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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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It’s a buyer’s market.   

Over the past few years, there’s been an explosion of growth in the digital marketing space.  Experts and gurus abound, providing a wealth of educational information to prospective clients (both good and bad).

Competition is a great thing. It forces agencies and consultants to constantly improve their game, and it provides increasing value to businesses and individuals seeking to hire these professionals to deliver the results they desperately need.

As a content marketer, I can speak directly to how this proliferation of competition is shaping my own approach. I would venture to guess, however, that my thesis could hold true for other types of consultancies and agencies.

Put simply: In a buyer’s market, the onus should be on the provider to prove their value before being hired.

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When we launched the BuzzBar 3 weeks ago, our customers loved it. 

But our customers wanted more.  They wanted to use the BuzzBar on any list of sites.  They wanted to tag sites.  They wanted to view their history with a site, and assign it a rating and relationship stage. And if they found something cool, they wanted to write a note.

Presenting the Bigger, Better BuzzBar

The BuzzStream team listened to customer feedback, went back to the lab, and made the BuzzBar better.  Today, we’re proud to show you the next evolution of the BuzzBar:

Now, you can:

Use the BuzzBar on Any Site

You can use the BuzzBar with more than just prospecting results – now any site can be browsed using the BuzzBar.  Want to sort through your competitor’s backlinks and rapidly qualify the good opportunities?  How about look through Twitter influencer’s websites you’ve sourced from Followerwonk? We’ve got you covered with the new BuzzBar.

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 Content marketing evangelists have spoken – “Create great content that appeals to your customers and you’ll profit.”

While this is true, marketers often forget the importance of promoting their content – people don’t find content by mistake, or by accident.  Every content plan needs a complementary promotion plan that combines paid, owned, and earned media. 

Beyond Simple Sharing on Corporate Social Accounts

I was watching a video where one content marketing evangelist went through the strategy and creation of content in great detail, but completely ignored the importance of promoting content.

He suggested that marketers should share it from corporate social accounts, and share it with employees, so they could share it if they wanted.

While these strategies are an acceptable start, they overlook the simple fact that for the vast majority of companies (unless you’re a market-leading megabrand), simply publishing content gets them nothing resembling good results.

It’s like writing the great America novel and leaving it on your doorstep.  Or creating a baseball diamond in a cornfield in Kansas.  Only in the movies do random strangers find your great things and make them a big deal.  In the real world, you have to work hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you’re doing.

But that’s why marketers have jobs right?

Building Your Promotion Plan Across Paid, Earned and Owned Media

While it’s become a something of a buzzword, thinking about your content promotion plan in the ‘Paid-Earned-Owned’ matrix is a useful cognitive pattern. 

The Altimeter Group Converged Media Model

Across your companies paid, owned, and earned channels, how will you promote your beautiful piece of content?  How will you get the word out and ensure the right people see it and share it?  This can’t be taken care of as end piece – these questions have to be answered before you ever start your content creation efforts.

Owned Media: Using Your Permission Marketing Assets

We’ll start with owned assets – they tend to be the simplest to discuss in this context.

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I. On Content Inspiration

Inspiration Comes Anytime

“After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.” – Henry Miller

Become familiar with thinking of content topics in your spare time. As you read or consume popular or viral content, think about why you like it, why you want to share it, and how the content was unique. You will find that by doing this regularly you will soon have ideas “pop” into your head at random moments. Just don’t forget to write them down!

Draw Inspiration from Experience, and Desire to Gather Experiences

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

Having a broad array of interests, experiences and knowledge can be hugely helpful to a proficient content marketer. Compelling content often comes from tying together disparate ideas or topics in a new way. Strive to learn about many different things and be genuinely interested in the world around you. Knowledge sponges and those who love learning tend to make the best content marketers.

Step Outside of Yourself and Your Routine

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.” – Toni Morrison

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