fine.

What’s less okay is when a PR pro schedules me for a 6AM call, when his or her contact would prefer to send an email anyway.

I try to keep the process low-touch and clear by specifying the type of interview that I’d like in my HARO query. Many other writers do the same, so please try to pay attention. I always love when PR pros ask if I’d prefer email or phone-based responses. As often as possible I’ll opt for email, and the end result will be outstanding.

6. Don’t ask when a piece will be published

I don’t say this out of annoyance. I say this out of wanting to save you time.

I, like many other freelance writers and content producers, write for dozens of publications. Because I’m independent, I have limited insight into these companies’ editorial schedules. It’s just easier that way—editors are great at what they do and don’t need multitudes of writers as additional cooks in their kitchens. Plus, writers have enough on their minds and can’t humanly track the many moving parts of publishing a piece of content.

It’s worth saying that out of all my tips in this blog post, this one is probably the most controversial. After all, PR reps, clients, and interviewees are thoughtful enough to offer up their time. Not to mention, some writers are editors who are managing their own editorial calendars. The best answer I have is to feel it out. Don’t take a nonresponse as a sign of disrespect, and be content with “I don’t know” as an answer.

Be patient, and you’ll see the story run. And if you’re a PR rep, be transparent about this process with your client, too. Present a realistic view of this process, and your stakeholders will understand.

7. Be personable and helpful

When working on a blog post “How to Overcome Fear of Risk” for Entrepreneur Magazine, I was floored to have received nearly 200 pitches in just 2 days.

HARO 1
As much as I wanted to read and include every single story submission, I couldn’t. After skimming through all 200 pitches, I realized that only 5 were worth the follow-up. The reason boiled down to a few common mistakes:

  • The majority of pitches that I received were too promotional and pretentious. Many “talked up” the experiences of the to-be interviewees but failed to provide substantive details that were relevant to the story.
  • Many of the pitches asked “if I’d like to see more information.” At the time, I had a 48-hour turnaround, which minimized my available bandwidth for back/forth communication. I needed details off the bat—follow-up communication would have slowed me down.

I realized that there were a few things that would have improved the majority of these pitches. Here’s a quick list that I would have liked for all of these to have:

  • A friendly introduction
  • A fun fact
  • Humility
  • Keywords or bullet points that describe the story

The bottom line? It’s possible to make more of an impact by writing less.

8. Make source attribution easy

One of my biggest time sinks as a writer is sourcing. I go through painstaking lengths to research my interview subjects and make sure that I’m referencing them correctly. It’s often a challenge to aggregate information from different sources, so I am more likely to respond to pitches that provide the basics from the start.

Thinking of sending journalists a quote? Make sure to include:

  • Who said it
  • What that person’s website is
  • Their job title
  • Their company
  • Their social media links
  • A link to a press kit
  • A Link to a high-res headshot

One tip: HARO doesn’t have the most robust user interface for sorting and categorizing messages, so it’s easy for communication to fall through the cracks under tight deadlines. The content world is chaotic. Make a simple email signature, so writers can find the sourcing details that they need, in one place.

Here’s an example of one of the best HARO pitches that I received for this story:

HARO 2In addition to sharing a great story, the  pitch included the person’s name, company details, email address, and social profiles.

9. Don’t assume the writer doesn’t like you

It can be demoralizing when you spend hours writing thoughtful emails, and nobody responds. Don’t take it personally; the majority of writers are too slammed for their own good and juggling far-too-many conversations. Our email inboxes look like this:

HARO 3
For context, this is my HARO-dedicated inbox.

Be persistent. If you see someone you’re trying to reach at an event or conference, walk up and say hi. There’s no need to take us to lunch, leave us voicemails, or try to fight for our attention. Instead, focus on building an authentic relationship. Remember: Our careers are going to last our entire lifetimes; expect paths to cross, over and over.

Your HARO pitch pre-send checklist

Now that you know how to use HARO and have crafted your beautiful pitch (hopefully using Ritika’s advice above), and it’s time to hit send.

But wait!

The devil is in the details, and you only have one shot at capturing a journalist’s attention. Even a minor mess-up will send a reporter straight into the arms of any of the hundreds of other responses they received in addition to your own.

So before you hit send, run through this list of questions to make sure your pitch is pitch-perfect. (Pun intended?)

  1. Do you meet all of the journalist’s background and credential requirements? If not, it’s not worth your time or the journalist’s time for you to pitch them. Stop the process right here, tuck your pitch away, and wait for a request that has requirements you can meet. Otherwise, you risk the writer associating your name with the irritation they feel when they open a pitch, read it, and realize it doesn’t meet their standards.
  2. Did you open with a greeting? It’s more polite than jumping right into answering their questions.
  3. If you have the reporter’s first name, did you address them by it in said greeting? That will help your email feel more personal.
  4. Did you answer the exact question asked and follow all of the journalist’s instructions? A word count limit would be an example of an instruction.
  5. Is your subject line clearly tied to their query? Writers could easily have multiple HARO requests going at the same time, so make it clear which one you’re offering help with.
  6. Is your subject line attention-grabbing? If you’re not sure, feel free to reference Neil Patel’s guide on headline writing.
  7. Did you include your source’s name? “Source” here being the person you’re quoting. Could very well be yourself.
  8. Did you include your source’s job title?
  9. Did you include your source’s website and company name?
  10. Did you include links to your source’s social media profiles?
  11. Did you include a link to your source’s online bio?
  12. Did you include a link to a Dropbox folder with high-res headshots of your source?
  13. Did you include at least three to four ways the writer can reach you? Email, phone, Skype, etc. Definitely include phone in case it’s more convenient for them to call.
  14. Are you sending your response within 12 hours of when the HARO email was sent? If not, consider saving your pitch for another journalist another time, or using that expert quote on your own platform. It’s likely too late to reach the journalist.
  15. Is your response as short as you can make it? Too long and you risk looking too self-involved and losing the journalist’s attention. Remember: It’s their story; you’re just a small part of it.
  16. Did you edit for grammar and spelling? Basic errors like these will immediately take you out of the running, so don’t let your hard work go to waste.
  17. Did you make your pitch skimmable? That is, did you use line breaks and bullet points to break up content chunks? Again, writers = short on time. Make things easy for them.
  18. Is your pitch 100% on topic? If you notice a tangent or wonder if a section could be seen as irrelevant, cut it.

Want more expert advice on pitching? Check out 17 PR professionals’ best pitching tips.

What to do after the pitch

You’ve sent your beautiful pitch on its way. Now what?

Here are six things to do after you’ve pitched to a HARO request:

1. Don’t follow up

I know we already covered this, but seriously. Don’t do it.

At most, you can send them a tweet right after you send your pitch, but after that, never speak of this again. (Unless they want to, in which case, give the people what they want!)

2. Watch out for your mention

If you haven’t already, create a Google Alert for your name or company name, so you can be notified if you receive a placement.

If you get a backlink as well and happen to use a tool like BuzzStream, BuzzStream’s Link Monitoring tab and relationship stages will let you know.

3. (If you get a placement) Share like you’ve never shared before

Everyone likes getting some recognition, journalists included. Share their article on social (both your company and your personal accounts) and anywhere else relevant, like a thread on an industry forum.

4. (If you get a placement) Say thank you, and let them know you’d be happy to do it again

Once you do get a placement, congrats! Pat yourself on the back, pop some bubbly (Sparkling water, anyone?), and write the journalist a quick thank you note to keep the relationship strong.

In your thank you, mention that you’ve shared the article (and all of the places you’ve shared it), and that you’d be more than happy to be a source for them again.

If they happen to be writing another piece in a similar industry, they might just shoot you the request directly and kill two birds with one stone.

5. Keep up the relationship (with relevant journalists)

Like we covered earlier, don’t let your relationships with journalists you’ve worked with fade into distant memory.

If you have a good idea of what this journalist writes about, or what they’re interested in, send them the occasional news or best practices article that you think would make their job easier. That way, you’ll build a real relationship with this journalist, and they’ll be more likely to think of you when they write their next story, or at least recognize your name in the pile of pitches.

If you don’t think you’ll remember to reach back out to your journalist contacts, try setting some calendar reminders with their bio and beat in the description of the event. On the days your reminders pop up, set aside some time to look around for articles that might interest them, then pass them along.

Note: I would recommend only putting forth this level of effort for journalists whose beat is relevant to your company. Like we learned from the Jotform example, it’s possible to get placements in less-than-relevant contexts and publications, consider it a success, but then drive only meager traffic to your website and convert little to none of it.

6. Track everything

If you have a CRM like BuzzStream, this step is pretty easy. Simply make a project for HARO journalists, forward relevant emails to your BuzzBox address, and track your mentions and backlinks.

You’ll then have all of your conversations with all of the different writers and publications in one place, as well as a way to easily report on the success of your HARO efforts.

If you send your emails from BuzzStream as well, you can even see if your pitch was opened at all, giving you insight into the effectiveness of your subject lines.

If you don’t have a CRM, you can always use a spreadsheet or Google sheet. I’d recommend including columns like:

  • Name of publication (with link to website)
  • Query name (What it was called in the HARO email)
  • Name of reporter
  • Link to reporter’s bio page
  • Submitted a response? (Yes/No)
  • When did I send my response? (Within 1 hour of receiving the HARO email, within the first 2 hours, within the first 3 hours, etc.)
  • Your pitch subject line
  • Date pitch sent
  • Published? (Yes/No)
  • Link to published article

Once you have your spreadsheet ready and start filling in data from your HARO pitches, you’ll be able to slice and dice your data for trends, and make your pitches even more effective.

Conclusion

HARO can be a good way to supplement your link building efforts, but only if you are willing to hone your pitching skills and editing skills, and have the ability to respond in a timely manner. If you choose to experiment with HARO, make sure you track your pitches so you’ll be able to look back and make sure it’s effort well-spent.

At its root, HARO is all about making a connection with someone else, and hopefully providing them something that will make their lives easier. In the spirit of helping a reporter out, don’t forget to forward queries along to colleagues who might be a perfect fit to contribute, even if you or your company are not. It never hurts to pay it forward.

 

The post The Comprehensive Guide to Pitching HARO Successfully in 2017 appeared first on BuzzStream.

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The Guide to Outreach Personalization with Siege Media and BuzzStream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/guide-to-outreach-personalization/ Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:20:09 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=5080 During our webinar on outreach personalization with Ross Hudgens, Founder and CEO of Siege Media, we covered a lot of best practices and received a ton of great questions. Here’s our summary of the key takeaways from the webinar, and a link to the recording, complete with outreach template examples and expert advice from Paul and Ross. What’s the state of doing outreach in 2017? For starters, you need to know that everyone and their mother, father, and dog are doing outreach right now. However, the opportunities for coverage haven’t necessarily increased. According to a study done by Fractl, “although most writers publish one story per day, 44% of them get pitched a minimum of TWENTY TIMES per day.” So to get coverage, you need a way to stand out from the crowd. That’s where using a strategic outreach personalization framework comes in. The 4 step framework to effectively personalized outreach emails 1. Segment your audience Segmenting your prospects is key to striking the balance between efficiently moving through a list, and putting together highly-targeted outreach. In order to determine whether prospects are in the same segment, you need to ask yourself, “Will the people in this group be motivated by the same email message?” In other words, for each prospect, you need to ask yourself another question: “What is this prospect interested in getting from me?” Once you have your answers, you can group together the prospects that are looking for the same things. You can boil down people’s motivations for covering a topic or piece of content into six main interest drivers: They have an interest in/passion for the topic They have a relationship with the person who emailed them They want to increase their influence They know this content will drive pageviews, traffic, etc They need some new content for the blog […]

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During our webinar on outreach personalization with Ross Hudgens, Founder and CEO of Siege Media, we covered a lot of best practices and received a ton of great questions. Here’s our summary of the key takeaways from the webinar, and a link to the recording, complete with outreach template examples and expert advice from Paul and Ross.

What’s the state of doing outreach in 2017?

For starters, you need to know that everyone and their mother, father, and dog are doing outreach right now. However, the opportunities for coverage haven’t necessarily increased.

According to a study done by Fractl, “although most writers publish one story per day, 44% of them get pitched a minimum of TWENTY TIMES per day.” So to get coverage, you need a way to stand out from the crowd. That’s where using a strategic outreach personalization framework comes in.

The 4 step framework to effectively personalized outreach emails

1. Segment your audience

Segmenting your prospects is key to striking the balance between efficiently moving through a list, and putting together highly-targeted outreach.

In order to determine whether prospects are in the same segment, you need to ask yourself, “Will the people in this group be motivated by the same email message?” In other words, for each prospect, you need to ask yourself another question: “What is this prospect interested in getting from me?” Once you have your answers, you can group together the prospects that are looking for the same things.

You can boil down people’s motivations for covering a topic or piece of content into six main interest drivers:

  1. They have an interest in/passion for the topic
  2. They have a relationship with the person who emailed them
  3. They want to increase their influence
  4. They know this content will drive pageviews, traffic, etc
  5. They need some new content for the blog and this piece is ready to go (i.e., pressures of a content calendar)
  6. They want to write about this before their competition does

Generally a prospect’s desire or motivation to cover your content will involve varying degrees of all six of these interest drivers. However, your segments will weigh each of these drivers differently, which is something you’ll keep in mind once you start building your email templates.

2. Create email templates for each segment

Once you have your audience segmented, it’s time to create templates for each one. As you’re creating your templates for your different segments, here are some tips for targeting personal bloggers, journalists, and site owners:



Another aspect you’ll want to consider when creating your templates for your segments is whether you’ll want to use the two-step outreach process, or the one-step outreach process.

The Two-Step Outreach Process

The two-step blogger outreach process is when you pitch your prospect without linking to the content you’d like covered. If the blogger or publication is interested, they have to email you back, and then you’ll send the link.

What makes this process beneficial is that it creates interest and mystery around your content, while also giving you a clearer opening to follow-up with your prospect later. For certain segments, it can be a really good fit.

For example, Ross and his team at Siege Media tried the two-step outreach process on a few of their segments. They ended up increasing their placement rate from 4.6% to 7.5%.

In general, keep in mind that although this process works well on most blogger personas, it does not work well for resource pages, contacts with whom you already have an existing relationships, or journalists/editors of very popular blogs/websites. For those guys and gals, you’ll probably want to use the one-step outreach process.

The One-Step Outreach Process

The one-step outreach process is when you pitch your prospect and include a link to the content you want covered. That way, if your prospect wants to cover the content, they have all of the resources they need and can act on it right away.

Here’s an example of what a one-step outreach process email might look like (courtesy of Ross):

This process works well with the same people that the two-step process didn’t work well with. That is, resource pages, people with whom you have existing relationships, and journalists/editors of extremely popular blogs/websites. (AKA people who are low on time.) On the other hand, the one-step process is not as good of a fit for low to mid-high-end blogs. In those cases, you’ll want to use the two-step outreach process is.

In short, when putting together your templates for your different outreach segments, be sure to keep these two processes in mind, and choose the most appropriate approach for each segment.

3. Personalize each email

Personalizing your outreach is where the magic happens. It’s your chance to quickly communicate how interested in your prospect you really are, and how much work you’ve already put into your relationship with them. You can do this with the right blogger outreach tool.

If you’re just getting started with personalizing your outreach and you’re not sure whether your personalization will be effective enough, try asking yourself:

Could this personalization apply to a large number of people/bloggers?

If so, it’s not good personalization.

For example, if I write “I really like your home improvement tips post!” it isn’t nearly as interesting or engaging as “I really like your tip on using mirrors to make rooms feel bigger! I had never thought of that, though I do have a couple of mirrors lying around at home.”

Of course, there is a careful line to walk between too little personalization and too much personalization. As a guiding rule, Ross recommends that personalization elements should make up 10-25% of your email. We don’t want the emails to get too long with extra personalization, because shorter emails with the previously mentioned ratio are more likely to create an authentic sense of “this was written end to end for me” for your prospect.

The three core personalization elements

If you’re at a total loss with where to start with email personalization, you can always start by including these three core personalization elements in your outreach:

  1. First name
  2. Website name
  3. 1-2 tailored custom sentence(s)

For extra credit, you can also include one or more additional custom fragments to these core elements, and you’re off to a solid start.

Let’s talk about flattery

Compliment authentically, or don’t compliment at all.

Your prospects can see right through fake praise, and the second they do, you can bet your relationship-building efforts have gone out the window.

Not at prospects are created equal

Different prospects require different degrees of personalization. Here’s a chart Ross put together that illustrates some situations that you’d want to personalize more heavily for, and some where you can lighten up.

4. Analyze your results

The very last step in this strategic four step outreach framework is to gauge your success. Ross and his team at Siege Media analyze their subject lines, email copy, and the content they’re promoting, as well as use the following benchmarks to track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Open rate:

  • 70-90% is a great open rate!
  • 50-70% is average. There might be a problem with your subject line and content ideas.
  • <50% may have a deliverability issue in addition to poor subject lines and content ideas.

Click rate:

  • 25-35%+ is great! Keep doing what you’re doing.
  • 15-25% is average. There might be a problem with your email copy, so it’s worth checking out
  • <15% may have a deliverability issue in addition to poor subject lines and content ideas.

Reply rate:

  • 15-20% of total emails sent is great and means your overall execution is on point.
  • 10-15% is solid.
  • Less than 10% means your content may be subpar, especially if there’s a big gap between opens and replies.

Don’t forget to compare your current campaigns to your past campaigns, as this can help you identify new or recurring weaknesses in your process. You may not necessarily be able to adjust your outreach mid-campaign, but you can use these use insights to inform future campaigns in addition to industry trends.

If you have any outreach personalization experiences, tips, or questions you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave us a comment below to join the conversation.

 

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Open and Click Through Tracking https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/open-and-click-through-tracking/ Tue, 31 Jan 2017 21:39:55 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4860   In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use BuzzStream’s open and click through tracking. Say I’m sending outreach for my campaign, and I’m including links to a blog post, a webinar sign up page, and to my website. To be able to see who’s opened my email, and to see which links they clicked, I’ll click on the dog icon in my outreach module and select Track Opens and Track Link clicks. I can also select add or edit link, to add another link to be tracked, or edit an existing link. Once I finish personalizing my outreach and click “send,” BuzzStream will track my opens and link clicks going forward. To see a contact’s history of opening your emails and clicking your links, you can open a contact’s record, and you’ll see how many times they clicked on a link appear next to the emails under the History. When you expand the messages, you’ll see where the recipients clicked. If I’d like to organize your contacts based on their email activity, you can add the related columns by clicking on the plus sign, then selecting Email Activity, and choosing from Email Link Clicks, Email Opens, Last Opened, and Last Clicked. You can also filter your contacts by their email activity to quickly review those who have engaged in specific actions.

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use BuzzStream’s open and click through tracking.

Say I’m sending outreach for my campaign, and I’m including links to a blog post, a webinar sign up page, and to my website. To be able to see who’s opened my email, and to see which links they clicked, I’ll click on the dog icon in my outreach module and select Track Opens and Track Link clicks.

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I can also select add or edit link, to add another link to be tracked, or edit an existing link. Once I finish personalizing my outreach and click “send,” BuzzStream will track my opens and link clicks going forward.

To see a contact’s history of opening your emails and clicking your links, you can open a contact’s record, and you’ll see how many times they clicked on a link appear next to the emails under the History. When you expand the messages, you’ll see where the recipients clicked.

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If I’d like to organize your contacts based on their email activity, you can add the related columns by clicking on the plus sign, then selecting Email Activity, and choosing from Email Link Clicks, Email Opens, Last Opened, and Last Clicked.

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You can also filter your contacts by their email activity to quickly review those who have engaged in specific actions.

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How to Connect Your Gmail to BuzzStream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/connect-gmail/ Wed, 11 Jan 2017 08:27:13 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4990 The post How to Connect Your Gmail to BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

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ARCHIVED How to Connect Your Exchange/Office365 Email Address to BuzzStream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-connect-your-exchangeoffice365-email/ Tue, 10 Jan 2017 07:51:48 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4982 In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Exchange or Office365 email account to BuzzStream. First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the Exchange icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your Exchange email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text. You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one. Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for Exchange’s IMAP Server, outlook.office365.com, then enter your email credentials, hit save and your Exchange email address has been connected.

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Exchange or Office365 email account to BuzzStream. First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the Exchange icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your Exchange email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text.

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You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one.

Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for Exchange’s IMAP Server, outlook.office365.com, then enter your email credentials, hit save and your Exchange email address has been connected.

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ARCHIVED Adding Users to Your Account https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/adding-users/ Mon, 09 Jan 2017 23:10:13 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4836 In this video and article, you’ll learn how to add users in BuzzStream to get your whole team on the same page when running your outreach campaigns. To add a user to BuzzStream, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner, then click “Settings.” From here, navigate to the left menu and select Manage Users. Here, you’ll see the list of users who are currently associated with your BuzzStream account. You can edit a user to update their information or access to projects, or add a new user by clicking the “Add User” button. When adding a new user, you’ll need to provide their Name, Email, Role, and which projects you’d like them to have access to. After that, hit save, and your user has been added.

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In this video and article, you’ll learn how to add users in BuzzStream to get your whole team on the same page when running your outreach campaigns.

To add a user to BuzzStream, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner, then click “Settings.”

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From here, navigate to the left menu and select Manage Users.

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Here, you’ll see the list of users who are currently associated with your BuzzStream account. You can edit a user to update their information or access to projects, or add a new user by clicking the “Add User” button.

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When adding a new user, you’ll need to provide their Name, Email, Role, and which projects you’d like them to have access to. After that, hit save, and your user has been added.

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ARCHIVED How to Connect Your Outlook.Com Email to Buzzstream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/connect-outlookcom-email/ Mon, 09 Jan 2017 08:01:41 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4984 In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Outlook.com email account to BuzzStream. First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the other icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your outlook.com email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text. You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one. Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for outlook’s imap server, imap-mail.outlook.com, then enter your email credentials, then hit next. After that, you’ll connect your outgoing mail by entering the url for outlook’s SMTP server, smtp-mail.outlook.com, then entering your email credentials. Once that’s done, hit save, and your outlook.com email address has been connected.

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Outlook.com email account to BuzzStream.

First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the other icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your outlook.com email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text.

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You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one.

Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for outlook’s imap server, imap-mail.outlook.com, then enter your email credentials, then hit next. After that, you’ll connect your outgoing mail by entering the url for outlook’s SMTP server, smtp-mail.outlook.com, then entering your email credentials. Once that’s done, hit save, and your outlook.com email address has been connected.

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ARCHIVED How to Connect Your Yahoo Email to BuzzStream https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/connect-yahoo-email/ Sun, 08 Jan 2017 08:22:04 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4988 In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Yahoo email account to BuzzStream. First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the other icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your yahoo email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text. You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one. Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for Yahoo’s IMAP server, imap.mail.yahoo.com, then enter your yahoo email credentials, then hit next. After that, you’ll connect your outgoing mail by entering the url for Yahoo’s SMTP server, smtp.mail.yahoo.com, then entering your yahoo email credentials. Once that’s done, hit save, and your yahoo email address has been connected.

The post ARCHIVED How to Connect Your Yahoo Email to BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to connect your Yahoo email account to BuzzStream.

First, click on the gear in the upper righthand corner and select Settings. Then, from the lefthand menu, select Connect to email. From here, click on the other icon, and it will open a pop up where you’ll enter your yahoo email address and password, along with your description, signature and unsubscribe text. You’ll also be able to set who can see emails from this account, who can send emails from this account, and your daily send limit if you’d like one.

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Next, to connect your incoming mail, you’ll enter the url for Yahoo’s IMAP server, imap.mail.yahoo.com, then enter your yahoo email credentials, then hit next. After that, you’ll connect your outgoing mail by entering the url for Yahoo’s SMTP server, smtp.mail.yahoo.com, then entering your yahoo email credentials. Once that’s done, hit save, and your yahoo email address has been connected.

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ARCHIVED Modifying Your Plan https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/modifying-your-plan/ Sun, 08 Jan 2017 06:03:07 +0000 https://www.buzzstream.com/?p=4958 In this lesson, you’ll learn how to modify your BuzzStream plan to make sure BuzzStream fits your changing needs. Let’s say your outreach team has grown and you want to upgrade your BuzzStream plan to include more users. Click on the gear in the upper right hand corner, then select Settings. From the left menu, select Account. You’ll see your current plan, then be able to adjust your plan by clicking Adjust your plans. From here, simply select your desired plan, number of users, and hit Continue. Next, enter your payment information, and hit Place Order, and your BuzzStream Plan has been modified. If you know you’ll be using BuzzStream long-term and would like to receive a substantial discount, you can switch to annual pricing in the bottom righthand corner, and you’ll get two months free.

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to modify your BuzzStream plan to make sure BuzzStream fits your changing needs.

Let’s say your outreach team has grown and you want to upgrade your BuzzStream plan to include more users. Click on the gear in the upper right hand corner, then select Settings. From the left menu, select Account.

Screen Shot 2017-02-01 at 11.57.07 PMYou’ll see your current plan, then be able to adjust your plan by clicking Adjust your plans. From here, simply select your desired plan, number of users, and hit Continue. Next, enter your payment information, and hit Place Order, and your BuzzStream Plan has been modified.

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If you know you’ll be using BuzzStream long-term and would like to receive a substantial discount, you can switch to annual pricing in the bottom righthand corner, and you’ll get two months free.

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