Content Building for Links
SECTION X
Searching for Content Gaps
Brainstorming Desirable Content
Concepts, Tactics and Styles
Linkbaiting & Viral Media
Okay, okay…you get it: The best way to get good links is to create good content. Enough already! Believe it or not, there is more to this. While good content will tend to get good links, there are strategies you can use to build content specifically designed to get links.
Searching for Content Gaps:
If you’ve followed the advice up to this point, you’ve identified the major players in your niche and you actively participate in forums, groups, posts and blog comments. In all of this research and activity you may start to notice certain trends and questions emerge. If your peers or customers are wondering about a certain topic, wishing for a certain product or tool, or generally speculating about a particular aspect of your industry; they are telling you exactly what kind of content they’d like to read and link to!
If you are astute, clever and quick, you can reap huge rewards by creating content to fill the gaps in what’s currently available. Give the people what they want; it’s really that simple. This doesn’t have to be life changing, industry revolutionizing content. It can be short, it can be humorous, it can be tangential to existing material, it just has to be different from what’s out there at the moment and it has to be something people have indicated they’d like to see. Use the politician’s model: for every one person who takes the time to voice their interest or concern in something, there are 10,000 that feel the same way.
If you see several people discussing how nice it would be if there were a tool that found the number of occurrences of the 20 most frequent keywords on a page, for instance, you could build that tool and watch them flock to your site.
Brainstorming Desirable Content:
All linkworthy content doesn’t have to begin as a eureka! moment gleaned from a stray blog comment. You should regularly sit down and brainstorm content ideas.
Don’t rule anything out in these sessions. Write down every bizarre little whim that comes to mind. While it may seem implausible at first, often you can repurpose or modify the idea into something really great. Let your creative juices flow freely.
Once you’ve squeezed every last drop of creative juice from your brain it’s time to focus, channel and filter everything. Are there ideas that are time-sensitive? What about concepts that can wait for an appropriate bit of news? Which type of content is each idea best suited to: Blog posts, viral marketing, featured articles, tools, press releases? Are you sure? Is there a better way to execute the idea? Would the concept work better for other content you want to cover?
You should look at every idea for both its concept/style (e.g. top ten list, how-to guide, article, tool, etc.) as well as its content/subject matter (e.g. pirates, ninjas, computer viruses, pirate viruses, ninja computers, etc.). These are building blocks, feel free to mix and match.
Concepts, Tactics and Styles:
There are certain concepts that tend to work particularly well for attracting attention and links. As we’ve said, you can plug different content into these style-templates in hundreds of different ways. Some of the most effective and popular concepts for presenting content include:
- Web Tools: handy applications that perform, streamline or aggregate normally tedious tasks.
- Widgets: embeddable code or images people can put on their page to calculate or present data (often output from a tool). Browser plugins fall somewhere between tools and widgets.
- Embedded Content: videos, podcasts, images…any cool, interesting or informative multimedia content on your page can be very popular.
- Beginner’s Guide to…: This can be serious or tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a popular and easily digested format.
- How to…: Much like a Beginner’s Guide.
- Top 10 Ways to…: Actually, lists of any length or manifestation are not only easy to build, but universally popular.
- Surveys: They’re interactive, they’re anonymous and they give instant feedback for people to comment on. (We suggest Wufoo.com for easy-to-make forms)
- Polls: Same as surveys. (We suggest Polldaddy.com for free polls)
- Contests: Everyone loves to win things and/or be recognized as the best. Give away something (anything) or offer an ego-boost to one or more lucky winners and you’ll get attention yourself.
- Multiple Expert Opinions: Gather a panel of experts and get them to talk about something. If they offer support of conventional wisdom, you’ve provided conclusive proof! If they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, you’ve made the sky fall! If they disagree, the sky might be falling!
- Interviews: Much in the vein of expert opinions, interviews can be even better if you include them as a video or podcast. Keep in mind that the more well-recognized or famous the participant, the more links you’re likely to receive.
- Encyclopedia-style Articles: Can’t find any experts? Nobody has a well-defined opinion? Create your own! Become an authoritative source to explain an obscure or confusing topic. Then make a page for it on Wikipedia and link back to yourself.
- Awards or Recognition: Create a series of awards or superlatives for your field and hand them out. This works best once you have an audience, but everyone will want to receive it and those who win will link back to you to acknowledge the kudos you’ve given them.
Capture of Top 10 Most Popular Stories on Digg – Notice numbered lists at the 2, 4 and 7 spots:
Linkbaiting & Viral Media:
Linkbaiting is the concept of creating content primarily for the purpose of gaining links. This is an incredibly effective link building strategy and is relatively simple in concept, but not always easy in execution.
Large social media and bookmarking portals such as Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, BoingBoing and others are widely read by tech-savvy audiences that tend to be more than willing to give out links to content they find valuable, interesting or amusing (most of the concepts above are usual suspects). Getting your story or tool on the front page of Digg could be worth hundreds of links in just a day or two.
Any potentially viral content (content that makes its way quickly around the web by word of mouth or, more appropriately, word of blog) can make for good linkbait. Due diligence is required to figure out what tends to gain traction at different sites and then designing something you think will be popular with a portal’s readers. Be warned: getting on the front page of these sites can result in thousands of visitors per hour. Make sure your server can handle the load or your visitors will be greeted with various errors instead of your brilliant content.
Rand very succinctly outlined the four stages of a successful linkbait campaign in his article on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog:
Stage 1: Linkbait LaunchThe content is released, shared with prominent bloggers, and submitted to portals like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Netscape.
Stage 2: The Long Tail of LinksIf the content gains traction and visibility at widely-read sites, medium and smaller outlets and personal blogs will likely point to it, and RSS feeds of the link and content will spread across the Web.
Stage 3: Residual Traffic and AttentionEven after the initial buzz from your successful linkbait campaign dies down, your site’s traffic may stay on a slight increase due to a “linkbait bump” that keeps users circling back to your site.
Stage 4: Search Engine RankingsThe massive influx of links will cause a direct boost of the link popularity of the content piece, as well as an overall boost in global site popularity—and search engines tend to reward links with rankings.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment