Ipad 2 For Men ? Great Christmas Gift For Men

You are wondering what?s kind of present you should give your lover on this Christmas. There are many kind of presents at the souvenir shops that make you dizzy, but still make you wonder what to give, what more meaningful, something that will surprise and ? he will always keep it with him. Let us [...]

Source: http://homemadechristmasgift.org/2011/11/ipad-2-for-men-great-christmas-gift-for-men/

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Sex, Lies, and the Art of Commanding Attention

It’s Killer Headlines week at Copyblogger! Our guest editor Jon Morrow will be delivering up great content for you all week on how to write headlines that get results. Today, how to choose the power words that make headlines work harder. Okay, show of hands. Who wonders if their writing might be just a teensy [...]

Source: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/28493291/0/copyblogger~Sex-Lies-and-the-Art-of-Commanding-Attention

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SEM Rush Review & Free Trial SEMRush Coupons

SEM Rush has long been one of my favorite SEO tools. We wrote a review of SEM Rush years ago. They were best of breed back then & they have only added more features since, including competitive research data for many local versions of Google outside of the core US results: UK, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil.

Recently they let me know that they started offering a free 2-week trial to new users.

Set up a free account on their website & enter the promotional code "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M"

For full disclosure, SEM Rush has been an SEO Book partner for years, as we have licensed their API to use in our competitive research tool. They also have an affiliate program & we are paid if you become a paying customer, however we do not get paid for recommending their free trial & their free trial doesn't even require giving them a credit card, so it literally is a no-risk free trial.

What is SEM Rush?

SEM Rush is a competitive research tool which helps you spy on how competing sites are performing in search. The big value add that SEM Rush has over a tool like Compete.com is that SEM Rush offers CPC estimates (from Google's Traffic Estimator tool) & estimated traffic volumes (from the Google AdWords keyword tool) near each keyword. Thus, rather than showing the traffic distribution to each site, this tool can list keyword value distribution for the sites (keyword value * estimated traffic).

As Google has started blocking showing some referral data the value of using these 3rd party tools has increased.

Normalizing Data

Using these estimates generally does not provide overall traffic totals that are as accurate as Compete.com's data licensing strategy, but if you own a site and know what it earns, you can set up a ratio to normalize the differences (at least to some extent, within the same vertical, for sites of similar size, using a similar business model).

One of our sites that earns about $5,000 a month shows a Google traffic value of close to $20,000 a month.
5,000/20,000 = 1/4 = 0.25

A similar site in the same vertical shows $10,000
$10,000 * 0.25 = $2,500

A couple big advantages over Compete.com and services like QuantCast for SEM Rush are that:

• they focus exclusively on estimating search traffic
• you get click volume estimates and click value estimates right next to each other
• they help you spot valuable up-and-coming keywords where you might not yet get much traffic because you rank on page 2 or 3

Disclaimers With Normalizing Data

It is hard to monetize traffic as well as Google does, so in virtually every competitive market your profit per visitor (after expenses) will generally be less than Google. Some reason why..

1. In some markets people are losing money to buy marketshare, while in other markets people may overbid just to block out competition.
2. Some merchants simply have fatter profit margins and can afford to outbid affiliates.
3. It is hard to integrate advertising in your site anywhere near as aggressively as Google does while still creating a site that will be able to gather enough links (and other signals of quality) to take a #1 organic ranking in competitive markets...so by default there will typically be some amount of slippage.
4. A site that offers editorial content wrapped in light ads will not convert eyeballs into cash anywhere near as well as a lead generation oriented affiliate site would.

SEM Rush Features

Keyword Values & Volumes

As mentioned above, this data is scraped from the Google Traffic Estimator and the Google Keyword Tool. More recently Google combined their search-based keyword tool features into their regular keyword tool & this data has become much harder to scrape (unless you are already sitting on a lot of it like SEM Rush is).

Top Search Traffic Domains

A list of the top 100 domain names that are estimated to be the highest value downstream traffic sources from Google.

You could get a similar list from Compete.com's Referral Analytics by running a downstream report on Google.com, although I think that might also include traffic from some of Google's non-search properties like Reader. Since SEM Rush looks at both traffic volume and traffic value it gives you a better idea of the potential profits in any market than looking at raw traffic stats alone would.

Top Competitors

Here is a list of sites that rank for many of the same keywords that SEO Book ranks for

Most competitors are quite obvious, however sometimes they will highlight competitors that you didn't realize, and in some cases those competitors are also working in other fertile keyword themes that you may have missed.

Overlapping Keywords

Here is a list of a few words where Seo Book and SEOmoz compete in the rankings

These sorts of charts are great for trying to show clients how site x performs against site y in order to help allocate more resources.

Compare AdWords to Organic Search

These are sites that rank for keywords that SEO Book is buying through AdWords

And these are sites that buy AdWords ads for keywords that this site ranks for

Before SEM Rush came out there were not many (or perhaps any?) tools that made it easy to compare AdWords against organic search.

Start Your Free Trial Today

SEM Rush Pro costs $79 per month (or $69 if you sign up recurring), so this free trial is worth about $35 to $40.

Take advantage of SEMRush's free 2-week trial today.

Set up a free account on their website & enter the promotional code "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M"

If you have any questions about getting the most out of SEM Rush feel free to ask in the comments below. We have used their service for years & can answer just about any question you may have & offer a wide variety of tips to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.

Categories: 

seo tools

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/qVSI_TjXs1E/sem-rush-coupons

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Use a Content Production Line for Fast, Effective Writing

What does your blog-post writing process look like? For many bloggers, it’s something like this: Think “I really should write a post today…” Make a coffee, tidy the desk, check emails, check Twitter Open up a blank document Stare at the screen for a while … and so on. If you’re lucky, you come up [...]

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Original Post: Use a Content Production Line for Fast, Effective Writing

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/use-a-content-production-line-for-fast-effective-writing/

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The Best and Worst Brand Makeovers of 2011

2012 is almost here, and unless those Mayans are right, it's time to evaluate what changes you're going to be making to your brand to make sure you hold strong through the next twelve months. You don’t need to drastically change what you're doing to reach prospects every year; you just need to show them that you are paying attention to the world around them as it changes. A new year means a fresh start and a world of possibilities for your brand, so get excited!

But as you mull over the changes you'll make to revamp your own brand, it's important to look at the successes and failures of other companies' rebranding efforts. Doing so will help you identify opportunities and serve as cautionary tales for your own brand. So here’s a look back into 2011 to see which brands did a great job making over their image, and those who did not (and possibly won’t live to see the end of 2012 because of it).

The Best Brand Makeovers of 2011

1.) Starbucks: A few years back you may remember Starbucks actually lost sight of what was important to their brand: the customer experience. They spent all their time on expansion and not enough time on the in-store experience that originally brought them fame. Since then, they brought the focus back to their stores and their coffee-loving community. This year, they showed the world what having a well known, customer-focused brand can actually mean. They also named dropped in a whole different way, launching a new logo that was so well known, it no longer needed to include the company's name.

Marketing Takeaway: Building a community of devoted fans is crucial to propelling a brand forward. They become advocates and influencers for your brand. Be it through customer service, experiences, or social media, maintaining a rich dialogue with your customers never goes out of style.

2.) Keds: 20 years ago, Keds was your mother’s brand. In fact, my own mother called me an old lady when she saw me browsing the Keds website a few years back. What she doesn’t know is that the Keds today is no longer the Keds she knew. They have modernized their brand by offering new designs, partnering with well-known designers, and placing their new shoes in hip retail locations. With these changes, they’ve also kept a little of the old. The blue Keds logo remains on every heel, and they have stayed true to the affordable price point for which they were known. 

Marketing Takeaway: If you are an older brand trying to modernize, allowing for a “re-discovery” of your brand might be what you need. I don’t know the Keds brand my mother experienced growing up, but I was able to have a whole new experience with the 2011 brand. Make sure your new image can still be mutigenerational; what’s new to me may also bring back memories for my parents' generation. 

3.) TBS: TBS won the Holy Grail of TV publicity when they acquired Conan O’Brien as its late night talk show host. TBS then needed to rebrand to appeal to their new customer base, which now skews much younger and slightly male. What their company came up with was a modernized play on their old smiley face logo. It is mechanical, movable, and modern, yet still totally TBS.

Marketing Takeaway: TBS did not stray far from their original appeal. They were already known for comedy, but they just needed a modern take for their new audience. The company went as far as bringing the brand in line with the standards of the day, but they didn’t go too far and alienate their original customer base.

The Worst Brand Makeovers of 2011

4.) Netflix: Poor Netflix can’t quite catch a break, can they? This year Netflix forgot about their intensely loyal fan base when they drastically raised prices, split their company, made a new brand in Qwikster, quickly gave up that brand, and then sort of apologized. Confused? Yeah, me too. Maybe they wouldn’t have lost so many customers if we weren’t all scratching our heads asking, “What just happened?” 

Marketing Takeaway: Quick changes without an open and honest communication with your customers can be devastating to your brand. Confusion often feels like betrayal, and with a huge audience of early adopters, Netflix will be hard pressed to get all of those lost customers back who have likely embarked on a search for another online video provider. Be honest about the needs you have as a company with customers. Blogging is a great tool to keep your customers in the loop with the changes at your company and serves as an open line of communication.

5.) Borders: Some may say that all bookstores are doomed, but Borders lost and it had nothing to do with the iPad, the Kindle, the Fire, or the Roaster. Okay I made that last one up, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing killed Borders but itself. It failed to connect with the things that customers valued. It watched as other companies modernized their brands, made deals with online retailers, and became big players in social media. They were constantly playing catch up, and in the end, that closed their doors. 

Marketing Takeaway: Be innovative in 2012. Connect with what your customers want, and soon you will be able to anticipate their needs even before they do. Even if something is working well now, it doesn’t mean it can’t be even greater. I am not still carrying around my original iPod, (and that’s not only because someone stole it) because they made the next one even more awesome.

Next year, keep an eye on what’s important to your customers, make changes to modernize without alienating, and most importantly, try something new. Here’s to an awesome 2012 for you and your brand!

What are some ways you plan to refresh your brand for the New Year?

Image credit: pheaber, Headstand Media, Chictopia, FastCompany, Huffington Post, Geek.com

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HubSpot/~3/Ob5E2izJ3Yo/The-Best-and-Worst-Brand-Makeovers-of-2011.aspx

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Spam? Affiliate is a 4 Letter Word

Google Hates Affiliates

Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem.

How was I aware of that?

2 ways:

• If you read any of Google's older guidelines that leaked over the years you would see a consistent disdain toward affiliate sites. This was also reflected in official advice at search engine conferences & whatnot.
• A friend of mine went to Google's campus & Google offered to "optimize" their AdWords account. As soon as the word affiliate came up it was like spoiled meat. Replacing the word "affiliate" with some other idiotic made up phrase (I think it was "regional online distributor") suddenly made everything O.K. again. Other friends had similar stories.

Note that the difference between "affiliate" and "regional online distributor" is for all intents and purposes linguistic crap, however it can be the difference between life and death for an online business.

To be fair, the ready availability of feeds to quickly generate sites means that most affiliate sites will be garbage. At some point Google gets sick of fighting the same battles over and over again. Then again, most websites are garbage & only the top x% of anything is going to be great.

At Affiliate Summit last year Google's Frederick Vallaeys basically stated that they appreciated the work of affiliates, but as the brands have moved in the independent affiliates have largely become unneeded duplication in the AdWords ad system. To quote him verbatim, "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel."

It is worth noting that Google doesn't consider itself "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel" when they insert themselves as an affiliate.

Should information empires be allowed to discriminate based on nothing more than the business model of competitors?

Spam vs Not Spam

The most recently leaked Google rater document stated

Spammers create spam pages to make money. Sometimes, they make money directly, by placing moneymaking links on the spam page. Here are two types of moneymaking links:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads: Spammers get paid each time ads are clicked on their webpages. Another term for PPC ads is ?sponsored links?.
• Thin Affiliates: Spammers make money when a transaction is completed after the user has clicked through to the merchant?s site from their webpages

PPC ads appear on many, many webpages. Some pages with PPC ads are spam, but many pages with PPC ads are not. Pages should not be assigned a Spam flag if they are created to provide information or help to users. Pages are spam if they exist only to make money and not to help users.
Sometimes, spam pages do not have moneymaking links. These spam pages are created to change search engine rankings or even to do harm to users? computers with sneaky downloads.

So in essence, the difference between spam & not spam is if the page is helpful to users.

The rating document takes 130 pages to clearly articulate the difference between what is spam and what is not spam.

But the core ethos in categorization is if it is original & helpful it is not spam unless it is doing something deceptive.

A Minor Exception*

Google's rater guides also arbitrarily sneaked in the "what the hell, if it is affiliate, it is spam" card:

Note: Major cosmopolitan cities are preferred targets for spammers, especially hotel affiliates. Such results should be flagged as Spam, even if they are related to the query and helpful to users. For example, a hotel affiliate page with a list of Chicago hotels may be assigned a rating Relevant, but also receive a Spam flag.

Google is directly going out of its way to attack competing business models.

Even if the site is quality - any way you slice it - they still tell raters to label it as spam if it is a hotel affiliate.

Once again it is worth pointing out that the label "affiliate" is just an arbitrary label. It could just as well be a "commissioned salesperson."

An Example Market: Books

In our forums one of our members quoted a brilliant book by Karl Polanyi from 1944 which was full of gems like "A so-called self-regulating market economy may evolve into Mafia capitalism ? and a Mafia political system"

I searched for that quote & guess what ranked #1?

Google Books of course.

Google's owned & operated affiliate offering in the niche.

The stolen version hosted on Google.com ranks #1...everything else is either spam, unneeded duplication in the marketplace, and/or conjecture that can float up and down as they tweak the algorithms.

To say that the book publishing industry is undergoing pains would be an understatement. But maybe in some weird way Google promoting Google helps the book industry by giving it more avenues to be seen? Maybe they are trying to help out book authors?

The structure of the book industry prevents the book author from getting anything but a small slice of the book's revenues (unless the author is well known and/or they self publish). Markets being what they are, most authors live in obscurity on the long tail. To help supplement their low cut of the revenue pie, some book authors use affiliate links to link to Amazon.com as a purchasing option on their official book websites.

Recently in our forums a member created a thread about a client site being blocked from AdWords because there was an affiliate link on the page for their own book!

Google is The Biggest Online Affiliate

So the author is not allowed to advertise his own work to give you multiple buying options & highlight options which offer her additional compensation, however...

• Google is free to steal the copyright work & promote their looted version first
• Google can run an affiliate network
• Google can double dip in the AdWords auction
• Google can give itself affiliate ad units in the SERPs (all their lead generation offers & the CPA-based product ads)
• Google can invest in start up affiliate networks (like VigLink) that automatically inserts affiliate links without any editorial discretion from the publisher
• Google can invest in networks of similar sites (like Whaleshark Media) that are primarily driven by affiliate links
• Google can create paid placement affiliate-driven sites like Boutiques.com & then fold them into Google Product Search without disclosing what is happening to those affiliate placements
• Google can become the ultimate online affiliate

And yet the word "affiliate" is a bad word.

The word affiliate is arbitrarily tarnished in the same way that SEO is.

Use another label & if you do the exact same thing it is clean. Craigslist or eBay are not affiliates as they are marketplaces. Wal-Mart & Amazon.com might do drop shipping & have some affiliate promotions on their sites, but they are retailers.

These arbitrary label differences make a big difference to the stability of an online business.

Machine Learning vs a Small Business Killing Machine

Google can claim that they use artificial intelligence and machine learning and are unbiased, but their ranking systems need training sets. And if upon this alleged independent rating affiliates come up as "spam" then how can an affiliate build a sustainable business model?

I know what you are thinking: "Well, Aaron, they can stop being affiliates and move up the value chain."

The problem with that is that as an affiliate I can compare a lot of products in a condensed space, but if I accept payments for products then I likely need to have a page for each product. The issue there is that if you do not have a strong brand and you have lots of pages on your site there is a great chance that the Panda algorithm will torch your website.

At the same time, if you try to go big & thick you have to worry about competing against Google as they buy out vital pieces of the supply chain, create their own affiliate partnerships, steal your content & outrank you with their copy of it, and launch their own affiliate channels & affiliate stores on their websites.

Brand Sites Become Affiliates

One of the things Google mentioned to identify thin affiliates from other merchants is this:

Check to see if the address of the image is the same as the address of the page or if it is the address of a ?real? merchant?

Small businesses are getting squeezed out of the search results by Panda. Affiliates are getting torched for not being a "real" merchant.

What is "real"?

At the same time, some of the biggest branded websites that Google promotes are now BECOMING AFFILIATES:

The new items on the website will mostly get to consumers through third-party sellers, which means B&N won?t have to carry the expense of inventory. The bookseller will just take a sales commission of 8% to 15% on each item.

What's worse, when brands come under review for spamming, Google says that they already ranked #1 so there is no reason to penalize them. Which is precisely why you can now buy rugs on Barnes & Noble. And it is precisely why you can find dating offers, education offers, jobs, and automotive sections on Excite.com. There is no SEO risk in brand extension for large brands that can do no wrong.

Google puts weight on domain names then suggests that domains can be a spam tool. So in a sense, if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are small you are a spammer. Whereas if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are large you deserve the benefit of the doubt & further promotion.

Sometimes the only difference between the brand and spammer labels is that the brands spam harder.

Brand + Money = Not Spam

For those with money, brand is another SEO tool to buy, and Google will proudly run the affiliate program for your duplicated site if you buy a bankrupt brand & slap a product feed on it.

Google literally ties their relevancy signals to their ad units. Recall that:

• Google counts YouTube ad views as organic views
• Google suggests that buying their display ads lifts branded search volume (which helps create a branded search signal)
• Google put the +1 button in display ads & claims that if you click on it you are recommending the site in the search results (in spite of having only seen an ad & not actually having seen the landing page yet! how hard is it to advertise "free money" and then offer up a landing page which says "oh, but there's a catch"?)

So if you have brand & money you can just flat out buy the "relevancy" signals. Yet if you try to create similar signals without paying Google & without owning a billion Dollar brand you are shunned & labeled as a spammer.

This subjective circular nonsense is getting a bit out of hand.

In summary, we are not SEOs and we are not affiliates.

We are a brand & we will buy retargeting AdWords ads + up our AdWords budget appropriately.

If we rebrand to remove "SEO" from the domain name can we please be added to Google's whitelist? ;)

Categories: 

google

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/OVH3Z0QKizo/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam

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Buzzstream Review: How Does it Measure Up?

Buzzstream recently rolled out a beautiful UI update and I've been impressed with their offering for awhile now.

We like to review products which we ourselves use , as well as products that we feel are impressive. For me, Buzzstream fits both of those characteristics.

Buzzstream is a tool that I am fully adding to my toolset for 2012 and I think you should give it a shot as well.

What is Buzzstream?

Buzzstream has two products:

• Buzzstream for Link Building
• Buzzstream for Social Media

We will be focusing on the link building tool in this post. Buzzstream for Link Building focuses solely on link building functionality from soup (prospecting) to nuts (tracking, reporting, relationship management).

One of my favorite aspects of this tool is it's dedicated nature. It focuses on making link building more collaborative, more scalable, and more effective. It does all three quite well and reinforces the belief that sometimes a dedicated tool is the answer.

Why Buzzstream for Link Building?

Link building has come so far in recent years with respect to things like degree of difficulty, requirements of quality, as well as the need to track links and manage relationships.

Link building is such a key piece of an online marketing campaign (not just passing link juice but bringing in targeted, quality traffic and building up brand equity) to the point where I think having a robust tool for it makes a lot of sense; especially when you can use a tool like Buzzstream for it.

Here are some of the key features of Buzzstream that we'll be covering here:

• Link Prospecting
• Link Reporting and Tracking
• Contact Management
• IMAP Email Integration
• Buzzmarker - Link Bookmarking Tool

Buzzstream Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a good, high-level overview of your account's history and tasks.

You can filter the history by:

• Showing complete history (notes, emails, twitter, logged calls, blog comments)
• One of the above mentioned history fields
• Show for all projects or a specific project
• All items for/from a user or for/from a specific user

The filtering capabilities are solid and make project spot checks very easy. For a quick export of your history, in .csv format just click on the folder to the left of the task area (in the right column).

Here is what the dashboard looks like:

To the right of the history pane is the task pane as well as recently viewed link prospects. The task pane also offers some good filtering capabilities:

I like the clean, visual look of the dashboard as well as the quick and helpful filtering capabilities. If you are running multiple campaigns with multiple members involved then I think you'll quickly appreciate the way Buzzstream has structured their dashboard.

Link Prospecting

To begin your link prospecting search, you can go to the Websites link and jump right in.

Then click on the Prospects icon to start your research. Here, you will need to set up a profile and up to 20 keywords and keyphrases for the search. I usually name the search after the main keyword I'm looking for, so in this case we'll rock SEO Tools and I'll throw in a couple more specific keywords for the search function.

In addition to prospecting you can specifically search the following countries:

• USA
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Israel
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• South Africa
• Sweden
• Spain
• UK

You also have your choice between website results, news results, and blog results under the Search Type option.

Also, you can have this auto-run daily for new results (which is a great feature!) as well as have notifications sent to a specific person (you or a team member or contractor) when new results arrive.

If you no longer wish to receive results but want to save the search for later, just click the inactive button and reactivate when needed.

Another cool feature here is the blacklist feature. Dump in sites you wish to exclude from your searches on a per project or account-level basis. This is extremely helpful for streamlining new prospecting searches across your entire account. Block out competitors, your other properties, sites you know you'll never get a link from, etc).

Working With Link Prospects

When you open the profile again you are presented with the results.

The results come with default columns but you can click the Columns icon to play with tons and tons of additional, useful options

Click on that and get all these column options:

Buzzstream Data

• Website
• Assigned To
• About
• Most Recent Activity
• Primary Contact
• Job Title
• Tags
• Relationship Stage
• RSS Feed
• Links
• Type

Dates

• Date Added
• Date Added To Project
• Last Modified (any project)
• Last Modified (this project)
• Last Viewed (any project)
• Last Viewed (this project)
• Last Communication Date

Metrics

• Followers (twitter)
• Following (twitter)
• Updates (twitter)
• PageRank
• Compete (UV/mo)
• Inbound Links - SeoMoz
• MozRank
• Juice Passing Links
• Domain Age
• Overall Rating
• Domain Authority

Address

• Address Type
• Address Line1
• Address Line2
• City
  State
  Zip
• Country

Social Networks

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google Plus

Contact Info

• Preferred Contact Method
• Email
• Phone
• "Contact Us" URL
• Suggested Profile Info

Prospecting Metrics (for keywords in your search)

• Highest SERP Position
• Average SERP Position
• SERP Count - Top 10
• SERP Count - Top 20

Buzzstream does a good job here of giving you control over so many different options. The other nice thing here is you can add a bunch of metrics or customize whatever you want, do a quick export, and set everything back to normal if you don't want or need all these metrics every time.

Here's a snippet of what the results look like with no filtering:

From here you can do all sorts of filtering with just about all of the options I outlined above. You can also click on a specific link and manage it at any point:

From here you can do just about anything:

• Add a task, tag or note
• Assign it to someone
• Update the relationship stage
• Rate the link
• Put your own custom field in there
• Copy or move it to another project (love this feature)
• Remove it from the project
• Check the WhoIS information
• Approve it for the project
• Add to your block list

Also, you can see the Twitter, FB, email, and phone icons next to each link. Buzzstream will pull those in when available. You can also add a site yourself but clicking the Add Site button where you can add as much or as little info as you have or want:

What I like to do is update the search with all the SEO related metrics and then filter (not looking for addresses or anything at this point, just SEO metrics).

Here are the filtering options:

The options pretty much cover everything you can add as a metric to their prospect results page. You can also create a specific filter and save it for future use (a big time saver for ongoing prospect research).

Once you are done filtering out the junk you can begin to work the prospect list by:

• Assigning it to an employee or contractor or yourself :)
• Updating the contact history by adding notes about contact history
• Update the relationship stage

Once the link is secured you can simply add it to the tracking and reporting component by clicking on the link and selecting "approve".

There are so many filtering options and editing options, as mentioned above, that I really encourage you to get in there and play around with it. You can customize it to fit your specific link building needs (big or small) which is a really nice feature to have (a tool that can scale up or down with you and your business).

Link Reporting and Tracking

I went ahead and approved the link-assistant.com domain as being a link I recently secured. To work with approved links you just need to move on over to the Links tab:

Again, you have a ton of filtering options here:

Buzzstream, via the Column tab, gives you lots of helpful data on a per link basis to help with overall link management and reporting:

You can also import all your links by clicking the import tab (Buzzstream gives you a template to use for this right from the import dialog box)

From here the next logical step is to set up link tracking to automatically notify you of any changes to links you are tracking.

Link Tracking

Buzzstream offers automated and manual link tracking. Buzzstream will let you track the following link data types via their automated backlink checker (this runs every 2 weeks) and manual link checker:

• Newly verified links
• Links that have changed (anchor text, no-follow, and so on)
• Links that have been removed
• Previous linking pages that are 404's
• Cache Date

You can select who receives this report, and the manual report via email. Manual reports can be completed by going to the links tab and clicking on the Run Backlink Checker Icon:

The report is then delivered to the specified email address (can be changed in project settings) in short order (longer for bigger checks of course).

I would recommend targeting the more important links here. There is a lot of churn on the web and link tracking tools, that are cloud based, do have tracking limits (Buzzstream comes in at 500 links for the basic plan, 25,000 for their Plus, and 100,000 for their Premium Plan). They also have a solo plan for 1 user and up to 1,500 tracked links.

They offer custom plans as well.

Link Reporting

The link reporting is good and is one area where I think they can use some improvement (ability to spit out anchor text distribution reports, upload logos,
automated report emailing, etc).

To generate a report you click on the pie (mmmmm pie) icon on the Links page:

Once you click there you get 2 options:

Link Report - reporting on link opportunities and completed links

Spend Report - reporting on the cost of links that cost money

Here is the dialog box for the Links Report:

Export options are PDF, HTML, and XML for Word and Excel.

The Spend Report is clean and simple to read, here is the dialog box for that:

The reports are quick to generate and clean. I think if they add some more customization options it will be a homerun; it's still better than most reporting options out there.

Keeping Up with Contacts

You can store, add, and access key contacts and their contact information within the People tab

As with their other options there is a wide variety of filtering and column customization capability to help you slice, dice, and keep track of key contacts within a specific project (or through an entire account).

You can add in pertinent contact info like their name, numbers, associated websites, social network information, and so on. You can also keep a history of calls, notes, and emails (more on emails in a minute) right inside the contact's information center:

IMAP Email Integration for Conversation Tracking

This is one of my favorite features. You can configure Buzzstream to automatically populate contact history on your link outreach campaigns:

If you are managing a team, or just your own link campaign really, this is a great feature to have. In addition to the other contact management features I mentioned above, this feature adds another layer of helpful contact management. Having CRM functionality inside of a link building tool is quite helpful when we talk about things like scaling link building campaigns and managing teams

When you add your email account you can also send email from Buzzstream. You can select any number of "People" or contacts that you want and work through them one by one by creating an email template (see below) and quickly customizing it to the specific person you are targeting

Using canned responses in Gmail is similar but the difference here is the integration with Buzzstream and the ease of going right through a selected list of contacts (and having it saved in their contact history automatically).

Lots of people use BuzzStream as a database of all their prospects/partners and then slice and dice them for campaigns. So, for example, suppose you are trying to secure guest posts. You go to All Contacts (contacts for your whole account, not just one project) and select everything tagged "finance" that's a "guest post" type and that's linked to you in the past.

After that, you take those contacts of known finance guest post opportunities, copy them to a new project and then work that list. You cover a lot of this in your filter descriptions. Essentially, use the tagging and filtering system to build your own database for rinse and repeat solutions.

You can also track Twitter stuff (which can get out of hand quickly in terms of back and forth contact, real time) and works the same way as Buzzstream's IMAP integration.

For the Twitter tracking you can basically import a bunch of twitter lists into BuzzStream, start retweeting their content and then filter to find everyone you've retweeted three days ago (filter by: Communication History=tweet, contact modified=3 days ago).

Save this filter and you have a list of people to follow up with on a regular basis. You can then send a template-based email that refers to the retweet and use that as a quick in to perhaps securing a link opportunity.

The Buzzmarker

Buzzstreams' Buzzmarker gives you the ability to save a prospect's information from any browser. To set up the Buzzmarker you just go into your settings and drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar :D

Here is a snippet of the Buzzmarker dialog box:

Anytime you come across news stories, blog posts, and Twitter feeds that you want to store for future work inside of Buzzstream all you do is click on the Buzzmarker

The Buzzmarker pulls in lots of information and gives you options to do a variety of things like:

• Add a task for the clipping
• The ability to gather and note link information like acquistion method and link type, also checks to see if the site is linking to you already
• Add contact info and social media profiles
• Links through to contact info search in Google, Pipl, as well as Twitter and Linkedin Profile search via Google, Twellow, and Linkedin

Give Buzzstream a Shot

If you are looking for a strong link building tool which incorporates any of the features below, you should give Buzzstream a try:

• Built in Link Prospecting
• CRM Functionality
• Scalability
• Ease of Use
• Permission and Access Control for Teams
• Link Tracking and Reporting

Buzzstream is a quality link building and link management tool that is certainly worth trying out if you are engaged in link building activity. The reporting is stronger than most other options out there but I think they can do even better with it after seeing what they've done on the inside. If you do try them out let us know what you think in the comments!

Take it for spin, they have free trials available over at Buzzstream.Com.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seobook/seobook/~3/swwvoJ08Wi8/comprehensive-review-buzzstream

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