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Corry Cummings is the owner and founder of Content Customs, an Internet marketing company specializing in content writing services.
About Content Customs
We conduct large scale link building for over a dozen different companies…What’s made us successful and what we think makes us stand out is that whenever we reach out to someone, we personalize it to the specific needs of each website owner, blogger, etc. Our approach with everything that we do is all about quality. We leverage our content creation skills and resources to build links.
As part of our link building efforts, we reach out to tens of thousands of websites to try to get placement in the areas we’re targeting. Managing our activities was actually really simple when we were only contacting a few hundred sites, but when you scale this up, things can get out of hand. It’s also very difficult to stay organized and maintain the quality that our clients and partners demand. BuzzStream allows us to keep things organized, and to hit the scale we need. We have over 30 individuals who collaborate on link building projects at all times. This would never be possible to do efficiently without a tool like BuzzStream.
Our Workflow
For us, it’s really all about building relationships with other blogs and website owners. We have the resources to create high quality web content for a very reasonable price. That is valuable to many website owners. We want to reach out to them and see what we can do to get our content out there, which will in turn get more inbound links pointing to our sites (and our clients). We primarily use BuzzStream as our database for link opportunities and a workflow system for managing our outreach efforts.
We spend a lot of time researching sites that could potentially be link partners in the future. Our research team spends all day every day adding sites to BuzzStream. When they add a site to the database, they use Tags to categorize them. We hold a high standard for sites that we are willing to work with. That enables us to basically just look for sites that hold those standards. Since we do such a high volume of link building, we are able to add any site (no matter what the topic) to BuzzStream because we know as long as it is a high quality site, we will have a place to contact and reach out for various opportunities.
When we’re working on a specific project, we use Filters to find the right opportunities for the client and then we move our contacts from our main database to a specific project. As we conduct outreach, we take advantage of BuzzStream’s relationship stages to manage workflow and we take a lot of notes with the note feature.
Why We Chose BuzzStream
It’s actually pretty simple for us…We’ve used a lot of different tools, and there really isn’t anything out there that compares. BuzzStream is way ahead of the game when it comes to link management tools. Even if there were comparable products, I doubt we would find another company that would work with us as closely as the Buzzstream team does. We have the need to scale very quickly, and BuzzStream has been flawless when it comes to working with us on that. When we have feedback and concerns about future developments of the product, our voice is heard and the feedback is actually put into work on new features.
Our Favorite BuzzStream Features
The ability to organize and track all of our contacts is absolutely huge for us. We don’t use all the bells and whistles that are offered. The basics are key. Tracking our progress, and keeping notes on each of our contacts really is a huge time saver. BuzzStream also does a great job of pulling in the site metrics, which saves a lot of time. We have to know who we have already contacted, and who has been added to each project. We want to make sure that one of our team members is not contacting the same site that was just contacted yesterday for another project. That can get messy, and would happen consistently if we didn’t have Buzzstream.
What We’d Like Added to BuzzStream
The only way to check for live links right now is on a specific page. If there were a way to check an entire site for our links, that would be extremely beneficial for us (and I am guessing most other BuzzStream users). We’d want BuzzStream to automatically find all of the live links that we have and add them to the contacts/potential link opportunities that we have added to BuzzStream. The ability to have custom statuses would also be nice. In other words, a way to change and add more relationship stages.
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