BuzzStream Review: Is This Link Building and Outreach Tool Worth It?

This is my personal review of the outreach tool BuzzStream.

To be clear:

I didn’t test out the tool for 15 minutes and call it a day.

In fact, I spent a full week evaluating every single feature that BuzzStream offers, including:

• Campaign management
• Outreach templates
• Finding contact information
• And more

Since our original review in 2018, BuzzStream has undergone significant changes.

Digital PR has emerged as one of the key link building methods used by today’s SEOs.

Between the HCU in 2024 and the fast-moving AI world, the effectiveness of traditional link building methods like guest posting or link insertion is falling to the wayside.

The new focus seems to be building brand mentions and branded traffic through digital PR.

BuzzStream has recently shifted to meet this new market need by focusing on new products catering to digital PR, such as their new ListIQ product, which I’ll discuss in this review.

And now it’s time for me to help you decide if BuzzStream offers the right tools for you.

BuzzStream Overview: What Are These Tools All About?

BuzzStream is a suite of products that help digital PRs build targeted media lists from Google Search (ListIQ) and send personalized email outreach campaigns (Outreach).

BuzzStream Outreach automates a lot of the legwork involved with outreach, like:

• Researching prospects
• Finding email addresses
• Sending follow-up emails
• Tracking reply rates

Another selling point is:

You can do all of your outreach in one place.

So instead of Excel spreadsheets and Gmail tabs… you manage your outreach and link building in one place:

In, 2025, BuzzStream released ListIQ, a new, standalone product separate from Outreach (though they flow into each other, as I’ll show you).

ListIQ helps build targeted media lists directly from a Google News search.

Since most digital PR campaigns start with finding the right people to reach out to, I’ll cover ListIQ first.

Find Journalists’ Contact Info with ListIQ

Most people find prospects for digital PR with media databases or Google News search.

For many, the media databases can be outdated or cast a wider net than they need.

So, to build a good list these days, I recommend Google News.

For example:

Say I want to reach fitness reporters to pitch them a story about a new data study I performed for a health client.

I might search for “fitness” in Google News search to find journalists writing about it.

This approach works… but it’s VERY slow.

Why?

You have to manually copy and paste each site that you find into a spreadsheet.

Then evaluate each site one by one, try to identify the journalist, find their contact information, etc.

Enter: BuzzStream’s newest addition, ListIQ.

This feature combines prospect finding and evaluation in one place.

I can search and extract information for journalists directly from Google News into a Google Sheet, (or import a list of URLs, such as backlink exports from Semrush.)

For example, I can extract bios, email addresses, author pages, and recent articles for everyone in the SERP simultaneously…

…then export into a Google Sheet to decide if I want to pitch them about my fitness statistics campaign.

I can also export this list into a CSV.

Find Relationship Info on the Fly

BuzzStream Outreach helps me monitor relationship information on the go through their “BuzzMarker.”

When I’m building lists, I sometimes want to dig into the site a bit to understand more about what they write about or find specific articles to reference.

BuzzMarker is a Chrome extension that you can use to understand which sites you already have attached to projects vs new ones.

I can also email them right from the page if I want.

For example, let’s say you come across a new site that seems like a GREAT fit for your new campaign.

But when you run BuzzMarker, you can see that they’re already part of a campaign:

You can look at contact history details to see if they’ve covered your site before, and even look at previous emails you’ve sent.

That way, you don’t need to cross-reference anything on a spreadsheet.

You can see that they’re part of a campaign right away.

(Or even worse, reach out to the same person twice with the same pitch.)

The BuzzMarker will also extract any generic contact information it can find from the site.

Building Outreach Templates

Just about any outreach tool on the market lets you send emails using their platform.

So why send your outreach emails with BuzzStream Outreach?

First, you can easily create email templates… and add them to your outreach messages:

(Which means you DON’T need to copy and paste anymore. This is a massive time saver)

Plus, you can add custom fields to your templates that BuzzStream automatically fills in:

(Like the prospect’s website, first name and more)

Nice.

Second, you can track EVERYTHING… including open rates, response rates and which templates perform best.

(More on that later)

Finally, when you outreach to individual people, you get LOTS of info on that person in one place.

(Like previous campaigns I’ve sent or social media profiles.)

This makes personalizing outreach messages A LOT easier.

For example, I can see if I’ve already reached out to them and gotten a link, making it easier to get a link the next time:

Automated follow-up Messages

If you’ve done outreach for any length if time you’ve probably noticed one thing:

Follow-ups can 2-5x your success rate.

That’s why I was happy to see that BuzzStream’s Outreach has a feature called “Sequences” that follow-up with link prospects automatically.

Here’s an example:

You can also create sequences with automated follow-ups.

As you can see, I only follow-up with people once or twice.

In my mind, 1-2 follow-ups improves your conversion rate without annoying the crap out of people.

That said, if you don’t mind burning bridges, you can add unlimited follow-up messages to a sequence:

You can also set follow-up messages to go out after a certain amount of time has passed.

And if you REALLY don’t want to use automated follow-ups, you can set your sequence up so that BuzzStream reminds you to send another message… instead of sending it automatically.

Tracking and Reporting

Tracking your outreach results is a HUGE pain.

You need to either cobble together different tools to help you measure open and reply rates (like YesWare)…

…and record everything in a spreadsheet.

That’s why most outreach tools (including BuzzStream) include some sort of tracking feature.

But is BuzzStream Outreach’s reporting any good?

Let’s find out…

You can get reports on four things:

1. How well your individual messages are performing (Message Insights)
2. How different team members are doing (Team Insights)
3. A status breakdown of entire project (Project Insights + Projects Leaderboard)
4. A birds eye view of all of the projects in your account (Projects Dashboard)

The Projects Dashboard is the newest addition so that’s what I want to focus on here.

The dashboard view gives me a top-down look at everything I’m working on, as well as the status of the projects.

I can quickly see which projects are getting links or more prep work.

Then I can easily click and take action on anything.

I haven’t used this view much but I can certainly see it being helpful for those managing large teams or multiple projects at once.

Link Monitoring

In my experience, if you reach out to someone and they add your link, they’ll get back to you 90% of the time.

(Usually saying something like: “Great post. I just added your link”).

That said, you will get the occasional link from someone that DOESN’T reply to your outreach email.

And for that situation, BuzzStream’s Outreach Link Monitoring feature is really helpful:

Link Monitoring scans the websites in your database to see if they’ve linked to you.

You also can set it up to check for links to any page on your site… or to a specific URL:

Pretty cool.

And it automatically updates the list every 2 weeks. That way, you don’t bug people that just linked to you.

BuzzStream: What I Liked

Here’s what I liked the most:

• BuzzStream’s tools streamline the most time consuming parts of the outreach process (especially with ListIQ)
• Setting up outreach campaigns (and sequences) is an absolute breeze
• Easy to create and use templates (and edit them before you hit “send”)
• Chrome BuzzMarker ended up being super duper helpful
• Helpful reporting features makes it easy to see how you’re doing
• You have all of your outreach management in one place
• BuzzStream pricing and plans are a great value for what you get. Plus, every plan comes with a free trial.

BuzzStream: What I Didn’t Like

Even though I think BuzzStream is an overall great tool, there are a few things I didn’t like:

First, BuzzStream has a steep learning curve. For example, Link Monitoring didn’t work for me at first because I didn’t enter my website in this field when I first signed up:

It was just a blank page… with no recommendations on what to do.

I ran into clunky UI issues like this quite a bit.

Personally, I would prefer something that walks you through each step of the outreach process (finding prospects, reaching out and reporting).

Sure, you get your hand held during the first 1-2 steps:

Then you’re pretty much on your own.

That said, customer support was very helpful when I asked questions:

I understand that BuzzStream’s power users are SEO agencies and PR firms. So there probably isn’t much demand for a dumbed down version.

Second, I’d like to see some pre-built campaigns (BuzzStream competitors like PitchBox have this feature).

For example, it would be cool to choose “Digital PR Campaign” and get a list of prospects, templates and sequences ready to use.

My Overall Recommendation Is…

If you’re doing outreach at scale or with a team, I HIGHLY recommend giving BuzzStream a try.

In fact, it’s one of my favorite overall link building tools.

But if you’ve never sent an outreach email before, start with the manual approach.

Otherwise you have to learn the entire outreach process… along with a new tool.

So that’s it for my BuzzStream review.