While attending an SES session last week I decided to put together some linkbait. The session itself wasn't particularly interesting and inspiration had struck so I figured I'd make better use of my time and write some kind of guide or howto article. The result was the 5 HTML elements you probably never use blog entry. My original plan was to launch it prior to Rand's linkbait session and then he could cite it as proof of concept, not that proof was needed but I thought it'd still be a cool idea if he could pull up Digg's front page mid-presentation and have our stuff on there. Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the entry before his session so I just held off until monday. Timing our popularity so we were on the front page around the same time as his presentation would have been really tricky as well.
The linkbait was a success, making it to the front pages of Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Digg. The results were rather interesting this time around: Reddit, who I had thought to be a bit of an underdog in the sphere, sent far more traffic than del.icio.us. Digg didn't catch on at first, we only had a handful of diggs for the first few days until last night when it spiked up to several hundred and eventually peaked at almost 3,000 diggs. This late spike at digg also caused our del.icio.us bookmarks to go up dramatically, putting us on del.icio.us popular for the second time in two days.
I was really impressed with the quality of commentary from the users at Reddit. They're not nearly as as trigger happy as the Digg crowd and the feedback was excellent. Watching Digg Swarm was pretty cool this time around, too. Digg swarm basically renders in flash which articles are popular on digg and shows what content users are flocking around. Jeff showed it to me a few days ago and I didn't really think much of it until yesterday evening when my entry was at the center of the swarm:
If your site ever makes Digg's front page, I highly recommend checking out the swarm - it's addicting stuff.
As some of you may have noticed I stuck a few text-link-ads affiliate banners on the HTML elements blog entry (you only see them if you aren't logged in). I wanted to experiment and see if I could monetize some of the traffic. I knew ahead of time digg/delicious/etc users don't click on ads, but I figured I'd give it a shot. The results weren't surprising. Out of 60,000 page views about 100 people clicked on the ad. This has made me wonder how tech-centric sites like Digg hope to subsist on online advertising alone. Clearly their users (myself included), very rarely click on advertising.
Despite this, linkbaiting is still an amazing marketing strategy. Our efforts managed to put the SEOmoz brand in front of thousands of webmaster with no real overhead cost to us. The entry itself took only a few hours to put together and the result is a higher industry profile and a few thousand natural links. How's that for ROI on my time? :)
Submit this Digg Story to Diggtrends for even MORE mileage https://diggtrends.com/stats.aspx?entry=52
They are spotlighting another 4 day delay in getting to the homepage
Matt, I'm not surprised by the CTR at all. In fact its something a lot of people are aware of. I expanded on the idea of ads not working and what else digg could do in an article I wrote last week: https://www.thejasonmurphyshow.com/index.php/2...
BTW - that was me that submitted to reddit. ;) Also submitted to netscape and newsvine. Kinda surprised (kinda not too) that they didn't pick up like the others.
Yep, and you guys do well at this Rand.
Link baiting minions on Digg and other trashy places is ok, link baiting other SEO's is not cool in my book.
Just an opinion, I find some linkbaits a bit insulting and I visit people's blogs less when they use trickery as a tactic too much.
As my friend graywolf said today, "Use Nicks 80/20 rule" and you can see in my blog I sometimes go 100% nasty on people too often and a great silence comes over it for a few days. :)
Anyhoo, I do not consider your link bait a link bait Oatmeal, it was a well written blog post with good information even if it was not useful to other internet marketers and webmasters who have been there and done that.
Funny you should say that, I was actually going to start my entry by explaining that just because I call something linkbait doesn't mean I'm simply baiting the users into linking to my site. Linkbait is a bad name for it. The article was informative and useful, not just some quick trick to grab the digg crowd.
Another good example is the page strength tool. A lot of the feedback I got from seasoned SEOs was along the lines of "Nice linkbait!" or "that'll get you some links." Although it will and that certainly was a consideration when we constructed it, the primary drive behind it was to provide value to the SEO community.
IMO, what you're talking about Aaron is not linkbait. Linkbait to me needs to be positive, insightful, and re-enforce brand as well as get links. That's why we almost never take the antagonism or retaliation type angles with our work - it's just not good for the brand.
Linkbait to me only really works when you're building brand equity along with your links. Most of our SEOmoz linkbait has the primary goal of increasing the exposure and readership of the blog (as you can clearly see that we don't monetize the site). What we really want is more RSS subscribers and daily readers and more folks to comment on the posts and help to make them more valuable. There's obviously selfish interests that accompany these, but SEOmoz really relies on the power of goodwill to build its brand and fuel financial growth.
I'm interested in seeing what kind of backlinks you get from this experiment. Rand and others have suggested that this is a good technique to get links to your site.
Doing a search on Google for "5 HTML elements you probably never use" returns 172 results but a lot of them are just news feed type listings syndicated from Digg. I do see some blog postings and backlinks to the article (and some idiot is copying your entire seomoz blog... lol). I'm sure more links will show up later after they get indexed.
I'm not surprised at all by the CTR of your ads. Tech people don't click on ads.
My big question is this: It's easy to linkbait with a tech geek topic... how do you create linkbait for something that is not tech related?
Is it possible? (Besides coming up some exaggerated offbeat/odd/funny type topic.)
It's possible to linkbait for non tech topics, we actually provide it as a service to our clients. Keep in mind that linkbaiting doesn't necessarily have to apply to the social bookmarking crowds (digg, delicious), it can apply to many other mediums, both online and offline. Offline linkbaiting is pretty much viral marketing.