I’m going to blatantly copy my fellow SMX London Linkbait and Viral Marketing presenter Ciarán and post my slides and notes here for you guys. What can I say. Imitation is flattering, isn’t it? And the posts are a good idea: it means that you all get to hear what I said about all the slides and you don’t have any irritating PowerPoint presentation to download. Because I know you all secretly believe that downloading massive .ppt files will take far too long and will crash your browsers.
Apologies for the strange little boxes on either side of the SEOmoz.org logo. Photoshop thinks they’re a different colour than PowerPoint would have you believe.
The introductory slide. Brilliant. I think I started well; don’t you? You have to love that font, and the way “Linkbait” is a bit bigger than “and the Real World.”
I had a hunch that most of the audience knew the basic definition of linkbait. If you’ve made it as far as a Linkbait and Viral Marketing panel, you’ve probably read at least one article about the subject. However, just in case, I briefly defined the concept and tried to shoot down some misconceptions you’ll hear about linkbait. I believe that linkbait’s name hurts it in terms of reputation because it implies a manipulation of people’s intentions. However, people will always link to good stuff and abandon poor-quality content: if you can create this good content and benefit your business, go right ahead.
Before I jumped into the actual content of linkbait, I went through some of the ways linkbait is spread… and tried to point out that Digg isn’t the sole source of all social media traffic. My goal was to say “Digg” only once or twice in the presentation, but when it comes to linkbait, that’s like trying to completely eliminate words like “um” from your vocabulary, no matter how much you’d like to.
For some reason, people who use particular blogging platforms seem to like linking to others who share their interests and use the same service. Livejournal actively promotes communication between people with common interests. Communities such as http://community.livejournal.com/libraries/ allow everyone who is interested in libraries to get together and chat. And you know, even to an English major, libraries can be pretty boring. Do you have library-industry linkbait? Let these guys know about it.
Similarly, your Jeep linkbait can spread quickly through sites like JK Jeep Forum. The traffic mightn’t be enormous, but it’s targeted. General forums like Gorilla Mask and Fark can send massive amounts of traffic to less targeted linkbait.
Of course, you have to mention Digg and its esteemed counterparts. You also have to mention Sphinn, since it’s SMX. The difference between industry-specific social news sites and the mainstream heavy-weights is similar to that of forums. Reddit isn’t the place for Internet Marketing news; Sphinn is.
If you’ve ever looked at the front page of Reddit or clicked Stumble, you will have noticed what becomes popular. Some of the content is inappropriate, inane, or a dreadful combination of both. The winners of the “I Look Like my Dog” contest are pretty funny. Look at that grey-haired woman. Hilarious. But your client, who provides large mortgages to people who want to build apartment buildings, mightn’t agree. Nor may your client like the “In case of zombies, break glass” gun. I have just realised how many mentions of zombies I made during this presentation…
An example of a site where “anything goes” is Cracked.com. Has there ever been anything posted on Cracked that has received less than 1000 diggs? The slide is small when posted here, but the example content on Cracked’s front page is the “5 Mental Disorders That Can Totally Get You Laid.” Awesome linkbait. The health insurance company you’re doing SEO for will totally love it.
I provided an example of some linkbait former SEOmozzer Matt Inman had produced for Avatar Financial Group. Avatar Financial is a hard money and bridge loans firm, based in Seattle. Matt’s piece, “21 things I learned about CakePHP,” attracted a good number of links to the site, none of which were relevant to the financial industry.
One of the tactics I use when dreaming up linkbait is to think about the problems, oddities, and quirks of the industry in question. The graph shows a painstakingly scientific (i.e: Wikipedia-based) research experiment we did to figure out how many American citizens wouldn’t qualify for Green Cards (permanent residency) if they had to. Which they don’t. And which Digg was quick to point out. The title of the Digg entry was slightly mis-worded and the concept of hypothetical situations was lost of most of the Digg crowd, but they still granted the piece 764 diggs. We weren’t too upset with that total, given the fact that the content wasn’t about Ubuntu, Ron Paul, or a video game.
Some of the graph’s features were more controversial than others (and some require some serious explanation). The graph is far from 100% accurate. Although the post itself explained all its omissions and oddities, few people actually read the surrounding text. This piece would have been a fantastic piece of linkbait for an immigration attorney. Unfortunately it wasn’t, but it shows some of the neat things you can do in such an industry.
Secondly, keep in mind the problems faced by your potential clients. What are they interested in? Student loans companies can consider using the ways people waste their money during university. They can pitch their content to Freshmen (first year students) and high school seniors, since the majority of the people looking for loans are of that age. Companies that specialise in refinancing student loans can pitch their content to university seniors in much the same way.
Everyone wants to be linked to with the right anchor text. It helps a lot. “Click here” links are still links, but “student loans refinancing” links are even better. Unless your linkbait’s subject matter is quite different from some of your keywords, attempt to use them in titles, descriptions, and the like. You can’t control how people link to you (Rebecca’s rocket ships?), but you throw them some hints.
Dutch site Hema.nl produced this neat Flash presentation of their… um… products page? Product highlights page? No, I don’t really know what it is, because I don’t speak Dutch. But I linked to it because it’s really cool, as did a whole lot of other people who don’t speak Dutch and who didn’t link to Hema.nl’s Dutch competitors. And that’s the point.
While I don’t recommend “hiding” linkbait, there’s no need to have it splashed all over a corporate homepage. You don’t even have to link to it from the homepage if you don’t want to. But it’s generally a good idea to have the content link back to the most important pages on the site! Remember that very popular pages within a site can appear as indented results for some searches, such as a brand or company name. You’re unlikely to successfully “hide” anything popular.
Here, I provide a “real life” example of someone else’s linkbait that exemplifies bait for a boring website. Not that I’m saying wedding invitations are dull. If you’re getting married, I suppose they’re mightily interesting. Here, WeddingPaperDivas.com provide some “geek weddings” bait, featuring wedding parties dressed as super heros, Star Trek characters, and zombies. For those of you keeping count, that was zombie-mention number two.
This piece of content links to all the site’s important pages via its navigation template, but there are no links to the bait from the homepage of the site. Their linkbait is on-topic and highly appealing.
I used the “Are you a Rebel or a Yankee” test to highlight a piece of linkbait that could have been more beneficial than it really was. This test – and others like it – were quite popular around six months ago, but this version of the test only provides a final result and a “send to your friends” link. For my third and final zombie reference, I provide an example of a cool badge that the quiz-makers should have made, so that I could show everyone that I have both a 67% chance of surviving the zombie apocalypse, and a 57% Dixie accent.
This is a recent example of the ever-so-easy but slightly unethical practice of Bait and Switch. For Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, we have pictures of limousines that have decided to drive over steep hills in towns like San Francisco. Who doesn’t like high-centered limousines? Everyone gets a chuckle out of that. I linked to the limousines in a previous SEOmoz blog post. Upon re-visiting the blog post to find an example of good corporate linkbait, I find that the page now redirects to the company’s Miami limousine rental page. Miami is probably their most profitable market. Most of the links that point to the page will contain the words “limo” or “limousine.”
While I’m not promoting the bait and switch, as it is a bit unethical and does result in people linking to something that they did not intend, it’s an option that many sites seem to use once they’re received a lot of links to a piece of popular content.
There are three quick points about linkbait that you’ll want to keep in mind.
Negative commentary is normal in all arenas of social media, but you’re well advised to turn on comment moderation before launching a piece of content. You can’t control what people say on social news sites, forums, or blogs, but you can control the commentary on home-turf.
The “real life” examples are being done right now. It’s not impossible – and not even too difficult – to create linkbait for “regular” clients.
(Yes, I know you can read the slides…) Linkbait sometimes fails to garner a lot of links, votes, or attention. Oh well! You’ve still created fresh content and it’s likely that your practice will pay off in time. You’ll learn what works, what doesn’t, and exactly where and how to market that which you create.
This is the point at which I thanked the crowd and stopped talking, and thankfully, they honoured the fact that I was finished by clapping. It would have been embarrassing if they hadn’t. Again, I’ve uploaded the presentation here if you’d like to have it for yourself and play it repeatedly!
Update: The version at SlideShare appears to have been converted into OpenOffice format. Some of the slides’ formatting appears to be a little bit strange. In London, the crowd saw the correctly-formatted version!
