Donut addicts, learn killer content techniques in a 5 day frenzy of linkbait knowledge
It has come to my attention that some people cannot afford the £200 a month fee for linkbait coaching because of the affliction donut addiction. Being a recovering addict myself I am well aware how this evil affliction can soak up any spare cash.
Especially when you have to walk past a Krispy Kreme shop every day to get to work.
And so to help out any donut addicts, today only I am offering bitesize membership offerings to everyone.
For only £50 you can get a 5 day access pass to Linkbait Coaching.
Instead of dropping a £50 note on a bag of donuts, learn about how you can create linkalicious content.
A word of warning though. The content contained within the Linkbait Coaching forum is extremely rich and full of killer content ideas. As I write this there are 2,999 posts on the forum. It is physically possible to read all 2,999 posts within 5 days but I cannot be liable for any mental problems which may ensue if you attempt to do this.
If creating content for links is your thing, then I strongly suggest you check this out.
This offer is only available for 24 hours.
Image credit: Krispy Kreme Corporation
I create a lot of content for clients and run into the same issues over and over. One problem is that the kind of content that gets results has an edge to it, but the client usually does not want content that has an edge to it, they just want to sell stuff.
Nothing wrong with wanting to just sell stuff.
However, magnetic content, content that attracts tends to be edgy content.
For example, if you are a client in the niche of “home lighting”, I may suggest an article along the lines of “Top ten lighting rigs to power your Cannabis Farm“.
I probably wont, but I am using this extreme example to illustrate the point. Of course the article still has to be written in a certain style whcih attracts the social movers and shakers and linkerati, to be deemed a winner.
Most business people do not live in my weird and wonderful world of online content creation, and so do not understand why approaching content in a counter intuitive way is sometimes essential.
So, it’s useful if we have an Edginess Index.
This is to gauge how edgy to make the content on a scale of 1 to 10.
Here is my Edginess Index:
1 = Local Govt publications
2 = Local newspaper
3 = BBC
4 = ?
5 = TV Quick
6 = Top Gear
7 = FHM
8 = Sun/Daily mail website
9 = National Enquirer
10 = XXXXXXXXXXX
1. The most anodyne, mundane, safe copy I have ever read is that of local government publications. The stuff that tells you how to put your rubbish out etc. Useful if you need to know how to put rubbish out, but you are never going to share it on Facebook.
2. Local newspapers tend to be written by numbers, local jumble sale info, cat stuck in tree, man buys pork pie etc. It’s safe, useful as it tells you what’s going on and interesting if your in your area someone who kidnaps cats and sells them to the local butcher to kill and put into sausages has just been arrested.
3. The BBC is a site I read every day, but for news and resource based information. Not for the edginess. I read it for it’s insightful news commentary, TV listings and sometimes its witty journos like Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders. But on the whole it’s as safe as houses and so comes in at number 3
4. Open to suggestions
5. TV Quick is safe enough to sell at the supermarket checkout, but edgy enough to attract the attention and initiate the impulse part of the brain of an interested reader. It does sometimes contain articles like, “I was so fat I even ate the sofa”, kind of articles, but mostly it’s stuff that tickles your gran. There are about ten of these types of publications on the supermarket shelf and so a fair sized market.
6. Now we are starting to get into the, “it may offend someone” category. Although not as offensive as the raw throat pipe of Mr Jeremy Clarkson, but it still does have that frisson of excitement. For example, “The first car I had sex in”, may be an article. Not talking about the bits and bobs you understand, but more the automotive angle, and so is less edgy than it seems.
7. FHM however, is as edgy as it seems. Offending a good portion of people, and yet attracting a sizable audience. Does not shy away from a bit of raw, bodily fluid type humour, but pulls back before you feel all dirty. I’m really talking about the articles, not the pictures.
In all of these content producers I am talking about the “tone” of the content, not the specific content itself, but what it represents and how many people it may offend.
8. Sun/Daily Mail website. These are British content producers, not sure what it would be in your locale. These contain highly offensive material, so much so that they regularly arouse the anger of a lot of people. These are at number 8 because of the amount of people that find them offensive, conversely they are insanely successful.
Very few of my business clients would want to be associated with articles such as “Freddie Star ate my hamster”. But this is what more people like to read and consume than most other publications.
The point is, these publications go out to offend and to bait people into a response. One only has to observe how the Mail handled the Samantha Brick situation. Which is a fascinating case to analyse and one we had a lot of fun with on Linkbait Coaching
9. National Enquirer, I’m not so sure. I don’t find this as offensive because I see it more with tongue in cheek. However, my business client is simply not going to understand why I want to create content about “How I saw into the soul of my neighbours cat to steal her bingo numbers”.
Although not really offensive, it scores high on the “I can’t put that on my website” scale.
A lot of the linkbait I create is around this level, because it gets attention and links. Problem is it’s very tricky to get it placed on a clients website or even as a guest post on another site.
It certainly is the most fun to create.
10. XXXXXXXXXXX is just too hot to handle. So offensive I can’t even repeat it here. Not a level I have ever gone up to, but it’s important to know it’s here and that it exists.
So there we have it, the more edgy we go the less likely a client is going to want it on their website or used as a guest post on someone else’s. The ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. It is very useful to use an edginess index, I would advise creating your own, relative to clients understanding.
If you do have an idea for number 4, or other numbers. Let me know.
Who decides what is quality content?
In a post panda World, low quality content no longer cuts the mustard. It’s the high quality stuff that Google now requires when deciding where to rank your website.
This refers to both the content on your web site and the content on the websites linking to you.
Quality web content can be defined along the following terms:
- It attracts and persuades a person to link to it for no other reason than to cite the information.
- It attracts and persuades a person to share it on social media for no other reason than to show the information to others.
It is the intent within these two statements that is fundamental.
It is human action or reaction that defines what is or isn’t quality. Action regardless of any other factor than the content itself.
This is what we would call social proof or more accurately human proof. By it’s very nature it cannot be manipulated in the same way a search engine algorithm can be.
To be able to accurately quantify web content, the content that must be the sole influencer.
The human signal remains pure and is the product of each individual who makes the decision to create each social signal they produce.
It can of course be mimicked by software designed to act like humans, although such software is unable to replicate the nuance and detail which human social signals produce. We see this in software designed to inflate social media accounts such as Twitter, Pinterest etc. Although they aid to give some signal, it is one of very low quality and easily identified.
The human social signal can also bought. In large offshore setups, low paid workers toil in Internet factories creating social signals to order for clients to gain advantage in search engine rankings. Similar offshore factories already exist to build links in forums, blog comments etc.
Thus, the human social signal is noisy and contaminated and if Google is not able to identify and isolate the manipulated social signal then Google’s search engine rankings can be manipulated regardless of the quality of the content.
We may be seeing evidence that Google has somehow factored in a way to quantify the veracity of the social signal. I only have anecdotal evidence and is an educated guess, but it is the only way to determine whether the social signal is worth listening to. And also Google does give us clues on the direction of how their search engine is going to work.
It has gone beyond Google simply listening to the social signal, all social signals must now be quantified if they are to be of any use and authorship is one way to do this. If Google knows who wrote the article and who is responding to the article it can in someway more accurately predict the quality of the social signal.
For example, if an SEO agency writes an article and someone else calls it “Awesome”, that is a signal. But if Google then works out that the person works for the SEO agency, or constantly calls the content which the SEO agency produces “Awesome”, then the signal needs to be quantified to be accurate.
I have noticed this behavior on Twitter and it feeds into my study of the tribal psychology that exists on Twitter and social media. A certain website will release an article, its immediate employees respond in an unnaturally hyped up fashion, the approbation cascades down to partner companies and individuals seeking attention and validation from association.
Sometimes the content is excellent, sometimes it is mediocre and yet the same applause emanates from the same individuals creating a never ending stream of hype. It is only when the content is viewed by dispassionate readers that we are able to assess its true quality and quantify it. Therefore if Google were to determine the quality of the content it would have to apply a filter to those who express relentless, sycophantic adoration.
If Google knows who is initiating the social signal it will be able to build an algorithm around the data it knows about the signal. If it knows the author and if they have given their data to the Google database voluntarily or not then the Company can perform a correct quantification of the social signal and even the link signal if it comes from a website or webpage soley in the control of the the author.
Therefore, we may be seeing a way that Google has accurately determined which is quality content and also which are quality links.
It may even determine that if the author is not in their database their signal cannot be correctly quantified and must be treated accordingly.
This may already be happening with the data Google has in its database from its G+ system. It may that this so called “social network” is not a social network at all, but more of a way for Google to acquire an accurate human social signal in relation to web content
In conclusion, it is essential that websites continue to produce high quality content, defined by the viewer who is independent of any benefits which may come to the website which hosts the content.
The content must be judged by the reaction of those outside of the tribe if it is to be regarded as high quality or not.
You cannot build natural links.
You cannot build organic links.
You can only build content that attracts, that persuades that can be promoted.
But wait, all the seo industry keep banging on about how you must build natural this and organic that.
Understand this, “we are not discussing peaches”.
And I love a good peach.
Quite simply, and I hate to say this as I have a lot of mates (and I even do it myself) do the natural-organic, link build shuffle. The reason it exists is one of marketing speak and oh how marketers love to create jargon.
In other words, it’s guff.
Marketing guff.
And it’s very effective marketing guff.
As an industry we need to label complex, machine based processes with easy to use fluffy, psuedo hippy terms like “organic”. This helps us sell a service that is imperfect, and hide the fact that we don’t totally know what the hell is going on because Google wont tell us. Of course you wouldn’t think that if you read most seo blogs as most present pure guess work as ironclad fact.
Google will hint that we need to build fields of lush, verdant organic links without a tinge of blackhat (another guff word) pesticide.
The problem with this is the language that marketing people use. But Google is run run by engineers and what we are dealing with is a highly engineered, efficient machine.
Get it into your heads.
Google is a machine.
What the hell is organic about that?
Building natural links is an oxymoron.
Is it better to suggest we need to build links that the machine “thinks” is natural.?
Machines are process led, they repeat tasks, they create patterns. Not that you could possibly backward engineer the Google algo . It is one of the most incredible things man has created, I could throw out some mind blowing stats here but you probably already know.
The point is:
We build content for people.
We try to build content for the machine.
Time for us to try to stop doing both.
Web content should be designed to make people gasp, not for a bot to judge with ones or zeroes.
If you do Both INbound and OUTbound marketing does that make you an Absolute Bounder?
“I say old chap, what an absolute bounder.”
Absolute Bounder
A few years ago I made the joke about Google buying digg.com and turning it into an affiliate site for gardening products.
After Google has now become a credit card affiliate and giving itself preferred ranking in its search engine it seems it is now competing with the very same sites it has indexed in its search engine.
Moneysupermarket.com gets a third of its revenue from Google organic searches and investment analysts are warning that Googles move into making money from credit card sales could wipe out two-thirds of moneysupermarket.com’s earnings. And the share price has dropped 8.1 per cent lower at 116.2p, its sharpest daily fall in four years.
Does this mean it’s the right time for those relying on Google to seek viable alternatives? But as Google has a virtual monopoly on internet search it’s difficult to see where else to go.
It’s one thing when a website has to worry about another competitor setting up a website, but when Google squats its Billion dollar corporate ass over your niche you may as well pack up and go home.
Time to think beyond Google
If you have been gripped by the Leveson Inquiry into Media Ethics as I have, you will have noticed that the lead council, Robert Jay Q.C. has a certain way of speaking and asking questions.
Yesterday a meme started on Twitter querying pop lyricists in the style of Robert Jay
“You may call it ‘sexual healing’, Dr Gaye, but I contend that some would consider it ‘serious medical malpractice’.” #popleveson
All of the boys, Ms Kelis? That is an extremely expansive claim for any dairy product. #popleveson
“You continue to blame it on the boogie, Mr Jackson. But evidence suggests that sunshine, moonlight & good times played a part” #popleveson
RT @janinegibson: I will remind you again, Miss Morrissette, that we are pursuing irony here and not mere inconvenience. #popleveson
RT @giantteddi: RT @DavidBlackm0re: “I will ask you again, and remember you are under oath – who let the dogs out? #PopLeveson
RT @johnmitchinson: Mr Bono, let me put it to you that the streets did indeed have names but that you have conveniently decided to forget them. #popleveson
Big-legged ladies lack soul? Seriously Mr Zeppelin, do you expect the court to accept such nonsensical assertions? #PopLeveson
RT @politicalhackuk: And did you honestly believe that rock and roll was an adequate foundation for a city of this size? #popleveson
Too vague Ms Turner, the depth of a river or altitude of a mountain has little relevance, exactly how close were you? #popleveson
RT @robdrummond: “I put it to you Mr Dury that you did indeed ask to be hit with said rhythm stick on a number of occasions, at varying speeds” #popleveson
RT @limeandonion: “Mr. Lennon, you are either an eggman or a walrus. You cannot be both, can you, surely?” #popleveson
If as you claim ‘you don’t like reggae’, why only moments later do you state ‘you love it’? #popleveson
“You continue to blame it on the boogie, Mr Jackson. But evidence suggests that sunshine, moonlight & good times played a part” #popleveson
Mr. Marley. I put it to you that if you did shoot the sheriff, you must also have been present for the shooting of his deputy. #popleveson
Mr Rotten, what evidence do you present that her majesty is directly responsible for your lack of education? #popleveson
Am I right in assuming Mr Joel that, despite all the evidence of arson that stands before you, you still deny starting the fire? #popleveson
RT @RevRichardColes: I ask you again: do you, or do you not, remember the good old days before the ghost town? #PopLeveson
The purpose of this post is to test a new curation tool that I will be using when offering the Web Content News Feed service. Currently it’s going out on Linkbait Coaching, but I will be offering it as a stand alone product to help with content creation ideas, ultimately leading to more links and attention.
My job is mostly about being creative, coming up with web content ideas, creating headlines, writing copy etc. It’s usually quite easy for me to do this and I have always thought that this could be taught, which is what I do at Linkbait Coaching.
Because I feel that it’s simply about having the right mind set, being in the correct mode and not having to be some mad creative genius.
Today I came across a video that reinforced everything that I believe about being creative. The video is by John Cleese, and it is well worth watching. But if you are in a hurry I had jotted down some notes below.
<- Notes begin
"Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating", John Cleese
Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have, it is absolutely unrelated to IQ as long as you are above a minimum.
The most creative people simply have developed a facility to get into a certain mood or way of operating to allow there natural creative to function. In other words an ability to play and to play for it’s own sake.
The closed mode is a business at work mode, but it is not creative. The open mode is more playful there is no pressure, there is time to play.
Open mode is the curiosity
We need to be in the open mode to ponder a problem, but then switch to the closed mode to implement it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its effectiveness.
There are certain conditions that are conducive to the open mode
Space
Time
Time
Confidence
Humour
Space and time is needed for unlimited play
It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent and it’s easier to do little things than things we are not sure of.
Most creative professionals are prepared to spend more time with a problem and so create more creative and original solutions.
Keep you mind gently around the problem
Notes end->
I strongly suggest you watch the video if in any way you are connected to creativity. I provide the open mind, the playful creative space. If you find creativity difficult when it comes to content creation and mostly want to get on with implementation then you can hire the creative aspect at Linkbait Coaching.
We are always playing and always have a free roaming mind generating threads and threads of creative goodness on the forums.
Sometimes it simply makes sense to hire a specialist than to try and muddle through.
Don’t sell
Teach