Jamdo Marketing Blog

Getting links to your blog or site is at the very heart of your SEO and traffic efforts. One of the better strategies for getting the links is linkbaiting - the art of producing content so good that other bloggers and sites are compelled to link to it without being asked.

Linkbaiting has become so popular among marketers and SEOs that some SEO companies charge up to $10,000 for a link baiting campaign and many believe that constant link baiting can be so effective that it will propel them to the top of the search engines in very competitive niches if done properly.

In short it is a good strategy to get links.

But do some people take that a bit too far?

Recently a fairly well known internet marketer made a post about an eploit he discovered in the search engines. The exploit allowed him to get his link on the pages of some very highly trafficked sites.

The post drew the attention of a few other bloggers and got him some incoming links and quite a few comments.

The problem?

He was lying.

This managed to upset a few people.

Now, this one post obviously had the desired effect - it got people talking and linking.

But was it worth it?

I don’t think so.

I think the post may have damaged the credibility of his blog and in the future he will probably have a harder time convincing people to link to him. He has damaged the credibility of his blog. (If the link bait was a one off page where long term credibility was not so important, this may not be such an issue).

Why would I, as a blogger,  link to a blog with a history of lies that makes me look like an idiot who fell for the lies in front of my readers?

In short, I wouldn’t.

I would therefore encourage people to be very careful about misleading linkbait on their blogs.

After all, the credibility of a blog is really its main value.

Technorati Tags: linkbait, seo

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If I want to read what Darren Rowse or John Chow think I will visit their damn blogs.

The thing is that lately there are a lot of new blogs about online marketing and blogging popping up everywhere - just check out MyBlogLog to see them all.

The problem is that 80% seem to be based on rehashing points from problogger.net and johnchow.com or telling us what John or Darren are saying - this makes those new blogs b-o-r-i-n-g!!!

As I said, if I want to know what those guys think, I will go straight to the source.

I come to a new blog, because I want a unique insight into what the author thinks about blogging and online marketing. A new author’s opinion, even if they don’t make as much as those big guys, is what makes a new blog unique and worth visiting.

That’s not to say don’t mention the big bloggers, but a good blogger always adds some unique perspective to another blogger’s ideas when they mention them. Tell your readers why what John Chow says matters to them and how your readers (who are probably different to John’s readers) can adapt that information to their specific needs.

A little orginality in your blog will go a long way to retaining your readers and getting you some more RSS sunscribers.

Technorati Tags: john chow, darren rowse, copycat

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Headlines are a great way to draw in readership and establish your writing and yourself as an authority on a subject. Skillful headline writing can increase the conversion rates of a sales letter by a huge margin too.

Unfortunately, headlines can also damage your credibility.

I was doing my daily Bloglines rounds this morning and came accross an interesting post from the Internet Marketing Watch which is a news roundup of what is happening in the world of internet marketing. It is updated 20 or 30 times a day and sometimes there is a gem among the rubbish.

One of their posts this morning caught my eye - How to Write Your Own eBook in 7 Days. A nice headline and, as I am working on an ebook, it piqued my interest. The 7 day claim is probably a bit of an exaggeration for someone who has a fulltime job, but often “how to” posts will at least include some relatively interesting or useful advice.

So I decided to visit the post directly as the feed was only partial.

It was just a short paragraph informing their readers that a guy names Joe Vitale had written a blog post on how to write an ebook in 7 days. I followed the link to this blog post from Joe.

And that was it. A post telling me he has sold lots of copies of this ebook and a link to the sales letter page. There was not a single tip on writing, organisation or ebook publishing. Nothing.

To be blunt, that pissed me off.

The title promised me “How to Write an Ebook in 7 Days” and effectively tricked me into visiting the blog. What a waste of time.

And there is the crux of the matter.

If you make a promise in your title, then you should live up to it.

By tricking me, Joe has done himself a disservice. I follow about 140 marketing blog feeds and have purchased items from many of them over the course of several years. But now I am wary of buying from Joe.

That’s not to say I will never buy from him or read his blog again. But in this particular instance he lost an opportunity to convert me (a very targeted prospect) into a regular reader and potentially a customer.

That is not a good start and could have been avoided by thinking about that headline.

Further Resources:

Blog Titles are Ads (Emphasises trust and reputation as factors in headline writing - Performancing)
Magnetic Headlines (A Series from Copy Blogger)
Writing Headlines That Get Results (Copy Blogger)
Using Titles Effectively on Blogs (Pro Blogger)
Titles are Everything (Pro Blogger)

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Most searches using a search engines do not use a single word. In fact using a single word to find what you are looking for on a search engine is a great way to be bogged down in a quagmire of irrelevant search results.

Ignat over at SEO Blog recently brought to my attention some statistics that reflect these facts. The vast majority of searches on the main search engines are carried out using two, three and four word phrases. Certainly that is a better way to narrow down a search and get some relevant results.

But what does it mean to us bloggers?

A few months ago, I started a blog on a newsy type of topic. It wasn’t a money making venture - more a labour of interest. It is starting to get some nice search engine traffic, but there is something that I have noticed by going through my statistics and logs (I use AW Stats and Performancing Metrics).

I get a lot of searches for people’s names.

In fact, the vast majority of the search engine traffic I get are from people looking for information on the people I am blogging about.

The great thing too, is that because my blog is a news type blog, I have a very good chance of getting to the top of search results for the names of people that I write about - largely because nobody else has written much about them or possibly hasn’t optimised their pages to show up in the search results for those names. That is because it is a breaking news blog - to an extent.

So how am I doing it?

When I find a blog-worthy story about a person, I optimise my post for their name. I will always use their name in the title, the first sentence and liberally throughtout my post. If there is some interesting online information about the person, then I make sure that I link to it, using their name as the anchor text, if possible. I also make sure that my internal linking strategy has links that point to my new post using the name of the person as anchor text. Basically solid blog SEO.

One other thing is that if the person’s full name has three names - like John Adam Smith, then it is easier to rank for the full name rather than just John Smith. This brings in more traffic as most sites will optimise for the shorter version.

Then I forget about it and move onto the next thing.

The great thing is that Google spiders my site daily, because there are always new stories. The indexing of a new story rarely takes more than 3 days and usually my site is in the top three for the name of the person I optimised for.

That’s a very easy way to get a lot of search engine traffic.

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Getting people to visit your blog in the first place take a bit of work. In order to maximise the benefit of that work, getting them to hang around on your blog for longer than just the first page should be one of your goals.

That means making your blog “sticky.”

Stickiness is simply a factor of making your blog more ttractive to visitors as a means to increasing the amount of page views per visitor.

By having people stay on your blog for longer you increase your chances fo being able to turn them into repeat visitors and your also help the profitablity of your blog.

There are quite a few little things that you can do to encourage people to stay longer by making your blog sticky.

1) Content

The most obvious of these is to have compelling content. If you can wow your vsiitors with the first blog entry that they read of yours, then the chances are that they are going to stay around and read a few more. Spending a little extra time making sure you create good content will pay major dividends in the future.

There are a few ways to go about improving your content. Usually its a case of doing good research and writing a comprehensive summary of that. You should also employ good blog writing techniques and make sure that your linking strategy is a major benefit to your readers. Your goal should be to entertain your readers and give them what they were looking for when they arrived. Hoopefully then, they will stick around for more.

2) Similar Stories

People usually start reading a blog post for one reason and one reason alone - interest. Whether that interest is personal, academic or professional they are always looking for something that they think they might find in that blog post. You need to take advantage of that.

The easiest way is to give them more of the same thing. That means showing them similar articles to the one they are reading in the hope that those similar articles might also spark their interest and get them to read them also.

One very popular tool for this is the Related Entries Wordpress plugin (for Wordpress blogs). It will show your visitor a list of similar articles from your blog that they might also enjoy. The list is usually placed at the end of your blog post. This spot is a hotspot for getting a good click through rate so you should use it.

3) Internal Linking Strategy

If you are unable or don’t wish to install that plugin (and even if you do install it), then you should employ a good internal linking strategy. That means linking to your other posts from within the body of your blog post. To make maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that the link anchor text is relevant and explains what the reader can expect to find if they click on the link. Don’t forget to also keep the principals of good blog SEO in mind when you are deciding on your anchor text.

If you want, you can also mention other articles you have written in your concluding paragraph that relate to the current article (with links). If you spell it out for your readers, you will get a good response!

As a further part of your internal linking strategy, you may also wish to highlight popular or posts or posts that you think will grab people’s interest. There are a few ways to do this. You can get a “most popular” posts plugin for wordpress called MostWanted (also require the StatTraq plugin), which assesses the popularity of posts based on how often people view each post. Alternatively you can manually put the links to your posts in a prominent position (Problogger does this well with his best posts in the header of the page). In general, I would favour the second option as it gives you more control and also because your most popular stories often gain popularity throught the search engines for topics that are tangental or unrelated to the theme of your blog.

4) Newsletter

Having some way to bring people back to your blog is good too. A newsletter is probably the obvious way here. You need to put the subscription box in a prominent position and let your readers know about it. Jamdo uses Zookoda. You can set it up to automatically inform your subscribers of new posts so there is minimum input required on your part after the intial setup. It will help you keep people coming back.

Concluding Thoughts

Blog stickiness doesn’t end with these tips. There are literally hundreds of things you can do to keep people on your site. Interactivity such as polls and having a pretty design are a couple that spring to mind that I won’t go into here. But remember to keep testing new things and responding to the behaviour of your audience.

This is a process fo evolution and very few people are able to have a perfect blog straight off the starting block. But if you keep improving things on your blog, your audience will appreciate it.

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, plugins, zookoda

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