#38 Is Link Building Dead? with Vince Nero

Louise:
Vince Nero is the director of content marketing at BuzzStream, an email outreach platform that is used by lots of digital PRs, including us. He has a background in link building, but has now converted to digital PR. And we wanted to get him on the podcast to chat about why that is and his experience of B2B digital PR. Welcome, Vince.

Vince:
Thanks so much for having me.

Steve:
Vince, it’s such a pleasure. I’ve been really, really looking forward to this conversation. Just wanted to start with a little bit of background on you because you’ve had a very interesting career so far and Luz obviously introduced you as director of content marketing at BuzzStream. Prior to BuzzStream, you used to be a link builder. Is that correct?

Vince:
So I kind of cut my teeth in the SEO industry at Siege Media, which is an agency here in the States. And we always build ourselves as a content marketing agency with a focus in SEO. And one of the big things that we did was blogger outreach. I feel like, know, because I started there in around 2015 and like that was still a pretty lucrative space, I’d say, before bloggers realised you could charge for links. So it was the kind of thing of creating infographics for people and getting them to link back. But then we also dabbled in the broken link building and resource pages and maybe some link insertions. But I think another key piece was kind of the digital PR.

It wasn’t maybe as sophisticated as it is now. As especially as like I’ve noticed, you know, like the UK seems to be four or five years ahead, you know, and just in terms of the way the whole strategy works and is to get get more buy in from clients and everything. So, yeah, long story short, I’d say I did kind of a mix of things. And the last piece I’ll say is I think one of the things that always interested me in digital PR, was kind of just like the relationship piece and, and almost treating, you know, the person on the other end of the email, as a person and not as just like this goal to get links. So that was, you know, I always skewed on the side of less is more when it came to doing outreach.

And when we started doing more digital PR, I guess my natural kind of inclinations leaned more heavily into that. I’d rather reach out to fewer people and really take the time to understand what they worked on and what they did rather than just blasting out a bunch of emails to people.

Steve:
Yeah, for sure. We talked to the team a lot about this, like the quality of a list in BuzzStream or, kind of, know, however you’re doing it is so, so important. And actually you don’t need, if you’re doing it right, you don’t need tons of people in there. You just need the right people that you really understand. The story is going to be right for them. So yeah, couldn’t agree, couldn’t agree more with that.

Louise:
It’s interesting though, because you kind of said, well, we kind of moved a bit to digital PR, which meant it’s bit more targeted and treating people like, know, talking to people like they’re people. Is that because you kind of feel like link building or what people perceive to be link building is the opposite of that?

Vince:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, so there’s two things that work here. In the States, I think the term digital PR link building, like there’s a little bit of like crossover and gets a little fuzzy. Like I talk to people now at BuzzStream and it’s like, do you do digital PR and they say, yeah, yeah, we reach out to bloggers all the time. And like, that’s not quite digital PR, right? Like that’s more like the blogger outreach, kind of more of what I put into like the traditional link building type of mindset, whereas like I define digital PR these days as you’re reaching out to high quality news publications. You and you talk to other people like I had a Rand Fishkin on our podcast and you he talked about digital PR while it’s just PR that happens online, right? So could be any, any type of PR that you do. could be event, you do an event, a live event, and then you’re doing PR online and trying to get people to, you know, raise awareness for it. So I think there’s a bit of terminology mismatch, especially here in the States. To get back to the first half of your question, Lou, it’s like the, yes, I think when you talk about more traditional link building, like guest posting or link insertions or link exchanges, that’s another big one, that is just the scale, just blasting out emails.

You don’t care who’s on the other end of, you know, there and there might be some nuance to it and broken link building have to, you know, call out you have a broken link and here’s where, know, we’re going to I want you to insert our link and switch it out, whatever. Like there’s a little bit of nuance into the personalisation, but like really doesn’t matter. It’s more of a numbers game. So I do think when you compare head to head, the like traditional link building to digital PR, here is the digital PR leans heavily on finding relevant people and getting way more targeted.

Louise:
So does that kind of mean, like, what are your feelings towards the term link builder now? So would you call yourself a link builder for BuzzStream or would you call yourself digital or something else completely?

Vince:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t actively. I would say I’m a content marketer first and foremost. Right now I am. Yeah, the term link building idea does have a negative connotation to me, think I just put that term in the bucket of like this spammy link builder. You know, it’s like you’re you’re just searching for links and I think I’m forgetting who told me this, but the way that I like frame it now is like you’re building content that is link worthy. You’re not building it to get links, right? Yeah, that’s nice. I try to make a point nowadays of every time I say this of instead of saying getting links, you’re saying getting links in coverage. So you’re not necessarily because I think now there is more of a push with AI, there’s more of a push now to get brand dimensions. And unlinked dimensions are all of a sudden a big thing. And it’s not just links that people are searching. So yeah, we’re in a weird time, for sure, with all this stuff.

Steve:
It’s a changeable time for sure. I mean, I absolutely love the fact as someone who has been in digital PR, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked a lot about the terminology, but has been in digital PR for a number of years. And yeah, like when you don’t get a link in an article, can be seen as like a negative thing. I love the fact it’s, it’s switching. It’s glorious. It’s like, if we get a link, great. If we don’t also great, long as the brand mentions there, this is good. And it leads me onto my next question about reporting, which we think quite a lot about.

How do you report on the impact of your work? Are you reporting any differently now than you would have done previously when you were doing more of the kind of, guess, traditional link building like blogger outreach, stuff like that? Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about that, Vince?

Vince:
Yeah, well, when I worked at agency, the main KPI was links. Secondarily, guess it was organic traffic and rankings. And the way that we would set up client campaigns was we’d put, we’d use like, so Ahrefs has their traffic value metric.

And basically, you can understand the value of every keyword. And therefore, every site would have some type of traffic value. So you can almost understand the value of every link, every referring domain going to that site. And in a lot of cases, some sites would get links pretty naturally if it was like an Airbnb or something. Maybe link building wasn’t super important to them because based on the traffic value they had and the number of referring domains, the actual value of a link was pretty low. And so ultimately, what you’re trying to get towards was we would come up with, in order to catch these people both in traffic value and organic traffic, we would need x amount of links. We need 80 links a year or something or or you know, 800 links a year and then you would break it down into OK, so if we need that, then we got to create 10 assets for you and each assets going to get eight links and how however you do it that way. So yeah, I would say the like the three key metrics there was like they were all kind of working towards the same goal, which was like to get exposure and like, you know. Ultimately, if you’re just looking at links, I got you 10 links like that can be somewhat helpful. really, what is that telling you? It’s like we’re getting you links to work towards boosting maybe your domain authority, which is going to help get you more organic traffic. That was kind of the through line. But I think nowadays, that is still a thing to keep in mind. But I think there’s a lot more to it.

When I create content now for BuzzStream, I wasn’t necessarily hired to be like, Vince, we got to bring in a bunch of links for BuzzStream it was like, we need brand exposure. We need to boost. We want you to be a thought leader in this space. We just want people talking about BuzzStream more. And so it’s an interesting time to be doing this because I kind of started with that earlier mindset and then, you know, everything upended the past year. I feel like it’s been a crazy major change. So now I’m thinking more along the lines of All of the avenues I can go so like I own the the newsletter I own the podcast, know the so in addition to the blog itself and social so like now my metrics I started I guess in 2024 where I was looking at or at the end of 2023, I was looking at keywords specifically. And I would be like, I’m tracking the rankings of these keywords every single week. And I can understand how we’re doing. Looking at organic traffic, those are the big metrics. And then I guess maybe at the beginning of this year, I really had a total like shift where I was like I’m wasting my time doing this I think I need to start looking at this stuff from a broader perspective I need to just start looking at where my traffic is coming from overall and like evaluate it that way from these channels so now it’s I’m looking at the email channel. I’m looking at the social channel. I’m looking at the organic channel I’m trying to look at AI channel. However, you know messy that gets but so yeah mine has kind of I’ve taken like a whole new mindset with all this stuff and I am realising how much of impact like our own audience is. And I think for a lot of people, you know, in the business like that, who are noticing dips in traffic, I think like that is what I recommend people. It’s like, I mean, Google has even come out and said this. Like I was at the Search Central event and a few it was like four months ago in New York City and they had a slide on there that was like, you know, don’t expect the same growth from there. Don’t accept that. Don’t expect the same traffic from organic search that you have in the past. And I think it’s just like a very telling way for all brands to really understand that you have to kind of shift the whole mindset of this. Like the old kind of playbook doesn’t seem to be built for the way forward these days.

Louise:
That’s so interesting because you mentioned and also I guess somewhat kind of discombobulating a bit because like you said it’s like since this year I’ve just had to change everything and I think that’s what everyone has felt like agencies, clients, brands, like everyone’s just a bit like whoa okay this is kind of feels like a quick shift but when you mentioned all the kind of the different avenues that you’re considering a bit more so like social and email is there one that for you and BuzzStream.

I guess maybe in a more B2B sense, you kind of see as more fruitful or maybe more surprised by like how well it’s going and you’re dialing that up a bit more or is it just a bit of everything?

Vince:
I would say LinkedIn, mean, for us, LinkedIn is very good. I’m not sure if like all B2B, you you really have to understand the audience, but for us, I’m spending a lot more time on LinkedIn and trying to, be as active as possible there. And then email, like the owned audience. I just think owned is such an important thing. The more that these studies come out, talking about like how different people are interacting with the news, interacting with the web, with search, and the more you can own that stuff, if people are coming to your site now with AI, I think the general consensus is people are coming to websites a lot more knowledgeable about your product now. So to me, that kind of lops off all the top funnel content that I used to rely on, know, and a lot of agencies did. And I don’t envy your guys position, you know, being an agency to your point, Lou, it’s like the crazy times being able to measure all this stuff and kind of make these calls with clients. I’m sure it’s it’s not.

Louise:
Yeah, I feel like actually in hindsight, it’s, I’ve asked the kind of attribution question, which is something that often like, you know, everyone’s just saying like, it’s very, it’s very messy. It’s a bit of everything. You don’t, you know, you might think it comes from one place, but that started somewhere completely different and you can’t track it and you got to get comfortable with that.

Vince:
It seems to everybody I talk to, it’s like, we probably should be expecting less links and less coverage and less, you know, email opens and less of everything these days. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just means you’re getting more highly qualified people in these funnels. You know, like you’re getting, you should be getting better links and the links that you’re getting are matter more than they did. You know, like I think gone are the days of the huge viral campaigns that digital PR agencies are used to kind of hanging a hat on, like, I got 200 links. Like, I think it’s OK to come out with eight links and think that that’s a really great result from these campaigns because there’s just less viewership and people are just interacting with the web in such different ways.

Steve:
And it comes back Vince to, cause I think you have asked the attribution question. You’ve thrown that into the mix early on, like Vince, you were talking earlier about the, when you joined BuzzStream, you were kind of asked to be like a thought leader, right? And the podcast helps with that. And it’s not easy to measure that on sales or listeners. And you know, you’ve had Rand Fishkin on the podcast we had him on. And actually sometimes it’s an intuition. Like does it fit? Is it, is it fun to do? Does it feel good? Is it something you can talk about it on another channel LinkedIn? do this podcast and it gives a perception of BuzzStream. I mean, you are industry experts. You are an industry expert, but it all helps to build that narrative. And like, we get quite obsessed, don’t we? With like, what is the end game? Is this worth it? And it’s like, well, does it always have to have like a definitive answer? Like, I think your podcast is great. One of the reasons we started this podcast was just to talk to interesting people in the industry and that is it. You know, that’s and share some great content with great people. I think that’s kind of enough sometimes.

Vince:
Yeah, I mean, would get I get the push back on that kind of conversation where it’s just like, well, how do I sell it to a client? Right. Like and maybe you don’t look, which again, like it’s vector. Like I don’t envy your position right now. Like I’m so glad to be in the position where I have buy in on this. And like, I don’t need to show these three lines. But like if you’re pitching this to a client, they have to kind of be bought in. And maybe it’s not this like it’s way easier to sell to a client who’s interested in SEO and digital PR, right? It’s hard to sell that kind of stuff if they, especially back in the day, even I remember we’d have link building contracts with people and you’re showing them, we got all these links for you and the C-suite comes in there like, I don’t care about any of this. What does this all mean for me? So maybe there’s a little bit of that. But I don’t know. Do you feel, getting back to the overall results, do you feel that there are less links, less coverage, less things to go around these days? Am I on point with that hypothesis?

Steve:
What I love about this conversation is because you’re a podcast host you’re kind of partly into being us This is this is fine. This is all good Lou. I’m gonna let you feel that one.

Vince:
Sorry, I’m sorry.

Louise:
I yes, I think there’s a, but there’s an, when we’ve spoken about it with clients, it’s like, it’s always such like a multifaceted thing as with all things in life, but it’s not an easy thing to just be like, oh, it’s because of this. It’s the like media landscape is awful for a lot of people in the sense that they’re making less money, they’re cutting jobs. And then with same amount of PRs, if not more amount of PRs because digital PR has grown and understanding of it has grown, at least in the UK. So there’s more people doing it. So you have higher competition. yeah, like definitely are, I actually, an interesting way of looking at it is I think maybe pre COVID and into the kind of digital PR boom time, we were upping our targets and upping our targets based on performance. Cause that’s always how we do our targets. Our targets aren’t, let’s see if we can just get this because let’s stretch ourselves. We do our targets based on what we think we can get. And they’re like ambitious, but they’re realistic. So for years it was like, we do more, we do more, we do more. Because we’re like, we can, we can push ourselves, other people are doing it. But now we are probably brought them down a little and then we’re kind of plateauing. So it’s not like it’s getting, it’s not like it’s dipping and dipping and dipping, but it isn’t on that kind of crazy hiatus where we’re talking, yeah, like about regularly getting campaigns with a hundred pieces of coverage. Like it does happen, but we would never have a target of a hundred piece of coverage for a campaign because that’s unrealistic.

But it’s not impossible because some things just take off and it’s fantastic. It’s really interesting. I don’t know how other people do their targets and KPIs and potentially people are doing it in more of a sense of let’s push it. You you sometimes hear that with clients be like, we want to make 10 % more this year in terms of revenue or whatever. And it’s like, just because like, let’s do it. Whereas our targets at least.

The way that we keep our sanity is we base it on what we think we can get with a slight ambitious kind of look on it, I guess. So it’s not just easy. And that’s, I think, worked out very nicely for us because then it keeps clients happy because we’re not over promising, keeps the people we work with happy because they’re not like burning out because they’re trying to achieve something they can’t get. So yeah, so in answer to your question, I think it’s definitely plateaued and it’s not just on this exponential growth, which it used to be. So I think that can sometimes feel like it’s in a negative sense, but I think it’s at the moment, plateau. Would you agree, Steve?

Steve:
Yeah, I would, I would a hundred percent agree with that. think it’s, we’ve been very good at being kind of realistic and transparent about like why we’re setting targets and what they’re there. She was going to differ slightly by sector, by type of story. That’s, that’s going to play a part as well. But, I think it comes back to something you said, Vince, which is, is, it’s about the, we can point to the quality. think what we’re good at, and I think the best agencies or the best digital PRs or content marketers, whatever term we’re using will.

To be able to get that quality, those quality publications, build those relationships with journalists and that is way more important than kind of like a reasonably arbitrary link target, but then you have to link it to impact. And that has, that’s changed quite a lot. come back to that. That has changed quite a lot in the past year and that’s scary and uncomfortable at points, but all we can do is be transparent, which sounds like what you’re doing at.

BuzzStream, I want to come back to something you said earlier though, where you kind of started to compare the US UK and sort of said UK is like five years ahead, which has always intrigued me because the US is a wonderful country, so advanced in so many things. But where is the US on kind of digital PR or kind of content marketing at the moment? And like, why do you think it’s kind of lagging behind somewhere like the UK in terms of maturity?

Vince:
I think with the UK, it is just such a condensed market. And with the US, I don’t know. There are certain tactics that, and I’d be curious to hear from you too, but that don’t seem to play as well here, or they’re just not as common. I don’t you know, we did this big study on journalist requests, right? Like the hashtag and like it’s like 90 % of them are UK based journalists. And I asked around to US journalists and they were like, why would I ever? I was like, do you ever use this? So I mean, you know, you ever use these hashtags to get and they’re like, why would I ever advertise a story that I want ahead of time? Like that was one of the things.

The other one was like, no, no, like I never solicit. Like I always go directly to people to find, you know, I’ll go to a university or, you know, it’s a professor or something. So and to me, like that’s a big piece of the kind of UK strategy is that from a lot of people I talk to. And then so, yeah, I don’t think that’s as prevalent here. And then.

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s something about the, and maybe it is just a terminology thing, like the PR versus digital PR. It’s like when you talk to people who are in traditional PR, they don’t want anything to do with SEO. Whereas at least anecdotally, like when I talk to people, it seems like there’s a little more friendly play between the digital PR, PR, and like the SEO teams. They kind of get it, like the clients, the brands, kind of get it. And again, maybe it just gets down to that everything’s more condensed in the UK. yeah, potentially one of the big reasons is just there’s these invisible fences up and nobody wants to collaborate across. PR people don’t want anything to do with the SEO people. So yeah, think there is just a lot of, maybe it’s the public relations people their nose up on SEO and they think that it’s kind of a spammy thing. And I think there’s probably a lot of validity to it based on, again, like the anecdotal stuff you hear from journalists just getting spammed all day. I was like, Muck Rack had a report that said it was like 5 % of journalists get pitched things that are relevant to them all the time. Just 5 % only get relevant pitches, whereas the other 95%, it was like 45 % never get pitched relevant.

Vince:
Yeah, and so maybe that is a part of it because it’s the US is so much bigger there. They’ve had so much more crap in their inboxes. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s a couple of theories, guess.

Louise:
I’m sick of it. Well, I guess it can only be theories, can’t it? Because like, yeah, you can, and like you said, it has to be anecdotal. It just kind of has to be that vibe. We spoke with a guy from Hard Numbers who are a UK based agency who do coverage and link guarantees. So they will say, you you pay us this and you will get this number of stories and off the back of that, we will guarantee you’ll get X. And if we don’t, then you don’t have to pay us kind of five. They said that they’re very successful, they’ve never, they always do hit that target, so it works out well. And he said that whenever he talks about that on LinkedIn, he gets quite a heated response, but the most, the people who get the angriest are US PRs, like, who seem completely affronted by the idea that you could put some sort of number against PR, that it just, it seemed to just really clash with their values about what their job is. So I do wonder whether you know, what I think is a really beneficial thing, which is showing the SEO value that PR can get if you get a link and well, then now maybe not, maybe with brand mentions, all that kind of stuff, then maybe just that, even though that’s helped, I would think would be helping their case and showing how valuable their work is, maybe just the fact that it feels too numerical and too clinical, it just somehow goes against what they like. I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Vince:
Yeah, I that was one of the big takeaways from our like did our state of digital PR, a big big study and it was like. We asked who do you as digital PR? So do you work most closely with and it was the SEO team and like brand the brand team and like the PR teams were the lowest. That’s what kind of blows my mind with with any of this stuff. Like if you’re if you’re looking to succeed these days based off all that we’re seeing, you know with. Brand mentions and AI and just the benefit of building a brand and having that brand recognition when even if you’re ranking well, if people don’t know who your brand is, they’re going to click on the brand that they know. there’s just so much evidence that brand, quote unquote, is such a powerful thing. And maybe it’s just the story isn’t being told the right way.

And we need to, as an industry, of push that story more. And I think, in a lot of ways, AI thing will hopefully push that more and get people working together cross-functionally. But yeah, right now, it still just seems to be stuck in the old ways. And the brands that are doing it well are the ones that are leveraging that kind of cross-function, but full kind of funnel or sorry, full picture or however you want to say it, like that all the teams are working together. Yeah.

Steve:
I think it’s kind of always been the dream, but we’ve sort of titled this episode, you know, is linked building dead. And I think there’s many ways of answering that question. I’m not sure I could say definitively yes or no, because like we still build links, right? Like that’s part what we do. And we talked about the terminology, but ultimately I think the brands that will win are the ones that don’t just have like an SEO team and like a digital PR person just going off and building links and not connecting at all with the brand team or like the PR team or agency that they’re working with. It should be, you know, a very collaborative approach, like understanding what the brand’s about, their values, what they stand for, the expertise they can confidently talk about. And then the PR team or the agency, you know, like let’s call it traditional PR could go off and do like bigger out of home activations or, know, like a campaign that is designed just to get awareness and the digital PR team could do stuff that is yeah, designed to get some links, but you know, also improve the brand awareness, but online. And I can see how it should work beautifully, but it’s going to take a while to catch up. think AI will accelerate it though. So yeah, I’m in complete agreement with you.

Vince:
Yeah, I get jealous sometimes of some of these other industry, like, you know, branding agencies or something where it’s like, or some of the traditional PR agencies where it’s like, know, we just did a partnership with, you know, it was like Heinz catch up and like, they could just go out and like do a partnership with whatever and it’s news, you know, it’s like Airbnb, like these big brands like and yeah, I don’t know. Somebody said this on our podcast. It was like, how do you attribute getting a sponsorship on an F1 car or something? It’s like you get your brand sponsored on a baseball or football jersey or something. There’s no clear attribution model to that. brands pay. Thousands millions of dollars for that right and we’re over here trying to be like well one link is equal to…

Steve:
Yeah, we feel each other’s pain here because it’s so true. It’s so true. I do look at these bigger brand activations and we talked about it internally. You get these agencies, whether it’s in the US or the UK, and they do some fabulous work, but sometimes they do this campaign which might cost, I don’t know, like a hundred thousand pounds or something, know, a hundred grand or something mad. And they get like six pieces of coverage and it’s like seen as this big success. It’s like, woo, look at us. And we’re like, we’re scrapping around for like 30, 40 pieces from this small data campaign. And we’re really, we’re actually showing the impact of it. And this is like, well, we got on, I dunno, like Forbes once and it’s brilliant. And it’s like, that is cool. Good for you. But it costs like a hundred times more or whatever. It’s insane. Make it make sense for us.

Vince:
That’s where I’m thinking, does it, do we have to start pushing it to where these big metrics don’t, like, have we always been conflating, you know, the number with the quality, like, you know, when you talk about the quality versus quantity thing, like, we haven’t gotten into that, but that’s clearly, mean, our heads are all in the same place, like, it seems to be that the quality links are the ones that really move the needle. I don’t think I’ve really seen a great study about the quality of links in relation to ranking and to, you you can kind of, you can get halfway there with like DRDA, like those types of metrics, but like relevancy is something that is really hard to measure. like, you know, if you were to get two or three relevant links, for a client, are you able to make the case that I got you two and three relevant links and these are the ones that really move the needle versus this other campaign, we got you 10 and it was like, you know, these generic big news sites, but like these two that were super relevant are worth more than those 10. Like I just, it’s an impossible task, but I do think there’s probably something to that where the push for relevant links is, you know, hopefully something that will continue to happen. It feels like it’s been moving towards there, but like, still think people are hung up on numbers.

Louise:
Yeah, various different agencies or different clients have tried to introduce different scores and ways of trying to put it into a number. That is a way to do it, to try and do it, but it’s so subjective when it comes to it. I think sometimes like, maybe I’m being too simplistic, but there’s an element of just using your head and seeing something you’re like, well, obviously that’s really relevant. But sometimes people don’t respond well to that. They need some sort of number and it’s if you, guess, if you’re also working in digital marketing and you’re working with more performance marketing channels where they can give you so much numbers, so much data on exactly how something’s performing and why and all this kind of stuff. It’s like, I think there’s a point where you just got to say like digital power isn’t like that.

Vince:
It’s just not… That’s a good point.

Steve:
But like you, I almost like I find it easier or I think it’s easier to sort of realise what’s completely irrelevant. So we talked about, I don’t know, casino sites talking about hay fever, you know, just to get links and all that. That’s wildly irrelevant, wildly irrelevant. But to, know, brands are not just about, we know this, not just about what they sell and the product. They’re about, you know, they can be about other things and I’m not going to give specific examples from our client base, but you’re not just going to talk about the product. So there’s like a bit of a framework around what you can talk about, but you could argue that there’s some, there’s some things that might not seem immediately relevant. And then you get into the world of like, well, it is to their audience, but maybe it’s not so much to Google or AI. And then it opens up our words. So like, it comes back to something that I think it was Ram Fishkin who said to us, and I love the simplicity of it. It’s like, did you sell more? You know, did you get like, whatever you’re doing, did you sell more?

Is your graph going up? Is your graph going up? And that should really be the ultimate metric, whether it’s holidays or, or, you know, users signing up to BuzzStream or shoes or whatever it is. Is it going up? Great. If it is, do more of what you’re doing and try. I love what you’re doing, Vince. You’re trying different things. And I think that is the ultimate thing we should be doing in marketing rather than just relying on, kind of same old, same old, testing, learning and seeing. Seeing what feels good and what is helping the numbers go up without trying to over measure. I don’t know. Does that make any sense? I feel like it does.

Vince:
No, I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people now like digital PR agencies are getting into like thought leadership and social using the deliverables and service offerings for clients because I do think there’s a lot of crossover and, you know, getting back to like, does do these links, you know, what the quality, quantity, whatever relevancy like at the end of the day, yeah, like the goal is to move the needle, the bottom line. So like that maybe supports even further my theory that we should be expecting less links from these campaigns because how many of these big links are, if you’re looking at the referral traffic for many of these links, I’m sure these campaigns that get like 100 links, it’s probably like two or three of them that are actually sending some traffic. Yeah, so maybe that’s the direction to head. That’s one direction people can head is we’re just going to get you links that are going to move the needle. And it’s from a bottom line standpoint. And it becomes all about referral traffic and all about doing it that way and tracking it through that way. But yeah, I think the days of just the, we got you 50 links or we got you this one high DA site, like I hope that brands will start to look outside of just that as wins.

Louise:
Yeah, for sure. Your kind of background, previous to BuzzStream, I’m just making an assumption, I would imagine is more like B2C stuff you were working on, potentially not. A mix. I mean, now obviously you’re pure B2B. What are the kind of differences you’ve felt and seen? And do you have any tips for someone who’s just starting out to like, maybe they’ve just got a B2B client or they’ve just, you know, gone in-house somewhere that’s a B2B business. Any advice?

Vince:
It was a mix, I would say. Yeah, I mean, I think that B2B seems to be a lot more data driven. And like the stuff that I’m working on now is like, I ask a lot of questions, trying to understand, like I talk to our customer service team just like to understand what, you know, hurdles people are having or like, I mean, the good part about me being in this position is that like I am the customer, like I understand the customer, was the customer, you know, it’s like, so I can kind of speak to what I know is like the zeitgeist in the industry right now, you know, it’s like, I see that guest posting is, has been peaking on Google Trends. So I’m like, Ooh, I could write a post about that because it’s, you know, relevant to everybody. And like, think data goes a long way in B2B, but then also pulling insights from customers seems to be more fruitful than like if I was a B2C brand, your customer base can be a lot of different things. I think it is kind of the big difference there.

Louise:
Yeah, well, mean, yeah, because like, you know, I’m assuming like all your customers link build, link builders or digital PRs, like is it is that the is not a CRM that other types of industries use? It’s that that’s who you’re so so that is a it’s a small but very engaged industry. You’re like your tool is something that we have been using for years. And if someone said, you can’t use it anymore, it would our operation would crumble. Like we would be such a work to kind of set up however we were going to work because it’s just a part of it. you know, we’re very engaged as your customers and it must be the case across lots of other places as well.

Vince:
Yeah. And again, like I think you can extract insights for like post ideas and stuff from a lot of different venues when you’re in that that scenario and like speaks to the fact that like, no, it is helpful to have the thought leadership thing. Like that’s where these things start to like play into one another. It’s like I can drum up interest in something or like I can. But sometimes what I’ll do is if I’m in a conversation in LinkedIn, I will comment on something and be like, that’s a good idea for a post. And I’ll go write the post, and I’ll go back into that LinkedIn conversation and be like, I just wrote a post about this. And that kind of stuff is not scalable, right? But I think it’s more that hyper-targeted approach that I’ve always done. Maybe with B2B, it also requires more nuance, although I don’t know. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s harder, but I just think it’s like maybe it’s just a smaller, potentially more difficult approach because a lot of times with B2C, your customer is everybody. And so you can kind of spread that box that you said. It gets a little larger. The industries that you can overlap with and get creative with to kind of come up with content. It’s a little harder to do that in B2B sometimes because the overlap doesn’t make as much sense.

Steve:
Yeah, that makes sense. We have one final question for you, Vince, and I’m hoping this is okay to ask. We want to peel back the curtain of what’s going on at BuzzStream. Is there anything you can tell us about like what you’re working on at the moment? You do a lot of great content, your own podcast, the blog, lot of thought leadership, but anything that’s happening, you know, with the, with the product or with your work that you can share to get our listeners excited.

Vince:
Yeah, and I kind of probably should have said this earlier, but like we are really making a big push into digital PR versus like link building. Because I think that is the future of this. Like I don’t think there is much of a future to the traditional link building. So when you say like is link building dead to like bring this full circle, like I think the traditional kind is is dead, but like digital PR as it pertains to link building is alive and well. And like, I even think you can like loop in the like unlinked brand mentions kind of into link building, although it gets a little fuzzy there,  so we’re making a lot of big bets. My content has kind of fully focused on digital PR stuff, although I kind of hit on some of the traditional link building stuff, like this guest posting thing I mentioned, but a lot of the times it’s to kind of chop down some of the preconceived notions about the traditional link building. So the guest posting thing I did, I basically found this big database of 26,000 sites, like an online link buying marketplace where you can buy guest posts. And I analysed the quality of them, the amount of traffic they get, and all this stuff, the cost of them, and kind of put together this thesis that there’s very little quality sites out there that you can buy links from and they cost a ton of money. It’s way better to do, to invest in something like Digital PR where you own the asset, you can control it more and you’re getting better links from it. But so all this to say that our biggest thing right now is we just released this List IQ tool, is, it’s a tool to help people build hyper-targeted media lists. Speaking to the B2B thing, I think one of the benefits of me having the podcast and talking with all the customers is you get to understand the problems that people have pretty quickly, and you can address them through the product. So one of the big problems is media databases. I we saw this in our state of digital PR report, too. was like, what’s your number one problem with media lists and media databases? And it was like, they’re inaccurate and they’re out of date. And then you couple that with the stuff that journalists are saying, which is like, they’re rarely getting pitched relevant content and, and, know, there’s fewer journalists out there. So what we’re doing now with list IQ is like enabling digital PRS and PR professionals to do that hyper-focused outreach and build hyper-focused, hyper-targeted lists, but doing it super quickly. Because you guys know, normally it takes forever to go in. You find the journalist. Ours is all done through Google News Search now. So it’s like you go into Google News Search, you can pull out all the individual URLs, and it’ll find you the journalist. It’ll find you their email address, their job title, bio, all this stuff that you can do and just like a few seconds. So that is one big problem we’re trying to solve for people. And where we go next, I think, we’re unsure. Like, it could be covered stuff. It could be integrating that more into the BuzzStream platform itself. Because right now, List IQ is separate from BuzzStream. It’s like we now are kind of like BuzzStream outreach tool and the BuzzStream List IQ tool.

So at the end of the day, the goal is always to just help people do their job better and make them better at doing outreach and hopefully win the hearts and minds of some of the journalists out there who…

Louise:
Well, yeah, mean, there’s probably plenty of quite shirty journalists out there who were fed up with getting a lot of spammy and irrelevant emails, so it’s probably music to their ears.

Vince:
Yeah, so I mean, you know, if we can enable it from that way to people to do their jobs more easily and and get some of the this slop off of the, you know, out of this industry, I think we’re all going to do a better job and we’re all going to have more success because I mean, this the stats are showing it’s like there’s fewer journalists and there’s a lot more people getting involved in digital PR. So it’s like the competition is way higher. so you gotta start getting more surgical, I think, with these approaches. Digital PRs need to start realising they can’t do the big media blast.

Steve:
It’s true. Vince, thanks so much for joining us and taking the time to tell us about your views on link building. I don’t think we fully answered the question is link building dead, but we had a good go and we covered a lot of ground. So we really, really appreciate it. If people want to get in touch with you, whether they’ve got ideas for, I don’t know, studies or for BuzzStream or just generally to hear about your industry insights, how should they do so?

Vince:
Yeah, I’m super active on LinkedIn. So I would say, so I’d tell people if you are not connected with me, but you want to connect and have a question or something, just like give a little message in there. That always helps me kind of weed out the people who are just going to sell me something or pitch me a guest post or something.

Steve:
Yeah.

Louise:
It’s always Wikipedia edits. Everyone’s always asking me, do you need someone to edit your Wikipedia? I don’t know why they like love, anyway, bye bye.

Vince:
I’ve not had those, that’s cool.

Steve:
I think they’ve cottoned onto our email a list at Propellernet because everyone gets them and it’s just like, Hey, you haven’t replied, know, like these really pushy salespeople, like you haven’t replied. I mean, only assume me it’s not of interest and it’s like, well, this is email 15. So like you can assume that. Well, thank you, Vince, an absolute pleasure. I’m sure our listeners got an awful lot out of that and, yeah, please check out Vince on, LinkedIn to see what BuzzStream is, is up.

Vince:
Yeah, thank you guys. This has been great. I really enjoyed this time.

Louise:
Thank you, Vince.