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.

The post How to Combine Industry Events with Videos for Link Building Results appeared first on BuzzStream.

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.

The post Outreach Now Available in the BuzzBar appeared first on BuzzStream.

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.

What are People Confused About?  How Can You Help Clarify?

Even the most adept reporter is sure to confuse some readers when covering any complex subject.  In some cases, the topic is so dense, there’s no way most readers will have the necessary background information to even fully grasp what is being reported.

There is an opportunity here to create content that clears up this confusion or lack of education.

What important detail is being glossed over by most publications?

It’s impossible for even the best reporter to cover all facets of breaking news, and there are often opportunities for adept content creators to provide supplemental data or additional resources that add to the credibility of the original story by bolstering it with new data.

What implications does the event/story have that aren’t being talked about by the publisher but are by commenters?

The comments section of any popular story can be a treasure trove of content ideas, as commenters often engage in conversations that are at the heart of the story – sometime even discussing implications of the story or event that were not discussed by the reporter.  Creating content that furthers these conversations can be extremely powerful.

Can the story benefit from being visualized?

For complex and controversial stories, there is often an opportunity to illuminate various positions or explain complexities via illustration.  Helping an author or reporter explain themselves or their story more completely using visuals can work extremely well, and help secure content placement opportunities before you’ve created anything.

What’s controversial about the story, what is the Devil’s advocate position?

Creating content that contradicts or at least proposes alternative points of view to what various reporters may be writing doesn’t necessarily open doors with those specific writers, but it does provide an alternative avenue to receive coverage by neutral parties who like to publish a variety of viewpoints on breaking or popular news.

Why This Works

A major goal of many content marketers is to have the content they create seen by large audiences and to achieve syndication across a wide variety of well visited and trusted websites.

In order to achieve this end, content must be interesting, share-worthy, an elicit an emotional response.  

It must also have an entry point to an initial large audience – viral growth is sparked fastest through a highly visible placement, a seed.

By creating content that is as newsworthy, timely and relevant to current events as it is interesting and emotionally resonant, you will have something capable of receiving coverage from some of the top news outlets online – placements that can serve as a powerful seed for your content to spread through the blogosphere.

What You Can Expect

Following this protocol, you’ll begin shaping your content strategy with ideas and concepts taken from the headlines just as much as you ideate on topics specifically tailored to your core niche.  It takes some skill, but eventually you will be able to identify key opportunities to develop value-add content to a wide variety of related news across publishers.

Getting content placed in a major newspaper or news outlet can have a profound impact on the lifecycle of the content and its overall success.   Sites like The Guardian, NY Daily News, Huffington Post, and The Independent can serve as ignition points – sources from which some of the top blogs source and curate content.

For an outreach team, one high profile syndication can drastically increase the efficacy of manual outreach efforts to secure additional placements for content.  Achieving a single placement from a highly trusted source (especially if that source is a newspaper or well-known news outlet), can add just the right amount of credibility to a pitch.  

For content with true viral potential, an initial seed is all that you will need.  Re-syndication originating from a top news source will travel around the globe, resulting in published features on websites across Europe and sometimes even into Asian markets.  From here, content often flows to top tier blog and news curators & aggregators – sites frequented by individuals highly involved in social media.   

This second step of syndication is often highly correlated with large spikes of social sharing and proliferation across hundreds or even thousands of high-traffic message boards.

In some circumstances, this massive re-syndication results in coverage offline, including television appearances, discussion on morning radio shows across the country, and even spots on local TV broadcasts.   Proliferation to offline channels is actually quite common for content achieving placement with at least one major initial news publisher.

Try to Hit a Home Run

As a content creator, you have a lot of choices about what you can write about and publish.  There are many success stories about individuals who have successfully grown their sites through consistent daily publishing.   Creating on-site value for your visitors is essential and a worthy endeavor – but if your goal with content (at least some of your content) is to build links, drive traffic, and build brand exposure – you need to be shooting for the moon.

Content that achieves coverage on the level we’ve been discussing will necessarily generate dozens to hundreds of inbound links from high-authority unique linking domains.  It will engage tens of thousands to millions of unique visitors.  It will build social engagement in the tens of thousands.

By shooting for the moon, you’ll learn quickly how to create what publishers and editors are looking for, and where you can provide added value for free (through your content).  Make it your mission to be featured on the front page of HuffPo.  Don’t stop until you get that mention in the New York Times.  With this type of effort, you will eventually achieve viral syndication on a massive scale.

(Photo Credit: 1, 2, 3, 4)

The post Mining Current Events for Content Marketing Home Runs appeared first on BuzzStream.

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. 

Habit #1: Develop An Audience Persona

Tailoring your content with your target audience in mind is an age-old adage.  But somehow, this fundamental practice was put to the side during the rise and heavy implementation of infographics in content marketing.  Sure, most infographics are generally related to the industry of the brand they were created for; but, do they serve a purpose to the person reading the piece.

Before brainstorming ideas for content, take a few tips from the Distilled team and consider using customer surveys  to help you determine your target audience and figure out what information they’d like to see content on. 

The most successful infographics are those that fulfill the needs of the audience they are aimed at.  If you create something with a marketing message that satisfies the audience’s interests, or emotions, links will be a natural by-product.

Habit #2:  Incorporate Influencer Feedback

Once you have developed an audience persona and have a general understanding of the topics you should create content around, take this one step further and incorporate ways to involve the influencers of that particular niche.  Put yourself in the shoes of those you will be reaching out to during the outreach process, and genuinely consider what you would want to see in a piece of content related to a topic you’re an expert on. 

If you’re not up-to-date on the area of focus you are generating content around, I suggest doing a little research to comb through recent headlines and identify newsworthy topics.  In case you haven’t heard of it yet, I find SEO Gadget’s Content Strategy Generator Tool to be extremely helpful for identifying trends.

One of my favorite examples in which someone has used influencer feedback to create a collaborative piece of content is an infographic that Caliber Interactive created for First Choice UK.  The year 2012 was about to kick-off, and speculation of how this could be our last year due to the end of the Mayan calendar was a trending topic. 

Caliber Interactive decided to use this trend as a theme and created an infographic that, assuming the Mayans were right, displayed how those who’ve traveled the world would like to spend their final months if the world did end on 21st December 2012.  No better person to approach than seasoned travel bloggers themselves, so they set out to contact these travel experts to ask them if they’d like to participate in the survey.

They were happily surprised by the high response rate and the enthusiasm shown from the bloggers that were reached out to.  A total of 21 influential bloggers responded to the survey and the results were heartwarming.  For example, after being asked of having the choice to spend your last days in a beautiful new place or partying with family, most of the travelers chose to be at home with those they love the most. 

A few standout quotes from those who participated were also showcased in the piece.  Also, each blog that participated was given due credit within the byline of the infographic itself.  Here’s the final product:

Ultimately, a handful of the bloggers who participated in the survey shared the infographic because they were happy to have been a key piece to the creation of it.  Also, a number of authoritative publishers within the travel space featured the infographic, including HuffPost Travel, AOL’s Gadling, and USA Today Travel Destinations Blog. 

End Result:  Engaging Content That Reaps Rewards & Relationships

To move beyond the bad habits we’re facing in which marketers shove infographics down the throats of their audiences and publishers, make it a more collaborative experience.  Most importantly, develop an audience persona before brainstorming ideas for content. 

Once you have a general idea of the content you will be creating, craft it so that the piece encourages participation and incorporates blogger feedback.  Remember, influencers provide windows of opportunity; they know what will be received the best by their audiences and provide expert advice on the topics they report on.

By focusing on your audience and interviewing influential bloggers within the topic area, your content will not only improve in quality, you will also be making everlasting relationships with the people who matter most — those who influence your audience.  Have you successfully incorporated feedback from influential bloggers into your content?  Please share your insights or examples in the comments.

(Photo Credit: 1)

The post Create Content, Not Clutter, By Changing Your Marketing Habits appeared first on BuzzStream.

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

Even the best monitoring search results aren’t useful if you can’t take action on them.  So today I’m going to talk about what to do with your mentions, and how to take action on them using BuzzStream so you can achieve great marketing outcomes.

The obvious SEO path is to email people who mention your brand, but don’t link, and ask them to link.  You can do this, but it’s not a great outreach email.  It’s rarely positioned and persuasive – and typically, there’s not much in it for the blogger.  “Hey, will you use your valuable time to go back through your work and add a link to me because… I’d like one?”

The even worse variant of this approach is finding articles that mention your competitors and ask why you weren’t included.  (We see our competitors do this sometimes – it doesn’t work well.)  That’s not classy – especially if you do it in the comments. 

Here are some approaches we take here at BuzzStream to do real marketing (and yes, get SEO link value) based on these brand mention results.

Find Negative Mentions and Ask What Went Wrong

Occasionally, someone writes something like “I found BuzzStream too difficult to use” or “I found it missed the mark for me.”  This represents a serious problem for your brand – and the chance to give a wonderful customer experience and turn a detractor into an evangelist.

When I see comments like this, I tend to reach out and ask nicely what went wrong – if they paid and didn’t mean to do so, we’ll offer them a refund, or an additional free trial and an in-person walk-thru.   

Care about your customer’s success – not just receiving their invoice – and you’ll find they’ll care about your success as well. 

While not everyone can be converted to an evangelist, often marketers can turn detractors into neutral parties – which won’t harm your online reputation.

Thank Positive Mentions and Build a Relationship

If someone mentions your product positively, that’s fantastic.  Don’t just take these folks for granted – thank them, add them to your CRM so you can stay in touch, and find out what you can do for them.  If you can, surprise them with a friendly phone call, show your gratitude, and listen to any suggestions they have.

Promote Positive Articles

If I, in my daily monitoring work, find an awesome article, I’ll do my best to promote it.  I’ll share it from company accounts on social networks like Twitter and Google Plus, as well as send it off to industry curators.  Then, more people see it, as well as helping that article gain second-degree links – which will in turn drive more link equity back to my site.  

You can tell whoever wrote the original article you’re doing this – or you can let wake up and find their article picked up in publications, an experience not unlike Christmas (or Festivus) morning. 

How to Use BuzzStream with Fresh Web Explorer

Now that you know what you’d like to do, you’ll want to go through each mention, categorize it, add the owner to your database, and take action on the mention.  While you can do this with any CRM or even an Excel sheet, in our (very biased) opinion, BuzzStream excels at this kind of work.  Here’s how you use BuzzStream with the SEOmoz Fresh Web Explorer:

1) Get Your Fresh Web Explorer Results

Start by searching for your brand in Fresh Web Explorer.  If you’ve never done this before, set it for 4 weeks.  If you’re looking for bran mentions on a consistent basis, you’ll want to do this every week, so set Fresh Web Explorer for once a week.

If your brand is very close to other brands, search for it in quotation marks, or exclude phrases that are close by.

2) Export a .CSV from Fresh Web Explorer

Click that glorious “Export as .CSV” button and get those results in everyone’s favorite file format:

3) Remove the Blank Rows from the .CSV

Before we can import it into BuzzStream, we’ll have to remove some of the extraneous blank rows.  (In the future, this step will be unnecessary.  Right now, we’re working on porting BuzzStream to a cloud environment so it runs dramatically faster, but after that port, a FWE import is on our list.)

Cut all of these rows, so the row headers from the FWE export are in row 1. 

Then, save that file as a .CSV. Name it something memorable – we’ll need it for the next step.

4) Import the Results from Fresh Web Explorer into BuzzStream

Now, we’ll import those results into BuzzStream, where we can then take action on them.  Start by selecting “Import from existing file” from the “Add Websites” dropdown:

Then, select ‘Match My CSV’ from the import screen:

Select your modified Fresh Web Explorer CSV and press Upload!  (You may want to import them into a new project for this type of monitoring.  You can select this from the ‘Show more options’ screen.)

5) Match the Fresh Web Explorer Fields to BuzzStream Fields

BuzzStream does this for you by default – you can just hit “Import these contacts” from the field match screen.  If you have a custom field for type of mention (like brand mentioned), you can select it now.

When you press import, BuzzStream automatically looks for contact information, collects metrics, and finds recent content on these sites.

6) Open the Sites in the BuzzBar

Now select all of the sites (from the ‘Select All’ checkbox on the left), and select “View in BuzzBar” from the main navigation.

7) Using the BuzzBar, Go Through Your Mentions and Make Notes

 Now you can view every site that’s mentioned you in the BuzzBar.  From the BuzzBar, you can take notes, tag sites, select custom fields, qualify sites, and more.

For example, I can tag everyone that mentions me in their respective categories, so later when I’m running outreach campaigns around new content, I can easily make a list of people who already know me.

Alternatively, I can create a new custom field for the action I’ll take on the kind of brand mention I see:

For example, our friend John Henry wrote a great article that includes BuzzStream.  So I’ll mark it as “To Promote Heavily“, and later, I’ll sort by “To Promote Heavily”, find the article, and share it with some industry curators.

There’s lots of ways you can use these tools together, depending on how you intend to work with your brand mentions.  Have fun, and make sure you share any new uses you find in the comments!

The post How to Use SEOmoz Fresh Web Explorer with BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

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:

• Do I have to ‘build’ a link?
• Do I have to persuade someone to do something they were not already inclined to do?
• Do I have to make a new friend?
• Do I have to make new content?

Start with the Easy Stuff

Whenever you start a project, you want to start with the easy stuff to build up your audience and link popularity before you tackle the big projects.  This will both give you a base to work with, and often the people you meet and relationships you build as you take care of the easier link opportunities (links on resource pages, etc.) will be interested in your larger, content-heavy projects like guest posts, interactive content, and more.

Additionally, if you can show your boss or clients wins and increases in organic traffic and sales for initial activities, it will be easier to get buy in on bigger projects in the future.

The Beginning, a Very Good Place to Start

I recommend starting link building projects with link reclamation. There are lots of great descriptions of link reclamation processes around the SEO blogosphere – basically the process consists of finding links to 404’ing URLs on your site, and either 301 redirecting them a resolving URL, or asking a webmaster to change the link’s destination. 

These people have already linked to you, so little persuasion is required.  Additionally, most webmasters who have intended on linking to you are open to fixing links.  (And if they don’t respond, you can always 301 redirect the URL to the most appropriate URL on your site.)

If the motto of salespeople (from the Glengarry GlennRoss) is “always be closing”, link development professionals should “always be building relationships.”  When you approach a webmaster about fixing a broken link to your site, think about building a relationship.  You may want to approach them in the future about guest posting or placing an infographic.

 And even if you’ve already received a link from that site, and thus are less interested in future links, they may have other sites, or friends with sites.  I recommend you store all of your contacts in a database like BuzzStream so you can sort them when opportunities arise.

The Next Step: Resource Pages

Once you’ve reclaimed your existing links, through 301 redirects or asking nicely, it’s time to move on to building new links.  The place I like to start is with resource and links pages.  (I don’t mean those ‘link exchange’ pages from the 90s – I mean legitimate resource pages like this one, this one, or this one.)

Most of these pages are curated in an attempt to provide visitors a great resource – so if you have a great resource, you can get it added to these pages by asking nicely.

And as I’ve written about before, often people build lists for their own site from other resource pages, so these links can often lead to second degree links – some on quite authoritative sites.

Again, Always Be Making Connections.  Lots of these curators are in a position to work with you in the future.

Mine Your Own Business: Finding Influencers on Your List

Many link development professionals start hitting up strangers at this point.  While this approach certainly can be effective, often these people are targeted by hundreds if not thousands of link development folks, and considerable effort is required to stand out and be different.

A better approach is starting with website owners who already want to hear from you.  You already have a big list of these – you just may not know it.  If you have an email lists or a social following, it’s very possible you already have a list of webmasters and bloggers who’d be happy to hear from.

You can mine your email and Twitter lists for bloggers and online influencers to work with.  These people want to hear from you – they are, after all, on your email list.  Many of them may even be customers.

If you start with them and build relationships, you can gain exposure you couldn’t get through cold emails.  Additionally, bloggers know other bloggers.  If you work with a blogger who’s already interested in your company successfully, you can ask them if they know anyone else who might be interested in the same review or guest post opportunity, and get a warm introduction.

Mining Your Twitter Account

This method was originally discussed by Wil Reynolds at Mozcon 2011.

Effectively the process is:

1. Gather a List of Your Twitter Followers (from Twitter API or Simply Measured)
2. Grab a List of the URLs Associated with Your Twitter Followers
3. Remove Sites Like Pinterest, Etsy, YouTube, Facebook, and Other Non-Opportunites
4. Use the SEOMoz Mozscape API (or BuzzStream) to Grab Link Metrics for Each Site
5. Compare These to a List of Your Linking Domains from Your Favorite Backlink Tool
6. Start with the High-Authority Sites, and Work Your Way Down

Now you have a list of bloggers who already want to hear from you and your company.  Keep in mind you’ll still have to vet the list manually (or use the BuzzBar), as some of your Twitter followers will be competitors or vendors, and not great opportunities.

Mining Your Email List

You can also mine your email list, just like you mined your Twitter account.

To do this, follow essentially the same procedure, except start by using the FullContact API to attach social profiles to your email records.  Then apply the same procedure – using the Twitter API, grab the URLs attached to each of these social profiles, and then sort by domain authority and prepare for outreach.

If you have interesting data you can attach to your email records (for example, what kind of product the blogger purchased), you can add that to your database and segment your outreach based on that information.

Making New Friends: Guest Posts and Product Reviews

Once you’ve reclaimed links, found resource pages, and mined your permission marketing assets for influencers, then it’s time to start using conventional link building processes like guest posts and product reviews. 

We’ve written about effective guest posts before – try to be the kind of guest poster bloggers want to introduce to their friends, rather than the kind they don’t want to invite back.

Big Content + Big Outreach: The Final Stage

Now that you’ve built relationships and exhausted all the low-hanging fruit, it’s time to employ big content and big outreach.

Whenever you do big content, set a release date, and work with influencers in advance.  We’ve all been a part of content marketing failures, and these can be prevented using ‘Lean Startup’ style audience feedback.

In this case, the big content is even easier because you already have so many influencer relationships.  Because you pulled in a lot of links already, I recommend aiming high here as far as distribution goes (aka Mashable or whatever the equivalent in your vertical is) and aim for a strong multiplier effect across paid, earned, and owned media.

Conclusion: Always Be Making Connections

As you go through this process, remember: people, not websites, have the power to make links.  Keep building your ‘little black book’ of bloggers as you execute your campaign, and you’ll find that your ability to build links grows over time, rather than reaching a point of diminishing returns.

Photo Credit: 1

The post How to Structure a Link Building Campaign for Maximum Impact appeared first on BuzzStream.

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.

Finding the Right Client-Agency Fit

As competition among service providers continues to stiffen, smart business owners will learn to assess potential marketing partners prior to signing long-term contracts.

Even more important than finding a strategic partner who is honest, reliable and does good work, it’s absolutely essential that the agency-client relationship is a good fit. Assessing this potential upfront is difficult, especially as the services provided by many agencies continue to expand, even sometimes beyond their core competencies.  

Unfortunately, many businesses jump into relationships too soon — relying on the wrong signals, and putting themselves in a position that isn’t likely to produce the results they expect. I’ve often marveled at the dichotomy between how stringent (and sometimes overkill) hiring and interview policies can be within companies, while vendor agreements are often signed with little to no due diligence.

Furthermore, as the complexities of digital marketing continue to grow, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for less educated business owners to make informed decisions about which types of agencies or potential partners actually possess the skills or background necessary to accomplish their goals. In many cases, the responsibility of actually setting the goals falls on the service provider, serving to muddy the water even further. This leaves the client in a constant state of limbo, always wondering if they’re being provided value commensurate with what they’re paying.

From the perspective of the service provider, there’s plenty of incentive to spend time assessing the fit of a potential client, or even turning the tables and interviewing them. Like all good relationships, success is bred from honest and open communication. The allure of signing a new client needs to be seen through a realistic lens. Service providers need to ask, “can I provide the results and services this potential client expects, the way they expect it?”

The solution is simple: Date before you get married. The courting process between a business and its prospective service provider can take many forms…

Courting the Client with Your Pitch

What has worked well for me is to provide some initial strategic value for free.   

As a business owner, I’m not looking to simply sign a client. I’m looking for a chance to show the client specific ways I can help their business and excite the client with my ideas on how to do it.  A great partner is willing to listen to your needs and then make a pitch demonstrating potential solutions.

Our sample pitch process might look like this:

1. Review the Client’s Goals and Needs

The agency or service provider begins with an assessment of a client’s needs and goals. Whether reported by the client, or determined by the provider following an internal review, a framework can be created that defines where the client currently sits in the marketplace, and loosely define where the client is looking to go.  For an SEO or content agency, these rough goals are sometimes defined in terms of the links, traffic, social exposure (or any other number of metrics).  

2. Conceptualize and Pitch Campaigns

The second component of the pitch process is more exciting, and gives a potential provider a chance to really differentiate its abilities. This is the stage in the process where the provider can conceptualize and pitch a set of unique campaign ideas and concepts.

These pitches are a chance to excite a potential client.   The time spent creating them are a worthwhile loss leader — even if they only serve to demonstrate your willingness to provide value.   By spending the time to examine the marketplace and environment the client competes within, a competent provider should be able to illuminate opportunities the client didn’t previously realize existed while also demonstrating creativity and passion for the work and the niche.

More than anything,  this type of approach modifies the more abstract notion of “hiring an agency,” and make it concrete by demonstrating what can be obtained by working with said agency.

Why Both Client and Vendor Benefit from a Great Pitch

Many agencies are loathe to make the investment required to construct a compelling pitch. This is understandable, considering that resources are being expended without the guarantee of a contract. My experience has shown that this initial risk and investment of time is the key to creating partnerships that actually work, and forms the backbone of a solid and sustainable client-vendor relationship long into the future.

The benefits of this approach are enormous. Not only does the initial up-front investment of time working with a potential client pre-contract allow you to assess the fit of the relationship, it also helps to properly shape expectations for both parties.    

Furthermore, by exciting potential clients about the potential you bring to the table, it’s quite common for budgets to open up, and the scope of your budding relationship to broaden. Even in the event that the relationship isn’t a good fit, you’re very likely to have at least created goodwill which can lead to referrals and new business down the line.   

(Image Credits: 1, 2, 3)

The post The Power of the Pitch: How to Start Great Agency-Client Relationships appeared first on BuzzStream.

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.

Simply highlight contacts on the Websites or People screen, and the ‘View in BuzzBar’ button appears next to the ‘Outreach’ dropdown.  Click that button, and the site will open in the BuzzBar in a new tab.

Change Relationship Stage and Priority from the BuzzBar

Found a great site?  Now you can make it as a high priority and change the Relationship Stage.  You can also mark sites that aren’t a good fit for your campaign as ‘Not Qualified’.  

Add Tags, Notes and Custom Fields from the BuzzBar

You can add tags and notes from the BuzzBar. You can also select or enter custom fields.

Want to categorize a site you’ve found with the BuzzBar?  Add a tag:

Found a high-influence blogger that’s a fan of your favorite sports team? You might want to make a note of that:

Found new information that fits into a custom field? Fill in a custom field from the BuzzBar:

View Your History with the Influencer from the BuzzBar

Have history with a contact you’ve just found?  Does someone else on your team?  Now you can find it while you’re qualifying sites with the BuzzBar:

Approve Discovered Contact Information

BuzzStream looks for contact information – but sometimes it finds contact information for guest authors or cited influencers, as well as the site owner.  Now you can approve discovered contact information from the BuzzBar:

View Links in the BuzzBar

If you’ve already added a link from that site to BuzzStream, you can see it in the BuzzBar:

The Future of the BuzzBar

We’re continuing to improve the BuzzBar and look forward to making it an incredibly valuable part of BuzzStream.  Our roadmap includes adding links and pages to BuzzStream directly from the BuzzBar, as well as the ability to do outreach while you’re looking at the site.

Please let us know what you think – drop us an email at support@buzzstream.com, leave a comment, or tweet us @BuzzStream.  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.

The post Presenting the Bigger, Better BuzzBar appeared first on BuzzStream.

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.

Most companies have:

• Some sort of social media presence (be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.)
• Email lists – of both customers and non-customers
• Blog(s)
• Often a more static website or microsites

Content marketers should develop a plan to promote their content in a unique, platform-native way across all of these assets.

For instance, if you’ve developed an infographic, create some extracts from it with interesting statistics.  These make great social updates for Twitter or LinkedIn.  

By contrast, for Facebook, you may wish to crop an image of the relevant part of the infographic and share it along with the interesting statistic to take advantage of the prominence image-centric posts are given in Facebook’s newsfeed.

Finally for the blog post, you can cut up the infographic into its component pieces, and write a blog post that elaborates on each statistics and explains it in greater detail.

You’ll also want to email a link to your list (sometimes in a larger newsletter).  At BuzzStream, we’ve found sharing our best content with our customers is an excellent way to get social distribution. 

All of these materials should link back to the graphic.  (Incidentally, it’s a good idea to add Twitter Card and Facebook OGP metadata to that page.  It’s also effective to host the graphic on a CDN if you’ll ask people to embed it. Taking the time to follow best practices can make content marketing practices dramatically more effective.)

While infographics are often put in the “fun and easy” bucket (they are fun to do well, and easy to do poorly), most of this advice applies to whitepapers, detailed visualizations of internal data, and other pieces of content.

Paid Media: Buying Attention at Bargain Basement Prices

Integrating paid media in content marketing is a topic of much debate – doesn’t the content marketing do that itself? 

If you take one thing away from this blog post, the answer is No. Nothing markets itself.  The world tends towards entropy, ignorance, and forgetting your company exists.   

That being said, I’m not suggesting you hire someone in a gorilla suit to stand by the side of the freeway holding a sign with the title of your latest white paper on it. 

The White Paper is in his briefcase.

(For starters, it would be difficult to attribute conversions to the person in the gorilla suit.  And our tests indicate gorilla suit advertisements convert poorly.)

Most direct marketing advertisement methods (paid search, etc.) deliver poor ROIs for content advertising.  They’re too expensive, and often deliver people who have the wrong need-state for enjoying some quality content.

Some paid content promotion tactics that can be very effective include:

• StumbleUpon Paid Discovery – StumbleUpon lets you buy clicks at low, low prices fromsocially engaged visitors.  These visitors are typically in the college demographic, and are often looking for engaging visual content.  Made a new piece of visual or interactive content in a b2c space targeting younger people? This is a great fit.
• Reddit Ads  - Similar to StumbleUpon ads, Reddit also has inexpensive clicks from a young, socially engaged audience available.  Remember to follow the protocol of the sub-Reddit you’re advertising on– for example, use the AMA or TIL conventions on the relevant subreddits.

For more tips on Reddit and StumbleUpon ads, I recommend this great SlideShare presentation by Brent Csutoras.

• Promoted Tweets – Twitter now allows you to promote individual tweets, which can be a great way to get in front of the right people and join the social conversation.  You can target users by interest, gender, geographic, or device – so you can get in front of the right people.
• Highly Targeted Facebook Ads – Facebook enables marketers to target both posts and conventional ads by an amazing variety of criteria.  For content promotion, you might want to target people that like WordPress, Blogs, or employees of media properties like TechCrunch or Mashable.
• Outbrain – Outbrain is another content promotion ad network– you can advertise for inexpensive traffic on related blogs for audience development.
• Retargeting on Display or Facebook – If you have a retargeting list, you can advertise your content to it inexpensively on AdRoll, or through Google Retargeting.

If you’re interested in building links specifically (and who isn’t), you may enjoy this video presentation from Carson Ward, where he used Reddit and other social ads to promote his content and found he got links at a very affordable price:

When you approach these paid opportunities, they take a slightly different mentality than traditional brand advertisements or direct response ads.  You want to encourage people to engage with the content, comment on it and share.  Questions work well, as does taking a page from the social aggregators and asking people to “Check this out” or “Let Us Know What You Think”. 

Earned Media: Embracing the Echo Chamber

Earned media is some of the most valuable – and hardest to get – exposure due to its credibility and potential reach.  While you might not see the same level of message control, the amount of trust placed in these recommendations is huge.

Earned media can take several forms:

Social Sharing from Individual Accounts

On networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, and whatever the kids are on these days. As far as efficacy, these can very from “Oh, that’s nice” to driving site-crashing levels of traffic and corresponding increases in sales.  

Pickups in Traditional or Trade Media 

These are conventional PR placements, but in this case, they’re about your content.  What this looks like will depend on your industry – I’ve seen successes range from TechCrunch reporting on aggregated mobile analytics data to USA Today writing about studies from drug rehab centers. 

In some (mostly b2b) verticals, pickups in trade media can be more effective than coverage in larger, general interest papers. 

Bloggers and Other Influencers writing about your content

These aren’t traditional media but rather individual bloggers writing about your content.  This isn’t a hard and fast line between individual bloggers and ‘real’ media anymore – what starts one place can rapidly go to another, and now it’s easy for individual blogger’s posts to get in front of traditional media and get picked up

If you do a lot of outreach to these smaller influencers, you may want to use a tool like BuzzStream to find these people and manage your process.

Prominent placements on aggregator sites like HackerNews, Reddit, etc.

These sites can send LOTS and LOTS of traffic – especially the two examples above.  However, these exist for just about every niche – sometimes they don’t send a lot of traffic, but even if they don’t they’re a good place to reach the curators and other online influencers.

These categories aren’t mutually exclusive any more – while in the past there was a hard line between press, customers, bloggers, analysts, etc., now everyone is part of one big group of people with online audiences.  A story that starts on Twitter gets submitted to HackerNews, picked up on TechCrunch, and then blogged about on smaller publications, etc. 

Whenever you launch a piece of content, you should plan for some sort of earned media promotion. 

While that can mean letting relevant content curators and writers know you’ve published something good, the best approach is to bake earned media appeal into your content.

What does that mean?

• Create ‘citable’ content – use high-authority research from scientific journals and sources to back up your content. (Greg Ciotti, Chris Dyson, and Derek Halpern all do this very well.)
• Consider where each part of your sub-sections may make a good guest post.  For example, if I were to create an ebook about the ‘ultimate guide to content promotion’, I’d try to write a guest post related to  the content section on Content Marketing Institute, the social section on Convince & Convert, and the search section on SEOmoz.   In each of these sections, I’d make sure I mention those organizations and link back to their most important and useful pieces of content.  Then when I approached them for a guest post, I would be in a better position, and visitors from those posts downloading the ebook would feel at home and trust the rest of the content. 
•  Encourage social sharing – consider making 140 character insights tweetable with one click thru Twitter Web Intents. (Also suggest people follow you on the second click so you can build your audience.)
• At the same time, get your metadata right so you look good when shared on social networks – use OGP tags for Facebook and Twitter Card metadata. 
• Make a list of publications you want coverage from before you start writing or outlining your content – observe what these people cover and modify your content to match their themes.
• If your content has visual elements, consider licensing them with creative commons and/or making them easy to embed. (If you decide to make them embeddable, don’t go nuts on the anchor text – no point in making a mess that you may have to clean up later.)

Fusion, Amplification, and Converged Media

In the past, these media types were deeply siloed.  Now, they effortlessly flow into one another, where paid promotion of owned media can lead to massive earned media wins, and paid and owned media can amplify earned media and give something with credibility incredible reach.

Planning for Fusion

In a perfect world, your owned and paid media touch off a tornado of earned media, creating that ‘echo chamber effect’ where your content (and thus your brand) appears to be everywhere. 

While there are a variety of strategies to do this, ultimately you want to get your initial earned, owned, and paid media out into your audience, and hopefully that will lead to more self-sustaining earned media.

This gets you scale and trust – without SuperBowl sized budgets.

Always remember: Earned media is the most important.  Anything a brand or marketer says is immediately suspect – but trusted third parties are just that – trusted third parties.  This makes amplifying an earned media win dramatically more valuable than a comparable amplification of owned media or straight paid media. 

To create this sort of amplification, use your owned and paid power to boost your earned wins, after pushing your original content.

For example, the creators of beautiful water filter Soma used this page as part of their Kickstarter campaign to invite their email list to like their press wins on Facebook. Earned amplified by Owned = Massive Win:

(Actually the whole post where they describe their process is a fascinating example of scaled PR outreach – it’s especially applicable if you like KickStarter, design, or startups.)

If you can get a quality earned media win – like a great guest post or a story –  immediately after your campaign starts, consider promoting it through paid media and on your own lists.  This is a good strategy because:

• More people get exposed to your ideas, your brand, and your content.
• Many publications maintain a “Most Read” or “Most Shared” internal sidebar – as your article climbs this, it will drive more traffic to your content as time goes on.
• Additionally, many publications these days are largely ad driven – if the set of topics around your ‘sweet spot’ becomes widely known at that publication as something that drives traffic, it’s likely you’ll appear in future coverage.
• That win sets you up with social proof to approach other publications with your content and get even bigger earned media wins.

The other tip I can’t recommend enough is to add retargeting pixels to your content as early as possible.  These retargeting lists are free to create, and will come in handy when you need to either move your content consumers down a purchasing path, or launch a new piece of content – you can advertise to everyone that interacted with your last piece for a very affordable rate.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve made something great doesn’t mean people will find out about it on their own. Developing a plan to promote your content across paid, earned, and owned media – before you even create it – is not just a best practice – it’s necessary to be an effective content marketer.

Photo Credits: Gorilla Suit, 

How do you promote your content and use the convergence of POE media to your marketing advantage?  Leave any questions or thoughts in the comments – I’ll be around all day to answer them.

The post Promoting Your Content Across Owned, Earned, and Paid Media appeared first on BuzzStream.

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

An empathetic heart is important for understanding what will resonate emotionally with audiences. Seek to understand what emotional and intellectual triggers are most effective with those you seek to target. Always be investigating new ways to make your content more unique or unexpected.

Inspiration Can Be Found in Other Mediums

Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears, those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto . . . Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh . . . I put in painters, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers . . . I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

Many times some of the best ideas are adaptations or new spins on something that has already been done. Look to other creative outlets online for inspiration. Try to think how a viral video could be adapted to an infographic, or vice versa. Think of how an article could be adapted to a quiz. How could a popular post from years ago be refreshed and updated with a new approach? Look to the success of other types of content to help you create ideas when you are having trouble being creative.

II. On Execution

Engage Your Audience with Narrative and Personalize Your Approach

“I’m always pretending that I’m sitting across from somebody. I’m telling them a story, and I don’t want them to get up until its finished.”  - James Patterson

If the content you are creating isn’t interesting enough to want to tell a friend, it isn’t good enough. It should be your goal to make sure your content is in some part narrative. Stories lend themselves to higher levels of emotional engagement and are more easily committed to memory.

Keep Your Focus, Be Concrete, and Build Toward a Conclusion

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” – Edgar Allan Poe

Conciseness and concreteness are essential. Be sure to be building toward a singular conclusion. Content that consists of interesting information and nothing more is not as good as content that consists of interesting information that builds toward a conclusion that that information proves. Cracked.com articles do this particularly well.

Be Unique and Unpredictable

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.” – G.K. Chesterton

There is no getting around it, there is a massive amount of new content created online every day. In order to stand out from the masses, you need to do something wholly different and unexpected in order to gain attention. If your content has been done before, you better put a really amazing new spin on it or be prepared for failure.

Don’t Be Afraid to Take a New Approach or Innovate

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” – Oscar Wilde

If you are putting out content consistently and have managed to grow a readership, one of the surest ways to fail is to rehash old ideas or stale topics. Look for new ways to surprise your audience, to keep them guessing, and most of all keep them engaged.

Success Takes Practice – Not Everything Will Be Stellar

“Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.” – Ray Bradbury

When creating editorial calendars or proposals for content for clients, be sure to reiterate that it is generally a better choice to try multiple content initiatives instead of putting all of your eggs in one basket. That said, good content marketing is a skill that is developed through practice. Keep at it and you will find success comes more often as you gain experience and better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Be Brave, Don’t Hesitate to Go Against the Grain

“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.” – Ray Bradbury

Standing out and being heard often involves discussing topics or taking positions that may be controversial. Be careful with your brand, but don’t write off all potentially volatile topics. Giving your audience content that elicits a strong opinion can be an incredible way to encourage sharing.

Draw on Emotion

“A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.” – Leo Tolstoy

Be willing to be vulnerable when possible. Show your humanity and your emotions as they can stir empathy in others. Seek to create content that speaks to these emotions.

Base Emotions are the Most Powerful

“The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.” – Eric Hoffer

Sharing content is often an inherently selfish and vain exercise. We share because we believe the content speaks to an aspect of ourselves or our emotions. Seek to craft content that touches these emotions, especially our vanity and self worth. 

Simplicity is Important, Include Only What is Interesting.

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard

It can sometimes be tempting to continue to include more, under the false assumption that more is better. The problem, when it comes to content marketing, is that having too much can easily be the cause of a reader losing interest. Keep in mind the shortening attention spans online, and simplify your content to only the most compelling information.

Make Your Content More Tangible and Familiar Through Analogy

“Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.” -Sigmund Freud

Analogies can help content consumers understand topics that at first blush feel unfamiliar. Content that is well understood is shared more often. Do all you can to simplify and elucidate complicated material.

Facts Win Out Over Emotional Appeals

“For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.” – George Orwell

Don’t mistake your personal convictions for truth. Your content should always be backed up with authoritative, impartial sources.

III. On Promotion and Reach

Target Tastemakers

“It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.” – Aldous Huxley

By understanding and targeting a select few tastemakers in your niche who wield disproportionate amounts of influence, you have a better chance of viral success. Seek out those at the top first, and work your way down.

The post Content Marketing Lessons from Legendary Wordsmiths appeared first on BuzzStream.