Blogging On BuzzFeed: An Alternative Partnership

Did you know that the right content formatting can lead to higher visibility than even our featured partnerships? Here's a brief explanation of what you can do to both increase your visibility on BuzzFeed and entice readers to click through to your site!

The obvious advantage of applying to become a Featured Partner is that content submission is automated, all of your content remains on your own servers, and when people click on your posts they're redirected back to your site. You retain all referral traffic for your content!

The automated posts in your feed all come in the form of Link Buzz. They still contain a thumbnail, URL, and description, and 100% of the clicks they receive land on your URL. For many, this is the ideal setup.

But there are disadvantages to being a Featured partner as well. When users leave BuzzFeed to get to your site, they're far less likely to use the LOL, WIN, FAIL, or other reaction badges. Why is this important?

Your visibility on BuzzFeed is largely dependent on how much reaction your posts accrue. When a post earns lots of LOL clicks, it'll be featured in the LOL feed. Lots of Trashy clicks lead to being featured in the Trashy Feed, and so on. The more reactions over-all, the more times your thumbnail will rotate through the main thumbnail header at the top of the site, and the more your headline will rotate through the BuzzFeed widget that's featured on our partner sites.

So what's the solution? How do you get the best of both worlds?

Create content-rich teaser posts that live on BuzzFeed, but entice the reader to click through to get the rest of the story.

Those readers who are only superficially engaged are still likely to click the reaction buttons, increasing your BuzzFeed visibility, and those who are so deeply engaged with the content that they want more will click through to your site, resulting in referral traffic.

Take a look at the following example to see what I mean.

For more tips on formatting, presentation, and best practices, check out BuzzFeed University.