If you aren’t already familiar with Buzzstream, it is a very useful link building tool that will help you through all stages of the outreach process.  From collecting prospects and their contact information to conducting your outreach, Buzzstream is there to help speed up the process by keeping you organized and making it just a little less tedious.  Below I will go through five reasons why Buzzstream is one of the most helpful tools you can use to run a successful link building campaign.

1. Helps speed up the prospecting and contact collecting process

Utilizing the Chrome add-on, BuzzMarker, considerably reduces the time it takes to save websites and gather contact information.  Once you find a site that you like, simply click the BuzzMarker icon and the tool will automatically pull the necessary information and saves it to your Buzzstream dashboard.

Should you find yourself on a list of potential sites, such as a “Top 25 Mommy Blogs” list, you can simply right click on the page and select “Create a Prospecting List” under the Buzzstream Buzzmarker dropdown.  The BuzzMarker will open up with a list of the sites in which you can browse through without losing the rest of the list.  Save the ones you like, delete the ones you don’t.

2.  Create email templates and keep them organized in Buzzstream

Buzzstream allows you to create multiple templates which can be edited at any time, viewed by other team members, and shown in various projects.

Once you’ve got your email templates created, you can then use “Dynamic Fields,” to mechanically insert names, city, website name, or any other fields to help personalize the email.  Just drag and drop each field you’d like to use into the subject and/or body of your template.  When it’s time to send your emails, those fields will automatically fill in.

3.  You can schedule future emails and set reminders

With Buzzstream, you can schedule emails to be sent at a later date as well as set reminders to follow-up if you haven’t received a response in a certain amount of days. 

4. Filter your websites and create custom relationship stages

In Buzzstream, you can separate your websites with tags.  If you’re conducting research for different outreach tactics, i.e: broken link building or guest posting, you’ll want a way to keep these websites separate so when it comes time for the outreach you’re only looking at the websites geared to whichever tactic you plan on using at the time.

Once you start your outreach, you’ll want to keep track of what stage of the process you’re in with each site.  Buzzstream provides standard stages such as attempting to reach and correspondence, but you can also create your own.  This allows you to easily see who has or has not been contacted yet or whether your link has been secured or denied.

5.  Buzzstream allows you to track open and response rates

Once you’ve created your templates and sent a few emails, Buzzstream will show you your open and response rates.  This lets you to see what works and what doesn’t.  Maybe a certain subject line has a higher open rate than another or using certain verbiage shows a better response rate.

Of course, like anything else in the world, Buzzstream is not perfect.  The BuzzMarker doesn’t always catch the best contact info and there are a few other organizational effects that can be improved upon- but those aside, Buzzstream is an awesome tool that will help you go a long way with your outreach efforts!