Companies and websites that deal with primarily ultra-boring subjects — car insurance, real estate brokering, call center technzzzz — [shakes self awake] really only have one hope of attracting large numbers of links via social media, and that’s by creating untargeted link bait. Car insurance: the most amazing escapes from car accidents. Real estate: What you could have bought with your current salary in 1990. Call center technology: the funniest customer service transcripts ever. You know the drill.
There’s a great example of this making the rounds at Reddit and Digg today: http://www.ftlauderdalelimo.com/, whose website is pretty horrible, has made Reddit’s homepage with three pictures of two “beached” limousines. The pictures aren’t even particularly interesting or clever, but they’re an improvement on the site’s regular content.
EDIT AND UPDATE: the beached limousine pictures no longer reside at the end of the above link. The link has been redirected to the company’s Miami limousine rentals page. This is known as the bait and switch and isn’t something you necessarily want to do with your linkbait.
Due to Digg’s labyrinth archiving system that includes both the www and non-www version of every page, as well as its assortment of pages such as /offbeat_news/page1, /offbeat_news/page2, /news/popular/30days/page27, /news/page60, etc, the referral logs of your small website will be completely overrun by your link bait effort. Even after the fact, the traffic generated by large-scale social media attention can overshadow a small site’s regular traffic, and it’s the regular traffic that you really want to monitor, not the fickle, bounce-rate-massacring Diggers.
If you use a stats program that doesn’t offer the option of either filtering results to exclude multiple social media sites (many allow you to exclude only one domain at a time), or one that doesn’t allow you to see referring domains instead of full URLs, you’re going to have to wade pretty deeply into your little stats program in order to see where your valuable readers are coming from. This is what has happened to my stats program post-Digg. I’ve blurred out referrers that are “genuine”, or not linking to the post that was dugg.
It never occurred to me that this would be a side-effect of effective link bait, but now it seems obvious. While Reddit does appear a number of times, its Digg’s awful archiving system that dictates its total ownership of an unfiltered statistics report. It also astounds me somewhat that people have bothered to click back as far as Digg’s 207th news page, as is shown by the URL third from the bottom of the list!
PS: Given Digg’s irritating www versus non-www issue, the Reddit entry atop the limousine pictures is especially appropriate.
