I have a confession to make. I am a celebrity gossip addict. I love to look at pics and see what people are wearing. While browsing one of my favorite sites yesterday I came across what looked to me like pay dirt for some great link bait.

Target famous celebrities and bloggers that millions of people read and consume, get exposure for your brand, and LINKS. Looking at it a bit closer, I see some missed opportunity that could have been capitalized on and began to realize that this probably wasn’t intentional link bait (in our world-the Internet world) at all. More “attention-bait”.

Magazines, newspapers, colleges, government, have been employing “attention-bait” since the beginning of media.

First, the story itself is not featured on the site, which forces a link to the homepage. Perez Hilton (one of the most popular blogs on the interwebs) actually wound up linking out to a newspaper article about the article to give his readers a sense of what it was about.

In the same way fashion designers used to shudder at white shoes after Labor Day (thank you winter white for doing away with that one!), I got cringy when I got to the Animal Fair website and saw the missed opportunity.

When clicking though from Perez we get here:

animal-fair-home-page.jpg

  • It’s not obvious we are in the right place.
  • We don’t get the story we came to see.
  • There is a banner for the current issue but no way to dig further into it.
  • There is no direct link to the article itself.

There are only a handful of blogs linking to the site. Even though they got some good press coverage, they lost out on a tremendous opportunity to generate viral buzz and links back to their website.

I did a little imagining, and this is the way things would have looked if I were in charge.

animal-fair-main.jpg

  • Pictures of the celebs and their dogs (you don’t even need to have the two together!).
  • Call to action to get the rest of the list (since their goal was to sell magazines, make that the call to action).
  • Big subscribe button above the fold (like this - we’ve got more).
  • List of the other content in the current issue (which would not have been given away for free on the site).
  • In addition to notifying the traditional press, I would have contacted all of the publicists and fan-clubs of those in the article, pet forums, and celebrity forums (get them excited and give them content to write about).

In all fairness, when you do get to the Animal Fair website, the first thing that comes up is a notice that the site is under construction so I assume that the new and improved site is going to be a little more robust.

My post is not about calling Animal Fair out. It’s more to drive home the point that with a little extra effort and planning you can take the same idea and generate twice as much buzz and results. The next time that you finish a viral piece, make sure you have thought of all possible opportunities to make it easy for people to 1) access it 2) spread it 3) link to it. You’ll be glad you did.

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Posted by Danielle Winfield at 7:47 pm
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