Been messing around with aiderss.com
It looks at a number of variables and tries to sort out the best posts from a blog. I have applied it to the digg monster cracked.com. It’s very useful for picking out headline ideas.

Categories: Social media marketing

An interesting nugget from the forums of Linkbaitcoaching.com

“What reason does this linkbait give for people to link to it.”

Too often I see visitor bait being created. So you got on the front page of digg, give yourself a gold medal and stick it on your ass.

Who are you targeting your linkbait to? If it’s the knuckle draggers on digg it’s not linkbait, it’s a wet fart in a hurricane.

C’mon on guys, it’s real simple. Linkbait is for getting links.

Who are you targetting? If you say “anyone”, get to the back of the queue and stay there. You need to know exactly who you are targetting, you need to know what they read, what gets their juices flowing, even the size of their underpants if it helps you craft content to appeal to their link finger.

Try linkbaiting one person, go on, try it. Chose an authority figure in the niche you operate and go after their link. That one authority link is worth more than ten thousand diggs (yes I know diggs lead to links, but only if the content is good enough)

Targetting one person makes it a lot easier to craft linkbait as it can tickle their fancy a lot easier. Once they link to you, others will follow.

Concentrate on getting the link, not the visit.

Categories: Linkbait

I try really hard to say no to any client linkbait requests these days, I do the odd one here and there. But I am so busy with other projects it’s difficult to give a client the time needed.

I now have a solution. If you need some great linkbait work done, get yourself over to linkbaitcoaching.com and sign up (as of now there are 12 spots left), not to learn how to do linkbait, but to get access to talented people I am training to become expert linkbaiters.

Lets not muck about here, I’m expensive. $4,000 for a piece of content to grab you a bunch of links and $300 an hour minimum ten hours for consultation work. For some webmasters that’s a huge chunk of change. But find an up and coming linkbaiter and you could be paying a lot less, plus you probably find it easier to get their attention.

With more and more people selling linkbaiting services, It’s hard to find out who is good and who is simply good at selling themselves and their own stuff.

By being in a training environment you get to see what people are actually producing and the successes they have, you get a more transparent view of what they are about. Sure it’s a bit raw and maybe a bit messy, it’s a training camp, it’s the engine room, it’s a place where all the bullshit is left at the door. You get to see it how it actually is.

You get to see how an idea goes from just a thought to a front page digg, a hot Stumbleupon, a raging reddit, thousands of page views, generating hundreds of links.

Some of the guys are hot, they “get it”, you can see it yourself I don’t need to sell them, my advice is to grab them before they become big shots and don’t have the time to return your calls. Build a relationship with them now and it may pay off later.

I coach these guys, it’s my job to turn them into expert linkbaiters capable of producing content which attracts so many links that Google has to get Matt Cutts to talk about them at an SEO conference to play down their abilities.

Yeah I know, it’s more competition for me. But I love to teach and I love being a part of what these kick ass, talented guys are doing.

You want a piece of the action? Head over to linkbaitcoaching.com and get your credit card out. And if you hesitate and miss one of those 12 spots which are left, please don’t moan you missed out.

It’s very undignified.

Categories: Social media marketing

The Guardian has run a piece talking about linkbait as if it were an everyday thing. Has linkbait gone mainstream?

Jack Schofield knows his linkbait, the piece he has referenced is a cracking piece, although as I speak it has not been submitted to digg or reddit or Stumble, what’s with that? Are they awake in celebrity scandal blog world.

Still, they got a link from the Guardian. Jack, what do I have to do to get a link from you?

Good find Jack.

ps. I took the bait and dugg it.

Categories: Linkbait

Linkbait is the honey.
Linkers are the bees.
The honey does not solicit the bees, it just is what it is.

“Long term, promotion of content that attracts relevant links from those empowered to publish will win. The act of linking is performed, unsolicited, by individual publishers.”

bold added

Great post by Lee Odden

Further commentary at Is Linkbait the Death of SEO?

Categories: Link Building Theory

How do you come up with a link bait idea? Ideas sometimes seem to come from nowhere, making the creative process seem like a magical, mystical thing.

Creativity does not exist in a vacuum and ideas do not come out of nothing. Good ideas are preceded by hard toil, time spent studying, thinking, testing, mulling over. Sometimes you may have been thinking about an idea for years.

One of the things I help people with at linkbaitcoaching.com is to come up with fresh, innovative, effective ideas for their linkbait. Sometimes the ideas spark fresh thoughts in the reader and they are able to go off in an even more original direction. It helps to have a spark.

Here are some examples of the kind of link bait ideas I come up with:

Who Spends the most on web advertising?

For a marketing site.
Analysis of the companies and brands who spend the most money on advertising on the web. Difficult to make it 100% accurate, but an interesting discussion starter. You could look at those who waste money on the web, or which website is the most useless to advertise on. When was the last time you clicked on a banner? But ask the question, are you the target?

Most Powerful Home Speaker System in the World

For a gadget site.
I am sure it has been done before so worth a research, remember, if it has worked once it has proved itself and the same elements will probably work again.
Figure out the way to decide what is the most powerful speaker, as HiFi geeks will probably take you to task on your claims. But, this is good, having people argue with you and not agree does not mean they will not link. Polarising opinion is sometimes the best way to get people to link. What you are doing in effect is creating a platform for the discussion to take place, people may not be linking to your content but the resulting discussion.

Announce Payday loans as an attack on the Working Class

For a financial site.
As the credit crunch takes hold (not sure what you call it in the USA) more and more people are seeking unconventional ways to raise cash. Payday loans give you cash against your future wages, problem is it has a crippling interest rate and tend to be targeted at vulnerable groups of society. Taking an ethical stand against such practices you can attract the attention of linkers that wouldn’t normally link to a financial site.
You can highlight some of the horror stories that people find themselves in and talk of large men with baseball bats turning up at the door at 6am.
The purpose is to offer a different look at a competitive market. Most sites do the, “Payday loans are great”, type story as they want to attract people who will click on the ads. But you want links, so go for the social ethical crowd and start a conversation that will be worth linking to.
If you can get pro and anti groups discussing on the same page you have hit payday gold.

Why ergonomic furniture is rubbish.

For a furniture or office furniture site or a saving money site
I end up reading a lot of adverts regarding ergonomic furniture, as if that’s the best kind of furniture. I am equipping a new office at the moment and notice the stuff. I think it’s a load of crap and I suspect others do too, give me a second hand £20 desk and a decent chair and I am sorted. Detail how expensive this ergonomic stuff is and what does it actually mean. As far as I can tell it means furniture with rounded corners.
Make this piece highly opinionated and point out how expensive some of this stuff is. I would totally advise an office furniture linkbait client to do this, but I know they never would because they do not understand linkbait. But, it can be used to shock people into linking to your site, “maverick furniture website reveals shocking truth of furniture scam”. What the site does then is explain why they think the range which they are carrying is worth every penny.

Why you should never pay more than £30 for a desk
Imagine that as a headline on an office furniture blog? If you have a website that is about furniture design, or about advising people how to save money setting up their businesses, your link worth radar will be beeping. It presents a negative view point which is very juicy to link to but the body of the content should take the reader from a negative start to a positive finish. Positive in the sense that the business running this furniture blog is so cool and on the side of the consumer it is willing to present information which seemingly harms it and benefits the consumer.

View it in the sense of a narrative, look how a Hollywood disaster movie is framed, the marketing is always about how awful and dire the situation is, but then ends upbeat as the little white, blonde girl and dog are saved.

Try looking at your linkbait creation as telling a story.

Best American Cities to get Shot in.

For a tourist site or medical
I lived in DC for six months and on the first night, 8 people were shot dead. Coming from a country where a stabbing can make national news I expected uproar, I don’t even think the local news covered it. Sometimes I think it takes an outsider to point out that things are kinda crazy.

That aside, the amount of people getting shot dead in America varies from city to city. But the interesting thing to point out is that being shot in a city where gunshot wounds are more common may mean you get treated by a more experienced surgeon for that type of wound. I had read somewhere that the US military sent their surgeons to such hospitals to get training in treating gunshot wounds.

So, the more gunshot wounds a hospital treats, the better your treatment can potentially be. It would be interesting to grab data on the top ten hospitals who treat the most gunshots per capita. This kind of research and presentation of statistical data, if backed up proper referencing of sources can bring you all sorts of attention from journalists and news organisations who may link to you.

Take readily available statistical data, reshape and reframe it, give it an attention grabbing headline and you may have a nice bit of linkbait on your hands.

The headlines in the above examples are not what you would end up with. It’s possible you can come up with better by spending more time thinking about it. I came up with the headlines whilst writing this post, so they have not been through the grist mill yet.

Maybe these ideas spark different ideas that you can use. Ideas are all around, you just have to be able to spot them. Once you have adopted the linkbaiters frame of mind it becomes natural.

You can find more ideas for linkbait over at linkbaitcoaching.com

Categories: link building ideas

Have you ever had a blog post idea knocking around your head for weeks and you just can’t get the chance or motivation to write about it?

I have mentioned creativity in seo before, unfortunately it’s something I rarely see talked about as an important part of seo.

Consider this:

“The birth of an idea may be preceded and followed by modes of attention that are much more focused, purposeful and intellectual”

from pp14 The Creative Thinking Plan by Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas

“Modes of attention”, interesting that it’s in the plural, as if we have to spend a lot of time thinking about a thing when we are in different mental states. Attacking the issue from different parts of our mind.

I no longer call myself an SEO and have not done for a long time, (if I ever was one) and I now the pursue the path of viral content creator, or online buzz marketer or what is commonly known in the business as linkbaiting. This requires a truck full of creativity each day, but creativity takes time.

It takes time to be creative, it’s probably the most important think I teach my linkbaiting students over at linkbaitcoaching.com, a good piece of linkbait will take up to ten days. Most of that is spent thinking and throwing away ideas. The ability to spot a bad idea is as important as coming up with the idea in the first place.

You need that time because the mind has to go through it’s different modes to come up with that idea. Now I know people who have taken 15 minutes to create a piece of linkbait and it’s a great success. But, you will probably find that the idea has been at the back of their minds fermenting and going through the editing process whilst snug in the sub-consciousness.

The true test is to be presented with a subject you are unfamiliar with and you have to start cold. It can involve a lot of walking, thinking and looking into the distance. It involves getting your brain to perform different modes of attention whilst thinking of the problem.

The same is with SEO, getting creative with SEO and not simply copying what others are doing can give you the edge. Most techniques when they hit the public are over. It’s those people who can see things in different ways and challenge the perceived wisdom. Usually the perceived wisdom is wrong as it follows what worked yesterday. To be a creative SEO you need to be thinking about what can work tomorrow.

I’m a natural contrarian, I believe will live in cycles and if someone says “don’t do that, it no longer works”, time to look at it closely. What I find also is that some things that are talked about in the SEO blogosphere are complete crap. A lot of the time you read something and you know it works because you are doing it and yet it goes hot on Sphinn, people are commenting and saying “good point”. Best thing is just to keep quiet and let them get on with it.

But when you start doing the opposite of what the masses do, strange things happen. You stumble across things which work and which no one else is doing. When that happens, you have struck SEO gold and you keep quiet about it (unless it can bump you up a couple of pay grades but that’s another matter), you then notice people saying it used to work a few years ago but not anymore.

To achieve real success in this business, you have to get creative. Which was what I was doing with my spoof news linkbait stories. It was a technique that has been used successfully by a number of people for years, no wonder they wanted to keep it quiet.

In the end, getting creative might lead you off the garden path and into the sharp toothed man traps Matt Cutts has laid for you, or you may get lynched by the foaming at the mouth blogosphere. No matter, you are in this business for results not some hippy-geek-ethos. You find what works and then you do what works.

Note:
I completely went off my target for this post, I wanted to talk and discuss creativity more. Ah well, stream of consciousness it will have to be

Categories: SEO Creativity

This is an seo test, nothing to get that excited about, unless you find seo tests exciting.

Ed Dale Mankini , is a search term that is being tested by Ed Dale and his gang over at 30 Day Challenge. (note: not quite accurate, see comments)

What’s interesting is they are targeting a lot of web 2.0 properties and highlighting those who rank non-competitive search terms. Thing is, it works and it works fast.

It is what it is and for quick, smash and grab marketing it’s very successful. As part of a long term strategy I can see techniques like this can get you off the ground and running very quickly and can give you a valuable insight into how the google indexing machine is working these days.

Also, it could be very useful in going after those narrow, non-competitive niches, although ask yourself, why are they non-competitive? Could it be that there is little money in it.

Like most techniques, this form on “keyword grabbing” is going to work for those who use it in ways no on else is thinking about. Those who take the tips and tricks and transpose it into their online marketing strategy are going to be ahead in the game, whilst those who are simply copying the technique will be still on the starting blocks.

How easy is it for google to stomp on this? Probably not that easy, as the algo would have to be tweaked in how it favoured such sites also the speed of indexing may have to be tweaked. But, what google is getting out of it is far more than what is damaging it. So I think the technique will be good for a while. Most of use have been using it for years anyway.

Saying all that, if you want to play the long game, at your core has to be information that people will climb over each other to read. No linkbait or widgetbait or keyword grabbing from web 2.0 properties is ever going to beat that, but they should be part of the mix. How much of the mix is down to you. Relying on one technique too much will force your head above the parapet for Matt Cutts to take his best golf swing at your head.

Also, such tricksy action can attract the ire of the blogosphere, as Maki bemoaned here, read the comments and you will notice Ed Dale putting his case forward in defense.

Sure, I don’t want the serps filled with low rent crap, but from a professional point of view we need to experiment, to test, to push things a little hard. And if we have to go the Ed Dale Mankini route then so be it.

Categories: SEO Test · Social media marketing

To be honest I have not used the personal attack hook that much. Not because I didn’t feel like it, but because I think it’s a slippery style of linkbait and one which can backfire easily, as we can see here with Marty and his shenanigans.

But hey, it got me to link. And if that was the point, then success. Of course there is a cost and that cost may not be instantly quantifiable. The cost must always be considered when indulging in controversial linkbait. Obviously for me it affects how I view the seomoz brand, calling what I do “outright fraud” is a little rich from a blog advocating sock puppet marketing.

I have learned, people do not need to like you or even agree with you to link to you. If you have an opinion there is always going to be someone with a different opinion. But, when you get personal as Marty as done here and I have done in the past, it transcends to a new level.

I am not moralising on the issue, people make their own decisions according to their own moral code and what they think Google will let them get away with.

Before you crank up the slagbait machine, do remember there are real people out there and that nuance and irony are sometimes difficult to communicate over a blog.

Categories: Linkbait

Red Evo made a comment on a guest post I wrote for Searchenginepeople.com. I ask what would you call linkbait if you couldn’t call it linkbait, his reply was “good content”.

No. Linkbait is not good content. Linkbait is exceptional content. All your content should be good at least I hope it is. Linkbait is the kind of content you spend ten days crafting. If you did that with all your content you wouldn’t get much done. Linkbait is targeted at a specific target, whilst content is simply targeted at the users of your site.

Someone else claims linkbait used to be called, “Killer headlines”.

No, a killer headline is part of what linkbait is but it is not what it is.

Yura asks a sensible question about using linkbait just for links, well that’s what linkbait is. It’s a tool in the seo tool box you use to get links. That is it’s purpose. If you want to get another outcome you use another tool.

What this tells me is possibly that the seo community still does not get linkbait. It does not surprise me , over at linkbaitcoaching.com the first questions I usually get aksed is “how can I build my network so I can game digg”. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it’s not as important as other components of linkbait.

You cannot really blame the seo, they tend to be an odd sort. Getting excited over web traffic stats and obsessing over keywords. I know because I am one, or rather was. Can’t really call myself an seo anymore.

The jump that the seo has to make from what they do to creating linkbait is quite a big one. It’s something I am learning whilst teaching how to linkbait. But once an seo does get it, they have an edge over their neighbour who doesn’t.

Categories: Social media marketing