And we are back from lunch! Everyone is slowly trickling in and chatting it up! Lots of people here from Bend, Oregon. Yay for Bend!
Dawn Foster from Faster Wonder is up first.
Why companies should participate
People - gives people a place to engage with your company
Product innovation - feedback
Evangelism - Help grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company. When coming from others (outside of the company) it has more impact.
Brand Loyalty - engagement can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products
Guiding Principles
Focus on the individuals - participate as a person, not a corporate entity. Don’t be like Walmart and create fictitious people.
Be Sincere
Participation Guidelines
Quietly monitor competitor’s communities and learn from them
Participate as a person with diverse interests
Talk about the industry first & your products second (become a thought leader for the industry)
Have a community manager. Someone to monitor what other people are talking about on the internet, moderate the blog, create content, etc.
Neil Patel of ACS is up:
What can we learn from Zappos? If you are an e commerce site, create a bag of crap and sell. Has to be a limited quantity. Cost should be very low. Make it like the lottery. Spread it through the blogosphere. Leverage Twitter and FriendFeed. If someone blogs about it, you can give them a bag for free.
Holiday Sales
Selected items for sale (1 or 2 - limited quantity). Up sell like crazy. Promote through social coupon sites such as deals.com.
Exclusive Channel Offers
One offer at a time. Limited quantities. Spread your offers out over time.
Branding Gimmicks
Putting your face on the dancing elfs. Everyone posted it on your blog and gains links. Has to be fun and entertaining. If a 10 year old would like it, it’s perfect. Don’t sell people. Have a company logo. Allow embed capabilities.
Email Scrapers (Tagged is a site to use)
Entice people to give you their email. Get their user name and password. Message their friends.
Widgets
Need to be useful, not just neat. Make it community oriented, easy to embed and tie it into your website.
Embargoes
Send it to everyone and say they can’t write about it until x date. They will all write it because they think everyone else is going to write it. Do something news worthy, write up an embargo, send it to bloggers, be careful about who you send it to - some bloggers don’t like each other.
Spam the Social Web
Submit affiliate links to social sites, link build to those pages and add comments to high ranking social sites.
Leverage Your Readers
Control your icons - don’t have 1,000 social media buttons. Test out social media buttons. Encourage your readers to participate in the social web and buy StumbleUpon traffic.
Matt Inman - Next Dating LLC
How did he have such success with his dating site - LinkBait! What is it? Content you create that gets people to link to you. Primary Benefit: Builds links and in turn elevates your search rankings.
He created a quiz - How Geek are you? This was his first content that truly went viral. He provided HTML badges that showed their Geek score. How many five year old could you take in a fight was the next quiz. Rick keyword links flow in!
Widgetbait Gone Wild - keep it relevant. If your site sells toasters, only make quizzes about toasters. Be careful what keywords you link back with. Don’t get in the news. Don’t get greedy. Google has been indisicive about their policy on this.
How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you - 14,000 links in less than a week!
Created a fake dating site called, zombie harmony, which was out ranking many of his competitors.
12 Juicy Linkbait tips:
Take commercial topic (your target keyword) and attach something geeky, fun or weird to it. Example: BBQ equipment - “What would your body taste like if barbequed?
Keep it simple
Getting on digg used to be 90% creativity, 10% promotion. Now it’s more like 60%/40%.
Don’t IM for stumbles, diggs, reddit upvotes. Instead, have them go to the category page and then vote
Latest rumor among linkbaiters is the IMing for stumbles doesn’t work.
Take some data and present it in an interesting way
Create a simple game and reward the user (freerice.com)
Don’t just write blogbait
Finding a linkbater - supper creative.
Keep your content benign - Make your linkbait appear non-commercial at first to aboid getting buried and encourage linkbuilding.
Check Out:
http://matthewinman.com/everything
Great Question from the Q&A:
What was your favorite linkbuilding endevor?
Matt Inman said that he managed a furniture website. He created a quiz in a half an hour called, “How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor?” Now they rank #1 for bunk beds.
What hasn’t worked for you?
Neil Patel said that things that are really intelligent and sophisticated that comes up with doesn’t do well. The stupid things are what people want to link to.
Dawn Foster says that the personal blog post get the most comments and links. The really good content doesn’t always create the buzz that you think it will.
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