Online Marketing Blog

On Thursday I’ll be presenting on a panel, “Beyond Linkbat: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online” with Chris Boggs and Sally Falkow. Sage Lewis will be moderating. I think this type of session is very timely as search engines begin to put more and more emphasis on higher quality and editorial link sources and less on sources that are easier to manipulate. Increasing competition online also means online branding and influence increase in their importance.

Online PR is a perfect solution for a topic that shines less light on tactics du jour, althought linkbaiting still works well, and more on leveraging the media and centers of influence online. I’ve written about how SEO and Online PR can work together in the past, but in this presentation I’ll be focusing on the Do’s and Don’ts of media relations and blogger relations.

When trying to describe link bait to someone outside the industry, it’s a bit hard to get the idea across. The problem is that link bait can be funny, sad, shocking, amazing and a bunch of other adjectives. Really, it’s not necessarily about what you create, it’s about the WOW factor.

The WOW factor is measured by your readers and how good they feel the story is. There is no way to know exactly how the public will react, even though sometimes you can estimate pretty well.

Think of it like the news. Millions of news events happen all the time, but how many do you actually see on TV? The big ones of course show up. With link bait, this is like taking someone that’s tops in your industry and having them do anything. More than likely, they’ll get lots of links out of it no matter how great it was. They have the following and so the WOW factor was imminent.

Here is a little fun for your Monday and it’s called HatBait.

What’s HatBait? Well it’s a fun little contest/promotional piece where Linda ambushed us all at SES in Chicago and asked us if we’d pose for her HatBait contest. Since she offered a free link, it was hard to resist.

Now she’s got them all up online and you get to vote for our favorite picture. Some look better than others and cows always rock!

Get your vote in by Wednesday and may the best hat picture win.

[tags]hatbait, linkbait[/tags]

SEO is constantly changing, but at the same time, the more things change the more they seem to stay the same.¬† Yesterday’s viral marketing becomes today’s linkbaiting. Despite changes in SEO tactics and nomenclature, the fundamentals stay the same: content and links. In order to keep up with these kinds of changes, smart online marketers are continuously revising tactics and execution to provide companies with a competitive advantage.

One of those tactics focuses on both content and links by promoting unique content that propagates virally through social news, blogs and network sites. This viral online marketing tactic is more commonly called “linkbaiting”. Regardless of what you call it, companies are starting to allocate marketing dollars to these tactics and search marketers are responding with new services.