SEO Blog

Buzz Marketing Link Bait Ideas

I’ve been trying to come up with a formula for success in creating link bait for our clients. The best thing to do for me has been to read the book “Buzz Marketing” by Mark Hughes. Mark was the former Marketing Director at Half.com, who had the town of Halfway Oregon rename itself to “Half.com” as part of the buzz marketing/link bait campaign.

Although Mark didn’t set out with creating a “link bait formula” when he wrote his book, the principles involved can be used very easily to create link bait.

Principle 1: Be Outrageous

Remember when Al Gore invented the Internet? That’s probably as much as I need to say on that principle. But I’m a small to medium sized business, you say, and I can’t think of anything outrageous about my sock puppets; you’re wrong. You just have to be willing to put up with the negative effects that might ride on the coat tails of some outrageous story.

Principle 2: Use a Celebrity

Britney Spears is a prime example of using celebrity status to further your agenda. But you are a small business, and you’re not famous. What if that sock puppet you make was used by Kid Rock’s nanny when he was growing up? Or maybe that fax service you provide was used to facilitate the negotiations between Russia and Germany in World War 2? (a stretch I know, but you get the idea)

Principle 3: Be Funny

This is the hardest but most profitable as far as risk vs. reward is concerned. The idea is to create a story that is so funny, people will just automatically start telling the story at the water cooler at work, or in the lunch room or on breaks. Like I said, this one is hard, but if you can pull it off, it’s pure gold. Sometimes making fun of yourself is the easiest way to be the funniest.

Principle 4: Do Something No One Else Has Done

This is where you’ve got the most leeway, because there are always lists, widgets, contests, prizes, and much more that no one else has done quite like you could. However, this principle doesn’t pack as much of a punch as you might expect from the other principles, just because you may have created a super de duper list of some kind, but there are already millions of lists, so yours has really got to stand out. I know you can do it though!

Principle 5: Be Controversial

Did TuPac really die, or is he holed up in his L.A. studio creating records still? Does Area 51 really exist? Does Scrapbooking paper really cure Alzheimer’s? (No it doesn’t by the way) Having a good team of lawyers will increase your likelihood of being safe with this one. That guerilla marketing campaign in Boston with the electronic bomb looking thing flipping the bird; Controversial. Your latest product release with New and Improved flavor; Not Controversial.

Principle 6: Be The Underdog

ClearPlay wins the award for best Underdog. The DGA and studios filed a lawsuit in 2002 against ClearPlay and a Colorado video rental store, CleanFlicks, which uses its own software to decode a DVD, alter it for content, then burn a new, edited version, back onto a DVD for rental.

The lawsuit is still pending. ClearPlay contends its software is not illegal because it does not alter the original DVD. But the amount of press that ClearPlay got from that lawsuit couldn’t have been bought in 100 years. They took on one of the biggest entities in their industry and stuck it out and got huge publicity.

Overall, you’ll be the most successful with a linkbait idea that genuinely entertains, inspires, offers something brand new, or gets people talking. If you can combine one or more of the major principles above into your campaign, you are on the road to a successful link bait strategy.

Google Gets Flash-y

Until now, creating a site in Flash was a sure fire way to guarantee zero search engine visibility. Sure, there were things you could do like sIFR and SWFObject, but these and other work-arounds required some extra work and a level of expertise. Adobe just announced that they are working with Google and Yahoo to make Flash indexable to the search engines. This is a huge step that will certainly make a lot of graphic designers very happy. Don’t let this news lull you into a false sense of security. This doesn’t mean that Flash sites will all of a sudden shoot to the top of the rankings. In fact, all that will be indexed is the text elements of the Flash file, so you should pay close attention to the text you use. Many Flash sites use text sparingly (which is often why they used Flash in the first place), so you’ve still got a lot of SEO work ahead of you to see any kind of real results in terms of top rankings. You’ve still got to pick the right keywords and write strong content. Also, don’t start thinking Flash is the answer to all your problems. You should still use Flash sparingly, and only when it makes sense. You’ve still got issues with deep linking (they’re working on it), and other issues that are more easily solved with HTML pages, but at least Flash doesn’t suck as badly for SEO as it used to.

Google has already rolled this out and Yahoo is working on it and “expects to deliver improved Web search capabilities for SWF applications in a future update to Yahoo! Search.”

More on the topic:
Official Press Release from Adobe
More Details from Adobe
Main Google Blog
Google Webmaster Blog
TechCrunch
Battelle’s SearchBlog
Search Engine Land

Hitwise Data: Google Rules

From the Hitwise Press Release:

Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.

So, no surprise that Google continues to dominate, growing their market dominance to 68% of all searches. Ask.com was up slightly from April. MSN and Yahoo were both down.

In the UK, the dominance was even more pronounced, with Google taking 87% of all searches!