Linkbait Tuesday: building links to gophone.com (AT&T)
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.
Recently LINK commissioned a survey to see how popular topping up mobile phones at cashpoints had become while other research shows some users talk less than others depending on their tariff.
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.
More linkbait articles
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Very cool post, I’m really liking the Tuesday linkbait feature!
Tyler October 24, 2007 12:39 am | Reply
Well, AT&T just got a %$£% load of consultancy for free
Nice job Patrick, a really good in depth look at what their online strategy should be. This kind of post reminds me just how much I enjoy your blog.
The point about sorting out the pop-ups is very important (they should also clean up their URL structure) if they want to rank for individual phone queries - which I presume they do.
One thing you missed off, which I would include is that once they start getting a presence online and within social media (on blogs, digg, reddit etc) they should be monitoring their reputation closely to make sure that they can engage with their audience. Having someone from AT&T swing by and comment on your blog generates a strong loyalty to the brand and shows you care about the customers. Again, once they have some weight within the blogosphere, doing interviews with the top technology blogs would be a great way to gain reach and exposure.
Hopefully you were looking for additional advice Patrick - I think you should actively encourage people to chip in their own ideas on Linkbait tuesdays since I think it could very quickly generate a nice little community (and of course increases the value of people applying for linkbait tuesdays)
Tom October 24, 2007 10:14 am | Reply
Good point Tom, everybody else please feel free to chime in.
Patrick Altoft October 24, 2007 11:57 am | Reply