Effective Link Building Service: 100% Organic: The Social Media Underground

**The Social Media Underground**

**by Stephan Spencer**

Building links is a struggle we SEOs all face. Of the three pillars
of SEO (content, architecture, and links), it's the link authority
pillar that i's usually the weakest. Looking at sites individually,
formulating your approach, sending personalized emails, picking up the
phone to speak to the webmasters - it's a lot of hard slog. If only it
weren't so darned difficult and time-consuming to acquire high
quality, relevant links! Yet without such links, you won't be able to
earn the trust, authority and importance required to rank, and your
optimization efforts will fall short.

There is another approach - a secret formula if you will, employed
by the SEO elite. One that's scalable, efficient and high-impact.

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It starts with "link bait". Yes, that overused, industry term that
refers to viral content that is irresistible to link to. But link bait
by itself isn't sufficient. You need to seed this link bait into
social media (such as Digg and StumbleUpon) using power user accounts
within those communities. In other words, you need to be (or be able
to call in a favor with) a social media insider who has wide-reaching
influence within that site's social community. Without a bevy of
friends, followers and fans, it's much harder to reach escape
velocity quick enough. That's because the algorithms for what's new
and hot within social news/bookmarking sites take into account the
time span within which the positive votes are acquired. A thousand
Diggs over a year is a very different thing from a thousand Diggs over
24 hours.

The secret formula really is a formula - or should I say,
formulaic. Think of it as an assembly line process. Viral ideas are
generated. The chosen ideas are researched and written up as articles
(or produced as videos), then published to your website. The articles
are then seeded into appropriate social sites by influentials within
those sites' communities. The point of all this isn't to reach your
target market directly; these users probably won't buy anything from
you. It's to reach that small percentage of the stampede to your site
that are journalists or bloggers - who will write about and link to
your viral content.

Let's take a look at this process in greater depth.

Ideation: It all starts with a great idea and this step is key: your
content/angle must be more than just clever to go viral. Gather a team
of your most creative and knowledgeable SEOs and marketers (and/or
your outside SEO firm) to brainstorm possible ideas for link bait that
will likely resonate within social media. Develop a list of ideas; you
can start with a handful and save the others for future use.

Selection and prioritization: Once a solid list has been developed,
it's time to prioritize and select the top several (e.g. three or
four) ideas to develop into full-blown articles/blog posts. Be
forewarned: you will have to stretch outside of your comfort zone; the
edgier (or geekier, or low-brow) the article, the more it will
resonate with the 16-year-old alpha geeks on Digg.

Content creation: Flesh out the chosen ideas into full-blown
articles/blog posts starting with the research. For example, a topic
of Top 100 Beers from Around the World will likely require many
pages of information to be collected from each beer's history, to
photos of the bottle/label, to nutrition information.

Make sure to craft a killer headline using this formula from social
media marketer Muhammad Saleem <http://muhammadsaleem.com/>
: number + adjective + key phrase. e.g. "13 Most Chilling Haunted
Hotels" or "16 Incredibly Unconventional Hotel Rooms." It�s a catchy
title that will reel people in. You may also/instead wish to develop
video or other visuals to help support your idea.

You really need a hook to turn an article idea into something that
will have legs in the social sphere. For example, consider a contest
idea of win free business cards for life. Pretty ho-hum, right?

At Netconcepts, we developed a contest for our client
Overnightprints.com. What was the angle/spin we added to the free
business cards for life idea? Simply this: design Shoemoney's (Jeremy
Schoemaker's) business card, Jeremy will serve as the judge and the
winning entry (as determined by Jeremy) will get free business cards
for life.

The cost of the contest for our client was negligible - the fine
print of the contest stated the winnings were a maximum of 1,000
business cards per year for up to 20 years. Jeremy blogged on his
Technorati top 100 blog, shoemoney.com, about the contest; he even
posted a video about it to YouTube. The link exposure this contest
garnered was priceless. Contests prove you don�t have to have a big
budget just a big idea.

Website Prep: Just like you'd prep for surgery, you'd prep your site
for a social push. Brent Csutoras <http://www.brentcsutoras.com>
describes the process required here as getting your site social
media ready. For example, if your site is a blog, it would be
advisable to distance your site from blogs. Blogs are old and tired
and not popular with Digg users anymore. So switch from a bloggy theme
to a magazine style theme, and remove the bloggy references, such as
date-based archives links and permalinks verbiage.

Also, make sure your site can handle the anticipated traffic. If your
server buckles under the load and the site goes dark, your submission
doesn't just get pulled from Digg's home page, it gets removed from
the site altogether -i.e. completely obliterated. With Digg, hitting
the front page will generate a traffic spike that will quickly
dissipate and then disappear almost completely after 24 to 48 hours.

Publishing: You will need a place to host your linkbait; it really
should be on your site if at all possible. Using a third party website
to host the article will result in subpar performance; so hopefully
you can tolerate the article living on your website. Remember you
don't have to link to the article from your navigation or sitemap or
from anywhere else on your site. Also, you need to be cognizant of the
time and day you publish. Publishing on Saturday night would not be a
good idea.

Social Media Seeding: Immediately after you have published the viral
content, it then needs to be submitted to the appropriate social media
site(s). These may include social news sites such as Digg or social
bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us.

As already alluded to, in order to maximize the chance of success,
it's important that the submitter be a "power user" within these
social networks to maximize the chances of hitting the front page or
popular page, thus driving the most visibility, traffic, and -�
eventually �- links. A Digg submission from the great unwashed just
won't get the same traction from the social media community. A power
user's street cred is worth a lot, so be ready to pay for it in
terms of cash or favors.

You can't be a power user across all the pertinent social media it
requires simply too much work. Power users spend all day and all night
at their computer monitoring various oddball news RSS feeds and other
social sites for content that will resonate with their targeted social
site's users. Once they find something, they quickly submit the URL
along with a killer title and description - before anyone else can.
This is how users move up in the pecking order within these social
media. The more stories they can get to the front page, the higher
their status.

Nearly everything that a top-ranked Digg user touches turns to gold;
it's not atypical for 80+% of their submissions to hit the Digg.com
front page. As you can see, the power user is the key to this
equation. If you happen to know one or be one, then you are in luck.
If not, you might want to consider hiring a top-notch SEO and social
media agency. Also, have a look at the Top 100 list of Diggers
<http://socialblade.com/digg/topusers.html>
for the most popular power users, note however, real names are
rarely attached.

Make friends within these groups and call in favors as you need them.
In return, be prepared to do the same. Greg Boser
<http://www.gregboser.com>
says for every hour you spend working on a client in social, you
need to spend six hours doing favors in return for those in your elite
network with whom you called in a favor. It�s all about reciprocating.
The more you vote and submit for others, the more you can ask for in
return.

Now let�s talk results; an ideal result is your link bait hitting the
front page of Digg and accumulating a thousand-plus links over the
following 3 to 6 months. Why does it take so long when a Digg spike is
so immediate? Because bloggers don't blog about your link bait right
away. They may keep it in the hopper and not get to it for weeks or
even months.

Then, because the blogosphere is one big echo chamber, that blogger's
readership will include other bloggers who will eventually blog about
and link to the article too. What would be the yield of really
hitting it out of the park in terms of this sort of link building?
Potentially over 5,000 links with perhaps a hundred of those being
PageRank 7 and a half dozen being PageRank 8 (hypothetically). That's
a solid investment.

Link baiting is a critical tactic to have in your SEO "toolkit"
because the efforts of just one article hitting the home page of Digg
can do wonders for your link authority and thus your Google rankings.
Put the time and effort into developing your most linkworthy ideas and
go out and negotiate with your power user friends. This combination
will ensure your success.

Hope you got some value out of me spilling the beans on this secret
formula for generating linkbait, acquiring links and measuring
success. Many marketers think of social media as a plaything; it would
rarely be the tool of choice to generate serious ROI. Sure, social
media IS fun, but it�s wrong to think that it can't pay the bills.
Leverage these social media outlets properly, and your link
opportunities are endless.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and
not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Stephan Spencer
<http://searchengineland.com/author/stephan-spencer/>

is founder and president of natural search marketing firm
Netconcepts <http://www.netconcepts.com>
and inventor of the GravityStream <http://www.gravitystream.com>
SEO proxy technology. He's currently authoring the upcoming O'Reilly
book /The Art of SEO/ along with co-authors Rand Fishkin, Jessie
Stricchiola, and Eric Enge.

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Effective Link Building Service

Friday, July 10, 2009

100% Organic: The Social Media Underground

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