Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments..
Darlington Weddings.co.uk is a niche site offering help and advice for people booking a wedding in the North East of England, about 45 minutes from my house.
The site ranks well in Google thanks to its age and is in need of some links before it starts to rank for more competitive search terms.
Websites like this earn money from selling adverts and the key to selling adverts is to attract a lot of traffic. The listings pages for all the companies and hotels on the site need to rank in second place on Google behind the actual company website. This will drive a substantial amount of long tail traffic.
First of all it is useful to find out what the most popular topics in the blogosphere are at the moment. Search the popular sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, sk-rt.com, StumbleUpon and Technorati to find out what’s being said and who’s saying it. Make sure you read all the wedding blogs and get to know the writers.
To make the site more linkable I would add interactive Google maps with hotel and venue locations as well as photo galleries and information for tourists. It would also be a good idea to stop resizing some of the images using html to improve the appearance. Useful maps are a massive linkbait opportunity in the tourism industry.
Adding WordPress is probably the easiest way to publish linkbait articles on the site. I would suggest trying to become a wedding blog and maybe listing the Top 50 Wedding Blogs as one of your first few posts. Try to make the list credible and make sure you network with other bloggers so they know who you are.
Linkbait ideas:
How to Organise a Wedding Online
Top 5 Amazing Wedding Venues
Top 10 Geek Wedding Cakes
Apple Fan Has iPhone Wedding Cake
The Ultimate Linux Wedding Cake
Wedding Toolbox: 15 Sites to Help
You Plan Your Wedding
10 Coolest Stag Nights
10 Amazing Hen Night Locations
Top 10 Best Man Jokes
How to Create a Website for your Wedding
Creating a Facebook wedding application so people can view guest lists and venue details inside Facebook would be a nice idea. Maybe have this linked to a tool that creates wedding websites, each with a link back to DarlingtonWeddings.co.uk
For the first in our Linkbait Tuesdays series we will be analysing gophone.com, a new site launched by AT&T specifically for prepaid devices. Scott Peterson, the Online Marketing Manager at AT&T emailed to ask about the best way to build links using blogging, link baiting, reviews and user generated content.
Linkbaiting for a large corporate site requires a different methodology and is quite a lot harder than normal. If this was a run of the mill mobile phone blog we could write about rumours, iPhone competitors, ways to hack the iPhone, Google Phone stories and all the usual things that get spread like wildfire through the gadget blogs. A major company can’t really post rumour and speculation so we need to take a slightly more subtle approach.
Making the site link friendly
The first task on a site like this is to create an area to publish content. Adding some kind of CMS to publish news and press releases should be a priority. Most corporate sites don’t need a blog (90% of people don’t know what one is) so the best method of publishing interesting content is often to simply create a “Latest News” section and publish stories every couple of days.
Calling something a news section also neatly bypasses the awkward questions that legal departments often raise whenever blogging is mentioned.
Once the CMS is in place it is important to make it subscriber friendly. Allow people to subscribe by email and RSS and make sure these options easy to find and easy to understand. Perhaps figuring out a way to direct subscribers from the main AT&T press section to this new section would help to kick start things.
Connecting with bloggers
Once the site is set up and you have a couple of stories published it’s a good idea to start making friends with some important bloggers. Leveraging the AT&T reputation will make this process much smoother than it normally is. Send emails to the top 50 gadget and mobile phone blogs that you subscribe to (if you don’t subscribe to them then you really should) explaining that you are a long time reader of their blog and that you will be releasing interesting and newsworthy content over at gophone.com/news. Tell them that you hope they will consider subscribing by email or RSS and that you look forward to reading more of their blog in the future.
Most half decent bloggers subscribe to press releases from major companies in their field anyway so selling this service shouldn’t be too hard.
What to publish
Large companies have a big advantage during linkbait campaigns. Not only can they leverage powerful press relationships and PR companies but they can also afford to create some real news stories rather than posting the same content as hundreds of other bloggers.
Both of these are linkbait articles dressed up as research and promoted by PR companies.
Try to commission some research into the habits of pre paid mobile phone users and publish it on the site. For example the report might find that 27% of pay monthly users drive expensive cars while 54% of pre pay users can only afford to take the bus. You could try to find the percentage of pre pay users who lose their phones compared to pay monthly users.
A recent study in the UK (commissioned by an affiliate website to generate publicity) found that 885,000 Brits drop their phone down the toilet every year. Needless to say that got a lot of press coverage. Remember that controversy brings links, as long as you have the facts to back up any statements. Plenty of large companies produce this research but forget to publish it on their site first and lose links as a result.
Other linkbait ideas
Top 10 most popular handsets each month (using AT&T stats)
10 ways to save money on your phone bill
How to choose a cell phone tariff
Cell phone buyers guide
Traffic graphs showing how popular the iPhone page on AT&T has been this year
Releasing any interesting stats about cell phone use, particularly data transfer
Some of the ideas above might have been done before and might seem easy but with some high level presentation and the fact they are tied to the AT&T brand they will work well.
Making content linkworthy
For major brands a lot of links can be gained simply by making existing content linkworthy. Building simple url structures and creating a dedicated page for each product with a static url, high quality images, in depth reviews and feature lists can bring thousands of extra links.
I don’t think an ecommerce site like this needs user generated content, as long as you publish an in depth review of each handset. Most successful affiliate sites leverage user reviews to try and build some credibility but ecommerce sites have the benefit of a large offline brand to gain authority.
Improve usability
Finally, a word on usability – a quick check of all the pages on the site shows that a number of popup pages are being indexed. When the visitor arrives at these they don’t have the normal main navigation sections and have no way of getting to the main site. Also most of them can’t be resized in Firefox meaning some of the content can’t be seen. Most importantly, if you open the popups from Google rather than the main site the button to buy the phone doesn’t work which must be costing some sales.
The pages currently have titles like “AT&T, formerly Cingular-Prepaid Pantech C120 – GoPhone(R) (Pay As You Go)” – a better title would be “Prepaid Pantech C120 – Pay As You Go phones from GoPhone AT&T”
Whether Cingular needs to be in the title is probably a matter for the legal department.
The meta descriptions also need some tweaking to make people want to click on them from the search results.
A fun new feature column will launch this week on BlogStorm called Linkbait Tuesdays.
Every Tuesday I will take a look at a readers website and offer tips on how to make the site more attractive to linkers along with a few ideas for linkbait articles.
If you want your site to be reviewed please send an email to patrick at blogstorm.co.uk with the subject “Linkbait Tuesdays” and I will choose the most interesting one each week. I don’t have anybody on the list for this week yet.
Please note I’m not too interested in offering linkbait ideas for SEO and internet marketing blogs as this is too easy.
Microsoft might not be as popular as Apple amongst bloggers but somebody at Redmond certainly knows how to linkbait.
When Tony Northrup published an article entitled 10 tips for improving your wireless network he followed pretty much every rule of linkbaiting and the article has 1831 links as a result. It’s also been on Digg twice.
Why this article works
The first aspect you notice is the article looks great, there is only 1 small advert on the left and the formatting is very easy on the eye.
Notice the good use of interesting and eye catching images and pictures, every linkbait article needs these.
Tony has also put his name at the top, anonymous linkbait never quite works as well.
Check out the “Related Links” section on the right, this is so Microsoft can make the most of every visitor by getting them to look at other interesting pages and articles. Retaining visitors is the hardest part of managing a social media campaign but having related links helps a lot.
The article follows the age old format of a top ten list very well. It delivers on the promise in the headline by having 10 tips listed, with diagrams and sub headings making it nice and easy to read.
Interestingly the article asks for feedback at the bottom so Microsoft can see which of their pages are most useful to people. How many blogs have this?
Funnily enough I’ve not actually read the article yet but it looks like it will be great.
Linkbuilding has got a lot easier over the last couple of years. Gone are the days of sending out link exchange emails, begging for links, submitting articles and submitting to directories. Now all you have to do is write some linkbait and the links come rolling in from thousands of blogs.
Of course I’m exaggerating here but the game has changed massively and 99% of the webmaster population hasn’t caught on yet.
Now is the time to start figuring out what you can put on your website that is so interesting, stunning, newsworthy, original and compelling that somebody simply has to link to it. That’s where the concept of a linkbait hook comes in.
The hook is the aspect of your content that makes somebody take the big jump from being an interested reader to somebody passionate and excited enough to open up their website editor and take the time and effort to actually link to you.
Hundreds of webmasters every day write Top 10 lists in the vain hope that they might get some high quality links from hitting the Digg front page. When was the last time Engadget linked to a top 10 post? No quality blogs will link to Digg bait style posts unless you can get a unique hook.
A good examples of the hook concept would be a list of the Top 100 blogs in a specific niche, bloggers are usually proud to have made the list and will link back to it to show off to their readers or they disagree so strongly with the way the list was calculated they will link to it and explain how it could be done better.
When I published my Digg saturation list one of the reasons TechCrunch and Danny linked to it was because they thought it could be done better another way. Marketing Pilgrim linked to it because they were “flattered” to have made the list.
The first thing to do when you come up with a cool linkbait idea is to sit down and try to think like a blogger. Would you want to link to this piece of content? Why would you link to it? Unless you can come up with a great reason why a popular blogger would link to it then its a good idea to file it away for a few days until you can find a hook.
CheddarVision is one of the most imaginitive and well executed linkbait campaigns of 2007. Over the past 9 months more than 1.5 million people have tuned in to watch a lump of Cheddar cheese mature, live over the internet.
The cheese has been named Weginald and will be auctioned off later this year.
Achieving over 8,500 links, including a story today on the BBC website, this is a pretty amazing example of linkbait in a non tech focused industry.
More than 100,000 viewers logged on to the website in March this year as Wedginald passed its first quality check with flying colours and organisers expect a similar figure to log-on on Wednesday.
Westcountry Farmhouse Cheesemakers are behind the cheddarvision website.
Cheese taster Tom Calver, who is involved in the project said: “The continued interest in the cheese is incredible.
“We never thought for a moment that the website would become this popular.”
The website now ranks number 3 on Google.co.uk for the term “cheddar cheese” and has probably sent thousands of visitors to the Westcountry Farmhouse Cheesemakers website thanks to some cleverly integrated menu links.
Notice also the social media links in the footer and sidebar of the website linking to facebook and other sites such as Digg & reddit. The Digg campaign hasn’t actually been implemented as well as it could have been as the button doesn’t link to an individual story but the awareness of social media was clearly present throughout the campaign.
Another good feature is the email subscription forms so that people can keep up to date with the cheese without using social media – perfect for any non internet savvy cheese fans.
Over the past 2 years SEOmoz has used social media more effectively than any other internet marketing blog and has ended up with over 1.35 million links as a result.
In this article we will discover which of the SEOmozzers linkbait attempts were the most popular and, most importantly, how you can use the same ideas to emulate the success of SEOmoz.
This post has been somewhat of a labour of love for me and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and researching it.
Firstly it is useful to take a look at the SEOmoz Alexa data which shows the phenomenal growth of the site during late 2006.
December 2005 – Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
Referenced everywhere the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization became the default location web marketing newbies were sent when they asked about learning SEO. 2 years later the article is still one of hte leading beginners resources in our industry and fully deserves the 4,689 links it has attracted.
January 2006 – IP location
The first piece of SEOmoz linkbait to hit the Digg front page was in early 2006 and used the new Google Maps API and some cool AJAX technology to create an AJAX Powered IP Location Lookup tool which went on to attract 9,566 links. The tool hit the Digg front page with 1352 Diggs and also received a lot of attention elsewhere with 1280 Del.icio.us bookmarks.
Matt is back with another good post this month about 5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should) which attracted 1400 links and over 3500 Diggs. This post has a perfect linkbait title and appeals to a wide range of web design blogs so the link potential is much higher than some of the other linkbait posts.
Attracting links from within a specific niche is difficult purely because of the limited number of related sites that may link to you. The tactic SEOmoz has used is to create more generic linkbait that appeals to a much wider section of the online community. If Rand had restricted SEOmoz to pure search engine optimisation content the site would not have seen anywhere near the growth or links from outside the SEO community as it has.
As long as your linkbait is loosely related to your core subject area it is important to embrace off topic posts and thrive on the links you gain from totally unrelated websites.
All the attention towards some guys attempt to block Firefox users
from visiting his website shows true marketing genius.
Jack Lewis, as he is apparently
known, has targeted the most loudest and most passionate group of
internet users with his tirade against Firefox. Whats more cunning is
that he responds with comments that get everybody even more upset than
normal.
An incorrect story about the site being hacked hit over 5,500 Diggs
yesterday, the only thing that could have got the site more links is
if he had faked his own hacking attempt.
You really can’t come up with linkbait this good. It has the
essential ingredients of controversy, passionate demographic, appeal
to social media and the unique angle that makes famous bloggers feel
that they just have to add something to the conversation and link to
the site.
For this reason WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com wins my linkbaiter of the
month award for August 2007. Expect this to be a regular feature on
BlogStorm.
Most people think that linkbait is a quick solution to build a few thousand natural links in a week using social media sites.
My favourite type of linkbait is one that keeps building links for months and even years on end. This type of linkbait has no expiry date and will help your site far more than a quick article that hits the Digg front page. Long term linkbait helps your Technorati rankings much more as they only count links from within the last 6 months.
I’ve tried a few different long term linkbait articles on BlogStorm. The most popular were the Google Analytics Tutorial and the Ultimate Guide to htaccess. These attract traffic from Google and should continue to attract links for a few years as long as I keep them updated on a regular basis.
If the posts become really outdated I will probably rewrite the article and 301 redirect the old version to the new version. Most information on the web is totally out of date and yet still ranks well in Google – you don’t want to tarnish your brand by giving people incorrect information just because they found an article on your site written in 2004.
The promotion of long term linkbait is exactly the same as normal linkbait. You need to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible. The most important thing is your page ranks well in Google so that it can be found and cited by webmasters researching your target subject. In the first few days it helps to kick start the links by seeding your content on social media sites but don’t be too concerned if this fails – unlike normal linkbait you have a much longer window for success.
The one statistic that the BlogStorm Tracker has reinforced for me
over the last two months is that news bloggers attract a lot ore links
than blogs offering tips and informational content.
You don’t have to be blogging about news all the time but adding a few
unique stories per week that are related to the rest of your content
works very well as part of an ongoing linkbait strategy.
Being a news blogger is hard. Unless you gain a reputation for
breaking news stories first and having quality content it is hard to
gain traction. Even when you get thousands of RSS subscribers many
will not bother to read your stories unless you’re the first to
publish (make sure you ping Feedburner!) or have an interesting title.
