I find myself in Montreal, Quebec this week, spending time with my old friend, Guillaume Bouchard of NVI and some new friends from an organization called Alliance numériQC (French only, sorry Anglophones). Guillaume and I got to chatting over dinner about the new version of Digg and the more prominent version of the social linkbait marketer’s worst enemy, the bury button:
You can see that the “bury” button now appears just below every story, as opposed to the old layout where you could select it from a list of items, including “OK this is lame” (though that tag never made much sense to me). The message I get from this is that Digg’s editors are hoping that more people will “bury” more material – perhaps they feel that the quantity of stories is too high, or they’d like for more content that the young, geek-centric, anti-marketing crowd that participates heavily at the site is suspicous of to stay off the home page.
Apparently, from what I hear around the social world, it’s working. And, sadly, it’s not just Digg; Reddit appears to have similar issues (I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that SEOmoz might also be banned there – certainly hilarious that SELand is, though). So, with all this negative, anti-marketer backlash against linkbait promotion, what course can you take? Well, here’s a few:
- Don’t Make Your Linkbait Feel Like Linkbait
Despite these hurdles, we’ve had several big pieces hit the social media airwaves at Digg in the last couple months, but they didn’t look like linkbait – they didn’t appear to be crafted or created with the intent of getting on Digg, and while this may sound like a strange cat-and-mouse game, you really need to look at your linkbait from the perspective of an angry, pubescent, World-of-Warcraft-addicted anti-marketer. If it looks clean to that guy, you’re in the clear. - Market to Important Bloggers Instead
Sure, when you pitch a piece to a blogger, they know you’re trying to make linkbait, but guess what? If the content’s great and it provides value to their visitors (and, most importantly, is relevant to topics they often cover), you’ll do fine. - Leverage StumbleUpon
If a piece of content gets a ton of up votes at StumbleUpon, you can feel a little more confident about submitting it to the other social voting sites. StumbleUpon’s audience can also be leveraged to help out with some of those votes, if you make it compelling and obvious that you’d appreciate their help in sharing the material. - Market over Email
I get a few emails every day begging for Sphinns, Diggs, Reddit bumps, etc. Some of these are good, but most are terrible. If you’re going to leverage your network, tell them to be smart about how they reach your story and vote it up – don’t provide a direct link to the Digg story page. Instead, ask them to check out the piece on your site and follow the Digg link from there. Those referral strings are going to look a lot more natural to the Digg editors. - Make it So Good They Can’t Resist
Certain pieces of viral content are too good to pass up – just remember that you don’t need to please everyone, you just have to make a small, passionate community really, really interested. Imagine the things you personally always spread around to your family, friends and coworkers – funny photos, videos, maybe politically leaning pieces, etc. - Pitch the Mainstream Media
It’s easier than ever before to reach journalists at publications big and small, so go for it! You may not have nearly the success rate of a professional PR networker, who’s had coffee with all of these journalists 6 times in the past month, but if your content is unique and up their alley, you’ve actually got a decent shot, and with hundreds of potential people to approach, the odds improve. Even better – when you hit the mainstream media with web content, the blogosphere and the social sites will often jump on the bandwagon.
Hopefully with these tactics in hand, you can continue to create and market great viral content. After all, the web is sorely in need of some good stuff, and by and large, there’s just us SMMs creating it.
p.s. Guillaume, since you’re such a good pal… I’ll take you fishing 🙂
p.p.s. For those who may have seen the criticism that our quiz received around the SEO blogosphere, be aware that I modified or replaced about 10 of the questions that received the most heat – apologies that my quality control wasn’t up to par – it’s been a really @#$%ing tough week.
