Not All Linkbait Is Shorterm
When customers come to us looking for linkbait, they are usually really looking for a short term spike in traffic from Digg or some other social media venue.
But the short term traffic spike from Digg is not worth very much on it’s own. In fact, there only two reasons that we continue to use Digg:
- Authority link snowballing
- Branding via Mainstream media recognition
Authority Link Snowballing
This is the idea that if your article is good enough to get a few solid mentions on some well read sources, you’ll likely get picked up by all the other sites that use them as sources. As an example, we recently had an article picked up by Sports Illustrated. Within an hour, the article was picked up by over 15 additional sports blogs. A few of those were powerful sites themselves, and resulted in even more coverage.
Snowballing is the idea that if you get noticed at the top, you’ll get noticed by even more people at the bottom. So your target should always be to capture the attention of big sites at the top of the mountain, so that smaller sites, on the way down the mountain, will notice you too. Starting at the top will allow you to gain momentum on your way down the mountain.
Digg is a good place to get noticed at the top of the mountain.
Mainstream Media Recognition
The fact of the matter is that a lot of new organizations carefully monitor Digg for interesting news stories that they can cover on their own websites. Often, these major media outlets will reference the original article that they see on Digg. Getting mentioned by Fox News or MTV can be brilliant for your brand and open a lot of doors. It ads to your credibility and makes others take you seriously.
Not All Linkbait Is Shorterm
At SeaWaves, when we develop linkbait, we like to think longterm, not short term. This is a strategy that is much more difficult for the client to grasp on a conceptual level, but let us explain.
The best longterm linkbait is a widely recognized, brandable website. To become widely recognized, you need to differentiate. You need to create quality resources that will draw attention to your website, not just in the short term, but over the long haul.
In addition to a regular dose of digg-bait, we recommend that our clients develop an ongoing series of resource landing pages. What’s a resource landing page? It’s basically a web page that organizes a comprehensive set of information about a particular topic, all in one place, and displays it in an attractive manner.
Ryan Caldwell over at Performancing has written up a resource landing page tutorial on the term tartans. What he shows you is how to integrate information, images, video and HTML code in such a way that helps you develop a solid resource for people interested in your topic.
By developing four solid resource pages per month, you will have close to 50 resource pages within 1 year. And by that time you will be well on your way to having the best type of linkbait possible: an authoritative website.