Of course, since I’m an SEO and am never one to pass up an opportunity to leverage link bait, I asked Jason “Are you going to submit this to any social media sites? This would do really well.” And I really thought it would–it was interesting, timely (the bracket was created right before the start of March Madness), easily digestible information. He said “Hold on, let me ask,” and spent the rest of the day asking various people about whether the bracket was going to be submitted. Jason quickly found out that, simply via “dating Rebecca osmosis,” he was the most knowledgeable social media person at the company. I’d gotten him hooked on Digg and reddit, so when he was going around asking people about submitting the bracket, he was met with confusing looks and head scratches.
Eventually, Jason got ahold of the person who handles SEO for the site but hasn’t really done a lot of social media. She said that an employee had submitted the piece to Digg. I saw the submission and raised an eyebrow:
This isn’t a good title and description. First of all, it makes it seem like the submission is just some random person’s NCAA bracket picks, and why would the Digg community give a crap about that? Secondly, from a reputation management perspective, it doesn’t really paint PayScale in a positive light. Linking to their content with a “Worst ever” title isn’t exactly the best idea. This bracket is unique because it analyzes schools based on graduate salaries, so why misrepresent it and undersell the part that makes the content stand out?
Unsurprisingly, the submission didn’t go anywhere. As of today it has 9 diggs. The employee who submitted it likely didn’t have much experience submitting stories to Digg and isn’t well-versed in crafting good titles and descriptions.
I recently found a couple more Digg submissions for the bracket:
This submission had the following issues:
- It didn’t show a thumbnail, which would have given Digg users a sneak peek of the image.
- It pasted the URL in the description, which looks kind of spammy. The submission’s title already links to the content, so there’s no need to paste the URL in the description.
- “…average salary of school’s grads” is grammatically incorrect. It insinuates that it predicts the winners based on one school’s graduates. It’s confusing, kind of boring, and disconnecting.
- It didn’t properly capitalize the title. Sure, some submissions have made the home page with improper capitalization, but look at my RSS feed for stories that have gone hot:
Here’s another submission:
Problems with this submission:
- It was submitted to the Lifestyle category, under Education. True, the chart may be educational to look at, but it’s probably more interesting for people who are March Madness/NCAA fans and are familiar with the bracket system. If I showed this to my sister, she probably would have been like “Meh,” whereas if I had showed the same bracket to my brother, a hardcore sports nut, he would have found it much more interesting. Thus, a submission to the Sports category would have probably been more appropriate and would have gotten more visibility from a more relevant audience.
- It’s missing a thumbnail. Entice diggers with some eye candy and compel them to click through.
- It mentions “This article uses the median salary of users of PayScale.com who are 5 to 15 years into their careers.” My eyes just glazed over while typing that. Yeah, it’s a factual statement, but diggers aren’t going to care. They don’t know what PayScale is, and they don’t care. They just want to see the bracket. If they have questions about how the bracket was compiled or what PayScale is, they’ll ask in the comments. Don’t overwhelm diggers from the get-go. A description should pique the user’s interest and cause him or her (though we’re dealing with Digg here, so it’s probably “him”) to click through.
Now, I had only seen the first failed submission on Digg, but I knew for a fact that the bracket could do better than a measly 9 votes. My boyfriend asked if I could improve upon the initial submission. I didn’t really want to risk submitting it myself–my strongest submission received 142 diggs but never got promoted–so I asked one of my friends who has a strong submission record to handle it. He asked me to provide the title, description, and category. This is what it looked like:
This submission made the home page, and my boyfriend was given proper kudos at his office. 🙂
Here are some factors that helped:
- The user submitted the bracket to the Sports/Basketball category in order to leverage all of those college basketball fans.
- I also bugged him to submit before the Sweet 16 started because I didn’t want the bracket to lose topical freshness.
- I crafted the title in the form of a question that would pique users’ interests.
- I mentioned “March Madness” for topicality’s sake and “Salary” to give an indication of what the content focused on.
- I simply pulled the bracket’s snippet and used it as the submission’s description, since it was pretty straightforward, yet simple.
- Lastly, the submitter used the actual bracket as a thumbnail so that users would see a teaser of the bracket.
Now, of course it didn’t hurt that a user with a strong track record submitted the bracket, but he’s also submitted lots of stuff that hasn’t made the home page. I also promoted the submission by shouting it to my friends on Digg and by posting the link on Pownce and on my Facebook profile (Note: I did not beg my friends or spam anyone for votes–I simply posted the link once and left it at that). Yes, a strong Digg account helps, as does promoting/sharing the story among friends. However, how you craft your submission really makes a big difference in its success or failure, and I hope I’ve illustrated that with my examples.
The moral of this story is that you should really do a bit of research before you try and promote some linkbait. Poke around the social media site to get a feel for what typically works, what doesn’t work, what patterns you notice, etc. Also, as I stated earlier, pick up a couple of magazines and newspapers and see how their headlines are crafted. For newsworthy stuff, look to a newspaper’s front page and see how the information was presented in the title and opening paragraph. For a Top 10 list or something more entertainment-focused, check out Cosmopolitan magazine or something similar and look at their “X Ways to Pleasure a Man/X Ways to Trim 10 Pounds” headlines (hey, it’s corny but it works).
Your title and description can often make or break your submission. Don’t forget to extend these tips to your actual piece, too–if you write something interesting, give it a compelling, eye-catching title. In this age of attention deficit Internet users, sometimes you only get one shot to grab their attention.
