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Making Link Bait Work For You

In marketing, you have one central task: Get attention that drives results. Pretty simple really, at least in theory. Online, the lion’s share of this process is generating links to your website or blog, which helps to gain ranking in the search engines and to generate brand awareness.

Do not underestimate that second element. The more brand awareness you generate, the more people search for you, the more it affects sales and/or leads.

Link baiting has been described as a kind of art form because, like art, what resonates with a group of people isn’t always predictable and certainly not controllable; only the after-effect – like book or box office sales – is measurable. But also like any creative endeavor, there are both guidelines to creation and case studies of what has worked in the past.

Wikipedia defines link bait this way: Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. You might be right to equate it to viral or word-of-mouth marketing, which is attracting more and more of the overall advertising spend each year.

I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links. Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time. If everything you ever say is controversial, it can be entertaining, but it’s harder to maintain credibility over the long haul.

Indeed, we should approach it positively. Controversy works, and is often called the Contrary/Attack/Evil "hook." It works like the villain in professional wrestling, or tension in great storytelling. People love a good fight, but if you’re seen as always the one picking the fight, they could sour on you rather quickly. 

Fear also works – writing or creating content with the intent of scaring people to death. People will sign up just to warn others, and you get not only the link-love, but a healthy dose of fear associated with your product or service, which may or may not be what you want.

Perhaps the most famous example that didn’t go negative – well, that could depend on your point of view – is Burger King’s Subservient Chicken. Most agree that whether or not it sold more chicken is moot. The special website was a smash success and Burger King generated a lot of attention for itself.

But my favorite (and more practical) example of a business using link bait to its advantage is the "Will It Blend" series of short videos from Blendtec, which can be viewed at YouTube, or at their homepage. The one where they drop an iPod into their blender has been viewed over 4.5 million times, favorited over 9,000 times, and has attracted over 7,700 comments.

These were two wildly successful examples, but we’ll leave you with the tried-and-true approaches developed by the link-bait experts out there, sans the negative ones. All of them are excellent ways to become part of the 3.5 billion daily conversations happening on the Web, at Digg, Reddit, YouTube, wherever.

The Resource Approach (Becoming the Expert In Your Field/Niche)

–    Create expert articles/lists/data sheets 
–    Create practical or fun tools
–    Write How-To articles
–    Create a comprehensive blog roll (give link love, get link love)
–    Compile informative news stories and articles

The News Approach

–    Get the scoop. Be first with industry news
–    Interview prominent people in your field
–    Investigate a hot topic
–    Do an exposé

The Humor/Novelty Approach

–    Post funny/interesting/amazing photos related to your industry
–    Create humorous/unique videos (Use Blendtec for inspiration)
–    Create lists; people love lists – Top 10 Ways to…; 10 Signs You’re…

But whatever you create as link bait, don’t just post and forget it. Send out emails to industry people, drop a link into Digg, post at YouTube. In short, take advantage of every medium at your disposal.

The "voice" delivering a message, along with its perceived authenticity, will become as powerful perhaps as the message or offer.

As media gets more saturated, we get better at filtering out garbage. Jakob Nielson’s article about writing articles instead of blog posts does a great job of explaining why writing fewer and more in depth articles is effective for gaining and keeping attention in a competitive marketplace.

On a related note, Frank just noticed a TV show skipping the TV and starting out on the web. There is no easier way to increased perceived authenticity than having a direct and open relationship with the audience.

IBM also offered research on the attention economy in a paper titled Vying for attention: the future of competing in media and entertainment. Rich Shefren recently created a mindmap of what he calls the Attention Age Doctrine, which shows why people are willing to pay larger premiums for great advice and nothing for decent advice.

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I overheard a startup that is making it easier for you to do that (hopefully we’ll get more on this in the next few weeks).

Martha Stewart is the latest to start her own ad network. It capitalizes on lifestyle and cooking sites that fit the Martha Stewart brand.

The network is called “Martha’s Circle,” and is forecast to generate around 20 million ad views a month. Sites belonging to the network include: Hostess with the Mostess, Charles and Hudson, 101 Cookbooks and Style Me Pretty. Advertisers include Ace Hardware, Bank of America, and Macy’s.

Example: Apartment Therapy’s site. It has five ad placements, and now two are from Martha’s Circle. The site earns money for the placements, and shares the revenue with Martha’s Circle. The other spots on the site Google AdSense ads. There are niche networks of all kinds and are said to convert at a higher rate because they are niche (highly targeted).

The advantage of working with an ad network is that you can monetize your bog or site with ads that match your content. It’s a win for ad networks as they can easily target a broad network of sites and blogs and work with one or a few networks rather than individual sites.

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Tag:

“I’m a ebay powerseller and getting into the niche marketing vibe.

Judging by the number of high dollar earnings screenshots I’m seeing, I’m planning to go into the internet marketing niche.

I worked hard to build my ebay business and am sure I can replicate the same in internet marketing.

Can you give me any suggestions?”

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My answer:

That’s the great thing about Internet Marketing, the ability to continually expand your focus and the ebay stats screenshots you sent me were pretty impressive too.

You might like to check out Super Affiliate Amit Mehta’s post “Selecting a niche is everything in affiliate marketing”

As an affiliate or a product creator, the biggest constraint you will face is time.

Like it or not, even outsourcing the bulk of your projects, you’ll need to closely monitor your ROI (return on investment) of your time which is limited to 24 hours a day.

This is what I mean:

If you’re working 12 hours day intially to build your business, you could be bringing in $20,000 – $50,000 a month as an affiliate marketer (leveraging on your previous experience as an eBay powerseller). Assuming you’re looking at a conservative 50% margin, that’s a $10,000 to $25,000 net profit off the bat.

Your hourly ROI is about $33.33 per hour (assuming the $10,000 is earned in 25 days a month, 12 hours a day) . At $25,000, your ROI works ou to about $83.88.
That’s the scenario for the “Internet Marketing niche”.

–

Now imagine you go into something with equally good potential, but with fewer competitiors (most new internet marketers inevitably choose the internet marketing or make money online niches…). A niche software product that most home users will benefit from – say a disk defragmentation software, an anti-virus software, or personal tax software.

[This is a theoretical scenario, so don’t take the numbers are concrete ones]

For the same 25 days a month, 12 hours a day, your profit could be $50,000 to $75,000 a month.

This could be due to fewer competitiors in your market, a higher degree of domain knowledge which keeps out “newbies” to this market, and lower marketing costs (eg. PPC bids costing much less than $5-10 a click found in ultra competitive niches).

What’s happened here?

For the same effort (time and resources), you’ve seen a quantum increase in your ROI (a minimum of 250%), so it has everything to do with profiling a niche and focusing on it.

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If anything when it comes to niches, the ones nobody talks about are the ones that will have the greatest market potential.

A little research before heading into any niche can help you best direct your resources.

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With social networks like Facebook and MySpace in the news a great deal, I find it interesting to get a sense of the depth of behind-the-scenes business planning going on and the role of PR in that planning.

According to BrandRepublic:

Facebook hunts UK agency
A dozen UK PR agencies have been approached by Facebook as it sets out to challenge MySpace’s dominance in Europe. Agencies including Mantra and Fishburn Hedges have been invited to present their credentials to coincide with Facebook’s opening of a London office later this month. It will then whittle the longlist down to a pitch shortlist of five.

LinkedIn brings in Bite to safeguard its niche
Business networking site LinkedIn has asked Bite to boost its UK profile as Facebook threatens its dominance in professional circles. Tech specialist Bite won a seven-way pitch against agencies including Lewis and Chameleon. The US-based site’s ­international director Liz O’Donnell did not deny that competition from Facebook was a motivating factor for Bite’s appointment. ‘We didn’t have any PR in the UK before,’ she said. ‘Some of it had to do with competition, and some was just raising our brand’s profile.’

And a related story about a social network that doesn’t look like one but is one:

Wag Ed to launch virtual trade site
Waggener Edstrom has won a brief to launch GameXa, a trading platform that allows online game players to buy and sell virtual currencies. The site currently caters to gamers playing the hugely popular World of Warcraft, which has more than 6.5 million registered players worldwide. World of Warcraft currently makes more money from selling virtual currency, ‘gold’, than from subscriptions to the game itself.

Add that one to the story about the recent credit card launch in Second Life and you get a strong view of the high-stakes business opportunities that will be be fought over in the coming months.

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When contemplating advertising on social networks (or indeed any other type of online advertising), you want to make sure to follow three simple rules. Target your advertising. Track your investment. Measure the success or failure. Keeping these three rules in mind, the following are areas to focus on when considering your own social network advertising and figuring your needs.

Searching for Networks

When searching for social networking sites to advertise on, there are a few things you need to take into consideration – primarily the traffic, the members, the niche, and the cost (more about this below). When contacted, sometimes social networks will give you general numbers on traffic and member base. Remember that on some networks, the member base is prominently displayed (such as on MySpace).

I previously put together a large list of social media sites; however, there are many more than these out there. Wikipedia has a list and Tropical SEO also has a list of niche social sites. Use these lists, but if you are truly serious about social network advertising, I would advise hitting the net with some additional searches. These are a great place to start, however.

What’s a Good CPM

CPM is going to be the usual base model for social network advertising. The range is actually pretty broad – from $3 CPM on MySpace to around $15-$25 on sites like Newsvine. Ten out of ten times there is room for negotiation, whether it is conducting an extended campaign for a price break or just lowering your CPM from $25 to $20. These companies want to make money and they want to help you in your online marketing needs. Finding the right CPM that fits your budget is going to be the tricky part.

Deciding Placement

Typically speaking, one of the best type of ads sold are a combination of two or more ads. Generally, you will see a leader board and a skyscraper or a leader board and a box unit with the same ad on it. Many times you will get a salesperson offering you a price break if you go for both. Depending on your ad budget, I would recomend doing a tandem ad placement. It really helps brand a page with your message.

Remember that you have a short period of time to catch someone’s attention, so having other messages on your targeted pages can cause confusion and divert a visitor’s eye and attention to something else.

In general, leader boards tend to be overlooked and underperform, so if you cannot do tandem, think about doing box units and skyscrapers.

Targeting Your Efforts

Go after niche social networking/media sites that have the type of audience you are targeting. If you are trying to sell newspapers, DON’T blow all your money on MySpace. Instead, give Newsvine a chance, etc.

Most social networks allow you to specify who to serve your ads to based on the configuration of their ad server. If your target demo is single women aged 18-35, then make sure you tell them this information, so they will be able to ONLY serve ads to that demographic. Always ask what the limitations on targeting are for their member base. Most of the social networks will have different things they can and cannot do.

Creating Incentivised Offers and Interesting Creatives

A mistake that I see more than 60% of the time is people doing banner advertising without incentivising their offer. This drastically can affect the click through and conversion rate on your advertising. Giving your viewers an incentive to click on the ad provides a potential client or conversion a reason to take action right away. For example, “this offer is only valid by clicking on the ad and not redeemable anywhere else.”

With banner advertising in particular, it is very likely that you will see low results, so whenever you have a chance to invoke a response … DO IT!

Leverage Multiple Metrics

The most important step in the entire process is leveraging multiple metrics. I have dealt with many social media sites doing banner advertising. These companies used impressive reporting (like DoubleClick, etc.); however, exactly what I needed to see was not in my reports and was not provided to me upon request. Be sure to set up your own internal tracking via a “tracking url” and leverage your internal web analytics cross-referenced with your tracking url cross-referenced with the social networking site’s reporting system.

If your goal for this campaign is conversions, be sure to set up your tracking url to follow a user to your goal page (thank you page). This will help greatly in determining whether or not your money was well spent or if you need to find a new online marketing plan.

Keep these tips in mind if you decide to experiment in social network advertising and don’t forget to keep up-to-date on the latest developments in this rapidly changing arena to stay ahead of the curve.

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CafeMom Mops Up $5 Million In Funding

“Moms are much more than a niche,” explained a press release.  “There are 40 million American moms with kids at home, they control 80% of household spending, and they are the primary customer for leading consumer brands across categories.  With more than 65 million pageviews and 1.7 million unique visits in July (up from 23 million PV and 750,000 UV at the end of Q1), CafeMom is already a leading destination on the web for mothers.”

And there you have it: those statistics answer the objections I usually raise to these types of stories.  Toss in a few high-profile advertisers – Playskool, Disney, and General Mills, for example – and we’re all set.

Dan Nova, a managing general partner at Highland Capital Partners, stated, “We are delighted to invest in CafeMom to rapidly grow the Company’s traffic and revenues,” and you can’t blame the guy.  Highland Capital participated in Metacafe’s recent $30 million financing round, by the way, so CafeMom would appear to have its foot stuck in the door of a very wealthy firm.

Also, VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall notes, “Women-oriented sites are experiencing robust growth . . . suggesting this is a good a time as any for the company to get a second wind.”

Get Rich With A Niche

When it comes to online advertising effectiveness, the tradeoff between reach and efficiency makes for a challenge for advertisers.

Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, had a couple of his posts on ad networks regarding reach, efficiency, and other topics combined into a nice, lengthy read on ]]> http://www.webpronews.com/get-rich-with-a-niche-2007-07/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/the-next-myspace-could-be-a-cluster-bomb-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/the-next-myspace-could-be-a-cluster-bomb-2007-07#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:29:01 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=39316 The rise of the social network has caused the rise of other, perhaps predictable, things: copycat networks; and investor curiosity. Blame MySpace and Facebook. Blame (or congratulate) Hi5, known, apparently, everywhere but the US, for extracting $20 million out of venture capitalists.
]]> The rise of the social network has caused the rise of other, perhaps predictable, things: copycat networks; and investor curiosity. Blame MySpace and Facebook. Blame (or congratulate) Hi5, known, apparently, everywhere but the US, for extracting $20 million out of venture capitalists.

Blame early-stage venture capitalist firm Lightspeed and partner Jeremy Liew for getting me started on this.

I say this might be predictable because we see it in every other market: something is a smash, surprising success, incredibly or potentially profitable, and all kinds of somethings just like it pop up to ride the wave until the public can’t stand it anymore.

Cases in point: every search engine that came along after Google; every new YouTube-esque video site; every reality show sneezed out of LA after Survivor; every hottie bottle-blonde teen pop sensation to ever walk off the stage of the Mouseketeer’s Club.

Oh yeah, and the Spice Girls.

Point is, they offer nothing new.

Mr. Liew, whom I said you could blame, was prompted by Hi5′s funding success and did some digging to find out which social networks out there had the highest user engagement.

That’s an interesting choice because it is indicative of where metrics are truly going. It’s not just about unique visitors anymore. It’s also about time spent with potential consumers. A hundred broke customers are worth far less to marketers than 10 ready-to-spend customers.

Excuse me while I state the obvious.

Liew provides us with charts and graphs, illustrating that Orkut, the Google-owned network primarily popular in Brazil and India, seems to have the most deeply active members, who outrank MySpace in terms of average pages viewed per visitor.

Orkut also nearly matches MySpace in terms of average visits per visitor. MySpace is still, by far, the king of the social networks, though, with over 100 times the number of visitors Orkut has.

In terms of all things considered – unique visitors, average pages per visitor, and average visit per visitor, MySpace trounces all competition, including the recently much-lauded Facebook.

"Myspace continues to dominate Facebook on all three key metrics, suggesting that reports of MySpace’s death are greatly exaggerated, Facebook apps notwithstanding."

Heh. Good one, Jeremy.

But these you’ve heard of. The next question is: which will be the next blockbuster? Inquiring investors want to know.

Recently, on a gut feeling, I announced the dawn of the niche network era. But in all actuality, I don’t think a niche network – though valuable for pinpoint targeting purposes – will be able to attract enough interest, from users or investors, on its own.

Liew notes two surprises on his engagement chart lists, neither of which he had heard of, nor I, and most likely, nor you, but made both top 11 lists in terms of engagement.

One is Hoverspot.com, which appears to be, like so many others, a clone of MySpace – very vanilla, very J. Crew, very, um, Microsoft Zune. Standard, a suitable alternative, like tofu, Hyundai, Ask.com, or the other white meat.

But unless everybody defects from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged.com, Friendster – you know, the social networks that look just like it – it’s hard to imagine it being a blockbuster.

But I’ve been wrong before. I was wrong about Emo music.

What’s more interesting to me are the true originals, and the fact that a social networking site called VampireFreaks.com is on that list. Talk about niche. Are there enough vampire freaks to make an impact, even if they’re really engrossed in their network? Well, they have more visitors than Orkut, if that tells you something.

It tells me there’s a surprising number of vampire freaks out there. But there’s a limited number of things, as a marketer, you can expect them to bite on.

Ba-rum-bum.

However, if you gather up the vampires, the bar flies, and the full-time moms, and put them under the same roof – in separate rooms, of course – you may be on to something really brilliant: a network of niche networks already divided by demographics.

I don’t expect any one social network to take over the industry giants. I expect clusters of them, bought and bundled and monetized, to it.