BuzzStream

Today’s guest post comes from one of our favorite customers, Adria Saracino. Adria is the head of outreach at Distilled, a digital marketing firm with offices in London, Seattle, and NYC. When not consulting on outreach or content strategies, you can find her managing a team of outreach warriors or writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet.

If your outreach strategy still relies solely on a Google search, it’s time to catch up with the times and start leveraging today’s social media landscape.

From Facebook to Pinterest and everything in between, social media has become by far the best way to build relationships and community while also establishing authenticity and expertise. But while there’s a lot out there about how businesses should leverage social media for their overall business functions, there’s less so about how individual employees can use social media to be more efficient specifically at outreach.

The following five tips seek to remedy that. Here are a few creative ways to build relationships with site owners in unexpected places.

1. Monitor Influencer Conversations on Twitter

As a place where authentic conversations flow naturally and oversharing is the norm, Twitter is a great place for finding not just customers but site owners, too. Why? Because site owners and contributors are just as hyped about social media as you are, and tend to tweet frequently as a means of driving traffic.

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One of the most powerful parts of BuzzStream is the prospecting module.  However, it’s also one of the parts of the product that’s most frequently misunderstood. 

In this post, I’ll take you through how to use the Prospecting module in detail.

When Should I Use the Prospecting Module?

As the name suggests, the prospecting module helps you prospect for links.  If you have an idea of what sort of links you want, and can create both a search and a qualifying criteria for that sort of opportunity, it’s excellent.  Additionally, because it reruns the searches every week, it’s great for ongoing opportunities, like competitor reviews.

When Should I Not Use the Prospecting Module?

Because the Prospecting Module uses prospecting searches, it’s not good when you don’t know what kind of opportunities you want and what sort of footprint you’re looking for.

Step by Step: The BuzzStream Prospecting Module

Step 1: Find the Prospecting Module and Open a Prospecting Profile

The prospecting module is that button that looks like a magnifying glass at the top of the ‘Link Partners’ tab. 

Click that button, and then select Add Prospecting Profile.

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Finding qualified link prospects is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

One question we hear a lot at BuzzStream is: “The prospecting module has returned lots of link opportunities, but which ones are worth my time? How do I qualify a link prospect?”

This is a great question.  And like so many questions in marketing, the answer is:

It Depends.

‘It depends’ isn’t helpful, so in this article I’ll explain how to qualify a link prospect in 2012.

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One question we hear frequently at BuzzStream is “How do I find link opportunities?”

There are lots of ways, but one of the best (and easiest to use immediately) is using prospecting queries. (You can also use the BuzzStream Prospecting Module to rapidly run lots of prospecting queries.)

Stems and Keywords

A prospecting query typically consists of (at least) two parts: a stem (otherwise known as a footprint) and a keyword.

Query stems have been written about extensively on other blogs.  Most people get them right.

So let’s look at the other piece that gives folks trouble: keywords.

Link Building Keyword Research: Your Link Building Keywords Aren’t Your SEO Keywords

The first impulse newer link builders have is to put in their SEO keywords.  If you’re promoting a blog, or something else in a content-rich, cooperative community (like, say, the SEO community), this works great.  But if you’re aiming for commercial keywords, you won’t get much back with this approach. 

Instead of thinking about your ‘money’ keywords, you need to think about the keywords you’d use to described link opportunities.

The Process

When people ask me “What keywords should I use for my link building keywords?” I give them a process like:

-          Make a big list of EVERYONE that could be interested in your product or topic

-          Make it bigger. I mean EVERYONE.  Not just the obvious ones – go beyond. 

-          Google around for some sites/publications in these areas, and make note of how they describe themselves and what keywords they use.  (Sometimes you can use lists like AllTop to find these.)

-          Now take these keywords and use them for link building keyword research.

An Example

Because that’s kind of an abstract concept, let’s take an example.  Let’s say you’re working on a linking campaign for the youth golf section of a ecommerce sports retailer.  Your client sells child-sized golf clubs, bags, balls, accessories, etc.

Well the obvious place to start is golf sites.  So you might start with some guest post prospecting queries for Golf.

But you’ll run out of golf linking opportunities pretty quickly.  And chances are your competitor’s SEOs went out and grabbed all of those golf link opportunities as well.

Lateral Thinking

Now it’s time for lateral thinking: Who else is interested in golf for kids? Might they have websites?

Let’s think:

-          Mommy Bloggers (numerous but have been hit up by marketers so frequently you need to come to the table with serious gift items)

-          Dad Bloggers (a rapidly growing category)

-          Youth sports coaching blogs (not as numerous, but definitely a strong fit)

-          Elementary Schools and Middle Schools

-          PE Teachers

And the list goes on.

Let’s unpack that example a little bit and look at PE teacher blogs. 

I immediately find four or five, and they all call themselves some variant on “the Physical Education blog”, so I start with the query “Physical Education inurl:category/guest” to find PE guest blog opportunities.

Happy Link Building, and please leave any thoughts or questions in the comments.