The March ‘10 Social Media Hot Topic List
Mar 10, 2010 by Greg Finn | Link Building, Social Media Marketing, UncategorizedWelcome to this belated March hot topic list! This list contains hot topics for the month that could do very well on social sites, and seeing that it is about a week later than usual, it is a great reason to get working on these today! Ideally you could use this to help aid in linkbait and content creation for social media. Hopefully these ideas can help you harness the momentum of a current hot topic and get more traction. Here’s what will be hot this March in social media!
- March Madness
This is hands down the biggest event of the month. Productivity drops across the country when the NCAA tournament is on. CBS has been streaming all games live over the web and there are so many angles to take with your linkbait on this topic. - The Pacific
Tom Hanks is producing this HBO WWII miniseries that premieres Sunday March 14th. This is a great opportunity to tie in with WWII linkbait, timelines, history and anything that is educational about WWII and “The Pacific” series. - Hot Tub Time Machine
A new movie that is in theatres on March 26th is called “Hot Tub Time Machine” and features some crazed party animals in an absurd premise. The film features John Cusack, Craig Robinson and other cult stars like Chevy Chase. There are many topics that can be related to this movie like” Worst Ideas for a Movie” “Stupidest Movie Premises [Where the Movie was Actually Good]“ “Time Machines in Movies – The Master Guide” .. the possibilities are endless. - Spring
March is the month where snow-dwellers see a glimpse of hope for better weather to come. Dropping Spring related linkbait will be quite timely and well-received by users. Putting facts and information on the wonderfully melty world of Spring is sure to perform well! - NFL Free Agency
Free agency just began, and there is a world of content that will appeal to NFL fanatics across the country. Breaking down the best/worst moves , ideal matches for free agents still available are prime topics for social users. Report cards, breakdowns and the winners/losers are always great angles to take. - Brackets & Gambling In General
These days it is hard to find an office without a NCAA bracket pool. This is by far the largest gambling event of the year in America. Last year even President Obama filled out his bracket. Any analysis of gambling that ties in brackets will perform extremely well. Also, stats around brackets, previous winners, best ways to choose ..etc will be hot topics in March. - Taxes
If there ever was a time that people would be receptive to tax information, March is that time! Show how much people pay, the average return, how to save $$ and other tips and tricks as people definitely have taxes on their minds this month. - Hockey
On the heels of the Canada/US game, people are paying attention to hockey again. Creating interesting lists that play off of Olympic athletes should be well received this month. Comparing Crosby to Gretzky, breaking down the best goaltending of the season, doing follow-up on how the Americans NHL teams fared vs the Canadians teams – there are many possibilities to revisit this formerly frozen topic.
Happy March linkbaiting!
Have any other hot topics for the month of March? Feel free to share examples below, and don’t forget to follow 10e20 on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed.
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The January ‘10 Social Media Hot Topic List
Jan 6, 2010 by Greg Finn | Link Building, Social Media Marketing, Social NetworksHappy 2010! Hope everyone had a good holiday and is sticking to their New Year’s Resolutions! We are here to help start 2010 with a bang by dropping some hot linkbait ideas for this cold month of January. By looking at some of the topics and finding a way to relate to your field, you can harness the momentum of that topic and hopefully get more traction with your content! Here are some topics that are going to be really popular in this first month of January!
- The Super Bowl
Sure, the Super Bowl is in February, but January is the time of the year to go after Super Bowl linkbait. Break down the teams, relate it to your business… but hurry before sites get too saturated! - Things to Look Forward to in 2010
Whether it be movies, gadgets, albums releases… people love articles that lay out the good things to come. So put together the best things that relate to your blog/industry to boost your awareness. - Martin Luther King Jr.
The 18th of January is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in honor of one of the most influential Americans ever. Chronicling the breakthroughs that have happened because of him, looking in on his past or any type of analysis that can be done on Dr. King will always do well in social media (and outside of social media!). - TV Shows Coming Back
A few shows came back in December, but the biggest US TV shows are coming back this month and there are plenty of opportunities to break down what has happened since the last season, how the new season is going and much more. - 2010 Predictions
This was hot last month and will remain hot throughout the month. If you have expert knowledge in a specific area, make some educated guesses as to what will happen this year in your industry. - Dubai
With the world’s tallest building opening yesterday, there is a great deal of information that can be put together around this new (financially troubled) super destination. - Golden Globes
The ‘pre-Oscar’ awards occur on the 17th and are a great indicator for the Oscars. Breaking down who wins, what they wear, winners, losers, who got hosed and who didn’t deserve to win could all be potential Golden ideas. - Lost Premiere
This gets its own bullet point as it technically launches in February and is the last season of the hit show. Lost fans are really passionate and gung-ho about the series so recaps/breakdowns/comparisons/predictions should perform well.
Have any other hot topics for the month of January? Feel free to share examples below!
…and don’t forget to follow 10e20 on Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed.
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Link Building Through Virtual Relationships
Sep 24, 2009 by Greg Finn | Link Building, SEO, Social Media MarketingLast week Jake wrote an awesome post about leveraging relationships for link building and it got me thinking. Seeing that I am a hermit who lives in front of the computer, how the heck do I build links without those daily “real-life” relationships? Well, believe it or not, I do actively build links with relationships without meeting people in the flesh and wanted to share some of my tips and tricks for doing this across my social media networks.
The main thing to remember is that if you are helpful and can provide value to someone else, it is basically a virtual handshake and a way to fire up your virtual relationship. Simple things like a vote, comment, retweet or even just praise can strengthen your relationship. Here are a few things to do to meet people in Social Media, and turn them into friends (who can help you build links).
Make it Easy for People to Contact You
Put your instant messaging name up on all of your social profiles so that you can connect. Internal messaging on many social sites is lackluster, and getting someone’s IM name can allow you to get in touch when you need to. A few tips for messaging would be to create a separate account for your “public IM name” so you won’t overload your personal account with voting/favor requests. Also, create an account on all of the main messaging platforms. Many people prefer using Gmail over AIM, or Yahoo! over Gmail, so set it all up and use a service like digsby or pidgin to neatly manage it.
Many times you can instantly help your friends by giving votes which will go a long way when you need a favor. People who are asking for votes/re-tweets/comments probably have a website that they are promoting – and guess what? If you have a good relationship, you now have a friend on IM that you can use if you are looking for a link!
Allow People to Easily Find You
So now we see the power of people who are actively promoting social media content, and how targeted they can be for links. To expand your networks, make it simple for people to find you across all social networks. Place your Digg profile link in your StumbleUpon profile description, and include your Twitter account in your Digg profile. The more places where people can find you, the more relationships you are going to build. Also, having the ability to help people across multiple sites will just add to your cause when asking for a link.
Act Like You Would in Real Life
When a person finds your IM name from a social network, many times they “say hi” by sending you a link in which you should vote on. This is one of the things that amazes me on a daily basis. I rarely meet any people who try to get something from me without even saying hello. When contacting people, you should try to really connect with them. Say you met someone from StumbleUpon, subscribe to their favorites and let them know when you really liked a story that they found. Find out where they live, what their name is, see what they like; basically, you should act like a human to them and you will work your way to a real relationship! The more information you have on someone, the more you can help them, and in turn, the more you can ask from them.
All-in-all, while I might not have as many “real life” relationships as Jake, I have found ways to acquire links while using social media and building my networks. To me, the biggest benefit of these virtual relationships is that the people you will meet will have a high probability of having a website where they could link to you, and you can easily help them to start a positive relationship. So even if you don’t have a wealth of personal connections offline, don’t fret! These tips should hopefully help you reach your link building goals!
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Ah, relationships. Good relationships are strong, meaningful bonds that act to hold people or objects together. Like the furniture maker’s forgotten “dovetail” joint that once held a strong piece of furniture together and is now replaced with weak staples between faux wood fiberboard, relationships seem to be the forgotten glue that once held the business world together. Oh relationships, where have you gone?
Actually, relationships are alive and well, out there, calling your name with opportunities awaiting just beyond that first handshake. And why do we love relationships? Relationships lead to links online! Some of the best links that a business can acquire to their website are those developed through real-life relationships.
The best advice to grab these links is to get out from behind that keyboard and monitor (don’t worry, you can take your iPhone or BlackBerry with you) and go meet some real PEOPLE.
By meeting people and developing real relationships with them, you have the opportunity to garner quality links to your website. If you’re networking in the right places, these links are often targeted and of relative high value for SEO and for traffic purposes.
What do we mean by “real-life” relationships? These are relationships with people that you’ve spoken to on the telephone or have met in person. These are actual people you’ve developed a rapport with at some point at an event or in online social networking.
How does one go about garnering links from real life relationships?
First, you need to initiate or develop the relationship:
- Start by attending industry conferences and social events. Those who you meet at industry conferences, if you have a similar philosophy, will allow you to link to them and visa versa. The great thing about industry conferences is that you meet targeted prospects for link opportunities. Sometimes there are dot-org (.org) website owners who run trade or industry sites and are willing to link to you. We all love .orgs, don’t we, for many of them are trustworthy and non-commercial in nature.
- If you’re not able to afford major industry conferences, it’s helpful to look for local networking groups and informal gatherings within your industry. It doesn’t have to be a huge once-annual event to attract a strong, focused group of attendees.
- Within industry magazines, find vendors who are offering related products but aren’t direct competitors. Approach them and let them know that they have an opportunity with you.
- Within industry trade journals, find other businesses and organizations that you can call on to work up a relationship. Offer up lunch in your neighborhood and then discuss with them your online opportunities.
- Look to your local Chamber of Commerce, get involved and become active as a volunteer / member. Make sure to get some linking going from the Chamber website.
- Use online social networking sites like Meetup.com, LinkedIn.com and even Twitter.com to network with users who have like-minded interests. The search features in these sites are solid and can lead you to some of the most valuable relationships anywhere.
- Visit targeted users’ websites from their profiles to see if they could be a good linking candidate.
- Find local MeetUp groups with people who are interested in like-minded topics or even topics that are slightly related. For example, if you’re in the art-supply business, find a MeetUp of artists such as photographers, painters and/or sculptors. Attend the MeetUp, be friendly and good things will happen.
- Twitter can be a great resource for finding links because the search is efficient, targeted, pretty much real time, and the initial pitch only has to be 140 characters in a direct message!
Once you’ve established a relationship, simply brief the target linker on the potential of the relationship. If you think it’s a good linking partner based on audiences (and not solely on SEO weighting), chances are this is a very easy pitch and beneficial to both parties. Engage and see if there can be a meaningful way to share information between sites and help each other out in whatever form would work for both parties.
Granted, in a fair amount of cases you may end up with reciprocal relationships, but a targeted and natural-looking reciprocal link may be better than no link at all, both for SEO purposes and for actual traffic over time! In many cases too there are simple, overlooked opportunities to garner one-way links directly back to your site and content.
Linking is a cumulative effort. Don’t expect to get hundreds of links overnight from this method. This is an organic, methodical process and not one which will bounce you to page #1 for all of your target or most competitive keywords in a day, or even a week. BUT, if you start out and say to yourself, “I’m going to garner quality, meaningful links over the course of time through hard work” - and set your goals to do so – it will happen. If you take the opportunity to ask for a link from most encounters and relationships you develop in your industry, good things will happen.
Relying on real-world networking, going out and pressing the flesh and meeting people in your industry (both at events and in online social networking websites) allows you to start on this path of natural linking success. You’ll find that your business “dovetails” with some of the best places on the Internet!
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When Offline Linkbait Ignores the Online Part
Jan 10, 2008 by Danielle Winfield | Design, Link BuildingI 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:
- 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.
- 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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The Importance of Images In Linkbait Articles
Oct 24, 2007 by Patrick Winfield | Design, Link Building
If you’re in an area that finds it hard to build natural links what do you do? You create bait and attract or catch the links whether this is done on purpose or as a happy accident. The best way to do this is with content that is directed at a specific audience and has appeal.
Images and visual aids add to this appeal or can be the whole lure altogether. Eye tracking visualization software studies have shown that viewers move across the content on a screen very very fast. What is to keep them there? Unless the content i
s of interest to them they will move on to the next page and continue the search.
Lets face it, people view and read on the screen much different than the printed page. If you have appealing or ‘juicy‘ images for the eyes to feast on then that just may be the
difference for a viewer to stay and read further.
The images need to be relevant to the content, that should be a given. Don’t use a picture of Pam Anderson in Baywatch unless you are writing about her… loop hole, I couldn’t resist.
With so many eyeballs just surfing the waves of content you need to stand out and become noticed. Add some life and face to your wonderful content and use imagery to help get noticed.
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John Scott from V7N has a great post up about intelligent link buying in a Google FUD world. As he correctly states:
Links remain the most important part of any search engine marketing campaign. Links are SEO. The difference between link building in 2002 and link building in 2007 is that the search engines are better equipped to evaluate those links, and this forces website owners to up their game. Keep building links, just be smart about it.
Here are 10 good tips for intelligent link buying:
1. Buy links from websites which exercise editorial integrity.
2. Vary Your Anchor Text
3. Buy Non-Keyword Links
4. Avoid Site-wide Links
5. PageRank Zero Can Pass Link Weight
6. Avoid Automated Link Spamming
7. Image Links And ALT Text
8. A Link On A Page Is Not The Same As A Link On A Page
9. Do NOT Rent Links
10. Google Tells You Where To Get Links
Click here for more of John Scott on Link Buying
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Video has become a bigger part of Netscape’s site as they continue to find their way. Video has its own Netscape Channel and was really made popular when the Michael Richards’ racist rant video was put up. Up until this past weekend the “Kramer video” was the most popular clip on the site (it was subsequently replaced by the Saddam Hussein cellphone camera execution) with over 72,000 views to date.
With each uploaded video Netscape gives you the option to share it by grabbing some simple JavaScript code and then placing it on your site or blog:
Much like this brand new website The Stoners Bar did:
On the actual Netscape page containing the video (right underneath the video), there is a small section called Top Syndicators of this Video. In this box there are up to ten links (all without a nofollow on them). If we look at this specific example – we’ll see a nice text link back to stonersbar.com:
A quick backlink check for stonersbar.com shows us of the four links showing from Yahoo – three of them are from this Netscape story:
There are three links showing due to the fact that this was such a commented on story that it spanned many different pages on Netscape (resulting in extra links). As a result this very new website (domain wasn’t even registered until late October) with basically no content is also indexed by Google due to that nice link love from a trusted, old domain like Netscape:
Now I’m not really that big of a Netscape fan at this point but you have to see the benefits here. They got to add video to their website that their visitors might be interested in, they got a link on a page that has been viewed over 72,000 times (and the associated traffic that comes from people clicking through their site) and they also get picked up and crawled very quickly. So while most people are embedding a YouTube clip into their site – grab the Netscape alternative, push some traffic to it (so that you are a top syndicator) and actually get something in return for it.
One thing that you might think of while seeing my example is: Yeah, that’s fine for a site named The Stoner Bar to have a video of Michael Richards’ spewing racist rants but what about my company?Take a look through the Video section on Netscape and I am sure you will be able to find something that would interest your audience. An electronics dealer? Put this video of someone playing Nintendo’s Donkey Kong on a PS3. A health related blog? This video of a Charlie Brown’s Christmas performed by the cast of Scrubs. Web development company? How about How to connect to an FTP server natively on Mac OS X.
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