In my last post[1], I explained how using network visualization tools can help you massively improve your content marketing PR/Outreach strategy —understanding which news outlets have the largest syndication networks empowers your outreach team to prioritize high-syndication publications over lower syndication publications. The result? The content you are pitching enjoys significantly more widespread link pickups.
Today, I’m going to take you a little deeper — we'll be looking at a few techniques for forming an even better understanding of the publisher syndication networks in your particular niche. I've broken this technique into two parts:
- Technique One — Leveraging Buzzsumo[2] influencer data and twitter scraping to find the most influential journalists writing about any topic
- Technique Two — Leveraging the Gdelt[3] Dataset to reveal deep story syndication networks between publishers using in-context links.
Why do this at all?
If you are interested in generating high-value links at scale, these techniques provide an undeniable competitive advantage — they help you to deeply understand how writers and news publications connect and syndicate to each other.
In our opinion at Fractl[4], data-driven content stories that have strong news hooks, finding writers and publications who would find the content compelling, and pitching them effectively is the single highest ROI SEO activity possible. Done correctly, it is entirely possible to generate dozens, sometimes even hundreds or thousands, of high-authority links with one or a handful of content campaigns.
Let's dive in.
Using Buzzsumo to understand journalist influencer networks on any topic
First, you want to figure out who your topc influencers are your a topic. A very handy feature of Buzzsumo is its “influencers” tool. You can locate it on the influences tab, then follow these