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Today’s post comes from BuzzStream customer Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko.com. He started his SEO career back in 2008, when article directories and blog comment backlinks were all the rage. Since then he’s built his namesake on discovering and sharing outside the box link building strategies.

Let’s face it: email outreach link building is monotonous, boring, and time consuming.

But you know what? It works!

In fact, I don’t know what I would do without my secret stash of proven email outreach templates. But I do know one thing: I wouldn’t be ranking for anything remotely competitive.

If you use BuzzStream then you don’t need any convincing about the power of email outreach. You already use the tool to build relationships (and links) with the movers and shakers in your niche.

That’s great.

But you may not realize what a small difference in conversions can make in your campaigns.

Think about it this way: let’s say that you send out 500 emails per month with a 2% conversion rate. That’s 120 links per year.

Not bad.

But if you bump that figure up to 5% you can turn those same emails into 300 links!

Today I’m going to share with you 6 simple ways that you can get more links from every batch of emails that you send out.

#1: Separate Your Prospects Into Tiers

Outreach is a give and take between personalization and speed. The more you personalize, the better your responses. But all that personalization takes time.

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NEWSFLASH!   Despite what you’ve read, your “epic content” isn’t going to magically go viral seconds after you click the publish button. There is no content marketing fairy. Like it or not, you’re going to have to work hard to promote your content. I mean really hard.

“Well, Hi Paul….Bad Start to the Day?”

Why the rant? Well, Cyrus Shepard wrote a fantastic “blueprint for ranking” post recently on the Moz blog (one of the best posts of the year, IMO). I found myself nodding in agreement throughout it…until I got to the end and read this: 

“This blueprint contains 25 steps to rank your content, but only the last three address link building. Why so few? Because 90% of your effort should go into creating great content, and 10% into link building.”

In fairness to Cyrus, there’s more nuance to his thoughts than this quote conveys, but this fits into a theme that seems to be gaining momentum in some circles.

I first saw Rand propose this at a Distilled conference I attended last year. The presentation was titled “F*** Link Building, Content Marketing FTW!” I’m paraphrasing, but in this presentation he said something to the effect of:

“I have this awesome link building tool…you should totally get it. Every time I use it, I get links from 400 unique domains. It’s called the publish button.”

Here’s the Reality

Look, I agree with most of Rand’s ideas about SEO (and marketing in general for that matter), but the suggestion that active outreach and promotion is unnecessary is making me crazy. It’s simply unrealistic. 

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Hey friends, I have a problem. You might have one, too.  

Google is sunsetting Google Reader, and that’s going to prevent a lot of our subscribers – good folks like you – from reading the BuzzStream blog.

I suspect you might have the same problem with your blog, so I wanted to show you how to get your subscribers onto Feedly, an awesome new RSS Reader.

What’s Feedly?

Feedly is a new RSS reader.  I anticipate it will become the dominant player in its category, due to its excellent user experience and great design.  It also offers several key advantages to web publishers – so I suggest you jump on the Feed.ly bandwagon and try to move your Google Reader subscribers to it, before you lose them.

(The other major option here is to attempt to move those subscribers to email.  Now this discussion is outside the scope of this post, and email is certainly a great choice, depending on your audience.)

What Do My Visitors Experience in Feedly?

Feedly creates a beautiful, customized news homepage for you, based on the stuff you like:

Individual posts look like this:

Pretty great, eh?  There’s also versions for Chrome and Firefox, as well as Kindle and Android devices.

How Do I Get Them to Subscribe to Feedly?

So now, you need to get your visitors to both a) start using Feedly, and b) add your site to their account.

Fortunately, Feedly has some one-click subscribe and download buttons.  They keep these hidden in a .ZIP file, but you can find them here.

According to Feedly, the Feedly button will:

You can choose a button image Feedly has provided, or make your own.

The buttons look (and work) like this:

You can create your own feedly subscribe link by linking to your feed URL appended to http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/.  So if I wanted to make that button that automatically subscribes you to BuzzStream’s feed via Feedly, I would go with a link to http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/BuzzStreamFeed. 

How Feedly Helps Web Publishers

Feedly, in addition to giving you a great way to save your readers from the forthcoming Google Reader Apocalypse, has a number of pretty rad featuers from a publishing perspective:

Encourages Sharing across Various Networks

Feedly has pretty solid social buttons, including some those for some less common services:

Claim Your Hashtag and Control Your Brand Searches

You can claim your hashtag on feedly, and thus control what results appear for brand searches in the reader.  It’s easy – you just need to fill out a Google Spreadsheet – and the Feedly team does the rest.

Get Your Blog Featured

 If you fall into certain categories – like design or business – your blog can get featured by Feedly, and you can gain hundreds of new subscribers.  You can learn more here on their publisher’s page.

P.S. Don’t Forget to Subscribe to the BuzzStream Feed

Google Reader will end, and you might not be able to read this blog any more.  Make sure you get Feedly and subscribe to the BuzzStream feed here:

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Todays’s post come from one of our favorite customers, Lexi Mills. Lexi has six years experience in online marketing and communications and spent 2 and a half years at an International SEO Agency becoming an SEO PR specialist.  She now heads up digital for Dynamo PR.

She has designed and implemented PR, SEO link building, and social campaigns in the UK and USA for B2B and B2C clients.  Her client experience covers everything from the music industry to debt, insurance, travel, tech, and luxury goods for both small start-ups and big brands.

Outreach is a tricky game, if you promote yourself too aggressively, you will turn off the very people you were hoping to build relationships with. Having worked in PR and outreach for several years I have relationships in quite a few areas however I was recently set the tasked of building relationships in a new market, specifically with design and decorating blogs for my client Bathrooms.com

I put a lot of thought into how I would go about doing this and thought it might be useful to share the strategy I mapped out with our head of social for contacting influential bloggers in a new market, so you can apply the tactics we used to your own outreach projects.

After the first few months of implementing the strategy I also went back and quizzed the key bloggers we were speaking to find out which parts of our approach made them want to engage with us.  I have summarized these into 6 key takeaways.

Our Outreach Strategy

1.) Build list of influencers

Attempt to build a list of the 100 most influential bloggers in your target niche. (We actually built a list of 200 to begin with and then eliminated a hundred further down the line.)

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Despite the obvious advantages of an industry event, many marketers don’t take advantage of these situations for link building. Since industry leaders, peers and interested attendees are all gathered in one place, you can’t afford to miss out on this chance to build your online network. But, how can you break through the noise and develop compelling content from an industry event? Well, that’s where video comes in.

 It’s becoming more difficult to conduct outreach and get a featured post. Now, more than ever, you need compelling content to entice webmasters and business owners to include your material. Video is one of the best ways you can differentiate your content.

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The BuzzBar keeps getting better.  This week, we added Outreach capabilities to the BuzzBar. Now you can connect with bloggers and influencers, without ever leaving their site.

Outreach in Action

Enough of my carrying on – go open your BuzzStream account and see how much more effective the BuzzBar can make you. (If by some tragic oversight you do not yet have a BuzzStream account, you can sign up for one here.)

Start by selecting some contacts, and opening them in the BuzzBar.  Find a site you’d like to reach out to – maybe for a guest post, a product review, or perhaps to say thank you for a media mention – and then select ‘Outreach’ from the top of the BuzzBar:

Now the Outreach Module will appear  at the bottom of the screen.  You’ll still be able to see the site – so you can match the tone and voice of blog in your pitch, and reference recent posts or contribution guidelines.

Click inside the text editor, and email away!  The text editor will expand – and now you can use all of your templates, email addresses, and other information from your BuzzStream account.  You can also schedule emails and send them in the future – so if that blogger is in a different time zone, you can reach them while they’re in front of their computer.

Please let us know what you think – drop us an email at support@buzzstream.com, leave a comment, or tweet us @BuzzStream.  Because of technical decisions made in the BuzzBar’s development, we can improve it rapidly. We read every single message, and we’d love to hear from you as we continue to make BuzzStream more powerful and easier to use.

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Pitching content and doing blogger outreach isn’t rocket science.  At its most basic level, securing placements for great content is all about understanding what publishers want.  

More often than not, writers, editors and bloggers are looking for content that is useful, fresh, timely, and will provide their readers with something nobody else can give them.  

As an agency specializing in viral content creation and promotion, we’ve written and spoken quite a bit about the emotional drivers that enhance virality and that increase the chances for content to be linked to.    

What we don’t talk nearly as much about is the importance of relevance and freshness, as well as the ability of pitched content to “contribute to the unfolding story.”

Adding to the Unfolding Story

Mining current events is a highly effective technique for content marketers looking to achieve widespread exposure.  Entering into a conversation already taking place, and adding value there, is perhaps one of the simplest methods for engaging an audience and generating interactions across a large network of people.

The key is to examine an issue or topic, then find ways to supplement what is already being said in a useful way.  With nearly any newsworthy topic, there are a number of things to look for when considering opportunities to create supplemental content.

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Today’s post comes from Britt Klontz. Britt is a New Media brand journalist who believes that a successful marketing campaign is rooted in the interests and emotions of the target audience.  She constantly strives to develop content ideas and campaign strategies that integrate collaboration from online influencers and truly serve a purpose to those who matter most, the audience that the campaign was created for.  

As the popularity of infographics grew and were created in an abundance, so did the number of pitches sent to the inboxes of influential bloggers everywhere.  Companies quickly jumped on the infographic bandwagon, churned out visuals that have no real reason to exist, and contributed to today’s content clutter epidemic. 

When infographics that are not useful or entertaining are created in mass quantity, an insane amount of pressure is put on those whose duty is to perform blogger outreach.  Ultimately, a vicious cycle ensues in which blogger outreach specialists have to spend hours trying to receive coverage on content that was created in haste and had no other purpose than to keep up with the status quo.

From a content creation standpoint, we must remember the importance of quality over quantity.  Also, we must make it a habit to create content that caters to those intended to consume it.  Engaging content is now a leading form of advertising and the power of audience participation should never be underestimated. 

In order to avoid adding to the noise by creating another infographic that produces a low ROI, I like to incorporate two key habits into my brainstorming habits:  developing an audience persona, and incorporating influencer feedback. 

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When I get into work, I start my day by looking for mentions of BuzzStream.  This isn’t mere vanity (although vanity is certainly involved) – it’s vital to our link building, branding, and evangelism strategy.

As it turns out, this isn’t as easy as it should be.  After trying out several different services, I’m back to setting Google to 24 hours and doing brand searches, often with ever-growing strings of “-site:someothersite.com”.  (It turns out a lot of people like to call the feeds in their app buzzstreams. Who knew.)

So, I was overjoyed when SEOmoz announced their newest product, Fresh Web Explorer.  FWE indexes more than 4 million RSS feeds, and searches for mentions of any term. 

It also has a solid set of advanced operators, so you can do things like search for mentions that don’t link, or mentions on a specific site.

And because of the crowdsourced feedback, the product will just get better and better.  Finally, a great tool for monitoring your mentions, your competitor’s mentions, mentions of products or executives, and more.

How to Take Action on Brand Mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start at the Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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