Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder, SEO-PR
Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz.org
Jennifer Slegg, CEO, JenSense.com
Aaron Kahlow, chairman and founder, Online Marketing Summit
How is a link magnet different than link bait?
Link bait: Content built to bring links in
Link magnet: Create a fundamental incentive to link; either emotionally or physically reward the linker to create an incentive.
The Web has become jaded. Think back to a few years ago. A great blog post would get 50,000 links from blogs in days. Now that same post would get about a dozen blog links, but a lot more people were linking in their social networks. Bloggers and journalists, or the “linkerati,” are smelling link bait and are suspicious.
The good news: people still link when it benefits them.
Thus, savvy marketers are rewarding linkers in non-financial ways. Yelp gave businesses an online Yelp badge that has great anchor text and links to that businesses profile. This earned them hundreds of thousands of super relevant links.
Ingredients in Link Magnet Soup
There’s an idea that great content gains links. He says this is a myth. It’s about branding and marketing and the ability to sell a concept, to nudge psychologically. That’s why content that rewards is so important.
Take Flickr for example. When you upload photos, you can license them for public use. People on the Web get their photos out there and used by others, and Flickr gets the links.
An Emotional & Obvious Hook
Twitter wasn’t on SEOmoz’s most linked to domains list two years ago. Now they are. People have an incentive to link to their own profile because they want followers. If you can play to the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (self-fulfillment, satisfaction, efficiency, effectiveness, utility, safety), people will link.
Targeted Links & Anchor Text
A lot of the time when you create embeddable badges or link opportunities, you have full control of the anchor text and ALT text.
Strategy for Promotion & Spread
Unless you have a distribution mechanism, your great content won’t get links. Here are examples:
Vimeo: The video player looks really good. They’ve worked hard on upload speed. They allow for longer video embeds. When you try embed the video, you get an overlay that grays out the screen behind. That’s all good for users. What Vimeo gets out of embedded videos is three optimized links.
okcupid: They release lots of trends about what their users think of other users’ attractiveness and how often users message others. These trends are picked up by bloggers and media all the time. Virtually every company has statistical data in their niche that they can use to this effect.
Techmeme Leaderboard: A few hours after Techmeme released their Leaderboard of blogs, most of those blogs had linked to Techmeme to point out their accomplishment.
Next Aaron, @AaronKahlow, is going to wing his presentation because Rand went over time. He’s going to make this interactive.
He says first and foremost is having good content that’s informative or engaging. If you don’t have the content, there’s nothing worth linking to.
Next consider persona. Who are you and who do you want to be? Stick with it and be consistent, and be comfortable with who you are.
Then, think about how the content can be shared. Is this something that one of my colleagues would want to share on Facebook? Is it tweetable? Ask these questions every time and match your expectations with that.
Finally, consider who your friends are. Keep good company, in terms of who you’re linking to, and copy them. Then do better than they because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Suggestions:
Decide who your target market is and address them. You can’t geek out if your audience is not the geek. Think about who you’re tasking with the responsibility and make sure their content will match your audience interests.
Share and make it easy. Retweet buttons should be front and center. Leverage things like Facebook Connect and put these tools to good use. The blog is usually the most linkable content on a site. You don’t necessarily have to create the content if it’s a supporting strategy. It can be an RSS feed of other blogs and you’ll get the link back.
Decide what kind of magnet you want to be. SEO, marketing, PR, chick magnet… oh wait, maybe that last one isn’t covered in this session.
more: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2010/03/how-to-become-a-link-magnet-2/