Vince says: “My insight is following the ‘less is more’ approach, and that really expands across everything from the content that you write, the outreach that you do, to the links that you get.

The more focus that we can put on the less, I think it's going to help you really hone in on the quality of everything you're doing, which (as we'll hopefully talk about here, David) is really the key to success in 2025 and beyond.”

Do you think that less automatically leads to more quality or is quality something that you also have to work on, in tandem with ‘less is more’?

“Great question. It's easy to take away from this that you can just do less. No. This is a harder task than it might seem on the surface.

Doing less doesn't mean just pulling back and writing one post per month or something. Focus in on doing the best that you can do, and spend the time that you would normally spend writing 5 posts and write a really great, relevant, quality post that's really targeted to your audience. That's what I mean by ‘less is more’.

You can apply that across things like link building. If you are trying to generate links, you can generate hundreds of links that might not do anything, but you could also focus all that time on 1 specific link, or 10 specific links, or really focus on a journalist or a specific site that you think is highly relevant, and highly quality.

That's going to move the needle a lot more than just this big approach.”

You started off talking about the importance of targeting the right audience and writing for them.

How do you measure the relevancy of what you intend to do?

“Another great question. This is something that SEOs are starting to get more into, and I think this is even more applicable in the AI age. There's the technical route, and you get into things in the AI realm that talk about relevancy and how the LLMs and AI technology break up content into different nodes and all this different technical jargon. But then there's the flip side of the more qualitative approach.

I like to say, if I was the customer, if I was reading this, if I was a journalist or a blogger and I'm receiving my email, would I take action on it? Would I read this and say, ‘Oh, this makes sense?’ As SEOs and content marketers (and I'm 1000% guilty of this myself), you start to get too caught up in the metrics and these vanity metrics: How much organic traffic can I bring in? How many links can I bring? You start to lose focus on the things that move the needle.

I think this is even harder for agencies because you typically have a lot of KPIs that you have to hit, and they're usually link numbers or traffic numbers. At the end of the day, if these links and this traffic aren't ultimately supporting the bottom line of a company, your time is limited, as an agency. If you're in-house, same deal.

To answer your question more directly, it's trying to think about the end user when you're doing anything. How is this going to impact the end user?

During my time here at BuzzStream, I've had a great support network. We're a small team, but Stephen Panico, who is the CMO here, and Paul May, the founder, (because I came from an agency background) have done a great job at making sure I'm not just publishing stuff for search, which was kind of a mindset switch for me.

Obviously, all the stuff I did in an agency was end user focus, but I still had that agency mindset and some of these lingering bad practices of focusing on vanity metrics. So, whenever I write stuff these days, it's always this focus on, ‘Is this actually helpful? Is this actually relevant? Is this something that people can actually take and do something with?’”

You mentioned the phrase ‘end user’ a couple of times there as well. Do you have an avatar of an ideal customer in mind? If so, how do you go about building that?

“Yeah, we definitely do have a couple. With BuzzStream, we know it's a mix of agency users and in-house, and I'd say primarily link builders and digital PRs. There are some affiliates that use it but, what we've done in the past year is – based on everything that is going on in the space – we've decided to lean into where we think we can add the most value. When it comes to understanding that ideal end user, I think it's: Who is going to get the most value out of this?

Sure, we could sell to link builders (and we still do), but really, the old-fashioned link building methods that people use or try to exploit, for lack of a better term, they're going to the wayside. That's pretty evident with the way the helpful content update decimated the guest post sites that just existed for guest posts.

That was a big customer base for us, and it still is, but if people really want to succeed in this business of building content and trying to get links and mentions, they have to shift their focus.

Long-winded answer here, but I think it really is thinking about who is going to get the most value out of what you have to say. Otherwise, you're just putting stuff out there and adding to the noise, right? It's easier said than done, for sure – and easier for me because I'm in-house, I think.

It's a tough sell sometimes, when you are in agency, if you get hired to do something and you have to convince the business that it might not be the best approach. However, when you’re thinking about the target user and the end user, you’re going to get the most out of what you do, if you’re thinking about the quality and making sure that they get the most out of what you’re writing.”

You talked briefly about persuading people in-house about the value of what you're doing. One of the challenges is that, traditionally in business, things are often measured by the volume of what you do. Sales calls: How many sales calls have you made today? Outreach: How many people have you outreached today?

However, you are a fan of reaching out to people less. So, how do you justify that, and how do you go about doing that to ensure that you have the same or better results?

“One of my jobs this year is to focus on answering that question.

I've started doing a lot of research into the data that we have, and this is a very specific answer to one of those questions of doing the ‘less is more’ approach with outreach. Let me get into this because it's really interesting.

There's this idea of the ‘spray and pray’ approach, where you reach out to as many people as you can because volume is going to ultimately be the thing that gets you the most hits, right? But I got access to BuzzStream data, and I analysed billions of emails, and found out that, basically, the open rate decreases and the response rate decreases as volume increases.

What it's saying is these people who are spending more time curating their lists and sending highly personalised outreach are really what's going to move the needle. On the flip side of that, sending too much is hurting the industry as a whole. Journalists and link builders – I get pitched stuff all the time and it's just noise at this point because none of it is personalised and none of it is really relevant to me, or very few emails are very relevant to what I do and what I talk about.”

Is it possible to automate personalisation?

“Somewhat, but not really. You can have shortcuts, for sure.

You can get the meat of your templates down – ‘This is the angle I want to take.’ – but you're not really going to be able to automate much of the personalisation because that's what makes it unique.

Now, there are some people who say, ‘Don't personalise to journalists.’ There are degrees of personalisation, I guess I should say, David. When you say personalisation, what do you mean?”

I guess it's a message that resonates with you.

I receive loads of LinkedIn outreach, loads of messages, and most people I will probably ignore. Most people I can read two or three lines of their message and think, ‘Okay, it's just a message that you've sent to loads of people.’

Occasionally I will see a message that makes me think, ‘Well they've possibly actually checked out what I've done in the past and they've written something personal based upon that.’

I'm just wondering if it's possible to use AI to automate that, to incorporate elements within the message that make me think that they've checked out what I've done previously.

“I think you can get it to the extent where it can save you time in doing that research. I could go into your website and ask ChatGPT to look at SEO in 2025. What are all the topics he's covered? What are some topics that remain uncovered? Where could I provide an alternate take? Where can I fit into this so I'm not adding to the noise?

I think that way of using AI as a research buddy can help. But if you're fully relying on AI to do it – I've seen terrible examples of this. I’ve had somebody reach out to me talking about the weather in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I live. It's like, okay, you clearly went into LinkedIn, saw that I was in Greenwich and used AI to pull in the weather or something. None of the rest of the message had anything to do with what I do. It was a sales email.

There are degrees of this. The reason I ask you too, David, about personalisation is that it can be as easy as using the person’s correct first name. Do you ever get messages from people calling you ‘Dave’? If they call you ‘Dave’ and you go by ‘David’ all the time, you're going to know that maybe this person's trying to cut corners and hasn't done their research.

I think there are degrees of this, and I don't think it can or should be automated as fully as some people might hope, unfortunately.”

I guess it depends on how large your target market is as well.

If your target market is only maybe a couple of thousand companies, then you don't want to be automating too much because, if you alienate them, then who are you going to reach out to once you actually get to the end of that list?

“That's the big thing too. When you think about it, with outreach, you can easily get yourself blacklisted and hurt your success later. If you're reaching out to the wrong person right now, because you want to try to hit some number in your head – ‘I need to send 100 emails! I need to send 1000 emails!’ – and this person sees, ‘Oh yeah, here comes Vince Nero again, it's probably the same old crap.’ Or, the worst-case scenario is they hit spam. They send you to the spam folder and then you're never getting seen.

You're hurting your chances for sure, especially when you have a small list. Agencies run into this all the time. I've heard of email senders that will block you. There are plenty of new requirements. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all now have recently released email requirements for what they call ‘bulk senders’, or people sending 5,000 or more emails in a 24-hour period. They have these very strict guidelines that they have to implement because they're trying to fight this type of mass-produced outreach.

I know we're focusing in on one aspect of it, but I think this is a very important aspect because it is indicative of this problem across the board: There's so much noise, especially in email. I think you can say that this is the case with content, and AI.

You can really use this idea of there being ‘too much noise’ across the board with content marketing.”

You also advocate a reduced number of links, or to actually try to focus on the quality of links rather than quantity. Where's the sweet spot? Obviously, you don't want just one link pointing to your page, but you don't want thousands of irrelevant links as well.

How do you know the ideal number of links that you should be trying to build to a particular page, to rank it for a fairly competitive term?

“I think you maybe hit on the key there at the end, which is looking at your competitors.

There’s so much that goes into it, and every category and every industry is going to be different, but one of the clearer ways to look at it is by looking at your competitors.

I had someone on our podcast, Nathan Gotch, and the way he thinks about link building I thought was really interesting.

What are your top 100 targets? Basically, you can focus it in on that, and then spend a lot of time on those 100 – and you build that 100 by looking at your competitors. Where are they getting links? What seems to be the most relevant to your industry? That’s a shortcut to your answer but it really is going to depend because 1 link might move the needle.

The Google leak last year talked about things like, they had relevancy scores in there. The big takeaway for me was this passage about getting links from highly clicked sections of a site that is also updated a lot. Say it's a news site – say you're ESPN or some sports website – you want to get your brand mentioned in the sports section because that sports section probably gets a lot of clicks and probably gets updated a lot. Those types of links seem to be valued more by Google.

I think AI is throwing a wrench into all of this because we don't really know what to make of citations and links and all that, but what it's getting people to think about these days is that maybe it's not even the link that matters. It's just being mentioned in some of these places. Again, look at where your competitors are being mentioned and lean on that.

If you can get mentioned more than them, to me, let’s simplify this whole thing. Look at your competitors. You want to get mentioned more, right? That is the shortcut to your initial question.”

What's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The key takeaway? Focus in on what is really going to move the needle.

I think that's going to be spending the time to do the quality outreach, write the quality content, and get those quality relevant links. That is where we're going to have success in 2025.”

Vince Nero is Director of Content Marketing at BuzzStream, and you can find him over at BuzzStream.com.