How to generate blog traffic with Buzzsumo and Buzzstream
Millions of blogs, videos, and infographics are published on the internet every day. The content you create should therefore stand out. But how do you ensure that you stand out among all those others?
You need to share valuable content to be considered a credible and trustworthy source in your industry. This type of content also generates more shares, likes, and traffic.
In this blog, I share two tools with you that can help you with this; Buzzsumo and Buzzstream. They can both be used separately but offer even more value when you combine them.
Buzzsumo
Three steps that will bring you valuable resources and traffic:
- Search for valuable resources in your industry;
- Improve existing content;
- Connect with the right people.
1. How to find valuable resources in your industry
Once you’ve decided on what topic to write about, the next step is to research valuable resources that support your story. First of all, you will have to find out what has been written about this topic before. That’s what you can use Buzzsumo for. I call it the ‘Google for Content Marketing’.
Then click on the Top Content button. Then type the keywords, such as ‘content’, ‘marketing’, and ‘trends’ in the search bar. To further specify your search query, you can filter it by date, content type, and/or domain name. Buzzsumo will then give you a list of search results including social media shares and a total number of shares.
Tip 1: I selected a shorter period (6 months) for my search because there was a lot of content available for my topic ‘content marketing trends’. You can select a longer time period for topics where less content is available.
You can also choose a specific social media platform. For example, if you want to know if the content you want to create is doing well on Pinterest, you can search Buzzsumo for ‘Pinterest shares’. Buzzsumo will then give you a list of all the content that has been shared (the most) on Pinterest.
When you are looking for top content, it is important to pay attention to the number of shares and likes. The higher the number of shares and links in a blog, the better. It is valuable and interesting content that you can use for your own blog, infographic, etc.
Tip 2: When in doubt about the type of blog, look at the blog titles. Which titles score the best and do the titles have something in common?
Trending feature
Your blog generates more traffic when it refers to recent topics. Buzzsumo has a handy trending feature for this. It can help you find top content in your industry.
As you can see, Buzzsumo gives you an overview of the most recent trending topics. You can choose from a general overview or a specific topic. If you want to write a blog about marketing, click on ‘marketing”. Buzzsumo gives you an overview of the trending topics in the marketing industry over the past 24 hours. It is also possible to choose a different time frame, such as 2,4,8, or 12 hours.
When you click on ‘most shared’ you will see which trending topics have been shared the most between the last 2 and 24 hours.
Personally, I find this a very handy feature because Buzzsumo gives me insight into which content is doing well with my audience. It helps to respond to topics that are ‘talked’ online.
If you know which content and topics are important to your audience, it is easier to focus your content on this. That’s good for your credibility.
Identify top content
In the webinar ‘3 content formats to lift your traffic’, Steve Rayson, director at Buzzsumo, mentions, in addition to the shares and likes, something else you can look for to find top content. He says it’s also important to pay attention to:
- Blog type;
There are different types of blogs you can choose from. Data from Buzzsumo shows that ‘How’, ‘Lists’ and ‘Quizzen’ score the best because they get the most shares and likes. You can also opt for a ‘Why’ blog, but it scores (slightly) less well.
- The number of images used in a blog ;
Images are important because people are visual. Using images in your blog is recommended as it increases readability. As a guideline, you can use 1 image for every 75 to 100 words. That immediately explains why infographics are so popular.
- Make use of practical information.
This means that the content you create is easy to share and useful to others.
People are willing to share content when they are emotionally touched by it or when they want to inform others because they find it valuable information.
2. Improve existing content
Now that you’ve done enough research, you can start evaluating the content you’ve found. It is important to improve the content you have found. Why else would people read your blog when they can read someone else’s original blog? So you will have to add value to the existing content. There are several ways you can do that.
- Make it longer
Because then it becomes easier to add more items/links. You also add something valuable to the ‘conversation’ that is conducted online.
- Update it
Choose a blog that was written by someone a long time ago. There is a good chance that it contains ‘old information”. Breathe new life into it by writing a (similar) blog but with new information and new insights.
- Be thorough
When you write a blog, it is important that you write an in-depth article, because that way you can add more value to your content. So, before you start writing, you can use Buzzsumo for thorough research based on the topic you want to write about.
3. Connect with the right people
When you’re done writing, you’ll want to share it with your audience so they can read the blog you’ve put so much effort and time into. You can use your own social media channels to promote your content. But if you want to reach a wider audience, you can connect with influencers (authorities) in your field. Usually, these are people who:
- Run a website in your industry;
- Be interested in your subject;
- Have previously liked or shared an article on this topic.
A handy tool that can help you find and connect with these influencers is Buzzstream. I use it to distribute and promote my content online to reach the people I want. ‘It’s my personal content marketing database’. This makes reaching the right people easier and faster.
You can use Buzzstream for:
- Online PR;
- Saving interesting resources;
- Content promotion.
I use it for content promotion. After you have logged in, you can collect relevant website data and collect data about interesting people and activities.
First of all, you need to install the Buzzmarker for Buzzstream, because it saves important links, blogs, news, tweets, and influencers for you.
Before you can use the Buzzmarker, you must first log in to Buzzstream and Buzzsumo at the same time. If you only log in to Buzzstream, you will get the message ‘you have already logged in and the Buzzmarker will not work.
Tip 3: Make sure you install the Buzzmarker in Chrome or Mozilla. Then you get the best result. The Buzzmarker does not work in Internet Explorer.
After installation, you will see the above icon in the top right corner of your Internet toolbar.
Click on the Buzzmarker, it will open a widget and reviews the website for interesting data such as articles, authors, and contact information.
But there’s more!
With Buzzmarker you can also add interesting (news) media.
When you click ‘Save to Buzzstream’ it will add your page to the Buzzstream website list.
One way to promote your content is to find influencers in your industry who have shared similar content in the past. If you want them to share your content, you can start sharing their content in your own blog by using links and/or mentions. You might be thinking, ‘Who are the influencers in my industry and how do I find them?
If you need help with this you can use Buzzsumo’s ‘influencers search’ function by clicking the influencer button. For example, search for ‘marketing”. Buzzsumo now gives you a whole list of “influencers” in your industry.
To select ‘ top influencers ‘, Buzzsumo’s Steve Rayson explains that it is important to look at the ‘retweet ratio’ and the ‘reply ratio’. When both are high, it’s an indication that people are ‘talking’ a lot about this content by retweeting/sharing.
Tip 4: A retweet rate of 4% or higher means someone is an influencer. You can see how involved the audience is from the reply ratio. The higher the reply rate, the more involved people are.
Based on that information I can select influencers in the content marketing industry. But there’s more to watch out for. As:
- Do they create their own content? If so, what kind of content is that?
- Where/how often do they publish?
- Where is their content shared?
The ‘View Links Shared’ button gives you insight into this.
All of this information can help you decide if this person is an interesting influencer because you know what kind of content they create or are interested in. It makes it easier for you to create similar content or incorporate their Twitter name or URL into your blog.
Once you’ve found the influencers, you can save their data somewhere so you can access them when you’ve finished your content. That’s where you can use Buzzstream. Here you can save their name, email, social media names, etc. under ‘People’ by clicking on ‘Add people’.
When it’s time to start promoting your content, you can use the ‘influencer outreach’ feature in Buzzstream. This feature allows you to create email templates that you can send to all the influencers you found through Buzzsumo and saved to Buzzstream.
A big advantage of this ‘influencer outreach’ tool is that you can save and save an email at any time. So you don’t have to set them up every time.
The fact that you can store influencer data and email templates in Buzzstream will save you a lot of time!
Buzzsumo, an ally for your content curation
Discover the ideal tool for building a social media content curation strategy.
Buzzsumo
1. Presentation
What is Buzzsumo? Some may already know it, but Buzzsumo is a web solution for finding content, influencers and creating alerts in a specific area or on a set of keywords. This tool has already been presented many times across the blogosphere, but here I want to deal with the content aspect only and ignore the other specificities of the platform.
The advantage of the basic version is that it is possible to use its search engine for free (for a single user), but it is not possible to export or exploit data or to create alerts, however, this is still sufficient for a curation. For more information, I refer you to the Buzzsumo price sheet.
2. Find content
Once you have registered on the site, you are automatically redirected to the feature that interests us here, namely “ Top Content ”.
The tool then consists of a classic search bar in which you will perform your query, the keywords can be in the language you want, and a filtering system on the left of the page. Filtering will refine your query.
You can filter by content-type:
- Item
- Infographics
- Guest post
- Gifts
- Interviews
Videos But also over time:
- In the last 24 hours
- Last week
- Last month
- The last 6 months
- Last year
Now, let’s perform a query with the terms “ content marketing ” with the criteria of article content and published last week, so we get the following results:
Search results are ranked according to the number of shares on social networks, these are essential metrics to determine the popularity of an article.
The most interesting thing is that Buzzsumo indicates the number of shares on the main social networks namely Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ which allows us to identify on which platform an article will have the most chance of ‘be popular.
By clicking the “ View Sharers ” button on any of the search results, you have the opportunity to find out who has shared that content.
And the “ Share ” button will allow you, as its name suggests, to share the content on the social network of your choice or add it to your favorite curation tool.
3. Conclusion
Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding popular content online, obviously, there are others out there, but this one strikes me as one of the best out there.
This article is intended to be simple in order to be accessible by all, there is no secret, to master a tool, you just need to familiarize yourself with it and it is extremely easy to use.
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