The recent Bilderberg meetings coming in June 2013 to The Grove Hotel have done some interesting things in regard to their SEO. I’ll keep conspiracies and negativity out of this post and focus on the marketing aspect of having such an event at your hotel. While this event is perhaps seen as a negative to a lot of people, I wonder what the marketing team for The Grove is thinking with all this social buzz around them.
It’s not surprise that holding such an event is going to attract attention, and if that attention is organic links and social followers, then they’re going to clean up. Let’s take a look at what all this attention is doing for them and perhaps you hoteliers can learn a thing or two about events and link bait.
While it’s still early, I expect their link profile to grow by at least 7-10% over the course of the conference. The Bilderberg conference runs from June 6th – 9th 2013 and there will be a lot of journalists and press waiting around in the bush. As for the attendees, don’t expect much to come from them.
Since a lot of the sites the links are coming from are not going to want to give any credit to the hotel, I think we will see a lot less links coming in. With that being said, one quick glance with Ahrefs.com shows that since the announcement, their link profile has experienced some growth.
The Grove Hotel should be in a good spot after this event in both their organic search listings as well as new social media followers. I should have perhaps waited until the conference was over but right now is prime time for attracting links, and I don’t even think The Grove Hotel realizes it.
How Could They Capture More Links?
Since these meetings have such a negative stigma to them, The Grove Hotel hasn’t mentioned a peep about it on their website or any of their social media accounts. The silence itself is interesting but if they chose to tease conspiracy theorists a bit I think they could troll their way to link bait gold.
Idea 1) Infographic Fodder
Infographics are still a link bait cash cow if done correctly and there is certainly enough ideas to grasp from for content. Around this time last year there was an infographic done regarding the members and connections involved with the attendees. While I don’t know how factual it is(doesn’t matter on the internet), it attracted a huge amount of buzz with a lot of the propulsion coming from a BusinessInsider.com post on the infographic.
An infographic dispelling some of the myths about the group might be an interesting angle. I think going for something that will enrage a little and get a debate going will bring in the shares. A lot of high end companies like The Grove Hotel will most likely not have the “balls” to get involved with anything too risque.
Idea 2) Media Coverage Opportunities
Since the Bilderberg group is trying to be more open about its meetings, the press will actually get a slight chance to perhaps talk about it. While every news corporation is owned by someone attending this meeting, I guess this might be an optional marketing tactic.
We recently helped a new local startup launch where they only gave us a 3 month time period in which to achieve a myriad of certain goals. Their budget per month was in the $X,XXX range which still made me a little weary . Typically with a content marketing campaign it takes time to craft and test the waters before seeing the benefits. I knew it would be overly ambitious to promise them the moon so I opted to take a chunk of that budget for a PPC campaign or two.
This would at least buy them highly targeted users to their startup and get actionable data sooner than later. We set out to spend $3,000 over the 3 month course with Adwords and Facebook’s PPC platform to acquire more local customers. While we just wanted those users and their “likes”, we experienced a multitude of other benefits that I didn’t anticipate.
Before going deeper into this post I will have to fully admit I an quite inept when it comes to doing PPC. I don’t have a whole lot of experience so I’m not sure how much luck factors into the success we had with this one client.
The PPC Gameplan
Like I said, our team doesn’t usually do PPC and when we have, it would almost always be for a contest we were promoting. In this case we would be just targeting a small set of keywords that should deliver a potential customer. The costs would be moderately high since there was a good amount of established competition.
For Adwords – We were going to run a PPC campaign that focused on sending users to the client’s Facebook coupon page which netted the customer 15%. Since users were forced to like the client’s page(get the app) to get the coupon, we felt that we’d capture enough local targeted customers to their Facebook page. I thought this would be much more valuable to capture those people in their Facebook page for future marketing.
For Facebook Ads – Since we can target a very specific demographic here we ran it as tight as we possibly could. This option is of course for those with a decent budget as PPC costs can run high, and fast.
So we often hear that no press is bad press and in the case of Burger King’s Twitter hacking they certainly will come out on top. While a lot of nefarious things were mentioned and done on the account no one will really care, so in the end Burger King will definitely enjoy the buzz.
The reason I hope they don’t care? No one will remember this in a week and during that time, I imagine the will get thousands of links and social followers because of it…so what’s the big deal? Let this sink in and be a lesson on how to turn a bad thing into something good.
If I were them, I would also try and get interviews from highly authoritative places about the incident and perhaps talk about brand image and or social media security…it’s kind of a snooze fest but I imagine a lot of publications are looking to talk to someone over there while the news is hot.
So WTF is “Future Bait” and is this quite possibly the creepiest post title in SEO history? Well to start, it’s definitely a term I’m going to try and coin (aka make up) here. It’s something we employ here as a tactic at Linkbuildr, although I never put too much thought into it until I talked with Jason Acidre (@JasonAcidre) and Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) on their blogs about it, and then subsequently mentioned it in one of our latest posts. Basically, Future Bait is creating content that will be needed in the future for a product or service, in the hope that your content will be out ahead of time (or right on time) and ready to take in links. I won’t give away all our secrets, but I can definitely show you folks how to structure and create content that will get you links when the time is right.
While this technique doesn’t always provide links in droves, you still stand a really good chance of snatching up a lot of valuable organic search traffic. I can honestly say that this is always a #winning marketing tactic regardless of the outcome of either desired result.
So, what kind of topics can you prepare that will be highly searched-for and most likely lead to links? Here are a few we like to make sure are covered, but let’s hear your thoughts/ideas in the comments below”
How To’s
Product Reviews and Guides
Figure out what problems people will be having and prep the solution… Tricky, but this can be done
Videos
Link bait lists that you know will be done, so beat everyone to the punch
Meme’s
Video Reviews
Let’s take the new Google Link Disavow Tool as an example of how us SEO’s could have jumped on a lot of traffic and links in the coming weeks ahead. Dan Petrovic from DejanSEO quickly jumped on this and made a 70 minute video showcasing all the features and how to use the bloody thing.
This was a smart move and since Google/Youtube is starting to rank videos by watch time, this is sure to be an “authority” video on the subject quite soon. So, how is this video going to attract them links? Well, if it ranks well and people embed it, they’re likely to link to the creators like I did in this post. The video doesn’t also have to be on Youtube and they could have used a self hosted service on their end. Google will still rank their own embedded videos well, and you have the option of providing an embed code for others to use that includes a nice link back home.
Product Reviews
Product reviews can be conducted before an actual product launch. You should most definitely try and get your hands on “the product” beforehand and get a review done. Take DejanSEO’s video above as an example; creating a review pretty much on the day of it being released is also a great tactic.
Getting in early or on the day of launch is going to earn you a lot of traffic and hopefully links as rebloggers and sources like Wikipedia are going to be linking out. Make sure you come up with the most comprehensive review possible with regards to both written content and media like videos and pictures. So many reviewers use stock content because they don’t actually have the product in hand – and that’s the number one problem!
Obviously CNET is a really big brand and they have some serious authority sitting behind their domain. Even so, they are always early to adopt the best product reviews. Their Samsung Galaxy S3 review was hot off the press as soon as they got their hands on it, and it’s as in-depth of a review as you’re going to get.
This page is seriously linked up. This page more than likely has more links than most of my readers’ sites, so while this kind of link bait is better for bigger brands, do what you can. Keep doing amazing product reviews and you will eventually burn that into your readers’ brains, and they’ll keep coming back to the source (your site) for more.
Affiliate Marketers Should Pay STRONG Attention To This Section
Google is not a big fan of affiliates, and they have good reasons for that. I see a lot of you folks’ affiliate-based websites and they’re usually absolute shit in regards to content, social activity, and especially the content itself. I think it’s safe to say that 90% of the affiliate sites reviewing products have never actually touched or seen the product, and that is a major problem. If I’m buying something, I sure as hell don’t want to read a review by someone who doesn’t actually know the product.
If you turned it around and actually created amazing product reviews yourself with HD video and high res pictures, well you’re off to a great start. Go beyond that step and do something whacky and wild with it like Blendtec does by blending all sorts of crap in their blenders. It gets attention, it gets links and it has netted them hundreds of thousands of social followers to remarket to all day long baby.
How To’s Are Easy Future Bait
“How to” content is extremely useful, as it’s always a sought after ranking need and best of all it is brilliant link bait. There will always be a need for “how to” content, so sit down with your team or yourself and a beer and figure out what’s coming up in your niche.
I sure do talk a big talk eh? As you may have noticed, I’ve never even written one for Linkbuildr, but we sure have brainstormed and done a bunch for our clients. I will however give you yet another example of something that has turned out quite well for one of my favorite sites: ArtOfManliness.com. In 2009 they created “How To Tie a Tie,” which is something I’ve used way more than I should have.
Regardless to say, this post has done wonders for their link profile and has attracted many links over the past few years for them. Notice the structure of it as well! Mostly great videos which keep users on longer, and there’s a lot of user interaction via the comments and social shares… This post is sending a lot of good signals to Google, and they’ve been rewarded for it. This is not an easy keyword to rank for either!
Top x Lists!
These are easy pickings, folks! Lists are loved by everyone, especially those of us with monkey-like attention spans who just need the goods as fast as possible. If you can get in early on a really good list, you’re definitely going to score some link loving, and the content doesn’t have to be that extensive.
I’ll use one of my favorite marketer’s lists as our example this time. Paddy Moogan from Distilled published a list of infographic sites for submitting to a while back, and it’s extremely useful. He graciously linked us in his post but he has WAY more sites to submit to, as well as in the comments so many others have dropped their sites that he missed. You can read his infographic list here but let’s take a peek into the links that this post has acquired.
That’s a nice number of links just for a post! I imagine Paddy will do an updated version at some point and he can double up those efforts and really bring the link juice home with it. Now that it’s up, it will continue to score more links from other bloggers as time goes on, but most of all from SEO/Webmaster forums.
Solutions To Future Problems
With new products and services coming out, there will always be related problems that people will seek out solutions for. Chances are that if one person has that problem, others will as well, so you know that your fix is going to be linked to other people in all sorts of ways (normally, socially etc). If you don’t already have a FAQ/Help center then here’s yet another reason why you should perhaps start one up.
Companies that don’t have an extensive help section are certainly missing out. You’re also going to be left in the dust for natural links if you don’t allow UGC either. The ability for your brand fans to post their problem will lead to unique searches/problems you initially left out, and voila, now you have a linkable asset! If you don’t do it, you’ll lose out to other Q/A sites and forums whereas you could be drawing those people into you.
I would also recommend bringing in the dev team and having them code up all sorts of embed codes for common answers and/or custom help videos and other media. We even had one startup request where we developed infographics for their top 10 most common questions and answers. These infographics provided a work flow solution in a clear and easy-to-follow design, and will continue to build them links as time goes on.
If you look at this page’s link profile you’ll see the diverse link types coming into this place and get a good idea of what can happen for you. I know Apple is one of the largest brands in the world, but for this post it gives you enough data to hopefully spark some ideas of your own.
The goal here is to diversify your link profile, as people seeking help and answers are going to be linking from their blogs, social profiles, forums, Q/A sites and other relevant spots around the web. Again, sit down and brainstorm some ideas that will be “future link bait” and keep doing that every few months… Twice a year at the very least.
Not really much I can write about this other than take notes as this title has turned boring auto news into a hilarious and a little distasteful topic. So many companies don’t have the balls to attempt this form of humor but if you’re not ready to let your hair down in marketing, you’re not going to get very far. My hat goes off to the writers over at Jalopnik and the whole Gawker crew in general….stay classy!
Writing link bait is one of the most fun aspects of link building and it takes a certain eye to do it right. Keeping on top of what’s trending is so very important and can lead to some quick and easy link bait ideas, even if you’re not a superstar writer. Knowing the trends is always a good asset to any marketing team and you’d be shocked at how many companies simply aren’t paying attention. I use a variety of tools to track trends and then capitalize on them to profit for not only myself, but our clients as well.
The majority of trend tacking tools are free, which is a huge plus for basically everybody. All you have to do is keep your eye out for something in your vertical. Great link bait requires you to always be writing about something fresh, funny and or “horrific”. Your content will go a long way with the right flare so lets see what we can do about keeping you all in the know.
Trends are fresh, so make sure your content is too!
If you can utilize this at least once a month for your brand, you’re going to become a company rockstar. Putting an end to tedious, boring and over done content is where you really start to see real results coming in from all angles… not just links!
You should be using this tactic now more than ever! Why? Well, since the Google freshness update has been brought out of the workshop you have a big opportunity for more traffic. Emerging trends are going to be a major player in your branding power and establishing yourself as an authority on the subject. What’s more is that this is an area where having the most links isn’t an issue.
Social Tools of the Trade
We’re going old school here and producing a list for your reading ease. It also prevents me from rambling on and and and on and on and on… If you’re used to reading my posts then you know I can get a little out of hand at times (like this paragraph for example).
Google Trends – I’ve been using this since it came out and it’s always a great way to discover trends according to Google search traffic. Since so many of us use Google, this becomes an invaluable tool for doing a little trend research. Sometimes it’s not an up to the minute report, but it should be useful here and there for certain data.
I find Google Trends really helpful in determining the popularity of certain products over a certain time period. It’s really helpful if you need to look back a year or so and determine certain things for a specific time period. I find it really helpful with Christmas trends or any other holidays. For even more in depth of a look, you can mosey on over to Google Insights for all sorts of awesome data on keywords and websites. Don’t forget to play around with Google Insights as well, check it out:
——————————— Technorati Authority – Here’s a site I haven’t mentioned in a long while and it’s a shame because it provides great insight in to the blogosphere. We’ve always been a big fan of how Technorati keeps tracks of the sames trends and buzz for each category in their blog directory. This has always lead to interesting and quality link building opportunities, as well as one of my personal favourite link bait idea generators.
——————————— Blog Pulse – If you’re wanting to track more blog trends and find hot topics to cover on your site, you can’t ignore this useful site. I always double check their trend results right after my visit to Technorati. They have a more useful search box that lets you get into specifics, which is helpful if you’re looking for one particular subject/keyword/niche.
I always use Blog Pulse in my link building efforts regardless if I’m writing link bait or not. I really find their conversation tracking abilities helpful for keeping an eye on a subject or two for any given date. You can also really dig deep into some older trends… up to 180 days back, which is a really nifty extra feature.
——————————— Trends Buzz – For a quick and lovely look at some daily trends and what’s trending you’ll want to bookmark this site. They cover all the important sites that you’ll want to know what’s going on with and I check it near daily just to stay in the know.
They have other areas where you can check out what was hot that day or what’s currently trending live and wild right on the web. It’s such a simple and easy to use interface and I hope they keep the site going for a long time. Big thanks to the folks behind the site and keeping it free for schmucks like me.
——————————— Topsy – This is perhaps the most useful and well put together site for tracking trends across videos, images, social news and blogs. They’ve recently added a Google+ trend tracking section of their website, which is something I’ve been using on a daily basis ever since it came out. You could pretty much stop using any other piece of software or trend analyzing website, use Topsy exclusively for your research and still have some of the most topical and interesting content in your niche.
Topsy also has an API and analytics section where things get pretty schweeeeet. You can even use this to go back in time a little and see trends for a whole event during a given time frame. A good example of this could be the recent occupy wall street news/mentions, or during a product launch to measure how well your marketing team did.
Tracking Twitter Like A Boss
Twitter is hands down the best and most up to date source for trending topics. You could only use their trending topics data and be totally fine in your link bait idea discovery. There are a few easy ways to discover trending topics on Twitter so I thought I’d share the ones I use. I’d also love to hear from you folks on the tools I missed out on listing. The beauty of the ones listed here is that they’re all free!
Twitter Trends – I’m sure you’ve noticed the trending topics on the sides of your Twitter searches. They’re a quick update on what’s hot at the moment and it allows you to change a few targeting features. The trending topics are both on the homepage with one of them being “promoted/paid/sponsored” and the rest are in the sidebar after you’ve searched. Once you’ve hit the sidebar trends, you can change your targeting by location and get down right local if need be. It’s definitely my favorite feature and I find myself getting super targeted information for a number of clients and niches that wouldn’t be relevant without it.
———————————- Hashtags.org – This is an excellent site for digging deep into the trending hashtags at any given time. You can also check previous dates if you’re doing some trend research, which is a really handy feature of this site. There’s not much to it other than figure out what you want to do research on and search away.
TweetMeme.com – This is a daily read for our team here at Linkbuildr mainly to see what’s the most Tweeted piece of content. It’s great for picking the right blog posts to comment on. You can also further develop your link bait ideas based on trending news, images and videos. The biggest and best blogs on the planet are using the TweetMeme plugin/app on their site so you know you’re getting a good data scope. You can follow us on TweetMeme or check out any site specifically and keep up to the minute tabs on your favorite websites.
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Twitter.com/Tweetingtrends – For those that would like to get their Twitter trends in their social circle, why not follow Tweeting Trends? They only tweet when something hits the top 10 and this, in my opinion, is all you need to spin some funny/weird angle for your link bait. I cannot think of an easier way to keep on top of the Twitterverse and I always keep their stream in a Hootsuite tab for viewing pleasure.
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The latest and greatest from the world of trend tracking is Data Sift. They have ponied up for the full on Twitter firehose access and offer the service to you by only paying for what you need. The platform is hands down the prettiest and the most useful when it comes to getting the data you need.
one of two exclusive re-syndicators of Twitter data, we deliver 100% of the firehose in a format that allows you to filter against the meta-data attached to each Tweet.
The data streams are really freakin cool and I wish I had paid access to all the data I need. I highly recommend checking out their example streams to get an idea of what this software suite can do for you and your business.
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Other Trends To Watch
Youtube – One of my favorite features of the new Youtube layout is where they show you the most popular videos of the day/week. One other area that’s a little harder to find is the Youtube Trends Dashboard where you can really dig deep into what’s trending. This is a great place to research your niche and come up with awesome videos to embed in your link bait. We’ve had a lot of success to video compilations for clients and this is the first place we go to find out what’s hot on Youtube.
———————— Top Selling On Amazon – Most of us are here to make money and the biggest shopping site in the world gives you all the trend data in the world. This is an essential place for people selling products and or looking for something hot to blog about. It’s almost Christmas time, so just think of all the link bait opportunities here. You can go down into every category and find all the goodies. Since we’re on the topic of trends, check out Amazon’s Movers & Shakers section for what’s spiking off.
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I’ve saved the best for last and it’s for the brands with a little extra in their budget. TrendHunter.com is an amazing website for just about everyone and their mother. You can be just a browser, there to network or take advantage of what’s actually hot in the world today. I’ve been a “Trend Hunter” for many years and I’ll continue to read this website every day of the week.
If you’re looking to go above and beyond in the world of trends, then you may want to try out Trend Hunter PRO. They’ve put together thousands of emerging trend opportunities, over 100,000 innovative examples and over a thousand reports for the 2012 year. So many amazing companies are on board and if you’re still scratching your head as to what the hell it’s all about, check out this video:
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Resources & Your Comments
As always, I like to leave some other great reading resources on what I’m blabbing on and on about. I also encourage you to leave links and mentions of tools you’re using in your marketing efforts, despite how little you folks comment. There are tons and tons of awesome tools for tracking trends so I want to hear about them.
In the web space, infographics are still one of the best and most cost-effective marketing strategies to build hundreds, even thousands of links to your website. It’s actually quite amazing how viral a well-designed piece of information can become – especially on platforms like Twitter.
Over the last 12 months or so, I’ve watched web agencies (particularly small to mid-sized firms) explode into the industry spotlight all because of a clever infographic that was shared and reposted by the right kind of people i.e. information design junkies like Mashable.
Obviously, nothing stays “bling bling” forever and exploitation will eventually become the demise of this link building buzz tactic. So in the tradition of pushing boundaries combined with absolute curiosity, I find myself wondering what’s next. Then it came to me:
Infographics as we currently know them are static, just like the web used to be. Naturally this means it’s only a matter of time before designers and savvy marketers start to move towards newer technologies to further enhance the viral potential and “linkability”.
Interactive infographics… That’s insane… Or is it?
Enter HTML5 and CSS3
Don’t start panicking; I’m not going to write a guest post on Linkbuildr.com about web design best practices because that wouldn’t be very relevant, but as an Internet marketer and avid blogger, if there’s a new way to spread content that users go bonkers for – I need to know about it.
After a few searches on Google I didn’t find much, and then I stumbled upon a very short but descriptive “challenge” of sorts posted by Mozilla developer and overall cool dude, Paul Rouget, where he asked his blog audience to design an infographic using HTML5 and CSS3.
This is exactly what I’m talking about!
Though there were only about 9 direct responses to his challenge via the blog post, I could already see the potential.
Just imagine how many more people would want to share awesome infographics if they were animated and interactive! The link building possibilities would be staggering.
Enter Live Data Feeds
Companies are fetching live data and using it all over the web, so why not take things a step further and fuse this functionality into traditional information design and create an attractive, viral piece of info-driven content where the data changes as time goes by. Not only would the content be highly engaging and attractive (thanks to HTML5 and CSS3) but it will also be up to date – constantly.
I know you’re probably thinking I’m insane, and the fact of the matter is that I wouldn’t even know where to begin to create my own Interactive Infographic, but from a marketer’s prospective more user engagement means more sharing – and this is what excites me.
What do you think? Too far off the edge or crazy linking potential?
I’m currently writing an article on how big brands can score tons of links just by doing regular updates. I’m a Starbucks junky so I noticed the red holiday cups out and about first thing November 1st, and then I saw the news about it. I thought it would make for a quick but thought provoking post about how large companies can score links with ease. I also took a picture right now of my delicious Christmas Blend for those who are “too cool” for Starbucks and don’t know what I’m talking about.
If you go take a look at Google both in the regular area, blog search and discussions you’ll see roughly 50 thousand websites talking about it. That’s a lot of bloddy links, citations and social media buzz going about all for just a regular update from Starbucks. This is a perfect example of how you as a big brand can benefit from your fans across the web.
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Negative SEO Attack?
Check out the anatomy of a "negative SEO" attack on our own site in our latest post. There's too much worry about these attacks happening, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Come read what I think and just what to do if anything like this happens to your brand.
So WTF is “Future Bait” and is this quite possibly the creepiest post title in SEO history? Well to start, it’s definitely a term I’m going to try and coin (aka make up) here. It’s something we employ here as a tactic at Linkbuildr, although I never put too much thought into it until I talked with Jason Acidre (
These are easy pickings, folks! Lists are loved by everyone, especially those of us with monkey-like attention spans who just need the goods as fast as possible. If you can get in early on a really good list, you’re definitely going to score some link loving, and the content doesn’t have to be that extensive.
In the web space, infographics are still one of the best and most 
After a few searches on Google I didn’t find much, and then I stumbled upon a very short but descriptive “challenge” of sorts posted by Mozilla developer and overall cool dude, 
