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How to Build Link Bait

Create useful content, and you will be rewarded with hundreds of backlinks. It’s as simple as that. I know: it’s easier said than done. If you are both an expert marketer and professional content producer, you are a rare breed. Most marketers have to acquire content, and the best way to do that is to find truly talented people and pay them to create something your audience will find interesting, useful and compelling. If you do this, users will link to and share your content. That’s link bait.

What is link bait? Here’s the definition from Oxford Dictionary:

“(On a website) content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine:”

Why do I want links?

Links lead to improved organic rankings in search engines, which in turn lead to more traffic to your website.  Backlinks also give clues to the search engines about which search queries are most relevant to your website’s content. This, in turn, improves the quality of traffic to your site, improving your conversions per clicks. In addition, links also drive traffic from the sites that are linking to you.

How does content attract backlinks?

People see content that speaks to them and then link to it on a website, webpage, or profile they control. This could include things such as blogs, social media profile pages, and forums.

Examples of great link bait

Link bait can come in many forms. However, the best link bait usually takes the form of:

  • Blogs
  • Infographics
  • Survey results
  • Whitepapers
  • Data visualization projects
  • Samples Apps
  • Tools
  • Videos
  • Games

Things to think about

Carefully consider the anchor text that will be used to link to your site. Also, make sure you make it as easy as possible to share and link to your content. This can be done most easily by adding share buttons and by adding encouragement to share the piece.

Remember: successful link bait is always truly good content. Take your time to develop content with a professional that is high quality, useful, accurate, and easy to consume.

Resources: Do a deep dive on Link Bait:

 

My Favorite Online Marketing Tools: Buffer.com

bufferappIf you are looking for a way to manage multiple social media profiles, Buffer is a great choice. I have been using Buffer for several years, and I find it very useful. It allows me to create a bunch of posts at once, controlling the social profiles that publish them, including at what time they are published.

I am currently managing my Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin pages. Currently, Buffer supports the following social platforms:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • Instragram

Scheduling your posts at certain times and on certain days can maximize how many people see what you publish. In addition, Buffer’s scheduling feature makes certain that your business is publishing updates regularly and consistently. Buffer also allows you to publish the same content across multiple platforms at once, including photos and videos. Currently, three million people and businesses utilize Buffer.

Buffer Analytics

I only use the free analytics option, but not in any scientific way–just a glance. I measure all my social media engagement and conversions with the different social platforms and Google Analytics.

Pablo

Buffer recently introduced a new tool: the Pablo image center. This tool makes it easy to create custom images that promote your brand and to alter those images as needed to post to different social media sites. This is a great way to create interesting, visually pleasing, and highly shareable content.

If you are in the online marketing industry, Buffer may make things much easier, both when it comes to posting and when it comes to analyzing your social media data. In addition,  you should also check out the following tools, which can be used in conjunction with Buffer to do some very powerful things:

Event Marketing At Hershey Park

Over Memorial Day weekend in 2014, my wife and I went to the Zac Brown Band concert at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania with a few friends. Hershey is a beautiful town, the show was in a lovely venue, and the crowd was a great mix of the American populous. When I walked around and did a bit of people watching, I soon realized that the crowd was a good mix of many diverse groups that could be marketed to at the show without coming off to intrusive:

  • Farmers
  • Yuppie
  • Rednecks
  • Typical Middle-Class Family
  • Blue Collar Worker
  • Pop Music Fan
  • meat heads
  • intellectuals
  • People living within a 50-mile radius of Hershey PA.
  • Etc.

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about marketing, I was interested to see how the venue took advantage of its opportunity to reach out (and profit).

Photos of the Venue

Below are some photos I took of the venue and its advertising opportunities while at the event.  If you are looking for a sales job with big upside, I suggest reaching out to Hershey HR department and pitching a manager.

Here are just a few marketing and advertising ideas I had while enjoying the show:

One of the things that felt odd about the day was the lack of government sponsorship.  This was Memorial Day weekend one of the few times during the year when the public thinks about their government and what it means to be a citizen. This could have been used as a time to ask the citizens to sign up for public service or register to vote. During the downtime between acts, they could have had representatives from State organizations such as the State Parks Department or National Guard speak/educate the public of their needs or services. There were many missed opportunities that would have added to the value of the event and that would have benefited the venue.

Overall, I had a great time and left feeling very positive toward the bands that played and the Hershey brand. I would recommend this venue to anyone and will be back again. But I do recommend that Hershey’s marketing and sales departments consider opening up more ad space. There’s a good amount of money to be made, and people are used to ads in these types of spaces.  I know most people would say they prefer not to be advertised to at an event that they paid to attend, but I don’t think selling the space that I address above would be overbearing.

Being a successful marketer means looking for advertising opportunities wherever you go, understanding who you are marketing to, and thinking outside of the box. You can learn a lot about advertising, even on your days off.