Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites

Speaker #1 – Rebecca Kelley, SEOmoz

Consider these three levels:

1) Research your site’s linkworthiness; what are the central tenets of your particular site?

2) Look at current trends on the WWW; this is the whole ‘Net. What’s hot and what’s not – right now?

3) Look at your industry; probably the most important. What are the authoritative sites or blogs for your sector?

Are negative, black-hat, sneaky, slimy, spamming, gaming techniques that produce short term traffic worth the potenial damage to your reputation?

No.

*Make sure that your servers can handle a huge influx of traffic, should you hit pay dirt.

*Be prepared with excellent content to follow up a linkbait campaign. Look beyond the initial rush!

Linkbaiting is a short-term traffic rush, kick ass, jump start strategy. Not a long term audience building plan.

Speaker #2 – Brent Csutoras, BrentCsutoras.com

Social Media Linkbait to consider:

a) Top 10 lists. Gee, I ought to do some of those on ASE…maybe a Top 100…

b) How-to articles. Helpful, easy to read. Use visuals / graphics / eye candy (yes!).

c) Current Events. Be quick – be very quick. Do your research. Be accurate!

d) Offbeat or extreme content. Remember the search engine MizPee? I do. Have I ever offended anyone? Sadly, yes.

e) Image campaigns. Image as in photo. Build some content around your cool photos.

Execution of a linkbait campaign:

1) Do your research.

a) read RSS feeds (Netvibes, etc.)

b) Use search engines, Google alerts

c) Monitor, stop by Internet communities

2) Th e Title / Description of your post should be: simple, clear, focused capitalized and numerical – 10 instead of ten. Ste ve has helped me with this. My “cutesy” titles, such as for the STD search engine, are actually a bad idea.

When you do a post – monitor the comments! “Manage” the comments.

Share your posts with friends and related sites. Ask them to digg your posts.

Social Media Tips:

*Be relevant to the sites you approach.

*Use images

*Limit the amount of ads

*Offer a summary

*NO spelling errors, bad grammar (their and there!), or inaccurate information.

*Don’t duplicate (recent) content.

*digg, digg, digg. Is your server ready – are you sure – are you certain? Load times?

*Are you link worthy? Is your content truly worthwhile? Time your posts/submissions (i.e. not late on Friday afternoon).

Bottom line: Online Social Media is just like real world social events – like parties. If you don’t mix and mingle in both worlds, you’re not going to succeed the way want to.

Speaker #3 – Cameron Olthius, Advantage Consulting Services

Common forms of Linkbait: (similar to above)

Informational – Lists, “How to” articles

Controversial – Stir up controversy (Algorithm vs. User Interface?)!

Use humor – carefully. Remember MizPee? I do.

News – Current events

Tools – Widgets, useful addons.

Benefits of Linkbait:

Links (duh)

Link profile (to the search engines)

Traffic

Branding – Be the expert on your topic. Hmmm..

Bookmarks – del.icio.us

Media publicity – digg, stumbleupon,; media professionals may be watching!

Tips:

*search on digg, stumbleupon, et al, for your topic to see what has worked in the past

*content: KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid, Use Lists, use pictures/images/graphics.

*seed your post. How are you going to get it submitted to digg, et al, with good titles and descriptions. Can someone submit your post in a sloppy way? Yes. (Ask Richard)

*do you have a “power account,” or know a power user?

*again, and again, use good titles and descriptions

*maybe your topic is too “niche” for large sites like digg and stumbleupon. Blogs like ASE might want to look for smaller social communities.

End of Session #2

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.