BuzzSumo:The Definitive Guide
This guide will teach you everything you need to know about BuzzSumo.
Advanced strategies.
Cool features.
And four entirely different case studies.
Let’s get started…
Chapter 1:Find Content Ideas
In this chapter you’ll learn how to use BuzzSumo to create better content.
Specifically, I’ll show you how to find proven content ideas that work GREAT.
(Including lots of real-life examples of these steps in action.)
Find Awesome Content Ideas With a Search
This is BuzzSumo’s bread and butter feature.
Just enter a keyword related to your industry…
…and get a list of the most popular content on that topic.
Don’t let simplicity fool you. This is a VERY powerful feature.
In fact, BuzzSumo’s keyword search helped me create one of my most successful posts of 2018: The Definitive Guide to Mobile SEO.
To date, this single piece of content has generated over 3,000 social shares, 398 comments and links from over 470 different domains.
Also, this post currently ranks in the top 3 for my target keyword “mobile SEO”.
And I got the idea for this post from BuzzSumo.
Here’s how it went down…
A while ago I did a BuzzSumo search for “SEO”:
That way, I could quickly find content in the SEO space that got lots of shares and links.
I also used a couple (B2B & TLD) of filters to zero in on relevant results.
(More on that later.)
And I noticed that 4 of the top 20 pieces of content were about: mobile SEO.
When I dug deeper, I realized that 3 MORE of the top 20 posts at least touched on the topic of “mobile SEO”.
In total:
7 out of 20 (35%) of the most popular posts in the entire world of SEO were about mobile optimization.
That’s when I realized: “I better get cracking on a mobile SEO post!”.
I also realized something else:
None of those 7 posts actually showed people how to optimize their site for mobile devices!
So I decided to fill in that content gap with a guide overflowing with actionable tips:
Because my content was based on a proven topic – and contained information no one else covered in one place – it did REALLY well.
Steal Your Competitor’s Best Content Ideas
Did you know you can search in BuzzSumo with a domain?
Well, you can. And it’s REALLY cool.
When you do, you’ll see that site’s best-performing content.
And this feature helped me create one of my best-performing pieces of content… ever.
The content?
The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2021.
Not only has this guide racked up a boatload of shares and links…
…but it’s consistently one of my 10 pages in terms of monthly organic traffic.
Let me walk you through the exact process that I used to develop and create that piece of content.
First, I popped Moz.com into BuzzSumo search.
And I noticed something surprising right away:
The #1 post from the Moz blog (out of 400+ posts) was about… SEO in 2021.
Say whaaaaat?!
It gets better.
Loads of their posts were on that exact same topic
At this point, I had NEVER even considered writing an “SEO in [year]” post.
(Why? Most of them are lame prediction posts that provide zero value.)
But considering how well that topic performed for Moz, I had to give it a shot.
Since then, I’ve learned that including the current year is a great tactic.
Not only does it make your content more relevant, but it also makes it way more likely to be evergreen.
Instead of a prediction post, I decided to include actual steps people could use to get their site ready for the upcoming year.
And like I mentioned earlier, that post absolutely crushed.
It got an initial wave of traffic in the first week…
…and even though the post has been around for a while, it still brings in a consistent stream of traffic from Google, social media and blogs:
Find Untapped Keyword Ideas
This tool is pretty new to BuzzSumo, but it’s super useful.
Let’s say you’ve found a content idea in BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer that gets crazy shares and links over time.
That might be enough to justify you writing about it.
But why not go the extra mile and check whether that demand extends to search?
All you need to do is enter your keyword, and you’re served up with search volume, CPC, and trend data.
If your keyword isn’t one that gets much traction in search – don’t worry.
BuzzSumo’s Keyword Tool also offers up hundreds if not thousands of keyword ideas that do.
Check out “related keywords” for keyword ideas that are broadly related to your query.
Or if you’re looking for exact match variations on your keyword idea, hit the “similar keywords” tab.
Then you can just optimize your content for topics that work in search and social.
And it goes without saying that SEO is definitely not about keyword stuffing anymore.
The more semantically related keywords you can include in your content, the better.
Pro Tip: Use these keywords as anchor text in other blogs, and build some great internal links.
Steal Your Competitors’ Keyword Ideas
Want to know exactly what your competitors are ranking for?
Who doesn’t.
In BuzzSumo’s Keyword Tool you can do just this, with a simple domain search.
This data is truly awesome.
It shows you what proportion of your competitor’s site is ranking in positions 1 –3, their monthly organic traffic stats, and their authority metrics.
Plus, you can get ideas from their top-ranking keywords.
All you have to do is sort the data by “Rank”.
If you were Moz’s competitor, you might want to go ahead and challenge their #1 ranking for the keyword “algorithm update google”.
Then you can find out what keyword is driving the majority of their organic traffic.
Just sort by “Estimated Visits”
Now, here’s where it gets really interesting.
You can find out exactly how much ownership your competitors have over a specific topic.
Just add a keyword in speech marks after your competitor’s domain.
Moz ranks for 421 “backlinks” related keywords and drives 9K searches a month.
That’s a lot of keyword ideas for you to explore, and a lot of traffic opportunities.
This kind of data is invaluable for building your own keyword strategy.
Uncover Untapped Long Tail Keywords With Question Analyzer
This is one of my favorite BuzzSumo features.
Why?
First, you can use the Question Analyzer to see the exact questions people are asking on Reddit, Quora and forums.
That way, you can get a list of burning questions in your industry.
Yup, that’s pretty cool.
But that’s not the main reason I use the Question Analyzer.
I mainly use this feature to find long-tail keywords.
Why?
Well, when someone asks a question on Reddit, it usually means they Googled it first… and came up empty.
In other words:
Lots of people are searching for that question… but the results stink!
So if you can create a piece of content that answers that exact question, you can get boatloads of traffic.
Here’s a real-life example:
Some time ago I decided to update this post.
So I added new screenshots, updated old content, and deleted outdated stuff:
I also realized that the title tag was leaving A LOT of traffic on the table.
You see, the old title tag was:
As you can probably guess, my target keyword for that page was: “YouTube SEO”.
And sure enough, my post ranked #1 in Google for that term:
But I also realized that I could get even MORE Google traffic to that page by including a long tail keyword in the title tag.
The question is:
What long-tail keyword should I pick?
Well, back in the day, I would fire up the Google Keyword Planner and type “YouTube SEO” into it.
But that would only give me super-similar variations of “YouTube SEO”.
(And as you can see, most of these variations have really low search volume.)
Instead, I logged into BuzzSumo and typed “YouTube SEO” into the Question Analyzer:
Then I hit the “Related themes” tab for a list of the top questions and categories that people asked about that topic:
One particular question stood out right away: “How to rank youtube videos?”
My post answered that question. But it wasn’t optimized around that term.
So I added a shortened version of that long-tail keyword to my title tag:
And it quickly hit the #1 spot for that long-tail keyword:
Which helped boost monthly organic traffic to that page by 23.49%.
Not bad.
Hack Facebook’s News Feed With BuzzSumo’s Facebook Tools
There’s no doubt about it:
It’s harder than ever to get your Facebook posts to appear in your follower’s news feeds.
But there’s a simple way to get around this problem: BuzzSumo’s Facebook Pages and Page Analyzer.
These tools show you what content is working hardest right now – for you and your competition – on Facebook.
That way, you can easily replicate strategies that actually get organic reach.
For example…
Let’s say you run a Paleo diet blog.
You’d do a search for “Paleo” on Facebook Pages:
And you’ll discover the most engaging Paleo-related Facebook pages.
Then all you’d do is select the competitors you want to compare – you can choose up to nine.
This will lead you to a full report on what the most successful Facebook posts have in common (in terms of format, length, publishing time, and more).
For example, for the top competitors in the Paleo diet space, images and videos CRUSH other post formats:
Your report will be set to a year by default, but you can align it with your reporting cadence to record the success of campaigns.
You can check out more about BuzzSumo’s Facebook Page Analyzer here.
Get More Results From Your Content With The Content Analysis Report
So you’ve found a proven topic.
Great.
The question is: what do you actually write?
Well, no tool is going to write a post for you.
(AI is good, but not that good… yet!)
That said, BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis Report can help you write stuff that actually works.
I’ll show you how this works with an example…
A while back I was sitting down to write my mobile SEO guide.
I already had an idea of how to structure and write the post.
But I used the “Content Analysis Report” to make sure my content would actually work.
First, I looked at what content type worked best for this topic.
And sure enough, “How-to Articles” did best:
Which was PERFECT because I planned on writing a how-to guide.
I also noticed that longer content about mobile SEO performed best (in terms of social shares):
I tend to publish long content anyway. But it was nice to get confirmation that longer content worked well for this particular topic.
So…
Publishing content based on proven topics and formats already puts you ahead of 90% of your competitors.
But as you probably know, hitting the “publish” button is only the first step.
To get your content to the first page of Google in 2021, you need to actively promote it.
That’s where Chapter 2 comes into play…
Chapter 2:Find Influencers
You already know that a single share from an influencer can put your content on the map.
But how do you find them?
Well, BuzzSumo has some pretty nifty features that make finding your industry’s movers and shakers an absolute cinch.
And in this chapter I’ll show you exactly how to use them.
Find Influencers With a Keyword Search
This is by far the easiest way to find influential people in a specific niche.
Pop in a keyword… and get a list of peeps that write about that topic.
This tool searches Twitter bios, and lets you see what an influencer has “Shared articles about” or “Shared articles from” – but more on this later.
If you’re looking for influential Facebook pages or YouTube channels, you can find those in BuzzSumo too.
YouTube Influencers can be prioritized by relevance to your topic, total subscribers, video count, or total views depending on what you deem most important.
Use “Shared Articles About” to Discover Influencers
At the end of the day, the goal of content promotion is to get someone to share YOUR content with THEIR audience.
That share can be in the form of a Facebook post. Or a link.
Either way, you need to get your content in front of people that are likely to share it.
And the best way to do that?
Use “Shared articles about”.
Instead of searching through Twitter bios, this feature reveals people that have recently shared content on your topic.
(Which means they’re super likely to share your content too.)
For example, a while back I was getting ready to publish this SEO case study on my blog:
I knew this post had the potential to do REALLY well.
IF I could get it in front of the right people.
Here’s what I did…
First, I did a “Shared articles about”. That way, I could get a list of people that had recently shared SEO and content marketing case studies.
And then I sorted by influencers with the highest average retweets to uncover people that were likely to actually get traction when sharing my post.
(Specifically, people that have a decent Twitter following… and write about SEO and content marketing.)
And I easily found a bunch:
Then, I emailed each of them this message:
(As you can see, I made sure to personalize this email script for each person that I reached out to.)
And when someone said they were interested in my post, I sent them a link:
Because I wasn’t pushy, a good chunk of the people I reached out to happily read my post…
…and shared it:
Find Quality Journalists To Pitch To
Building connections with relevant journalists can do very good things for your brand.
But how do you know who is relevant?
And, more importantly, how do you know what a “good” connection looks like?
Enter BuzzSumo Journalist Profiles.
This tool tells you everything you need to know about a journalist.
Interests.
Contact information.
Publications they write for.
All at the click of a button.
You just need to search your topic and look out for the journalist icon.
Here it is in the Content Analyzer…
In BuzzSumo Monitoring…
And in BuzzSumo’s Trending Tool…
When you find it, give it a click to pull up a full profile of the journalist.
This profile is awesome for helping you decide which journalists to prioritize.
Are you pitching an idea?
Or sharing your newest piece of content?
Check out “topics” to see if they already have an interest in your subject.
And – most importantly – pay attention to their content performance and followers.
This will give you an idea of the reach that they could generate for you.
Then all that’s left to do is contact them.
One more great thing about this tool is that it comes in filter form.
Meaning, you can view content written only by journalists if you want to.
Here’s where you can find that filter in the Content Analyzer…
What’s great about this is that you can go even more granular by applying extra filters.
Find journalists that write for B2B publications with a B2B filter.
And see which journalists are writing for your competitors with a domain filter.
Try out all the filter options to find a journalist that’s right for you.
Remember, a great outreach email or pitch is all about relevance and personalization.
That’s why a tool like this is crucial to the success of your campaign.
One last thing, and possibly my favorite way to use this tool.
Head to Twitter Influencers and type in your own domain into the “Shared articles from” search.
Then hit the “Journalist Profiles” filter…
This will show you all the best journalists that are already a fan of your work.
In other words, your warmest outreach opportunities.
These journalists are prioritized based on “Relevance”.
This is code for all the most important metrics that make for a good influencer…
Follower count.
Average retweets.
Reply ratio.
Even the number of times they have been added to Twitter lists.
So start at the top and work your way down.
Easy.
Find The Top Authors In Your Industry
You can also use BuzzSumo to find the biggest and baddest authors in your industry.
So: what can you do with this information?
First, you get access to a list of the top bloggers and journalists that write about your topic.
(Which is helpful for building your influencer list.)
But the #1 benefit of this feature is that you see what influencers write about.
Topics.
Angles.
Formats.
You get the idea. 🙂
Why is this important?
If you want influencers to share your content, they need to actually like your content.
I know, I know: “Thanks Captain Obvious!”.
But it’s true.
In fact, I get email pitches like this all the time:
There’s a ZERO percent chance I’ll share that content. Why?
Because I’ve never written about or shared anything about marketing for nonprofits.
On the other hand, check out this hilarious outreach email someone recently sent me:
Yup, this is a top-notch outreach email. But if Benyamin was pitching content on a topic I didn’t care about, I’d still hit “delete” without thinking twice.
Fortunately, the content he’s pitching (an actionable guide to lead magnets) is in my wheelhouse.
And that’s why I decided to share it.
Chapter 3:Monitor Mentions (and Links)
In this chapter, I’ll show you how to get the most out of BuzzSumo’s “Monitoring” feature.
In my opinion, this is THE most powerful feature on the entire platform.
Seriously.
And in this chapter you’ll learn how to use Monitoring to build strategic relationships, get more backlinks, and see what people are saying about you online.
Turn Unlinked Mentions Into Backlinks
Usually, when someone mentions you in a blog post, they link to you.
Usually.
But there are times when someone mentions your brand… without linking to your site.
Here’s an example:
As it turns out, you can easily turn an unlinked mention into a backlink with a simple outreach email:
The question is:
HOW do you find these unlinked mentions?
BuzzSumo Monitoring.
Just add a new “Brand Mention” for your brand:
And you’ll see forums, blogs and news sites that mention your brand.
Results with a little link icon actually linked to you:
And results without, haven’t.
You can also sort by mentions with and without links:
Simple.
Find Who Links To Your Competitors
Here’s the deal:
People that link to your competitors are VERY likely to link to you too.
Now:
You COULD find your competitor’s backlinks with a tool like Semrush.
(And that definitely works.)
But there’s one problem with that approach:
It’s hard to find people that recently linked to your competition.
Instead, you end up sifting through thousands of links… many of which are 5+ years old.
Enter: Monitoring
With Monitoring, you see the exact sites that JUST linked to your competitors:
It even shows you how many times that piece of content has been shared, your mentions over time… and the Domain Authority of the site.
Easy peasy.
Find Conversations About Your Brand
In my opinion, BuzzSumo has one of the best brand monitoring tools on the market.
And I should know.
I’ve tried ’em all.
I started tracking mentions with BuzzSumo in 2014!
And since then, I’ve noticed that it finds more brand mentions than any other tool.
Note: I’m talking purely about mentions on news sites, blogs, Q&A sites (like Quora), and online communities. BuzzSumo doesn’t track mentions on social media platforms like Facebook.
Anyway…
Why is this helpful?
Well, whether you like it or not, people are gonna talk about you online.
And if you keep tabs on those conversations, you can see what people like (and don’t like) about your brand.
And if it makes sense, step in and participate in the conversation.
Fortunately, in my case, conversations about me and Backlinko are mostly positive:
Mostly… 🙂
Either way, it’s good to see what people are saying about me.
See Who Links To You
You can ask BuzzSumo to send you an email alert whenever you get a new backlink.
Or create a Slack channel, so you never miss an incoming link or mention:
Or, if you want to get a better understanding of your content’s popularity, you can just review all of your new links once a week, or day.
(10x a day in my case????)
So:
What can you do with this information?
Build relationships with the people that linked to you
This is especially powerful for authors that write for multiple websites.
When you send them a quick “Thank you!” message, they’re MUCH more likely to link to you in future articles.
For example, some time ago I noticed that I got a link from CrazyEgg:
And when I clicked on the author’s name in BuzzSumo, I noticed that he wrote for A LOT of different marketing and online business blogs:
So I sent David a quick note to say “thanks” for mentioning Backlinko in his post.
To be clear:
I’m not being manipulative or shady.
Instead, I’m building a strategic relationship with someone that writes content in my niche.
Track EVERYTHING
You can set up an alert for pretty much anything in BuzzSumo.
Your brand.
Your competitors.
Your content.
Your keywords and topics.
Mentions of journalists and authors you’re researching.
You can even track when a specific website publishes new content.
This 360 tracking is awesome for helping you find new content opportunities.
Take author and journalist alerts.
Not only are they great for helping you personalize your emails.
They can give you awesome new content ideas.
If a journalist has written about a certain topic, you can bet they’ve done their audience research.
That’s a ready-validated topic. Now all you need to do is add your own take.
What about competitor tracking?
Knowing who is writing about your competitors is vital.
That person will already be interested in what you have to say.
All you have to do is reach out to them and start building that relationship.
Prevent a brand crisis
BuzzSumo Alerts are as near to real-time as you can get.
In fact, the BuzzSumo team did a quick test which proved that BuzzSumo Alerts are faster than Google Alerts.
And for that reason, they’re perfect for spotting when a brand crisis is about to hit.
All you need to do is set up alerts for the predictable and the unpredictable, to spot potentially harmful mentions.
For example, global, political or social situations might impact your business, so that whenever your brand is mentioned in relation to these topics, you get an instant notification.
One way to do this is to set up a “Keyword Alert” for existing crisis topics (ie. coronavirus).
Then all you need to do is add your brand name into the “Results MUST ALSO contain” section.
And a great way to monitor the unpredictable is to track competitor mentions of your brand name.
You just need to create a “Brand Alert” monitoring your brand name.
Then add a “Domain Filter” of your competitor’s web address.
If your competitors are likely to badmouth you, this is an awesome way to spot and address any false claims.
BuzzSumo Alerts will let you know about harmful unlinked mentions that would sneak through if you were only tracking links.
For more ideas on how to monitor your brand in a crisis, check out BuzzSumo’s crisis management guide.
Chapter 4:Cool BuzzSumo Features
In this chapter, you’re going to learn about some of my favorite BuzzSumo features.
You’ll see exactly how to use BuzzSumo to create viral content, make better infographics and take your content promotion up a notch.
So without further ado, let’s dive right into Chapter 4.
Monitor When and Where Keywords Are Used Online
In chapter 3 I showed you how to use BuzzSumo Monitoring to track conversations of your brand online.
But what you may not know is that you can also use BuzzSumo to track mentions of KEYWORDS.
For example, I’ve been tracking the keyword “Skyscraper Technique” since 2015.
This report lets me know whether or not people are still talking about The Skyscraper Technique.
(Fortunately, they still are.)
But you can also use this same feature to help get your content in front of people that are super likely to share it.
I’ll explain how this works with an example…
A while ago I published this voice search SEO study.
This post did great in terms of links…
…but I know it has the potential to get even MORE links.
So I set up an alert for the keyword “voice search”.
That way, I can easily find people that write about voice search… and show them my study.
Create Better Infographics
There’s no doubt about it:
Creating an infographic that stands out today is HARD.
Fortunately, you can easily increase the odds that your infographic gets results.
Here’s how:
First, do a search for your target keyword.
Then, under “Content Type”, uncheck everything except “Infographics”.
That way, you can see the handful of infographics that people actually shared.
In B2B? Use This Filter
For certain searches in BuzzSumo, you may stumble over some pretty irrelevant stuff.
For example, it turns out that “Seo” is a common Vietnamese last name.
So when I search for “SEO” in BuzzSumo, the vast majority of results are from foreign news sites:
But when I check “Only B2B Publishers”…
…I get a clean list of results:
Nice.
Get a Higher ROI From Your Content With
“Evergreen Score”
It’s no secret that I’m a HUGE fan of publishing evergreen content.
(In fact, I only publish something if it’s going to bring in traffic for years.)
That said:
When you do a normal BuzzSumo search, the results are sorted by total shares:
And you have NO idea whether those shares happened the day after the post went live…
…or months later.
Enter: The Evergreen Score.
The Evergreen Score shows you content that’s continued to generate shares and backlinks… after the initial buzz.
For example:
If you do a normal BuzzSumo search for “SEO”, my content doesn’t crack the top 20:
As you can see, the results are dominated by huge brands, like Entrepreneur and Marketing Land.
But watch what happens when you sort the results by Evergreen Score:
Bam!
My “SEO in 2021” guide has a high Evergreen Score because it’s still valuable MONTHS after it went live.
(Which means people continue to share and link to it.)
So if you wanted to create a piece of evergreen content about SEO, my guide would be a good model to follow.
Chapter 5:Case Studies
In this chapter, you’ll see four BuzzSumo case studies.
Specifically, you’ll learn exactly how “normal” people used BuzzSumo to create viral content, build backlinks, improve their Google rankings, and more.
But first, let’s kick things off with a case study that completely blew my mind…
Case Study #1: How Rise at Seven won numerous campaign awards and boosted their client’s revenue by 55%
Rise at Seven uses BuzzSumo to brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas for client campaigns.
They get inspiration from other successful PR campaign ideas that gain big shares and links.
In this instance, a client came to them because they needed to boost their backlink profile in the US and Europe.
The client sold star map constellations.
Rise at Seven went straight to BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer to do some broad research.
They looked at big topics like the “night sky”.
Then they checked BuzzSumo’s Topic Explorer and spotted something.
There was one topic that kept cropping up.
One that was written about in volume.
And that was: Light pollution.
And in BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis Report they noticed one more thing.
Engagement for “light pollution” was growing over time.
Next, they zoned in on the backlink profile of light pollution campaigns that had done well in the past.
They needed to check that links were coming from high authority publications.
Spoiler: They were.
That was enough to validate the topic. Rise at Seven was confident it would work.
The last bit of research they did involved Facebook Reaction data in the Content Analysis Report.
They wanted to look at the emotions surrounding “light pollution”.
From the data, they knew that their campaign shouldn’t be aiming to make people laugh.
Instead, it should be emotive, awe-inspiring, and highly visual.
They began to workshop a great idea.
They took the 27 most light-polluted cities in the world and used an interactive slider to show what they’d look like without light pollution.
Pretty awesome, right?
The results were phenomenal.
They bagged awards, including the Best Interactive Campaign of the Year at the UK Content Awards, and Best Use of Imagery 2020 at the Content Marketing Awards.
They landed their client 130+ links, including some from major publications like Forbes and Lonely Planet.
AND they boosted their clients’ YoY revenue by 55%.
Impressive.
Case Study #2: How Russ Henneberry grew a 30K newsletter and boosted open rates by 10%
TheCLIKK is a newsletter founded by Russ Henneberry and built largely on BuzzSumo data.
Every day Russ and managing editor Kevin Williamson head into BuzzSumo’s Trending Tool.
They work through curated content feeds, including “digital marketing”, “tech”, and “business”, to find super interesting content to share with their subscribers.
After that, they head to bookmarks they’ve created for some top publisher domains in BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer.
Then it’s just a case of curating either the most engaging or latest content.
In the last two years, this technique has helped theCLIKK to grow to 30K subscribers.
Marketers from PayPal, Google, and LinkedIn all read theCLIKK for regular digital marketing knowledge.
According to Kevin, without BuzzSumo theCLIKK would take 60 – 80% longer to create every day.
And Russ attributes a 10% growth in open rate to BuzzSumo, during a time when theCLIKK doubled down on their usage of the tool.
Nice.
Case Study #3: How James Got Featured on Mashable, Cosmopolitan, MTV, The Daily Mail, And More
James Brockbank used BuzzSumo to get links and mentions on authority sites like Esquire, Glamour, MTV, Bustle and more:
It gets better:
These links helped James’ client rank on the first page of Google UK for terms like “women’s loungewear tracksuits”, “slogan jumpers”, and a whole host of others… just in time for the Christmas season.
Overall, this single campaign boosted their search traffic by 87.9%:
Here’s the full story…
James’ client is the fashion eCommerce site Missy Empire.
According to James:
“Our client had been producing ‘style guides’ and other blog content but struggled to earn links.”
So he decided to try something new.
Create something that fashion blogs and news sites would WANT to share
So he used BuzzSumo’s domain search to uncover fashion content that got lots of shares.
And James could sum up what he found in one word:
Kardashians.
James also stumbled on a “Reality Superstar Rich List” from Forbes. This page listed the earnings of every Kardashian family member.
So James created a simple calculator that allows you to compare your earnings with the Kardashians.
And the press absolutely LOVED this tool.
In fact, to date, this tool has links from over 130 blogs and news sites:
Crazy.
Case Study #4: How Matteo Got 190 Social Shares (And 64 New Backlinks) to a Brand New Blog
Last year Matteo Gasparello had a problem…
You see, Matteo had launched a brand new digital marketing blog.
And Matteo knew that, for his blog to stand out, he’d need to publish a piece of EPIC content.
The problem was:
What kind of content should he publish? A list post? A tutorial? How about a case study?
So he fired up BuzzSumo.
And he searched for terms like “video marketing”, “Facebook video ads” and “video advertising”:
Matteo quickly noticed that these 4 posts did REALLY well:
So he incorporated what he liked from those 4 posts into a guide: Online Video Advertising: All You Need to Know.
Considering Matteo’s blog was brand new, he knew that he couldn’t just “publish and pray”.
So he used BuzzSumo to find people that had shared content about video ads in the past:
As Matteo put it:
“Now it was only a matter of browsing through the results and contacting people that were really interested in video ads.”
And he reached out to those folks with a personalized (and non-pushy) email:
Because Matteo’s outreach emails were targeted AND respectful, he got lots of replies like this…
…and this.
And once Matteo started sending his excellent guide to people that were interested, the shares and links started to pour in:
Chapter 6:Advanced Tips & Strategies
Basics? Check.
Case studies? Check.
Now it’s time to dive into advanced BuzzSumo tips, strategies and tactics that you can use to hire freelance writers, find awesome keyword ideas, and more.
Let’s do this.
Find (Quality) Freelance Writers
Finding a freelance writer is easy.
But finding a GOOD freelance writer?
That’s another story.
Fortunately, you can use BuzzSumo to find writers that actually know what they’re doing.
Here’s how:
First, search for your topic in BuzzSumo:
Then, keep an eye out for writers that tend to get lots of shares on their stuff.
Now:
Most of these writers are going to be big names… not freelancers:
But if you dig deep, you can find freelancers that know how to write kick-butt content in your niche:
Pro Tip: Click on the author’s name in the search results… and you can see everything they’ve published:
Create Targeted Content With “Search by Subreddit”
Does your target audience hang out on a particular Subreddit?
If so, BuzzSumo can show you the EXACT questions those folks ask.
(And the topics they’re most interested in.)
Let me show you how this works with a real life example:
My content is designed to help professional marketers get higher rankings and more traffic.
So even though there is a r/SEO subreddit…
…it’s full of newbs.
Instead, my target audience tends to hang out on r/bigSEO.
And, using BuzzSumo, I can EASILY see the exact topics members of that subreddit are most interested in.
Here’s how:
First, I head over to BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer. But instead of typing in a keyword, I hit “Search By Subreddit”.
And when I click on the “View related themes” tab, BuzzSumo hooks me up with a list of topics that members of this subreddit tend to discuss most:
Nice.
Find Keyword Ideas With BuzzSumo Suggest
This couldn’t be simpler:
Just type a keyword into BuzzSumo search…
…and see what they suggest to you:
And in the related topics:
Very cool.
Track Marketing Reach (and Backlinks)
Are MORE people talking about your brand this month?
It’s not an easy question to answer.
That is, unless you track mentions and links with BuzzSumo.
When you set up mention monitoring, you can see how mentions and links change over time.
If you notice that more people are talking about you (in a good way), that’s a sign that your marketing is working.
If not… it might be time to change things up.
Find Awesome Interview Opportunities
Interviews are one of my FAVORITE ways to get targeted traffic (and links).
The only problem is:
It’s REALLY hard to find high-quality interview opportunities.
Fortunately, BuzzSumo makes this process a cinch.
Here’s how to do it:
First, find someone in your niche that tends to get interviewed a lot.
(I’ll use my friend Noah Kagan in this example.)
Then, type his or her name into BuzzSumo search:
Why?
Well, unless someone is REALLY popular, they’ll only show up in BuzzSumo’s results if they’ve been interviewed.
For example:
When I search for “Noah Kagan” in BuzzSumo, 18 out of the 20 results are places he’s been interviewed.
Very cool.
Now It's Your Turn
So those are my best tips, strategies and secrets for getting the most out of BuzzSumo.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Which strategy from this guide are you going to try first?
Are you going to use BuzzSumo to find a writer? Or maybe you want to start tracking brand mentions.
Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.