BuzzSumo is a great new tool for finding content and influencer marketing opportunities.  Together with the BuzzMarker for Chrome, it supercharges your ability to find and pitch content marketing placements and other promotional opportunities.

(Editor’s Note:  BuzzStream and BuzzSumo are different companies, united by a mutual dedication to helping marketers build buzz.)

Video Walk-Thru:

Step-by-Step Walk-Thru:

Let’s look at a sample campaign: Our team has created an interactive resource about yoga poses for people with back pain.  Now, I’ll look for bloggers to feature it, and embed one (or more) of my images in their post, to educate people, build my brand, and drive links and traffic back to my site.

I’ll start by using BuzzSumo to search for people who’ve posted successful content about yoga poses for people with back problems.  I’ll search for “yoga poses back pain” in BuzzSumo, and BuzzSumo will find popular, socially shared content about that topic:

Next, I’ll select ‘past 6 months ‘ to get as many BuzzSumo results as I can for this query, so I can investigate every possible placement opportunity and build my list:

This looks like a pretty good list to work with.

Now, I’ll research these contacts so my team and I know which opportunities we should spend time on.  I’ll start by right click, and select “Create a prospecting list” from the BuzzMarker dropdown:

Now, BuzzStream will open the prospecting list in the BuzzMarker for Chrome.  If I see any sites that aren’t good fit for my campaign, I can delete them now.  In this case, I see a Udemy page, which isnt’t a great content promotion opportunity, so I’ll click the trash can icon next to the domain to delete it from my prospecting list.

Additionally, I can  click Filter Prospect List at the top, and limit my list to sites that aren’t already in my BuzzStream account:

I’ll filter my prospecting list by sites not in BuzzStream – so I don’t spend time researching sites my team or I have worked with before, and thus already know.

Now that I’ve cleaned up my prospecting list, I’ll hit Start Prospecting and begin surfing through my list:

Here’s what happens when I hit ‘Start Prospecting’:

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s break this screen down a little more:

1. Website Name – The name of the website. I can change this, if I want to keep it in your database as MindBodyGreen instead of MindBodyGreen.com. (While this is up to you, this can come in handy later when you’re creating outreach templates.)
2. Website Type – This is a category field for what kind of website the prospect site is – a news site, a niche directory, etc. In this case, I’ll choose ‘blog’, but you can create a custom system of types and categories for your projects that matches your industry and organizational system.
3. Tags – I can organize my BuzzStream account with topical, ‘bottom-up’ tags, along with top down categories – in this case I might tag this site “yoga”, “health”, and “green”, so I can find it easily when I’m working on projects in the future. Tags are a great way to connect sites with topics in your database.
4. Discovered Social Accounts & Contact Information – When Iadd a page or a site to BuzzStream, BuzzStream looks for contact information like emails, social handles, and contact pages. This is where the contact information and social handles BuzzStream discovers is shown in the BuzzMarker for Chrome.  (If a piece of contact information looks wrong, you can click on the trash can icon to delete it.)
5. Discovered Contact Pages – Like the contact information, these are contact pages BuzzStream has discovered.
6. Author Information – If you find a specific author you want to work with, you can use this box to enter their information.  (In this yoga case, the article is by a guest author, so this isn’t necessary.)  BuzzStream looks for the author and tries to fill in this field automatically.
7. Project and Teammate – If you’re working on a team, you can assign a team mate to this website. (Maybe you see a perfect opportunity for another client of yours, so you BuzzMark it and assign it to their account manager.)  You can also save the website into a different BuzzStream project.
8. Relationship Stage – This field shows you where you are in the outreach & placement process with this website.
9. List Navigator – The List Navigator lets you scroll back and forth through sites in your prospecting list.  You can move forward and backwards through the list with the right and left arrows, or return to the prospecting list by hitting the bulleted list icon.
10. Save to BuzzStream – This button adds the website (and author, if that field is filled) to your BuzzStream account.

In this case, this looks like a good opportunity for my project, so I’ll categorize it, add tags, and Save it to my BuzzStream account:

(I won’t add the author because this a guest contribution.)

Now BuzzStream creates a profile for this site, automatically gathering more metrics like Twitter followers, Domain Authority, and more:

It looks like this in the web dashboard of your BuzzStream account:

Now that I’ve saved this opportunity, let’s look at the next one in our list:

Now this opportunity is not a great fit, so I’m going to move on to the next opportunity by pressing the Right Arrow on the List Navigator.

The next opportunity in my list is Fitbie.  As you can see, BuzzStream found social handles and contact information for this site:

This looks like a good opportunity, so I’ll fill out the information in the BuzzMarker for Chrome.

 

I’ll move through my whole list that way.  (I’ll conduct an outreach campaign once I’ve researched the list, using the techniques shown in Lesson 3 of BuzzStream University.)

And that’s how you can use BuzzSumo and BuzzStream to find, qualify, and research  content promotion opportunities.

You can sign up for BuzzSumo now – it’s a free tool with additional capabilities for registered and premium users.

And if you don’t yet have a BuzzStream account, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial here.