Outreach is an essential component of any linkbuilding campaign, but it can also be a super time consuming one. This is especially true if you approach outreach and linkbuilding as relationship building.
So as someone who spends a lot of time on outreach campaigns, I’m a fan of anything that help me be more efficient or makes my life easier. And Buzzstream definitely does that. For those of you not familiar, Buzzstream is a tool that helps manage and organize outreach.
Basically, if I was stuck on a desert island, and could only take one SEO tool, I would choose Buzzstream. I’ve been a longtime champion of the tool-- but with its recent release of the Buzzmarker extension, it has become even more critical to my workflow. Why? Because the Buzzmarker is like an outreach Swiss army knife-- there are so many different ways to use it!
Prospecting & Qualifying
When prospecting, I think it's really important to be able to look at a site and determine if it's a good match. A site might look great on paper with awesome metrics, but may have other red flags that make it a no-go (for example: an existing relationship with a competitor or not having a great voice or tone to the blog). The Buzzmarker is great for this because you can quickly scan through the site and get a feel for it-- then easily add it to Buzzstream, if appropriate, without ever leaving the page. You can also quickly identify if you or someone on your team has an existing relationship with the site.
The Buzzmarker has 3 main functions:
- Buzzmark this Page- This allows you to quickly add or update a contact in Buzzstream
- Highlight Contacts in Buzzstream- Using this feature, you can see at a glance which prospects in a list are in your current project or other projects in Buzzstream, which really facilitates collaboration and allows you to leverage relationships
- Create a Prospecting List- Create a prospect list from any list of links, then qualify sites at a glance and see outreach history
Though the tool doesn't include site metrics, the Mozbar plays well with the Buzzmarker, giving you everything you need to qualify a prospect in one place.
Get Creative
What's really cool is that though it was seemingly designed with the SERPs in mind, there are so many next level and creative uses for it beyond using Google.
Reddit can be a time suck, or it can be an awesome prospecting source. Why? At its core, Reddit is a crowdsourced collection of links (“the front page of the internet”), which makes it a perfect compliment to the Buzzmarker.
For niche clients and websites, it's an awesome way to find sites that people your target demo are already reading and sharing. Subreddits like r/gamernews are great because it aggregates news, so there are typically links to blogs or news sites as opposed to videos or images. The tactic also works with sites like Inbound.org or Hacker News.
Blog Rolls
I've mentioned using blog rolls as prospecting source before, but it's even easier with the Buzzmarker. If you find a site you like and is a good fit, looking at the blogs they read to find other prospects is really smart. Why? People tend to follow and recommend people that are similar to themselves-- so you likely have an already sourced and partially qualified list of sites.
Before when you wanted to crawl blog rolls, you needed to use a tool like Scrape Similar, which would generate a Google doc with your prospects. Buzzmarker eliminates that step and lets you move straight to qualifying.
Other Awesome Uses
The awesome thing about the Buzzmarker is that it works on any list of links, so there's tons of potential uses. Two of my other favorites:
- Buzzsumo; This is one of my favorite new tools AND one of my favorite ways to use the Buzzmarker to prospect. There are a couple of really good tutorials out there already, so instead of rehashing what they said, I encourage you to check out Paddy Moogan's post or Buzzstream University.
- Ahrefs: Want to create a prospecting list from the backlinks of a similar asset or competitor? Check out this detailed tutorial direct from Buzzstream
Outreach
Buzzstream just rolled out a new feature to the Buzzmarker last week, which integrated outreach into the tool. You can now send outreach, right from the prospect's page, without ever needing to go into the Buzzstream interface. When I heard the announcement this was my reaction:
Why did this feature make my day? It is awesome news for a couple of reasons:
- It streamlines the process. You can now go from prospecting to outreach within seconds.
- You can actually see the prospect you're reaching out to, while you're doing it. This is a really helpful feature, because it allows you to easily personalize the message-- which makes it seem much more authentic and genuine.
It's really user friendly and feels very similar to Gmail's compose:
With the Buzzmarker, you basically have everything you need to conduct outreach from start to finish at your finger tips. That's definitely a tool I want in my arsenal!
Do you love Buzzstream as much as I do? Have an awesome use? Tweet me @up_for_GRABS89 or share it the comments section!
