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BuzzStream Best Practices

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BuzzStream is a great tool that streamlines your content marketing, outreach and link building efforts. This post outlines some best practices to follow while using BuzzStream.com.

Influencer Outreach

Influencer outreach is an old concept which is now gaining in popularity. This method is one of the best for marketing your content and gaining thousands of new site visitors.

Generally influencers have very little time to spare. They’re inboxes are flooded daily with various requests. When you add your email into the mix, you’re taking even more of their precious time away.

Here’s how you can efficiently utilize BuzzStream to improve the odds of your email being seen and acted on.

Who Are the Influencers?

You need to know who the influencers in your field are. When researching influencers, look for those which incorporate the 3R’s:

  • Reach (number of followers)
  • Relevance (fit in well with your industry?)
  • Resonance (retweet/share ratio high? Engagement power)

Using the online training industry as an example, 3 main types of influencers would be:

  1. Bloggers / Thought Leaders
    • Udemy.com
    • Lynda.com
    • Litmos.com
  2. Journalists / Industry News Sites
    • eLearningIndustry.com
    • TrainingIndustry.com
  3. Peers
    • TotalTraining.com
    • 360Training.com
    • TeamTreeHouse.com

BuzzMarker Extension

The first step to take when beginning to use BuzzStream is to install the BuzzMarker. This extension greatly reduces the time it will take to research and collect contact information.
After signing into BuzzStream, look to the left hand pane and select Setup Buzzmarker.

buzzmarker-buzzstream

buzzmarker

Researching Influencers

To go about finding the influencers, we suggest the following 3 different methods.
Ask Google

To start looking for influential bloggers, do a regular Google search for bloggers in your industry. Alternatively, try other keywords such as: product names, service names, etc.
From a search for “eLearning bloggers”, you can see in the screenshot below the wealth of information in the search results.
BuzzMarker is a great tool for efficiently going through search result pages or for using on most of the “Top 10 eLearning Blog” type pages. We will demonstrate this in the next section.

influencer-research

BuzzSumo

Using BuzzSumo.com, you can search for the most shared content for any term you type in. Simply go to the search bar:

buzzsumo

You can further narrow down the results with the filters on the left pane. The most common filters are by date or content type.

For example, this one article has been shared by 46,600 people! This gives you an idea of the type of content you should be creating from the sheer number of people who have engaged with this article and shared it with their followers.

To view the specific people who have shared this article (and who in turn may share your similar article), click on:

View Sharers

buzzsumo-shares

From here, go through the top several results and find those who have a high follower count and those who tend to share content often.

BuzzStream Discovery
buzzstream-discoveryBuzzStream’s Discovery tool lets you enter a keyword or phrase that people in your industry would be interested in and it returns influencers who write about that topic.

From the results, you can filter by:

• Number of followers
• Last post date
• Domain authority of the site they post on
• Etc.

We will go more in depth on the Discovery Tool further later in this article.

BuzzMarker Guide

Whether you’re manually Googling to find prospects to reach out to or have found an awesome “Top 10 Blogs” type page, BuzzMarker is the tool to help you from here.

buzzmarker-guideYou can start using the BuzzMarker tool by doing the following:

1. Right-click on the page.
2. Hover over: BuzzStream Buzzmarker.
3. Select: Create a prospecting list.

On the right side of the search results or article page, you will see the following:

buzzstream-prospecting

 

To remove any sites you don’t like from this list, hover over them and click on the trash bin icon. Or, just click the “Start Prospecting” button at the bottom.

Once you Start Prospecting, a new browser tab will open (so you don’t lose your original search results page).

Here you can go through each of the pages in the prospecting list via the horizontal navigation menu on the bottom:

link-prospecting

BuzzMarker will automatically populate with contact information for each site. Some of which include:

• Contact names
• Social media accounts
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses

For items it doesn’t find, you can manually go through the site, find the information and enter it into the BuzzMarker fields.

What we love about BuzzMarker is that you can organize each prospect via:

Website Type

website-type

Tags

tags

Moving down the BuzzMarker list, you can further organize via:

Project
Assignee – BuzzStream makes it easy for teams. Simply assign this prospect to a member of your team.
Relationship Stage

relationship-stage

Overall Rating – How important is this prospect?

overall-rating

Add a note – Any reminders to yourself about this prospect or notes to a team member.
Example of the filled out sections:

add-a-note

Note: Remember BuzzSumo.com? By right clicking anywhere on the results page, you can select BuzzStream Buzzmarker – Create a prospecting list to efficiently make use of both tools.

BuzzStream Discovery

Navigate to BuzzStream Discovery here or from within BuzzStream, click on the menu next to your project name and “Discovery”.

buzzstream-discovery-stage

At the first screen, type in the keyword or phrase you want to search for.

buzzstream-influencer

BuzzStream recently mentioned that they now have the following advanced search operators to help narrow down your results. They are:

buzzstream-search-operators

Each result shows the following information:

• Name and Twitter URL.
• Websites they are an author on.
• Bio and Location.
• Relevant articles.

buzzstream-example

Note: Twitter sharing stats for their written articles will not be shown since Twitter recently pulled their API access.

buzzstream-prospectWhen you view their full profile, BuzzStream allows you to dive even deeper. The first thing to look at is the Engagement & Activity Levels on the right-hand side.

The Engagement Level shows the overall reach and amplification of the influencer via number of twitter followers and average shares per post.

The Activity Level shows how involved and active they are within the industry and with their followers. It shows the number of posts in the last year, frequency of posting and when they published their most recent post.

This example shows a great influencer prospect to reach out to!

The main profile view shows 3 tabs:

• Content
• Footprint
• Network

The first tab, Content, is the default view. It shows a sample of their articles, where and when they were published, a snippet and social shares (minus Twitter).

For some influencers, such as this example, they have hundreds of articles. You will want to use the “filter content” link to the right of the search bar. Filtering options are self-explanatory.

buzzstream-discovery-filter

The second tab is the Footprint section which basically gives you an idea of their online footprint. You can get a measure of their influence here via Twitter data and Domain Authority of the sites they contribute to.

footprint-tab-buzzstream

Lastly, there’s the Network tab.
This is quite an interesting graph. It shows who the person is influenced by (green circles) and who he influences (blue circles). At times it’s a great graph to show you how various influencers in your industry are connected.

network-tab-buzzstream

add-to-projectAfter reviewing this wealth of data for the influencer, the next question is: Do you want to proceed and reach out to him/her? Simply click on the upper-right hand corner icon, Add to project.

Outreach

BuzzStream Main View

Back in the main BuzzStream dashboard is where you will see any sites you have added via BuzzMarker. It will show you any discovered and automatically filled in data as well as the Relationship Stage.

buzzstream-main-view

Click on the name of the prospect here and you will be rewarded with a significant amount of data as well as any tasks, notes, tags and correspondence.

If you want to manually add in various sites (not through BuzzMarker), simply click on the Add Websites button. You have a couple options in here. Most of the time you will be “adding from a list of URLs”.

add-websites

BuzzStream Outreach

BuzzStream makes email correspondence with influencers as easy as possible.

To start, simply click on the Outreach tab and select Create Template.

buzzstream-outreach

To send emails directly from BuzzStream, you need to provide it access to your email account. Click on whichever email you are going to use. (ie. Gmail, Exchange, etc.…)

buzzstream-email

In the next screen, give the template a name and decide if you want to share it with your team.

buzzstream-email-template

Start creating your email template and utilize the Dynamic Fields on the right of the window. Drag and drop them into your email template. When it’s time to email, it will auto populate for you.

buzzstream-dynamic-fields

Email Outreach

You can send emails from within BuzzStream or straight from the BuzzMarker extension.

From BuzzMarker, while you’re on the page and finished filling in the prospect’s information, you have an option to email them. Click on the email icon on the left.

send-buzzstream-emails

Alternatively, from within BuzzStream you can select the prospect who you want to email by clicking on the checkbox beside their name. Then, click on the Outreach tab and Start Outreach.

buzzstream-start-outreach

After you’ve sent off an email to the first prospect on your list, BuzzStream will fill in the email template for the next prospect. You can send emails very quickly this way.

What’s better is that you can track all outgoing and incoming emails.

It’s a good idea to create multiple email templates and test which works better. To find out which email template is working better for you, go back to the Outreach tab -> Manage Templates. Here it will show the actual open and reply rates.

Link Building

BuzzStream is great for organization and keeping everything in one centralized place for your team. It keeps track of your outreach with influencers and also keeps track of backlinks.

Once your influencer has told you they’ve posted your article or built a link to your site, sign into BuzzStream and make a note of it.

There are two locations where you can do this.

1. Websites View

website-view

Find your prospect in the list and click on their name. Click on Add Link, fill out the fields and click “save”.

buzzstream-add-link

2. Link Monitoring View

link-monitoring-view

Click on Add Links and Add from List of URLs.

add-links

Regardless of the way you jot down your shiny new backlink, BuzzStream will automatically check on that backlink every couple of weeks. It will tell you if there’s been any change, such as a change in the anchor text, do-follow to no-follow or if it’s been deleted. How great is that?!

You can also have BuzzStream search and email you any backlinks pointing to your URL which you may have not seen.

check-backlinks

Metamend is an SEO and online marketing agency with clients around the globe. We are more than happy to answer any questions you have regarding your current or future SEO strategy.
Request a quote today to get started!

The post BuzzStream Best Practices appeared first on Metamend.


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