Helping To Protect Freelancers From Harassment
Specialized independent work is growing in this country, from coast to coast, but with that growth has come some growing pains. From healthcare to retirement planning,
How do you find out what people are talking about? It’s a simple question but a vital one for content marketers and freelancers who want to create brand awareness. Google SERPs give one set of data points, but a SERP placement is really how popular or useful Google thinks a link is.
A much surer method of finding out what’s popular is to use social media shares. The share is the ultimate social media virality marker. People have to take the time and the risk of putting a particular piece of content up on their stream when they share. It invites a response from all of the people who see that feed. More than a simple like, a share shows true investment in a piece of content.
But finding out how many people shared a piece of content was a real pain, at least until BuzzSumo came along. BuzzSumo lets you put in a keyword and find out the most popular shared articles related to it. They aggregate shares across all of the major social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+, then find the pieces of content with the most shares related to the keyword.
For instance, let’s put in the word freelancing. BuzzSumo ranks articles by the total aggregate of social shares. At the top with 76,100 shares is a funny set of comics about the differences between office life and the freelance life. Continue scrolling and you can start to get a sense of what is attracting people who read articles in this niche. By knowing what people are looking for and talking about, you can create content pieces related to those topics that can grab attention. You could reference the topics in your query letters, or write responses to them on your own social media channels.
Just this feature would be enough, but BuzzSumo does so much more. It doesn’t just find the top articles. It also finds the domains and the authors that have the greatest impact related to a keyword. In short, it’s an influencer search engine. If you’re looking for guest posting opportunities, this is a huge advantage. Why spend time trying to build your awareness with everyone under the sun when you could target the top ten people in your niche? You can even search for influencers directly by clicking the influencers link at the top of the page.
Want to track your own posts and influencer reach? That’s done through their monitoring tool.
The free version offers you a glimpse into what BuzzSumo offers if you want to get an idea of how they’ll help you before you go all-in. In the free version, you get a few results and searches each day through the free interface. But even a single well-done search can reveal enough for you to see if this will be a good tool for your freelancing career.
A subscription to BuzzSumo is necessary to really start using the tool. That’s where we can help. As part of our membership benefits package, you can get a code for 30% off of a three-month subscription to BuzzSumo. We think that if you are writing any kind of content for the web or need to know what the latest buzz is within your industry, this is an indispensable tool that goes far beyond what a Google search can do. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
