Using Outbrain for Amplifying Content Pieces on News/Media Outlets

[Island]

This is a concept I found in a Buzzstream content promotion guide I read recently, which I highly recommend by the way.

1) Get a guest post/or some sort of earned content piece up on a major news/content website. This could be anything from Buzzfeed, Elite Daily, Lifehack.org all the way to Huffington Post, Forbes, Entrepreneur(i.e the big boys).

2) These websites typically put their most shared/popular posts on the homepage. So by creating a very shareable content piece, and then using a content amplification service like Outbrain, we can essentially help these posts do much better than they usually do in both traffic and social shares, and get them on the homepage.

If you're not aware of content amplification, when you're on sites like CNN or other big content sites its the "Promoted Stories" or the "Stories from around the web" tabs.

3) Our money site gets up getting a lot more traffic, and it's a breeze getting future posting opportunities on the same website.

Has anybody tried this strategy?

I may be working with one of my friends who runs a fitness brand and I'm thinking of doing this for him. Get him to write up a guest post on a website that's fairly easy to get into, crank up traffic on OutBrain, and see what kind of results this ends up getting him.

 

[Sutra]

I have not tried that but it sounds interesting. Please keep us updated with your results.

 

[Postmortis]

I like this idea, thinking outside the box!

One thing I'd add though is that if you're after large traffic volume, it might be worth looking into a different content syndication channel besides Outbrain, such as Zemanta/Taboola.

Based on past campaigns, Outbrain brings in traffic that generally converts the best but is also the most expensive with an average CPC of $0.26 compared to Zemanta/Taboola which can go below $0.12 per click. So if you're purely after as much traffic as you can, have a look into those.

 

[miketpowell]

This kind of stuff can be very powerful - I've done a ton with these "content recommendation engines" which is the exact same ad unit that got Pulse 360 crushed by the FTC in 2010 but now it's suddenly different with VC backing and a different name so the law does apply to them... lol.

Your main decision on this is do you get the content hosted on another site or just throw up your own "blog" section and do your own post. There are pros/cons to each

Hosted On Other Source:
Pro: Get the trust of the source with the readers, more likely to share, gets there own audience viewing it more
Con: You might not get to control the exact language/link son the page. Tracking options are limited to what you can convince them to run. Optimizing the copy of the article overtime is definitely not happening. The site has a bunch of there own paid ads to distract the reader and get themselves money for clicks.

Hosting Yourself:
Pro: Right your own content, optimize and track it like any other LP you'd use, don't lose any of the traffic to ads you don't own.
Con: Lack of authority/trust because unknown source to reader

There are definitely more to list but those are the big ones. The key thing is how important is the authority going to be to your audience. Some audiences respond very well to authority and others it doesn't really matter as they click where ever and have no clue what site they are on.

An example of a company killing it with this is https://www.betterment.com/ - The LTV of a customer is huge and these customers trust authority for stuff like this. So pushing traffic to puff pieces about them on Forbes/Business Insider is very effective. I've seen them using many different sites, tapping into the authority each site has over a given audience.