Buzzstream Review and Outreach Link Building Guide

Is Buzzstream Worth It? – My Verdict

Based on my experience with this tool, Buzzstream is the market's top outreach management and white hat link-building software.

I tested the software for a few weeks, analyzing each function Buzzstream offers, from outreach email templates to campaign management, content promotion, filtering contact info, and more.

I found early on that you MUST set up your Buzzstream account properly. Otherwise, you'll struggle to max out what this tool offers.

In fact, that's the primary reason I am putting together this Buzzstream review — to help you experience this software's true potential and, by extension, run outreach campaigns that deliver the results.

Buzzstream Pros

• Ability to filter prospects according to metrics, streamline the most time-consuming part of the outreach process
• Integrated Google Scraper
• Built-in Chrome Buzzmarker
• It's easy to set up outreach campaigns and sequences 
• Reasonable pricing and plans. Besides, there's a free trial for every plan
• Valuable reporting function to help you keep track of what you're doing
• Creating outreach emails is a breeze thanks to the well-crafted templates
•  Centralized outreach management

Buzzstream Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Clunky user-interface issues
• The tool misses pre-built campaigns
• The social search tool could make do with some upgrade

Buzzstream Pricing

Buzzstream is available in four pricing plans as follows

Starter: $24 per month

Growth: $24 per month

Professional: $299 per month

Custom: $999 per month

I recently wrote a blog post about the truth about backlinks. Why? Because there's a lot of misconception about what a good back-linking strategy should look like.

Apart from a handpicked list of guest posting services, I rarely review software or tools to help you build links. Most aren't worth it, and the best you can get is a bunch of low-quality links or services that can potentially set up your website for Google's penalty.

Buzzstream is different.

The system is a relationship and outreach CRM that you can leverage to manage and nurture a growing portfolio of outreach campaigns if you know how to optimize the features.

As I mentioned, Buzzstream has a steep learning curve. The tool boasts powerful and helpful features if you know what to do, but like most CRMs, it isn't the easiest of tools to master.

Add the fact that most people haven't run a successful outreach campaign, and getting lost in the melee is easy. 

This Buzzstream review isn't all about selling the tool to you. Instead, I want to show you how I use the tool to create and manage my outreach process. That way, you make an informed decision as to whether Buzzstream is the tool for your business. 

Side Note: Creating a massive backlink prospects list and running the actual outreach campaign is an involving strategy, so most of the concepts I've outlined below can be overwhelming if you're a beginner.

Still, you can always shoot me a question in the comment section if you're unsure or want clarification. 

I'll start by demystifying a popular myth.

Can Link Building Through Outreach Work for Small Businesses? 

Yes. You can use the Buzzstream outreach feature to bag high-quality backlinks. You don't have to own a big business or brand to build links through outreach. I recommend leveraging the Skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean.

So, don't hesitate to launch your campaign. It works pretty well, especially if your website meets the benchmarks for success. I will talk about the benchmarks required in a short while.

You must put in the time, though. I like dedicating five to ten hours weekly to outreach for my websites. 

In most cases, I get a 5 to 20% response rate for outreach emails. I send 10 to 30 emails before I can secure a live link. The success rate may vary from one niche to the other, and how well your site meets the criteria required to succeed.  

The best part is that Buzzstream can help speed up your projects, so it shouldn't take long before you start seeing the result.

Better yet, links acquired through Buzzstream are editorial, which means they're reviewed and approved. Why is this important? Because Google doesn't penalize such backlinks. Conversely, that's the kind of links Google wants to see pointing to your websites.

So, if you're in for organic growth that can withstand Google updates, Buzzstream outreach is the way to go. 

With that out of the way, let me answer the second question most people ask regarding email outreach before I dive into the Buzzstream review.

Does My Business Require Outreach?

In most cases, I get a 5 to 20% response rate for outreach emails. I send 10 to 30 emails before I can secure a live link. The success rate may vary from one niche to the other, and how well your site meets the criteria required to succeed.  

You can use Buzzstream as a link-building tool and secure good backlinks for your sites while at it. But, before you take the plunge, you must assess your commitment to the process.

Outreach is a numbers game, so if you only plan to send one outreach email every week, I suggest you go for other relatively affordable tools such as Yesware. Or, you can use the spreadsheet to manage your prospect list, contact details, and other aspects of your campaign.

The same goes if you intend to send less than 100 emails per month.

For starters, Yesware is a Gmail sales tool that allows you to manage basic tasks of the outreach process. You can use it to manage your email templates and track open and reply rate metrics.

Yesware works well if you'll be sending a few weekly emails. Read on if you want to run formidable campaigns that generate tons of links and authority to your sites.

Benchmarks for Successful Outreach Link Building 

Outreach is a powerful marketing strategy to boost your page and website authority. Still, most people fail to achieve positive results. And the reason is they don't know the right recipe for success.

The thing is, sending an outreach email isn't rocket science. At its core, it's a tactic to earn links for your site.

But the prospects will judge you and, by extension, accept to link to your sites based on your first impression.

So, if your website is full of commercial content that lacks authority and an ancient design, you'll have problems earning links.

Indeed, you can secure a link from guest post farms, but that should be the last thing you should be looking for, especially when you spend time and money acquiring links.

That said, here's what you should do before looking for link prospects.

1. Ensure Your Website Has Clean, Easy-to-Navigate UX

It shouldn't be time-consuming to navigate your website. You want a modern, clean site before you start to send emails curated to earn you links.

You can leverage Thrive Themes for a conversion-focused, modern website. The platform comes with an integrated, easy-to-use visual content builder to help you spruce up your site. 

I use Thrive Suite on this website for a clean look and easy navigation. 

2. Ensure You Have Enough Valuable Content and the Capacity to Generate More

You'll struggle to get linked to using Buzzstream or any other link-building tool if you don't have helpful content on your site.

At the very least, you should be able to generate more helpful content if needed.

You can scale your content production using Zimmwriter. The platform allows you to churn content quickly without bending your budget. You'll then use SurferSEO to optimize your content for search engines.

The idea is to have enough content on your site to boost your reply rates once you start outreach.

3. Ensure You Have an Identifiable Avatar

It doesn't matter if you're a company. Your content should have an identifiable avatar.

My contacts are more likely to reply to your messages if I send emails as Jussi, a digital marketer with over 25 years of industry experience.

So, your outreach email should be from the domain you're outreaching to show you're the site owner and to boost the number of replies to your requests. 

The point I am putting across is that outreach is an excellent way to engage prospects for links. However, you have to do it right to get the results.

Otherwise, outreach done wrong can be time-consuming and frustrating, degenerating into hundreds of follow-ups with few to no results.

Here are some stats to underscore the need to do your homework before outreaching.

• A non-optimized strategy can, on average, get you 10 backlinks with a 2% open rate, having sent 500+ emails.
• An optimized strategy can get you 10 backlinks with a 5% open rate, having sent 200+ emails.
• An incredibly optimized strategy can, on average, get you 10 links with an 8% open rate, having sent 120+ emails.

Based on these stats, you'll save a lot of time by getting the basics right. And these are simple metrics based on my experience. The more you double down on the fundamentals, the easier it is to get links from authoritative websites.

Now that you know what a solid foundation for outreach looks like, let's look at what Buzzstream can do to help boost your campaigns.

Buzzstream Review

As I mentioned, how much you get out of Buzzstream has a lot to do with how you set up your account. 

Buzzstream, at its core, is a CRM; like any CRM tool, the initial setup is crucial.

And because you can create as many projects as you like, I recommend breaking up the process to make setting up your account easier. 

The first thing you'll want to do is to create a folder for every site (if you have multiple sites). Then create a second folder for the content. Last, open a folder to divide every project per opportunity source. 

Side Note: When creating folders, avoid duplicates, even though Buzzstream will always tell you if a prospect is in a separate project. 

With the initial setup out of the way, it's time to start outreaching.

Buzzstream Outreach 

Here's how the outreach process works:

Select Outreach Strategy>Identify Your Outreach Targets>Collect Details and Contact Info>Pre-Outreach Activities>Run the Initial Outreach>Follow up>Nurture the Relationship.

Let's break it down.

1. Selecting Your Outreach Strategy 

The first thing you want to do is to develop a strategy that'll enable you to streamline your link-building campaign. You want to develop tactics to initiate a conversation in a way that'll convince prospects to engage with you. 

I recommend the following three strategies:

Guest Posting 

Guest posting involves reaching out to other website owners in your niche to have them host an original article on their sites. 

The idea is to enable your audience to discover your brand, browse your website and sign up for your list. Guest posting allows you to gain editorial links pointing back to your site and, by extension, boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. 

Skyscraper Technique 

Brian Dean, Backlinko's founder, popularized the skyscraper technique. 

The strategy involves updating an older piece of content that gained a significant amount of backlinks and then reaching out to sites that linked to it so they can link to the new one you created.

Broken Link Building

This strategy involves finding resource pages on authoritative sites with backlinks to dead pages. Your job is to rehost the resource or redo it better and outreach to the site owner, asking them to link to your site. 

Other strategies include:

• Requesting for reviews 
• Recruiting affiliates 
• Direct sales 

2. Identifying Your Outreaching Prospects 

You have to cluster your targets to align with your chosen outreach strategy to increase your success rate. For example, if you decide to go with guest posting, you'll want to find websites that accept guest posts. 

In addition, good prospects to link building will:

• Have a High Domain Authority, preferably above 40
• Be regularly updated 
• Have a reasonable amount of readership. You can determine this by looking at metrics such as social profiles, traffic, blog comments, or mentions 
• Reach out to others for linking 

You can find these targets by:

• Running advanced queries on Google
• Reverse engineering your competitors using third-party tools

Buzzstream allows you to collect contact info for these prospects easily. The tool has an integrated Google scraper allowing you to input advanced queries. The tool will then scrape hundreds of prospects for your project for review.

The scraper is a valuable and efficient tool that allows you to discover opportunities at the click of a button, from guest posting to broken link building.

While Buzzstream does a pretty decent job finding link-building opportunities, I recommend using it with other tools like Buzzsumo or Buzzstream's chrome extension to discover popular guest posts on social media relevant to my niche.

I recommend using Ahrefs for the Skyscraper technique to scrape do-follow links for the content you want to reverse engineer.

Ahrefs allows you to filter backlinks you want to review while hiding spammy ones. That way, you can create a rich list of project opportunities.

3. Collect Details and Contact Info

You know how to collect opportunities for backlinks. The next step, arguably the most time-consuming of the entire process, is filtering and details collection.

In this step, you hope to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The first thing you want to do is to find a website's editor or owner and their email address.

The good news is, Buzzstream has a built-in feature enabling you to review sites in your projects. Buzzmarker, on the other hand, allows you to analyze your prospect list in an iFrame quickly.

While Buzzstream can help you gather contact details, the process isn't comprehensive.

Here's a little trick to help you get the info for your contacts:

Press Ctrl+F Contact to find the contact page on the size. If you bump into a generic form, add it to Buzzstream. You'll want to go a step further to find better contact info, such as the personal email address of the site's owner or editor.

Head over to the about us page. Hover over the "team" section of the page. Here you'll want to look for the person in charge of the content and their email address.

If you still haven't found the address, consider using tools like Hunter.io, Findymail, or Skrapp.

Here's the info you should collect from your contacts to ensure your backlinking projects are successful:

• The name of the person you'll be sending the outreach emails
• A few things about the person
• A link to their social media profiles

What you want based on your approach and strategy

It is essential to know the info you collect doesn't have to be right always. So, some emails will bounce, and that's the reality of building backlinks through outreach.

Either way, outreaching is a number's game, and the more opportunities you gather, the more backlinks you'll likely acquire.

4. Pre-outreach Activities

You must have a well-thought-out strategy to ask people to link back to your site. You'll have a problem getting backlinks without laying down a solid foundation.

So, how do you ensure everything flows smoothly and that you get the responses you're hoping for?

My #1 recommendation is to leverage social media to help create some awareness about your website.

You can do this by promoting the sites you want to guest post for and notifying them about your actions.

That way, when you return for backlinks or a guest post, they'll be more than willing to reciprocate.

Here's what the process looks like:

Determine Your Outreach Target>Follow Them on Social Media>Share Their Posts>Engage Them for the First Outreach

You may want to tag the site's owner in the comment section so they can get notified whenever there's a new comment or share.

You want to run this strategy for a little while before outreach.

Speaking of social media, I suggest using Twitter, especially if you have a significant following. That way, you can generate retweets and notifications, making your shares more valuable.

In addition, you can use scheduling tools to automate the process.

And the beauty of it is that Buzzstream allows you to track the conversation stage to know when to email.

5. Initial Outreach

Now that you have created an outreach system, it's time to get to work. At this point, you have worked out everything you need to send your first message.

I suggest creating a template with a curated message depending on your idea of the website's owner and how they will likely engage with you.

Buzzstream comes with an integrated outreach and template manager.

You can use the template manager to store your templates and track the success of each message. That way, you can determine which works best for your link building.

One subject line that works well is "love your content," followed by a proposal.

To save time, you can create several core templates and then tweak them to suit a specific project.

You'll also want to determine if you've collected the right information and back-linking opportunities.

Again, Buzzstream allows you to generate emails per your gathered information. Besides, the tool enables you to customize your emails to create a connection with the person you're sending them to.

All you need to do is to pick the sites you want to email, and Buzzstream will take care of the rest. The system will pick the person's information, URLs, and email.

Your work is to review the email to see if it requires tweaking and hit send. Buzzstream will repeat the process for the next contact. It'll also change the conversation stage automatically. That way, you can know who you've emailed and who you haven't.

6. Follow-up

You won't get replies from the first emails you send.

While outreach works, you must follow up several times for people to link back to you.

Follow-ups are part of the process.

You follow up on your leads easily on Buzzstream. The tool will even send you reminders and even provide a template specifically designed to help you/

While the template is generic, you can tweak it to suit your goal.

Here's a good template that has given me positive results almost always:

Subject: Did you miss my last email?

 Hello, [First Name],

 Did you receive my last email? Please let me know what you think about my proposal.

 Sincerely,

 [Your Name]

I recommend using the 3-7-7 formula for follow-ups.

Send the first follow-up 3 days after the initial message and the rest seven days apart.

If the person doesn't reply, chances are, they're not interested.

You'll also get replies where that outrightly reject your proposal. That's how outreach works, and you shouldn't be discouraged.

7. Nurture the Relationship

Link building is a continuous process.

Most people focus on getting linked to and cut off communication with the site's owner. It shouldn't be like that.

I recommend nurturing the relationship to expand your chances of getting more backlinks. You can even collaborate on other projects, such as subscribing to their email list, promoting each other services, hosting events together, and so on.

So, once your post is accepted, you should strive to foster the relationship.

You can decide how to engage with the person based on what you want to get from them. For instance, if the site has a newsletter, you can aim to appear on it in the long run. So, keep the communication open.

Bonus - Pre-made Templates

As I wrap up this Buzzstream review, here are a few templates to help you get started with your outreach process for link building.

Guest Post

Subject: Guest Post for [Site Name]

Hello [First Name],

I hope this message finds you well.

As a long-time reader and follower of your content, I have always appreciated the insightful articles you publish, particularly your post titled "[Mentioned Content Title]," which I found to be an excellent read.

I am contacting you to inquire whether you currently accept guest posts for [Their site].

 I would love to contribute a guest post that I believe would provide valuable insights to your readers. After brainstorming several topics, I have come up with the following ideas that I believe would resonate with your audience:

• Idea 1
• Idea 2
• Idea 3

To give you a sense of the quality of my work, here are some examples of skin care-related articles that I have previously written and published:

• Sample article 1
• Sample article 2
• Sample article 3

I would be honored to have the opportunity to share my knowledge and expertise with your readers through a guest post. Please let me know if you are interested, and I would be happy to provide you with further details.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards, [Your Name]

Broken Link

Email 1 - Reporting a Broken Link

Subject: Broken Link on [Site Name]

Hello [First Name],

I hope this email finds you well. While browsing your website, I came across a broken link that I thought you might want to know about. The link can be found on this page [Page with Broken Link] and leads to an error page [Page with a broken link to].

If you're interested, I recently published a post covering a similar topic that may be useful for your readers. You can find the post here: [Your Link].

Please let me know if you need any assistance updating the link, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,

[Your Name]

Skyscraper Outreach

Subject: Offering a Valuable Resource for Your Site

Dear [First Name],

I hope this email finds you well. I recently came across your article on [Mentioned Content Title] ([Mentioned Content URL]) and noticed that you mentioned an article on [a subject related to your niche or website's content]

I wanted to share our updated and more comprehensive version of the article, which includes actionable tips and is up-to-date for [Year]

I believe this resource would be valuable to your readers, and I would be honored if you could consider adding it to your page.

Thank you for your time, and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Best regards,

[Your Name]

And there you have it. A comprehensive Buzzstream review. Go ahead and use this link-building tool to acquire awesome links to your site. All the best!