BuzzStream

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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Links and resources pages are one of the oldest uses for the web – and an excellent link opportunity. Adding to our last post on better guest posting, today’s post will focus on improving your techniques for getting links on links and resource pages.

Why Get Links on Resource Pages?

Although deeply out of fashion, these links can be excellent for search engine optimization authority building.  They typically don’t send much traffic, but they have many benefits:

• They Often Lead to More Links

Bloggers who make lists often draw from these pages in making new lists, meaning they’re “links that build links”. I’ve found that the appearance of a site in a list on Quora (or other Q&A sites) will often lead to more links on other sites down the road.  

• They’re Often Linked to From the Top Level, Flowing Lots of PageRank

Many of these ‘Links’ or ‘Resources’ pages are in the top-level navigation of sites, and will stay ‘high’ in the site structure – as opposed to blog posts, which get buried over time.  While the value of traditional (as defined in the 1998 paper) PageRank is debatable, links from these pages flow a great deal of it.  

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(This is the third and final post in our series about how to use BuzzStream with the SEOmoz Pro tools.)

The Competitive Link Finder from SEOmoz is a really useful link building tool.  It looks through competitor link profiles, and finds sites that link to multiple competitors, but don’t like to your site.  You’re left with a targeted list of sites for engagement and outreach.

Today I’m going to show you how to use BuzzStream with the Competitive Link Finder.  The Competitive Link Finder finds great link prospects, and then I can use BuzzStream to build relationships with the sites owners, and get those sweet, sweet links.

I’ll use BuzzStream as example:

Step 1: Add Your Site and Some Competitors

Begin by adding your own site, along with some of your competitors. I’ll use BuzzStream and some other companies in the blogger outreach space.

Step 2: Get Your Results and Open Sites Where You Don’t Have Links

You’ll get a list of sites back, with a helpful checkmark if your site has a link from that domain.

I can see great sites that link to my competitors but haven’t (yet) linked to BuzzStream – like Fobes, NetworkSolutions, theNextWeb, ProBlogger, GrowMap, and more. 

You can look at the sites’ links to your competitors by clicking on the ‘# Linking Pages’ field:

Step 3: Visit the Pages and Evaluate the Opportunity

Now, you can visit the pages where your competitors have links and understand the opportunity.  Are the links from guest posts? Resource roundups? Product reviews?

For example, I see another blogger outreach tool featured in a resource roundup guest post on ProBlogger.  I know Darren Rowse publishes ProBlogger, and I can probably engage with him through Twitter and comments and write a guest post for ProBlogger.

Step 4: BuzzMark the Site

Now that I’ve found an appropriate site, I’ll add it to my BuzzStream account with the BuzzMarker.  (The BuzzMarker is BuzzStream’s bookmarklet that adds sites to your database in one click, while researching their metrics.)

Step 5: Engage, Build a Relationship, and Pitch

Now that you’ve added a site to BuzzStream, you can begin engaging and building a relationship prior to your pitch.  (And of course, you can keep a record of these activities in the contact record in BuzzStream.)

Thanks for Reading – and if you have any questions or tips about how to use BuzzStream with the SEOmoz Pro tools, please leave them in the comments.

Continuing with our series on how to use BuzzStream with SEOmoz Pro tools, today we’ll look at how to use BuzzStream with Open Site Explorer.

Using BuzzStream with Open Site Explorer

BuzzStream is an influencer outreach tool – perfect for building relationships with the owners and authors of influential websites.  Open Site Explorer allows you to understand the link profile of other sites.  You can combine these tools together to guide and execute your link development processes.

While there’s lots of ways to use these tools together (and BuzzStream uses SEOmoz’ API to populate domain authority, mozRank, and other metrics), today I’ll walk you through one way to use these tools together: using BuzzStream to investigate your competitor’s backlinks.

Step 1: Download Your Competitor’s Sitewide Backlinks in a .CSV

Find a site closely related to yours – it can be a competitor, a partner, or another site in your vertical, and download their link profile. (I like to get all of the links, even those to deep pages.  In fact, in some areas like ecommerce, often deep links are easier to get than links to the homepage.)

For this example, I’ll look at the link profile of one of our partners, Citation Labs, to try to find some new link opportunities.  (This is getting kind of meta – looking at link building tools in a post about link building with link building tools – but just roll with it.) 

I’ll get all of the followed and 301’ed links (not concerned with nofollow’ed links at the moment), external links, for the root domain.  I’ll download the .CSV so I can import it into BuzzStream.

Step 2: Import the Results Into a New Project in BuzzStream

Go into your BuzzStream account.  (If you don’t have one yet, you can go sign up for a free trial here.)  Navigate to the ‘Websites’ tab (sometimes called ‘Link Partners’ in older accounts), and Select the ‘Import’ option.

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Today’s guest post is from Traian Neacsu. Traian is the Director of SEO and co-founder of Pitstop Media Inc, a Canadian company that provides top rated search engine marketing services to businesses across North America. To invite the author to publish articles on your blog please contact www.pitstopmedia.com

If you’re a link builder who chooses his or her link partners based on their social influence, you probably don’t like to be cheated when it comes to decision-making metrics. Would you spend hours writing a guest article for a blogger with only 5 subscribers, or would you rather publish it on a blog with 250 subscribers? Or how would you like to acquire a PR8 link, only to find out later that the PR was forged, and it’s actually 0 (zero)? I don’t think anyone likes that kind of “sorcery”.

I consider the numbers of blog subscribers in addition to the useful metrics provided by default within BuzzStream when I decide on how to approach link partners.

This article will show you how to find this metric in BuzzStream, with the help of custom fields and a bit of detective work.

Create a new custom field with BuzzStream

This is easy. Just go to your Account -> Customize Fields -> New Custom Field:

Name it Blog Subscribers and use “type numerical”.

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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