Link building sessions at Search Engine Strategies shows are
always popular and draw some of the most substantial crowds
from the ranks of webmasters and corporate SEO's attending
conferences. But only one extreme form of link building,
called "linkbaiting" can reel in the big fish and attract
industry-wide attention or land whale sized national media
for massive linking on the scale site owners fantasize about.
The Linkbaiting session at SES 2006 in San Jose offered
bucket loads of link bait to hopeful link anglers.
Rand Fishkin (appropriate name for LinkBaiting) of SEOmoz.org
was first of a panel of experienced link bait fishermen to
present on the topic at the Search Engine Strategies 2006
show. Fishkin recently landed a shark with excellent bait
offered at his site he named the "Page Strength Tool," which
helps webmasters determine the overall quality score, and can
determine ranking factors for their web site beyond simple
"PageRank." The tool magically reviews dozens of factors
contributing to high ranking of sites and reports to
webmasters where they're strong and what needs work.
http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php
Fishkin started by outlining the elements that lead to
success. Step one to link baiting is in researching a sector
link "worthiness" by doing some discovery of "big" players in
your field. Check del.icio.us tags and technorati tags on
your topic. Can your web site content be tweaked to appeal to
pundits in this field?
He suggested "online viral public relations" as another name
for linkbaiting, since the "baiting" term seems to carry
negative connotations. He recommends selecting a content
focus to meld branding and viral elements and to do keyword
research to find popular phrases in your area. Digg.com as
well as del.icio.us offer "most popular" areas showing what
is currently hot. Fishkin also recommends StumbleUpon.com as
an undervalued resource to research areas of online buzz and
interest. Look for elements that encourage linking.
Fishkin was followed by Cameron Olthuis of Advantage
Consulting Services with a presentation titled, "Tracking
your buzz - Because your reputation depends on it"
Olthuis emphasized how critical it is to monitor perceptions
of buzz. Track your buzz using blog search engines and
conversation tracking at popular message boards to follow
public conversation about your site. Track the right terms to
monitor how people perceive your buzz, Subscribe to RSS feeds
using company name, company URL, competitors or industry
related sites. He recommends that you figure out how best to
leverage your buzz once it starts by watching what people
say. If you have no knowledge of what is being said, the buzz
you do gain could end up being nothing more than chumming for
fish - You may attract them, but you'll never catch them with
out hooking them after they show up.
Join any conversations you do find by commenting on blogs,
respond to emails and by posting in forums, answering
questions, because it keeps your buzz going and can lead to
many more links. If buzz is negative, be sure to turn it into
good any way you can. Take focus off of negative buzz if it
happens by creating a different controversy. ClaimID is a
personal reputation management company he recommended using
to track online buzz.
http://www.claimID.com
The Mentos & Diet Coke fountain video was discussed by
Olthuis as an example of taking control of any buzz that
starts spontaneously. For those unfamiliar with it, the video
involves putting the candy into Diet Coke to create a
fountain of soda. (Fizz in this case, rather than buzz).
Mentos took advantage or the buzz created by the video phenom
and funneled the traffic to a newly created contest to
"Create your own Mentos Fountain." The most popular video,
linked to by the home page of the Mentos web site, has been
viewed over 6 million times. The Mentos site is at:
http://us.mentos.com
The video can be viewed at: http://www.eepybird.com/
Embrace your buzz, regardless of good, bad or ugly. Measure
it with backlinks, brand image, trends, new customers by
using Yahoo Site Explorer, blog search engines Google Trends,
Opinmind and Google Analytics. Boggs wrapped up with the quip
"Learn rinse, repeat."
The next presentation was by Jennifer Laycock, editor of
SearchEngineGuide. Her advice is "Give them something to Talk
About" Why use link baiting and viral marketing? The cost is
the in the idea, not the marketing. Any idea won't do, must
be something worth talking about. Once you get that idea,
there is almost no cost involved. The technique creates brand
evangelists and gives people a reason to talk about your
product. Because it is driven by passion, it creates a better
conversion at a rapid response rate.
She gave the example of the "Subservient Chicken" game on the
web site from Burger King - did it sell any chicken? She
emphatically claims that it is "Not about selling chicken,
it's about branding and awareness." She observed that it had
resulted in hundreds of millions of visits, with an average
time on the site of over 7 minutes - unheard of for most web
pages. Laycock says it was about "making a brand cool." She
asserts that this video resulted in a new demographic of web
savvy, mostly young visitors becoming newly interested in
Burger King.
Lack of Brand Control is an issue she suggests is on the down
side of viral marketing. Laycock warns that there is no
control over who gets your message or how it is sent.
Unbridled growth of a viral message and complete lack of
contol over how quickly or even where you grow. The
popularity is often hard to measure.
Laycock gave tips for creating the idea by suggesting that
you ask yourself, "What sparks passion in my customers? What
hasn't been done before? How will your idea benefit your
users? Will your audience risk their own reputation on it?
Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader not
the originator. A good viral marketing idea is one that
builds and works through relationships.
She emphasized that the point of linkbaiting is to "attract
eyeballs." Successful link bait makes it easy to spread the
word by providing tools or simple methods of sharing. This is
one key to the success of videos that can be linked through
YouTube.
Laycock recommends scalability be considered before launching
and that you must be poised to act if things take off. She
urges that it is critical to get beyond the idea itself to
exploit motivators. She insists that "people want to be cool,
so give them the chance" to do that with your link bait.
She gave the example of Gmail invites as one great method of
allowing early existing Gmail users to be cool, by having the
ability to invite their friends to the service (when it was
by invitation only) via a simple link in the mail interface.
She proposes that linkbaiters "use existing networks and take
advantage of other peoples resources."
Laycock had her own success in lainkbaiting through a
fundraising site she began called "Lactivist," which was
intended to raise money for a (mother's) "Milk Bank" by
selling t-shirts and seeking donations to support
breastfeeding instead of feeding formula to newborn babies.
http://www.Lactivist.com
She used that site to next emphasize that "People are Talking
and Linking" so that we need to pay attention to the impact
of blogs. She recommends that everyone doing linkbaiting
should "Understand the Impact of a good Post." and just as
importantly, "Understand the impact of a Bad Post." She
suggests that the way to "get people to do what you want is
by arousing their desires."
People wanted to participate in the series and spread the
word about Lactivist (Short for "Lactation Activist"). She
emphasized the importance of being intersted in others,
learning their names, visiting their sites and doing active
link building.
Did the linkbaiting for Lactivisit work? Laycock claimed the
site produced $2500 in profit and $1000 in donations for the
Milk Bank. More than 1,000 incoming links make up 75% of the
traffic to the site. Total unique visitors 36,500 in a very
short period. She says the project also produced a
SearchEngineGuide ebook for promotional purposes.
The final presentation was titled, "Gaining Visibility in the
Golden Age of Links". Given by Chris Boggs of G3Group. He
recommended what he called "Linkbaiting in a search engine
friendly fashion" by contacting bloggers specific to your
industry.
He said, "You can't just put the worm on the hook, you have
to throw the hook out and do link building first," because
link baiting has become the holy grail of search marketing.
Many hooks are baited, but are cast in shallow waters without
big fish to notice or take the bait. You can't catch a marlin
with worms cast on wimpy hooks bobbing into a back country
pond.
He noted a bad example of reputation issues created by links
gained from negative publicity, pointing to the Comcast
customer service fuss by a blogger that had bad experience
waiting for Comcast service rep to show up and then caught
him sleeping on video during the visit. That bad PR has the
video complainer ranked at number 5 in a google search for
"Comcast customer service".
Boggs spent much of his presentation giving a long list of
link baiting site examples from past few months. Notable
among them was the "Church of the flying spaghetti monster"
and the Air Force One graffitti story (a faked creation that
imitated the presidential plane with graffiti spray painted
across the wing mounted engine, supposedly done at Andrews
Air Force Base.)
Flying Spaghetti Monster: http://www.venganza.org/
Air Force One Graffiti: http://www.stillfree.com/
Each of the examples given in this story produced extreme
amounts of controversy or publicity and gained mainstream
press coverage. Those sites that successfully create link
bait are those that produce positive buzz and lead to massive
linking and great PR for sites that do it well. Each of the
speakers gave great advice regarding link bait development
that, if followed, may lead to landing the big fish of
national media attention and many thousands of links with
just a big idea and not necessarily big budgets.
Copyright August 11, 2006 by Mike Banks Valentine
