As I work with our clients on their link building projects, I am often testing out new tools to make the process more efficient. After meeting with Lee at PubCon South in March, Jeremy Bencken – one of the founders of BuzzStream – followed up with Lee for the opportunity to demo and test out their link building tool – BuzzStream for Link Building. Lee requested that I take a look at this tool, and I was glad for the opportunity.
For many webmasters, managing link building campaigns can seem pretty daunting. Identifying a link building strategy is one key to success. Another is ensuring link building efficiency and follow up. Identifying processes and tools to help increase this efficiency can greatly increase the amount and value of links you achieve.
BuzzStream is one such tool. Developed by the creators of ApartmentRatings.com, BuzzStream helps identify sites from which to request links, and makes this link building process efficient and human. The BuzzStream for Link Building tool works in 4 key ways: Identifying contact information, managing communications, managing link opportunities and link request sent, and monitoring backlinks achieved.
When searching for link building opportunities, BuzzStream’s BuzzMarker can help quickly identify contact information and website information to easily categorize within your BuzzStream Dashboard. By pulling this information automatically, BuzzMarker helps save time, rather than the link builder spending minutes searching for a contact email address or documenting content categories. Then, when this information is placed in the BuzzStream Dashboard, you are able to sort by a variety of factors, such as PageRank, date found, type of link, and contact status.
BuzzStream also allows you to easily manage communications between themselves and the website’s owner or writer. BuzzStream identifies Tweeting between your accounts, as well as emails being sent back and forth. This communication monitoring helps you, as a link builder, begin a relationship with this webmaster, and build it over time. The website owner is more likely to link to a person they know, so these relationships matter.
Once the link request is sent, BuzzStream catalogs this request to easily be found later. You can search by requests sent within a particular timeframe, requests sent to sites with a certain PageRank and many other sorting factors to make documenting and reporting these request simple and efficient.
The main objective to all of this opportunity documentation and relationship building is acquiring the link. BuzzStream keeps with its efficiency trend and employs a backlink checker which automatically runs each week to detect the achievement of a link from the link requests you’ve sent out. This information is then automatically documented in your contact dashboard, allowing you now to easily sort by which link you’ve received. On top of that, the backlink checker also identifies if any links were taken away, if the links were NoFollowed, if the anchor text changed, or if the page that holds your link all of a sudden becomes populated with spammy content. Because of this, you can also easily see the value of each link you’ve achieved, and you know how to request updates if necessary.
BuzzStream does an great job of streamlining the link request process, and the automatic documentation of it all is incredible. With affordable price points for up to 20 different users, BuzzStream can be an effective linking asset for individuals starting their own link building to agencies looking to automate some of their processes.
