Lots of new BuzzStream features to talk about.  The addition we’re most excited about is the Outreach Module, which we think has the potential to significantly improve the quality and speed of your outreach efforts…if BuzzStream were an 80′s teen sitcom, then this would most certainly be our “very special holiday episode.”  Some might even say that it’s the most shocking episode of BuzzStream yet.

Now that you’re done rolling your eyes, let’s take a look at the new stuff.

New Feature: The Outreach Module

The Outreach Module gives you a way to conduct broad-based outreach, but without sacrificing personalization.  You’ve told us that the way you often conduct outreach is to create a list, select a template and then customize it for each person to make it relevant to them (based on their interests, your relationship with them, their location, etc.).  You’ve also told us that the process is time-consuming and not as effective as it could be because: a) you don’t have a quick and easy way to segment your list and apply a template to them, b) you’re bouncing between your email client and all of your sources of info for each person, and c) it can be hard to keep track of the status of the outreach efforts (e.g., who still needs to be contacted, who requires follow-up, etc.).

To address this, the Outreach Module makes it easy to segment your contacts into a list, apply a template to your contacts and then view the relationship info needed to personalize your emails without ever leaving the email. It also ties into BuzzStream’s task management and contact filtering capabilities to help you keep track of the contacts that require follow-up.

The Outreach Module is pretty simple…there are three steps to it:

1) Segment your contacts into an outreach list using BuzzStream’s filtering capabilities

2) Create an email template, which will serve as a starting point for each email you send

3) Personalize each email and send

The personalization step is where the fun begins.   For each contact in your list, BuzzStream provides you with the contact record information on the same screen as the email you’re writing to them (populated with the template).  All of the information about the contact is on the left-hand side and the email is on the right-hand side.  You can hover over any articles, links, notes, etc to see all of the info.  By putting this all in one screen, there’s no need to click back and forth searching for emails you’ve sent them in the past, blog posts they’ve written that are relevant to you, notes about them, etc.  And once you’ve personalized the email, just click “Send and go to next contact” and you’ll be taken through your list.

For a full walk-through of the Outreach Module, check out this tutorial.

Thank You!

We took a very different approach to the design of this feature and we owe a big debt of gratitude to all of the people who contributed to the “Help us design the new outreach module” post on GetSatisfaction.  This is the first time we’ve designed a feature in such a public way and I wasn’t sure how effective this approach would be.  The results completely exceeded my expectations. Not only did the feedback have a major impact on the current release, it also gave us outstanding ideas for the next version.  Special thanks to Adria Saracino, Blake Bookstaff,  Jeremy Bencken, Margaret Conway, Jeff Novak, Christine Sadler, and Jools Weller.  You guys rock!

New Feature: Improved Support for Team Discussions

Let’s say you’ve added a contact into BuzzStream and you need to ask a team member if the contact should be added to a campaign.  BuzzStream now better supports contact-specific collaboration by letting you notify people when you add a note.  Just click “notify team members” when you’re adding a note and select the people you want to notify:

They’ll receive an email notifying them that the note has been added and they can access the contact record with one click.

New Feature: Notifications for New Contacts and Overdue Tasks

We’ve added two new email notifications to help you make sure that the activities that are most important to you are getting done.  First, if a task that you assigned to a  team members is due or overdue, you’ll receive notification.  You’ll also receive notification when someone assigns a contact to you.

New Feature: Add a Task to More than One Contact

Suppose you need someone on your team to research a list of contacts to find their email addresses.  Rather than creating a task for each one, you can now associate the task with multiple contacts.  To do this in BuzzStream, I might start by sorting by “email address” to find contacts that don’t have an email address and select these contacts:

Click ‘Edit’ and select “New Task”

If you assign the task to a team member, they’ll receive one email with a link that takes them to the full list of contacts.

New Feature: Bulk Notes

Similar to bulk tasks, we’ve also added the ability to add a note to multiple contacts.  To do this, just select the contacts, click “Edit” and click “Add Note.”

The Outreach Module gives you a way to conduct broad-based outreach, but without sacrificing personalization.  It makes it easy to segment your contacts into a list, apply a template to your contacts and then view the relationship information needed to personalize your emails without ever leaving the email. It also ties into BuzzStream’s task management and contact filtering capabilities to help you keep track of the contacts that require follow-up.  The Outreach Module is available in both BuzzStream for PR and Social Media and BuzzStream for Link Management.

There are four steps to using the Outreach Module:

1. Add your outgoing mail settings in the Settings section
2. Segment your contacts into an outreach list
3. Create an email template, which will serve as a starting point for each email you send
4. Personalize each email and send

Let’s use an example to give you a better sense of how it works.  Suppose I’m working on behalf of a real estate website that’s developed a tool that shows real estate pricing trends by city.  Other sites can plug this tool into their own site to make it more engaging to their readers.  To promote this, one segment I’m going to reach out to is a group I consider “high value, low hanging fruit.”   This group includes local real estate bloggers who:

• we’ve rated as high influence
• have linked to us or written about us in the past, and
• we’ve had conversations with them

The outreach approach will be to:

• send an initial email to everyone in the list
• follow up three days later with anyone who hasn’t responded.

Here are the steps…

Step 1: Add your mail server into the Settings section

BuzzStream sends mail through your mail server (i.e., the same way that you connect to a smartphone), so you first need to enter your outgoing mail server settings..  This can only be done by BuzzStream administrators or someone who is assigned a role that’s been given access to this permission.  To enter your settings, just click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right-hand corner of the application and go to the ‘Mail Server’ tab.  To see the typical email settings for common cloud-based email services (like Gmail), check out the FAQ.

Step 2: Segment your contacts into lists

To create my first segment, I’ll click on ‘Filters’ and select all contacts with the tag “Real Estate”, with an overall rating of ‘High’ or ‘Very High’, Link Status of ‘Yes’, and a Communication History of ‘Any’.

I’ll then click the ‘Save Filter’ link and name it “Low Hanging Fruit – not started”

I’ll also save a filter for the follow-up email…i.e. “show me everyone in this original group whose contact was modified three days ago.”

Step 3: Select the contacts and apply an email template to the segment

I’ll select the contacts that I want to include in this outreach effort and then I’ll click “Email Outreach (click on the image to enlarge).

In this case, I need to create a new template (click on the image to enlarge).

Note that I can use merge fields for some basic personalization (e.g., first name, city, etc.).  You can use your custom fields as merge fields as well.

Once I’ve completed the template, I’ll click “Save and Continue to start personalizing my emails.

Step 4: Personalize emails and send them

Here’s where the fun begins.   For each contact in your list, BuzzStream provides you with the contact record information on the same screen as the email you’ll send them (populated with the template).

All of the information about the contact is on the left-hand side and the email is on the right-hand side.  You can hover over any articles, links, notes, etc to see all of the info.  By putting this all in one screen, there’s no need to click back and forth searching for emails you’ve sent them in the past, blog posts they’ve written that are relevant to you, notes about them, etc.

Once you’ve personalized the email, just click “Send and go to next contact” and you’ll be taken through your list.

We see a lot of generalized link building articles with out there with titles like “Tips and Tricks” or “Top 5 Ways to…”. We wanted to get a bit more specific and hear from our customers about how they operate in their vertical.  We feel context is key to understanding and developing effective link building tactics. Brian Ratzker (@ratzker) of GourmetGiftBaskets.com walks us through a few strategies they’ve recently employed. Brian is a BuzzStream customer and the Online Marketing Manager for GourmetGiftBaskets.com, home to award winning gift baskets, fruit baskets and much more! He is also the personality behind GourmetGiftBaskets.com on Twitter and Facebook.

Linkbaiting is a method of attracting incoming links to your website through a creative endeavor.  Attracting links can be very difficult and the strategies discussed in many articles and blog posts don’t usually make sense for a retail website.  The most successful methods are usually the most creative and not only make your company stand out from your competition but also from everyone else trying to get noticed on regular basis.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to come up with an astronomically crazy idea in order to be successful.  There are many tried and true methods of Linkbaiting that can work for your retail website.

At GourmetGiftBaskets.com, we have dabbled in the astronomical as well as the tried and true.  One of the best ways a retail website can attract links is through brand loyalty.  Unfortunately, in the Gift Baskets industry our customers don’t normally buy our products for themselves, which makes it difficult to create brand loyalty.  Therefore, we need to be extra creative and below are some of the ways we are Linkbaiting.

The Astronomical – On August 15th, 2009, we broke the Guinness Book of World Records record for the World’s Largest Cupcake.  We documented the whole process on our website, hired a PR firm for the event and promoted it on Facebook and Twitter.   This was definitely a big endeavor that attracted a lot of attention, especially from mainstream media.

The Blog Basket – We are regularly writing blog posts that our customers and fans might find interesting, such as 148 Margarita Recipes to Celebrate Cinco de Mayo.  We don’t plan on using our blog as a sales tool but a way to connect with our customers on a personal level and hopefully drive some traffic from long tail keywords in the search engines.  If one of our posts goes viral and attracts a ton of links that would be great but we certainly aren’t counting on that.

Social Media – We are very active on Facebook and Twitter and believe these channels can have a tremendous impact on our business.  We give away Gift Baskets on a weekly basis on both websites to build followers and create brand awareness.  We also try to post links to articles that our followers might find interesting as well as find ways to interact with our fans.  During Easter, we created a fun quiz on Facebook, “What Easter Candy Are You?”, which attracted a lot of attention.

Blogger Outreach – There are many Bloggers that are more than willing to accept free gifts to review products on their Blog and provide giveaways for their readers.  The Linkbaiting value of this strategy doesn’t necessarily come from the links that are posted in these reviews but from the audience that participates in these contests and the increase in brand recognition.  We predominantly use these reviews to increase our followers on Twitter and Facebook.  Just make sure the Bloggers disclose that they didn’t pay for the donated product and give them the leeway to write what they really think.

Besides copying the tactics we are utilizing, I suggest you do research on Linkbaiting and try to find methods that will work for you.  There were articles and blog posts that certainly helped me brainstorm ideas, such as Linkbaiting Hooks and How to Write a Blog Post.  Another piece of important advice when you’re conducting your research, read the comments.  Comments in blog posts can provide some of the best ideas and unfortunately some of the worst but that’s just how research goes.

Remember, Linkbaiting is about attracting links but don’t forget that it also needs to be about building your brand and attracting new business.  In most cases, the links you acquire should just be the icing on the cake and not necessarily your primary focus.  Effective Linkbaiting also requires a tremendous amount of effort and dedication of resources; you need to make sure you’re getting an adequate return on this investment.

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time creating press opportunities… finding people who are interested in your niche, connecting with them, building relationships, and ever so softly pitching your company.

But sometimes journalists go looking for experts. And chance favors the prepared mind. If you know where they look, you can be standing by to help them out. This post covers three free services you can monitor to find PR opportunities.

Traditionally, the major service that connects journalists with experts was ProfNet, which charges both parties experts to participate. I say, “nuts to that” in the digital age. Enter Help A Reporter (HARO). Peter Shankman is an uber-connected PR guru who receives requests from the press (the serious mainstream press) all the time looking for experts of various kinds– anything from professional gardeners to Fortune 100 CTO’s. Peter compiles all of these expert requests and sends out a daily email to his massive subscriber base of PR pros and experts.  Another service, PitchRate.com, launched this year and is similar in concept to HARO but saves expert requests on their website where you can search them (and manage your pitches) and also will send you a daily digest of requests via email. PitchRate is newer, so it has a much smaller user base than HARO.

The newest entrant, ExpertTweet, announced today, was launched by Jeremy Pepper Porter at Journalistics (a fantastic blog, btw).  They take this idea to Twitter. Just follow @experttweet and you’ll see journalists’ expert requests as they’re posted in real-time. I really like this format because the requests are very brief and to-the-point, which makes them easier to follow.  They’re also easier to search and filter using Twitter (more on that in a second).

Filtering

One thing that’s true of all these services is that you’re going to have to read through a lot of irrelevant posts to see the requests that you can act on. Unless you have lots of clients in many different niches, monitoring these services can be like reading through all the For Sale ads on Craigslist to find a kayak.  So, to fix this problem, you need to glue together some RSS feeds and create filters.

How to Filter ExpertTweets

• Create a search Twitter for your keyword like this: from:ExpertTweet “my kw phrase” OR mykeyword2

• Run the search (it’s ok if there aren’t any results at the moment) and right-click “RSS feed for this query” and copy the link location.

• Now go to FeedMyInbox, paste the feed, and enter your real email address (the one you actually have time to read).

Viola. Now you’ll receive an email each time ExpertTweet has a request that matches your keywords.

How to Filter HARO & PitchRate

Since these are email-based services, you’ll need a way to get the email going somewhere you can generate an RSS feed. For that, we’re going to use my buddy Josh Baer’s service, OtherInbox.

• Sign up for an OtherInbox account. OIB gives you an infinite email address like *@[username].oib.com which you use to create custom emails for each site you want to automatically filter into their own folders on OIB.  It’s a great for giving out emails to e-commerce vendors, but it’s also handy for managing your HARO and PitchRate emails because every OIB folder can be exported into an RSS feed.  For example, I subscribe to HARO with haro@[myusername].oib.com and PitchRate with pitchrate@[myusername].oib.com.
• Login to OIB, navigate to your HARO or PitchRate folder.  If you’re using Firefox, click the RSS icon in your browser’s Location bar. Choose the one that says “Inbox messages for HARO” which should cause the RSS feed to appear in your browser. Once the feed loads in Firefox, copy that URL.
  
• Now you have the RSS feed for all the HARO content, but you need a way to filter the messages so you only see the emails that mention your keywords. This is where a service called FeedRinse comes in. Create a FeedRinse account and paste the HARO RSS feed into Feedrinse.  Then setup the keywords that you want to filter your HARO messages by. Feedrinse will generate you a new RSS feed that only contains the HARO messages that matched your keywords.  Copy that RSS feed’s URL.
• You’re almost there…  Now visit FeedMyInbox, paste the RSS feed URL from Feedrinse, and you’re all set. Now you should only see HARO and Pitchrate messages that match your keywords.

Alternatively, you can paste your filtered RSS feeds into BuzzStream and manage them using our workflow tools. As new results appear, you will see them in your monitoring results alongside regular stories, blog posts, comments, and other press opportunities. From there, you can manage ExpertTweet, HARO, and PitchRate requests like any other engagement opportunities– assign them to other users, add notes, and use the BuzzMarker to convert opportunities into contacts and start tracking your outreach.

I realize I breezed over using Feedrinse pretty quickly, so if you want more info about that step, please post a comment and I’ll put together a screencast if there’s interest.

PS: Not familiar with BuzzStream?  BuzzStream is a social media monitoring service that enables you to find press coverage and social media conversations, research and convert them into influencer contacts in one click (automatically capturing contact information and making them searchable by web metrics), and then track your relationships via email and Twitter.  Join our private beta here.

Problem– you want to get buzz and backlinks for your startup or small business; you’re hearing about all these sweet  social media monitoring platforms, but you don’t want to pay and Google Alerts isn’t social enough (it doesn’t pick up Tweets, Digg, Youtube, etc).  What to do?  Try building your own!

As a bootstrapper, I always felt like good enough shouldn’t be the enemy of perfect, so here’s my quick and dirty way to setup a social media monitoring system using several free services: SocialMention, FeedRinse, Google Reader, and AideRSS.

A few caveats:

• If I were setting up full scale monitoring for a real campaign, I would have monitored many more keywords and phrases, which would require a lot more tweaking of the keywords and filters.
• Right now, Social Mention seems to get some crazy results.  And I have not tested to see if their results are truly complete.  So beware, your effectiveness with this method is only as good as their ability to capture everything (and not bring you too much junk).  That’s a big if.  Now, if Social Mention doesn’t work out for you, then you could cobble together your own set of RSS search feeds directly from Google Alerts, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Topix, Twitter, etc. but that would take more time.
• AideRSS is great in terms of identifying the most influential blog posts, but it’s helpless with Twitter, Youtube, and the rest of social media.  If someone says something on Twitter, it always has a PostRank of 1 regardless of how many followers that person has or their blog’s PageRank.  So you can’t turn off your brain entirely… I just find AideRSS saves me time and helps me avoid missing the most important posts.

Here are some other free services to check out: Addict-o-Matic, Dataopedia, Perspctv, and HowSociable.  For those folks who are using the full-service offerings like Radian6, Visible Technologies, MightyBrand, Attentio, Buzzding, Buzzlogic, Buzzmetrics, Buzznumbers, Buzzgain, Collective Intellect, Techrigy, Cymphony,  eCairn, Filtrbox, Vibemetrix, Scout Labs, or Trackur, I’d love to hear some feedback about the cool things they do beyond this sort of super-basic monitoring, especially if you’re using them to find and engage SEO link-building opportunities.  What are the killer extra features for you?

Lastly, thanks for the folks at Greenling, Austin’s best organic produce delivery service, for being my guinea pig.

Update: Here are some new posts outlining other people’s strategies to monitor social media for free:

• Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques by Rob Gonda

This week’s guest post by Kyle Flaherty who writes a blog using insight, lessons learned and horror stories from his nearly 12 years in high-tech public relations, communications and marketing. He is currently Director of Marketing and Social Media at BreakingPoint Systems and of course you can find him on Twitter.

What’s the first rule of social marketing? Listen!

What’s the second rule of social marketing? Listen!

I first started thinking deeply about the concept of listening when I came across the term “lurker” at an event featuring Jackie Huba of “Church of the Customer Blog” and Society for Word of Mouth. The conversation came up in relation to stats that say 90% of folks involved in your social media activity are lurkers and 10% are active participants. Immediately the idea of lurkers turned into ‘listeners’ for me; people who are reading a blog, quietly joining a LinkedIn Group, reading Twitter and much more. Listeners are often your most dedicated readers and for your company they often become the most educated about your product and service and when they are ready to participate it is most likely as a qualified business lead.The best comparison is the person who walks into the auto dealership with a ream of printed materials from automotive websites, collected over a few weeks of ‘listening’, versus the person who walks in and just wants to talk with someone about their cars. The former is already in negotiating mode, the latter needs to go through the research stage in real-time, with a sales person who just wants to close. Which situation would you rather have, not only for selling, but for the customer experience? Well, what if the auto company was listening at the same time and had the new features and financing options that people had said they wanted on all of those sites. We just may have a match!

Listening is important and will set you up for success in your social marketing, if you are in any type of marketing role you must become a good listener because:

1. Listening is inspiring. Listening to your prospective community base will be the inspiration for the social media tools you use. Listening to our community on their blogs and microblogs led us to learn Ning and Facebook was of no value, for them, but rather LinkedIn was the key and we know spend a lot of time in that social network.

2. Listen before you jump. You must always listen to people first, for an extended period of time, before you jump into the conversation. For example; I have hundreds of searches within Twitter sent to me through RSS every morning, based on the pain points of our potential customers. I end up listening to these people on a daily basis, but often time take no action immediately.

3. Often silence makes the loudest noise. A great personal example is a person I listen to through his blog and his LinkedIn updates. Over the past two months I’ve learned about his pain points at work, his background, his skill set and more. He recently joined our LinkedIn group for network engineers and I could now easily reach out to him, set up a time to connect and listen some more.

4. Listening makes you a better communicator. I learned this one when I was actually in PR when my manager would tell me first to listen to how a reporter answered the phone. Was the reporter’s greeting a “hello” vs “yeah” or was the tone “speedy” vs “thought out”? I would then adjust my introduction accordingly.

The more you listen, in terms of quality of listening and quantity, the more you learn about your potential community and the better you will communicate with them in your efforts. However the question becomes how can you sort through all of the noise that is currently online. It is simply staggering to even sort through the noise on one medium like Twitter, however it is this medium that can provide you with some of the most important and impactful insights. I’m not going to write about ‘what’ you should be listening to, that obviously depends on your overall goals for Twitter, whether personal or business. Instead I’m going to go through three ways to better listen to Twitter conversations in order to get more out of your experience, consider it your Twitter Miracle Ear.

1) It’s All About the App: One of the great aspects of Twitter is the open API and the ability to use different applications when Tweeting (yes, the API restrictions are also horribly annoying, but that is another post). Originally I was on Snitter, moved to Tweetr, switched to Twhirl and now am devoted to TweetDeck…for now. I didn’t make changes for the sake of changes, in each case I need features and functionality that made listening to conversations on Twitter easier. The reason I’m now on TweetDeck is very simple; the ability to create personalized lists of conversations based on people or search terms. Using an app like Tweetdeck you can create a list of local people, sports-chat, social marketers or colleagues.  All of a sudden you have created a filter on top of the firehose that is Twitter and can really catch up quickly on conversations. I’m hoping that TweetDeck, or someone, adds some features to allow for easier reading of conversation threads, but the point is to use a variety of applications and find the one that can help open up your Twitter ears.

2) RSS Is Your Friend: Each morning part of my routine, as a social marketer, is reviewing thousands of RSS feeds, most based on Twitter search terms. It all starts over at Twitter Search, where you can put in any term that you want and generate an RSS feed to track in your reader. For any business this is a critical tool in tracking the conversation about your own company, your competitors, partners and more. One recommendation when setting up these searches is to use the same keywords you have gathered for SEO purposes or the terms people are using to find your website. You will end up refining this over time for sure, but getting these set up now will help you get in on the conversation as soon as possible.

3) Routine is Your Friend: Like working out or parenting, listening on Twitter is all about setting up a routine.  You’ve set up your application properly and your RSS feeds are feeding, now you have to schedule time each day in order to catch up on all of this data. Some folks might argue that “Twitter is too organic, man…you have to let it wash over you like a moonlight swim”, I’m not exactly sure who those people are, but trust me they are all over the web, avoid. But you need to set up a routine for yourself that will allow you to keep up with the often insurmountable amount of data that will be coming your way. I’ve found that my best listening is done in the morning, so I make sure to review all my RSS feeds during the first hour in the office. Then I use my Twitter application about once an hour for five minutes to review the conversations. All in all it helps me find the right conversations and listen to what folks are saying.

Each morning and throughout the day you are going to find people that are important to your business in some way or another, now it is up to you to engage. And that of course will be in my second column!

Shannon Paul’s had a post yesterday that included very good advice for PR pros who want to plunge into the social media world (make sure you look at the presentation she’s embedded in the post).  Shannon suggests that PR pros need to start thinking about how they can make their content searchable and sharable in order to make the leap.  Kudos to Shannon for raising an issue that the clients of PR agencies have been demanding – make it easy to find the information – focus on keywords, SEO and links.

Given that the intersection of social media, PR and SEO is a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts here at BuzzStream, I thought I’d expand on one of the topics in Shannon’s presentation – keyword selection.  Picking keywords is incredibly important, and not just for press release optimization…do it right and it will help all of your marketing activities.

For our SEO-oriented audience, most of this will be fairly basic.  For those of you in PR that are new to this, I’m hoping it will give you some good ideas about how you can more effectively identify keywords, and do it in a fast, inexpensive fashion.  There’s no one right way to select keywords, but we like the approach I’m going to describe because it helps you identify keywords that are closely aligned to the terms your customer uses to shop for or to find information about products in your market (as opposed to simply finding keywords based on things like overall keyword popularity).

Keyword selection can feel pretty daunting when you’re just getting started, but it’s not as tough as it seems.  Here’s how we do it at BuzzStream.

Don’t START with Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool!

Note that I didn’t say “don’t use the keyword suggestion tool.”  It’s valuable as a supplemental tool, but in my opinion there are a lot of reasons not to rely on it as your starting point.  The problems are similar in many ways to the problems with relying on shotgun blast media pitches for your media and blogger outreach efforts…it’s broad-based, but much of what you get is irrelevant.  Additionally, it doesn’t help you identify the long-tail search opportunities, which have a ton of potential value.  Instead, you need to start by trying to put yourself in the customer’s shoes (if you’ve developed personas and a positioning statement for the company, it’ll be even easier).  In order to do this, the first thing we do is brainstorm on the following topics …for each, I’ve included some of the more general terms we’ve identified for BuzzStream’s customer to serve as examples:

1. Who is the product for? – e.g., small business, SMBs, DIY
2. What type/category? – e.g., marketing, word-of-mouth, SEO, public relations
3. What is it? – e.g., software, service, tools
4. Verbs/adjectives? – e.g., improve enhance, better
5. What does it affect? – PageRank, publicity, lead generation

For each of these, start with the most general terms and progressively drill-down.  So, for example, you might have “marketing” as the most general term for “category,” and from there you might drill all the way down to something as specific as “microPR.”  The more general terms will have much more traffic, but they’re harder to rank on and they don’t convert as well.  It’s the exact opposite for the more specific terms, which is what makes them so valuable.

Once you’re done, you’ll end up with a bunch of keywords in each of the five categories.  Then you start putting the terms together – e.g., “small business marketing software,” and “tools to improve search performance.”  You can do this in Excel, so that you don’t have to manually create the combinations.  You’ll need to eyeball the combinations and remove the ones that don’t make sense…you don’t have to spend a ton of time doing this because the bad ones will mostly be thrown out when you test your keywords (I’ll cover this in a minute).

Check out the competition

You can supplement the concept-oriented keywords you created by looking at your competition to see what they’re doing.  There are lots of tools to help you see what others are bidding on and to see their ads.  This is valuable because you get to see the language they use in their ads…it also helps you identify competitors that you weren’t aware of.  Some of the tools to look at include adgooroo, spyfu and keycompete.  All of these tools include a free trial period.

Competitive keyword searching still won’t tell you which terms are working and not working though.  For that, you need to test.

Test, test, test!

Once you’ve generated your keywords combinations, you can test them with an Adwords campaign.  Setting up an adwords campaign is easy to do and it’s inexpensive.  You can take a very large list of keywords (thousands) and get a good idea of what your customer really care about for less than a $1,000.  The information you’ll get back is incredibly useful because not only do you find out what people are clicking on, you can determine what converts into blog subscriptions, email signups, leads, revenue, etc.

Other resources

This is really just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a ton of good resources if you want to dig in deep into keyword research and selection.  My favorite is Search Engine Guide’s series on keyword research, selection and organization.  Aaron Wall has great training information on keyword selection as well.

If there are specific areas of keyword selection you’d like us to drill into in future posts, let us know.

One other thing – keyword selection is as much art as science, so feel free to jump in here…PR and social media pros – what’s working well for you when selecting keywords?

There are lots of strategies for building backlinks to your site and let’s face it, they’re all hard (except for the ones that are ‘banned’)– linkbait, competitor backlink mining + begging, crazy n-way reciprocal linking, paid links, content syndication, etc.

But there’s a little-known strategy many user-generated content sites could take advantage of: creating reports for reporters.  The goal is to create information tools that help reporters get data from your site and make it really easy for them to cite you and link to you (without ever having to call you).

In a way, it’s like the old PR strategy of listing yourself as an expert on Profnet, and then hoping that when a reporter needs a quote, they’ll call you.  More modern examples include Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist.  Trulia, Zillow, and Hotpads all offer heatmaps.  And at my old site, ApartmentRatings.com, we created average apartment rental pricing charts by MSA.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. your website can get cited and linked even if a reporter doesn’t have time to interview you,
2. you can exert some control over the content, making it necessary for the reporter to link back to it,
3. this tactic tends to generate increasing links over time (which is sort of the opposite of how a linkbaiting campaign works)
4. and of course there’s the brand benefit of being seen as a go-to source and leader in your industry.

What should you build? Charts, tables, statistics, snapshots, trends… something interesting, based on the largest  sample set you can muster, and if possible, geographically-segmented (since local reporters are more interested in trends in their city and/or state).  Obviously your opportunities here will depend a lot on your website’s actual data, legal restrictions, your creativity, and your dev resrouces, but here are a few ideas:

• What are your users searching for? Offer reports showing search trends.
• Collecting leads? Offer reports showing buyer trends.
• Aggregating data from multiple sources? Offer a report averaging the data and highlighting trends.

Once you set up reports, your data should automatically update over time.  And of course, you should think about it from the perspective of a reporter- is your information quotable, do your graphs look nice enough to reprint, are the trends easy to understand, is it clear how the data was gathered and how many data points are represented, do you provide access to the underlying data so the reporter can give the data to their art department, can they embed your charts on another site (and if so, is your HTML setup to properly give you a text link back), if a reporter has a question is there an email or phone number readily available.

I’m a recently-exited entrepreneur and I have a few things to say about getting PR for startups.

My background: I co-founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000, built the site to over 100 million page views per year, and sold it last year (after seven years) to a fairly large Internet company from LA. In
the process, we never spent a dollar on PPC advertising or PR agencies, and we bootstrapped all the way.

My goal is tell other entrepreneurs and marketing people, and basically anyone who’s trying to figure out a way to get their product or service to take off, about our mistakes and what worked for us.

This first post was inspired by two things: Jason Calcanis’ post about ideas to help startups save money and a SXSW session called startup metrics for pirates. Yarr. (Ok, that’s it for my pirate schtick.)

One of the items on Jason’s list is, “Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm.” Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban agreed.

ApartmentRatings.com never had a PR agency and we got full page stories in the NY Times and Washington Post, A1 in the Wall Street Journal, an NPR interview, and write-ups in dozens of blogs like SearchEngineWatch and other major market daily papers.

With the press, we attracted a lot of good traffic (and clippings my parents could show their friends), but the thing that was more important to me was that we got lots of valuable organic links from highly reputed sites. I basically viewed PR as a form of SEO strategy. I strongly feel that PR is the most potent SEO
strategy on the planet because there are fewer more credible sources than newspapers and a good blog post from even a long-tail blog often gets picked up by A-listers and mainstream media.

This blog is going to go in some depth on how we did it, but here’s my first suggestion:

Don’t buy a media list from Bacon’s or Vocus; build it yourself with Google Alerts.

Go to Google Alerts and create some searches that will surface reporters you’d care about (and more importantly who might care about you). You can search competitor names, related companies, or basically anything you think would be in stories written by reporters who might cover you. If you do this right, you
should get 10+ stories a day in your Inbox that will be written by reporters who are covering your space. They are your media list.

Make a Spreadsheet to Store Reporters Addresses

Make a list in Excel with the reporter’s name, email and phone, and some notes about what they wrote, and start building your list. Many major papers put the reporter’s email address somewhere on their stories, so the easiest thing is to just copy it off the story. This is also true of phone numbers. If that doesn’t work, I’d visit a publication’s “Contact Us” page to figure out what the email standard is for their newspaper. If that doesn’t work, you can always guess that it’s either first.last@domainname.com or flast@domainname.com. I know it sounds like a time consuming pain-in-the-arse, but you gotta do what you gotta do. This is “pirate” PR my friends… do what works. A little bit easier is the phone number… you can often get the main number
for the publication by Googling “Publication name, city, state” and if that doesn’t work, look it up from
their DNS records.

So that’s your first lesson in pirate PR. Build a media list based on what reporters are actually writing (not by the categories that Bacons or Vocus have encoded to them), and lookup reporters email and phone numbers for free.