FW: Linkbait and Content Marketing - What Are Your Goals

Linkbait and Content Marketing – What Are Your Goals

By Michael Gray on May 26, 2011

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One of the most difficult conversations I have with new or perspective clients is about Linkbait and content marketing and explaining how its real goal isn’t to drive sales but to build links, build awareness, and send social signals to the search engines. To make this post useful and actionable, I’m going to take you through the process/planning stage for a former client I had who has since sold his business.

an important point to understand: we are targeting the “general online population,” not just potential customers …

When I was working for the man and building my own business by moonlighting at night (ok–and a little during the day), one of my first clients was for a salt water fish store. He sold fish and aquarium supplies online. Now, ultimately, his goal was to get his content in front of people who own salt water fish tanks and are interested in his products. However, unless you are a well known brand, competing on price (aka running a sale or promotional offer), or are offering an impulse purchase (no long term commitment and low price), you won’t make sales from social media (stay tuned to the end when I will talk more about this).
IMHO the biggest benefits from social media are link building potential, brand awareness, and social media signals (see what social signals might Google use). Lets take a look at our niche:

• There is a small subset of the population that has a salt water fish tank and has a potential interest in our merchandise.
• There is a slightly larger subset of people who know someone who has a salt water fish tank and might forward/share with them content they come across.
• There is a larger subset of people who are interested in the science/nature/environmental aspects of marine life, marine mammals, and ocean life.
• There is a larger set of people who are interested in travel aspect of marine life, snorkeling, scuba, diving with sharks, swimming with dolphins, and visiting aquatic-related travel destinations.
• There is a larger set of people who would enjoy/share photos of marine/ocean-related content, especially if the photos are beautiful, interesting, engaging, or unusual.
• There is a much larger set of people who will read/share interesting content that is about marine related subject matter, if it is exceptional.
• There is a small group of people who will publish marine related content and will link to it
• There is a medium sized group who will write/link/tweet about marine based content if it is exceptional enough (aka the linkerati)

We are going to target two groups of people because they include most of the other groups. They are “people who will read/share marine based content if it is interesting enough” and “people who will write/link/tweet about marine based content if it is interesting enough.” This is an important point to understand: we are targeting the “general online population,” not just potential customers, because our goals are links, sharing, and social signals.
So how do we get started? Let’s come up with some potential ideas for our Linkbait (see creating exceptional content for boring subjects):
Top 10/15/20 Most Beautiful/Ugly/Bizarre Creatures in the Ocean – This isn’t a typical piece of image based Linkbait. I would do all three. Just choose a different number for each one and space them out at least a month apart.
Best Places to Scuba/Snorkel in the Country/Continent/World – This is a bit of travel Linkbait but, again, it has multiple versions. In fact, you can do them as head & tail continent and refresh the posts every year like seasonal living URL’s.
Most Expensive/Dangerous Seafood Meals – This has a lot of options. You can do an info graphic of seafood prices to other food like beef and chicken. You could map graphics of seafood consumption. You could create cooking linkbait about expensive seafood, or dangerous seafood to eat (like the fugu blowfish). You can do Eco/green based content on sustainability of seafood. You can do “mom” based content like how to eat healthy seafood on a budget. You can do health focused content on seafood. There are lots and lots of variations here.
Largest Marine Mammals/Fish/Invertebrates – People like stories about giant sharks, whales, squid or octopi, and you can revisit this kind of post every 2-3 years as news/science updates (see how often should I update my content and updating evergreen content).
Most Dangerous/Poisonous/Deadly Fish/Sea Snakes/Marine Life – Again, people tie into group-think and share common fears of (and fascination with) sharks, snakes, piranhas, and general ocean life. Just be careful and don’t run a scuba piece right before or after a piece about dangerous sharks. It looks … contradictory.
Most Beautiful Ocean/Beach/Underwater photography/paintings – Again people like looking at “nice pictures.”
Now, this list is by no means all encompassing and the titles are just working concepts at this point. Hopefully they give you some idea about how you can take a niche shopping site and widen the focus to include a larger group of people who would be interested in liking/sharing/linking to your website/blog.
The next step is to start to flesh out the articles. Do a little research and figure out which one will have the best content. For example, use a service like oDesk and hire someone to research the most expensive seafood dishes, both currently and historically. Have them be on the lookout for unusual anecdotes like seafood that was expensive and hunted to extinction or seafood that’s illegal to eat. Have them give you source links so you can verify the data before sending it off to your premium content writer or infograpic artist.
Once you know about your pieces, start scheduling them and sending them out to be produced. You could push out a minor piece every 2-3 weeks and a major piece every 4-5 weeks. You want to spread out similar pieces unless you are doing a content series. Make sure you have the tail pieces in place before you push out the head (see head and tail content). As a I mentioned above, don’t push out a “Top 5 most dangerous sharks of Australia” back to back with “Best places to scuba dive in Australia.” It looks … odd.
So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Think about who your customers are then widen the focus to include as large an audience as possible while still staying “on topic.”
• Brainstorm for ideas on possible topics for articles.
• Do research then prioritize/schedule content creation.
• Create any backup content you may need.
• Create content and schedule for publication.
• Spread campaigns out over time to send new links and social signals to search engines over a prolonged period of time.
• Pay attention to seasonal news/events and tie into them.
• Look to update science/news/informational content on a regular basis as needed. Use living URL’s.

Ok, you made it to the end. This post has some bonus content! What if you do want to actually sell things using social media? Well IMHO you will need to do one or more of these things:

• Be a well known, established, trusted brand – If Amazon puts out a top Father’s Day gift ideas list, people will buy from them because they know/trust Amazon. If you aren’t Amazon, you will have a hard time with this strategy.
• Compete on price – If you offer a sale, discount, or promotional price below your competition, you may make some sales. Keep the item(s) as general interest as possible (aka you can’t sell catfood–no matter how low the price–to someone who doesn’t have cats)
• Be General Interest, Low Commitment - A lot of people like clown fish thanks to “Finding Nemo,” but not everyone wants to commit to having a fish tank, not even at a cheap price for a startup tank with a free clown fish. However, almost everyone can buy a T-shirt with sharks saying funny things on it.
• Be impulsed priced – Lots of people want to go to France for vacation, but not a lot of people will drop a thousand dollars or more on a discount vacation at the drop of hat. However, a lot of people will spend $10/$20/$50 on an impulse item if they like it.

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FW: Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification

Linkbait Failure – Not Understanding the Need For Instant Gratification

By Michael Gray on May 19, 2011

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Whenever I see someone else’s linkbait that fails, one of the common reasons is the failure to understand the need for instant gratification. I came across a text book example of this recently so I thought I would share it with you.Like my evil twin brother, Machu Picchu is on my bucket list of places to see before I die. It’s this mystical spiritual place up in the mountains of Peru. It’s made up of ancient Inca buildings and terraced plateaus. It takes at least 3 days to get there and back, and the views from it are simply breathtaking (click any of the pics below to enlarge).
I came across an article from the LA Times “100 facts for 100 years of Machu Picchu“. Great! I love Machu Picchu, and I may know some things about it, but with 100 facts, I’m sure there will be at least one or two new things I’ll learn. When I clicked through, I was presented with exactly one fact … seriously!  The site is running a series with 100 different posts–each with 1 fact. While I have gone on record as saying that creating a series is an effective strategy for building loyal readers, that post ignored the need people have for instant gratification.
As Michael Strong of Blueglass recently wrote about in “Linkbait Fulfilling Your Titles Promise“, if you set my expectation for 100 facts but only give me 1, I’m going to feel cheated/depressed/let-down. The chances that I’m going to “share” your content across Email, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or Stumbleupon just dropped to near zero. I wrote about something similar a few years ago, “When Your Title is Linkbait But Your Post Isn’t“. Writing a title creates “a deal” with the user. They should never have a “Don’t Make Me Think Moment” and wonder what your post is about, and they should find whatever your title “promises”.
Some simple concepts I try to share with anyone I talk with about creating great linkbait:

• Make a strong impression right off the bat. It can be with words, video, or pictures (see using images for Linkbait), but you need to “hook” people in the first few seconds. Saving the best for last only works when people know who you are, like Steven Spielberg.
• Your content needs to be exceptional if you want me to share it and do your content marketing for you. Everyday people have hundreds of things, all competing for their attention. If you want to “catch someone’s eye,” you need to be aware of that competition. Hat tip to Gabe Rivera.
• While it may be very important to you that I like/upvote/share your content, you need to make it important to me. Don’t ever confuse your love of something with the need for Google Traffic . You need to create the “you know who would really like this …” or “I really have to share this with …” type of experience/feeling.

You should think of creating and marketing linkbait as an Olympic Level competition for content creation. Stand out with a catchy, funny, witty, shocking, or otherwise compelling title. Your content should be captivating and grab my attention in my first few seconds on the page. You needs to deliver on the promise your title makes. You need to do it in an interesting and direct manner. Don’t bury the punchline at the end of a 40 minute video or 2000 word block of text. Make it easy for me to do what you want me to do with your content. Want me to “like” it on Facebook? There better be a Facebook button at the end of the post. The same goes for email, Twitter, Stumbleupon, or any other sharing service.

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FW: SEO Smart Links Plugin

Posted on: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 9:09 PM
Author: Daniel Scocco
Subject: SEO Smart Links Plugin

It has been a long time since I recommended a WordPress plugin, but here we go again. I started using this plugin on a niche site, and so far it seems to be helping a lot with the search engine optimization. The plugin is called SEO Smart Links, and it basically allows you to specify keywords, and whenever those keywords appear on your posts or pages the plugin will automatically create a link to the post of your choice. As you can see this can be useful both for your human visitors and for search bots, and your posts will be interlinked more efficiently. Here’s a screenshot of the options page: Another use for the plugin is to insert affiliate links on your posts. You just need to select the keywords, and the plugin will automatically link them to your affiliate offers. It’s quite a handy tool to have on any WordPress blog, so check it out. Original Post: SEO Smart Links Plugin

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Article Marketing in a Post Panda World

By Michael Gray on May 24, 2011

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Article marketing has been one of the foundations of link building ever since I got started in SEO. However, since sites like Ezinearticles and Suite 101 have taken a huge loss in ranking and traffic as a result of the panda update, should article marketing still be a part of your overall strategy? We need to take a step back and look at the big picture to find the answer …
While many people will debate this, I don’t believe sites like Ezinearticles were passing much link equity for quite some time. The links acted more like pointers and helped with discovery. The pages themselves could accumulate trust/authority/pagerank, but they weren’t transferring much of that value to the website linked to in the bio paragraph.
Secondly, if the article was republished somewhere else, it was most likely treated as duplicate content. Ezinearticles had more trust than the almost any other site republishing the article, so they were given credit as the original content “owner”. The real value from Ezinearticles was finding people who were interested in taking your content and publishing it in exchange for a link, then tracking the competition in the space to see what other link building sources/methods they were using.
So should article marketing still be a part of your strategy? Yes–just a much less important one. First, you need to be honest about the quality of the articles you submitted. Chances are good that the $3 articles with 250 words that read like it was written by an ESL student working the night shift at an all night convenience store while his boss wasn’t around isn’t worth spending time/money on anymore. Most article directories have raised the bar for quality while trying to get back in Google’s good graces. So, if you are going to use article directories, you will need to send them higher quality content. Unless you are a brand new website, I wouldn’t create more than 15-20 articles a year: the ROI just isn’t there anymore. Keep in mind that you will have to point links at your articles from a variety of sources if you want them to have maximum effect.
If you are doing any ORM work, article marketing is still viable. Get the person/company name in the title, point a few links, and, unless you are competing against major sources, you should be good to go.
Your link building activities should never be dominated by just one tactic.You need to have a blend/mixture for maximum effectiveness. If you focus on just one technique, you run the ris:k of losing all your rankings if that tactic gets devalued.
So what are the takeaways from this post

• Article marketing should still be part of your overall marketing strategy–just a less important one.
• Bring the quality of your articles up to good or better.
• Submit to 3-4 article directories, not just one.
• Submit 15-20 articles per year.
• Point links directly at your articles from your website and other sources.
• Don’t expect a huge transfer of link equity. Think of it as a “fresh pointer”.
• For ORM, article marketing can be used much more aggressively.
  

Filter Bubble Book Review

By Michael Gray on May 23, 2011

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The Filter Bubble is a new book by Eli Pariser that addresses the subject of how personalization of sites like Google and Facebook are sheltering us from information that doesn’t agree with our world view. Instead of the Internet being a window to new experiences and viewpoints, it becomes a mirror, reflecting back only what we already believe.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I will state that I was given a review copy of this book, but it didn’t influence my opinion of the book.
Eli Parsier gave a 9 minute talk at a recent Ted Conference. If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend watching it.

I haven’t been a fan of Google’s personalized search and have written a few posts on it in the past (see Serendipity … It’s What’s Missing From Personalized Search, Personalized Google News â€" Will That be on the Test, and Eric Schmidt, The Wall Street Journal and Personalized Search). This book took a lot of my arguments to the next level. For example a search for [solar energy] could bring up entirely different results based on your personalization history. If you read a lot of “green” Eco friendly content, your Google search results will give you links that match your viewpoint and not a more rounded out set of links showing both the pros and cons of solar energy.
I think it would be fair to say that, due to my profession, I have a pretty well informed opinion about personalized results. One of the things I wondered was would I learn anything new from this book? I can say I was pleasantly surprised. For example, we all know that the free gmail product is subsidized by the ads. The ads they show you are based on the content of your email messages or, more often (and more annoyingly), by retargeting. However what this book brought up was that the real point of gmail was so Google could learn more about you, what you read, what you like/dislike and click to build up a better profile of you and serve you better ads. Below is an example of what Google thinks I like (kinda scary, huh?):

What Google Thinks I like

While it’s easy to point fingers at Google, Facebook is just as guilty, and they are a lot less transparent about personalization and edge rank. Unless you have a very small number of friends on Facebook, your news stream is filtered, showing you very popular content, content from your friends you visit/click the most, and content from pages you like/interact with. If you have friends with differing viewpoints and read their links/updates but don’t click them, eventually Facebook will stop showing you updates from those people. Since more and more people are getting their news primarily from Facebook, this again creates a distorted view of the world.
Studies have shown that readers want all the news and don’t want it tailored to them, but Google and Facebook have a financial incentive to do the opposite.
I know some Googlers were in the audience at the Ted conference, and I know some of them read this blog. I also know that, like Marissa Mayer, “they just don’t think of it that way”; they are just giving us what we want. However, as any parent can tell you, if you give your kid what they want, you’ll end up with a fat kid who eats nothing but McDonald’s chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese. As a parent, it’s our job to find a way to get some broccoli into their diet. Since Google and Facebook are the leading forces on the Internet, it’s their job to find a way to make sure we see that “information broccoli.”
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Looking at the cover and the brief writeups, I knew I was going to agree with a lot of what the author had to say. What I didn’t expect was to learn as much as as I did and how the situation is actually a lot scarier than I believed. If you work in search/internet marketing and want to get a better understanding of the effects of personalization, you’ll like and probably learn from this book. If you work in a technology-related publishing job, this is a book that will hopefully make you think about the bigger picture and the dangers of page view journalism.

This is a book I recommend if you are looking for a book that will make you think and question how the news we read and consume is vastly different than it was 10 years ago when Google news was invented.

Using Images for Better Linkbait

By Michael Gray on May 10, 2011

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The following is part of a series on image optimization. In this post, we’re going to be talking about images for increasing the success of linkbait.

While the long term viability of the infographic as a linkbait tactic remains to be seen, there’s no question that adding images to your posts can definitely increase a post’s linkability. First, as an example of how having no images can ruin a post, take a look at this post on  Museums in New York City from Frommers (screen shot). Now there’s no question that Frommers is one of the most respected and trusted names in the travel space, but do they really have zero budget for images? I mean, even if there is zero budget, what about Creative Commons images? I found this shot below of the Giant Whale in the Museum of Natural History in less than 3 minutes.

Blue Whale at Museum of Natural History in New York City

The next example is when you put up images, but they either suck or are just boring. Case in point: this article from Lonely Planet on local bars (screen shot). If the place you are talking about is as good/interesting as you say it is, there should be creative pictures online. If there aren’t, use Craigslist to hire a local amateur photographer and put the picture into creative commons in exchange for links.
But back to the core topic: using pictures as linkbait. Generally speaking, the more unique, shocking, and unexpected the image is, the better your post will be. This image below of a crazy woman with a colander on her head is one I love–it’s just impossible to look at it and not laugh a little!

Crazy conspiracy theory woman wearing colander

For more examples, here’s a post that went viral about 60 completely unusable stock photography images. Maybe that’s not your editorial style? How about this post that got over 1600 upvotes of “women laughing eating salad“. Sure, it’s been done already, but a few days later over 1400 votes were given to a post about “Men Laughing Alone With Fruit Salad“. So sometimes it’s just a mater of creating exceptional content for boring topics.
Need more ideas? Ok, let’s say you run a website about cheap hotels in Paris. How about “Unusual Pictures of the Eiffel Tower“. Have a website about car insurance? Include pictures of funny car accidents, like this one.

Mini Cooper Meets Wall

Some other advice: unless you are Agatha Christie or Steven King and people “know” to expect a surprise ending, put your strongest image first. You have the first few seconds to grab someone’s attention, no more. Just forget what your English teacher told you in high school about saving the best for last. There was no interwebz when he/she grew up. If you are going to have a lot of images, go with thumbnails linked to larger images to keep page load times to a minimum. Unless you have a real need for a crazy huge files, keep the image below 1024×800 so people can see the whole thing on their screen. Download time and page size does matter. If you’re not a well known and established brand, avoid the muli-page slideshow gallery: it’s just a bad user experience. People Magazine might be able to get away with 50 page slideshow, but your celebrity/fashion website probably won’t.
So what are the takeaways from this post:

• Use images. They will almost always make your post more linkable.
• Use interesting images and not boring ones. If interesting images don’t exist, seize the opportunity to create them.
• Lead with your strongest, most compelling image.
• Use image compilations to make saturated or boring topics more interesting.
• Use thumbnails to link to larger images to keep page size as small as possible and load time as fast as possible.

Nice Idea From the Finance and Investing Niche

Nice Idea From the Finance and Investing Niche

Most of you guys only know my work on this blog, but I also own websites in other niches. The finance and investing niche is one of them. I own a site called Learn Gold Coins, which is a complete guide for those who want to learn about gold coins and investing in gold.
The interesting thing about having sites in different niches is that you can learn tricks and strategies from one and apply to the others. For instance, recently I started using a plugin from a network of investing sies (called Wikinvest Wire), and I was surprised by how efficient the model they created is.
Basically you need to apply first, and only sites that are relevant to the network and have quality content get accepted. Once accepted you’ll download the plugin (for WordPress, Blogger or whatever blogging platform you are using) and install.
And here comes the cool idea. Once you install the plugin it will start working immediately, inserting at the bottom of your posts a section with links to related posts on other blogs participating on the network. Here’s how it looks:

Why is this a cool idea? Because it ensures that members will not try to cheat the system (by hiding the links or moving them to a different section, for example), and that each member on the network will get an equal share of exposure.
I have seen many blogging and site networks in the past, and even joined some of them, but none worked well exactly because members could cheat the system, and the exposure each member would get from the network wasn’t equal. The system Wikinvest Wire uses solves this problem.
“Cool, but I don’t have a site in the finance niche so I can’t join that network.” That is not the point of this post. The point is to share a structure for a blogging network that really works. Crafting a similar plugin wouldn’t be too hard, so you basically could start your own network on a different niche using the same structure.
I for one am considering to do it.

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