Let go of the wire: Why you have to stop link building
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A presentation I gave to Distilled's September Seattle SEO meetup in 2012.
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Let go of the wire: Why you have to stop link building
- 1. LET GO OF THE WIRE BLOW UP THE LINK BUILDING Ian Lurie @portentint ian@portent.com This is an annotated version of the presentation I gave at Distilled’s SEO Meetup in September of 2012.
- 2. I always create a link bundle to go with presentations. You can check it out here. PORTENT.CO/DISTNAR (Yes, use .co, not .com)
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- 4. No explanation necessary. I’m not the brighest of bulbs.
- 5. When I rewired my first house, I grabbed what I thought was a ground. It gave me a shock. Unlike laboratory animals, I didn’t learn from that, and grabbed the wire 4 more times. Hey, stupid: Do not touch Especially you, Ian Sigh.
- 6. But SEOs are doing the same thing, and have been for years. Going back before even the Florida update, Google’s hammered site owners who tried to rank through link spam. Let’s build links Google says any form of link acquisition could be spam. But we keep trying to ‘acquire’ links. We grab the wire again, and again, and again. Bzzzzt Let’s build links Bzzzzt Let’s build links Bzzzzt
- 7. I MEAN THIS IN THE NICEST WAY
- 8. I really do mean this in a nice way. ‘We’ includes SEOs, clients who believe link building is a good long-term strategy, pundits who recommend it, and me. Why do we keep doing this?! ARE WE ALL IDIOTS?!
- 9. I suspect link building is now Google’s favorite drinking game. Every time an SEO mentions it or tries another harebrained scheme to ‘fool’ Google, someone at the big G gets a free beer. They get lots to drink there. LINK BUILDING G O O G L E ’ S FAVO R I T E D R I N K I N G G A M E
- 10. Of course, the moment guest posts became trendy, we turned those into spam, too. Bzzt. “
- 11. Or, how about this. A link exchange?! In 2012?!!! Bzzt. “
- 12. The best analogy I can think of is the old days of PR. We’d contact journalists to let them know why our client’s story would matter to the journalist’s readers. If we’d done PR the way we now do link building, we’d call journalists and say: “ can you write about Hi, my client so he can sell more stuff?” It’s nuts. Note that I’m not saying ‘Artificial link building never works!’ Of course it can work. It just doesn’t work consistently, or permanently. And the wake-up call can be a nasty one for a business dependent on Google traffic.
- 13. CONTENT MARKETING But wait! It gets better! Now we have ‘content marketing.’ It’s all the rage. Marketers everywhere push it as a new strategy that can get you rankings.
- 14. CONTENT MARKETING A G R E AT WAY TO S E L L M O R E B O O KS What it really is is a trendy term that doesn’t mean much. Mentioning ‘Content Marketing’ may get folks to read a blog post or buy your book. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even a tactic, the way most marketers define it.
- 15. I WROTE ALL THIS STUFF So now, marketers and site owners say, “I wrote all this stuff…”
- 16. …And by ‘stuff’ they mean 5+ articles for $100 or less, each, with specific keyword densities. aka: Crap
- 17. …and they get nothing for their efforts. uh. cheep?
- 18. LET GO OF THE WIRE STOP IT. Let go of the damned wire. Stop looking for easy solutions to authority-building. ‘Cranking out’ crappy content won’t do it. Neither will buying, begging for or otherwise artificially acquiring links. Understand this: THERE ARE NO EASY SOLUTIONS. Acquiring links in such a way that Google won’t quickly detect it isn’t easy. Nor is successful content spam. You’re better off focusing on marketing.
- 19. LET GO OF THE WIRE Stop grabbing the wire. Rant: The truth is, we keep grabbing the wire – we’re not clinging to it. We just keep grabbing it and getting shocked, again and again.
- 20. Create marketable content Don’t build a marketing strategy around ‘cranking out’ content. Build your strategy around creating marketable content. That means good stuff. This isn’t the focus of this talk, so I’m not going to go into more details. Hopefully you know the difference between marketable content and total dreck.
- 21. Build authority through conversion THIS is what I’m talking about tonight: Build authority by starting with the assumption that everyone converts in some way. Every visitor to your site should read something, or share it, or ‘like’ it, or subscribe to your blog/newsletter, or request info, or buy… Everyone converts, somehow. That’s the goal.
- 22. MARKET YOUR CONTENT To do that, you start with marketable content. Then you market it.
- 23. MARKET YOUR CONTENT (This is content marketing) CONTENT MARKETING: Building authority for your site and your brand by creating & promoting fantastic content. NOT CONTENT MARKETING: Writing one 500-word blog post per day, for as little money as possible, then announcing it to my 10 Twitter followers.
- 24. THE RULE
- 26. EVERYONE CONVERTS READS SHARES SUBSCRIBES LINKS BUYS
- 27. OH C'MON IAN, REAL BRANDS DON'T DO THAT. First thing I hear when I talk about this kind of marketing is ‘Real brands don’t do that’. Oh no?
- 28. USA Network created their ‘Ask a Spy’ series: Free, short videos you could watch on YouTube or on the USA web site. The goal? Promote the show Burn Notice.
- 29. They promoted the heck out of these videos, with commercials, PPC ads, etc..
- 30. I don’t know what the results were, but the show is going on its 4th season and has a solid following.
- 31. How about a knitting company running a PPC ad for their free patterns? Why advertise free content? Because they’re doing CONTENT MARKETING.s
- 32. ConsumerSearch does the same thing.
- 33. THE PROCESS The process: 1. Create great, free content so good that it’s a service in itself. 2. Promote it. 3. Convert readers into fans into customers. Lots of people talk about #1 and #3. I’m going to show you some tools and tactics for #2.
- 34. OUTBRAIN Outbrain: A service that lets you place links to your content in an ad widget they put on major sites, like Slate. You pay by the click. The links are not crawlable, so no Google TOS problems.
- 35. Then you get a report kinda like this.
- 36. IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m not suggesting you write crap and then spend $9999 getting visitors to it. I am suggesting that you have a lot of competitors, and waiting for organic traffic to something you slaved away at writing for a week may lead to indigestion. Paid advertising is a great way to give great new content a boost.
- 37. Once you do that, you need to see if it’s working. That means looking at content effectiveness. TEST YOUR CONTENT
- 38. Sigh. My bounce rate is ridiculous… MEH MEH GAH! This report shows traffic from the OutBrain network, and whether it’s doing anything for me. If I was tracking goals like subscriptions and sales, I could look at that, too. In this case, I was sloppy, so all I get is visito duration and bounce rate.
- 39. HMMMM. I’LL KEEP TESTING THESE. These two titles aren’t doing all that bad.
- 40. AS FOR THIS ONE…
- 41. Portent.com/reading-time.htm And, for that top article, I need to see how long it SHOULD take to read. We built a quick little tool that lets you evaluate reading time and grade level. Here’s the report on that article. 2:37 to read. So an average time-on-page of :24 is pretty awful.
- 42. Average blog bounce rate: 66%
- 43. sigh
- 44. REFINE THE CAMPAIGN NONE of this means you give up!!!! Instead, look at where traffic’s coming from.
- 45. In Outbrain, I can turn off articles that aren’t performing. So I took the worst performers from my content report and remove them from the stream.
- 46. $.14 CPC All this cost me $.14/click. About $100 in 2 days.
- 47. 5% RESHARES (so far) And generated a 5% RESHARE RATE through Google+, Twitter and Facebook. Every reshare helps build site authority and rankings, AND increases the chances someone will link to that page. So this is a win, to say the least.
- 48. STUMBLEUPON PAID DISCOVERY Stumbleupon has an amazing advertising program called ‘paid discovery’. You pay a per-Stumble fee to have your content inserted into the stream for relevant readers.
- 50. I decided to test a time-management presentation I did.
- 51. Stumbleupon scores content based on thumbs-up, thumbs-down and readership. I did poorly. HEADDESK
- 53. But it turns out I was in a few silly categories. I found the low-scoring ones and removed them from the campaign. CLICK
- 54. I also changed the content serving priority.
- 55. …and got huge re-shares, which let to 129 simultaneous visitors on Portent.com for a few hours. Whoa.
- 56. Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit Outbrain and Stumbleupon are just the start. Do the same thing on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites. But do it smart. Remember…
- 57. EVERYONE CONVERTS Everyone converts. If you’re not getting conversion, you may not be targeting the right content, or the best audience, or something else.
- 58. And NEVER quit. EVER. Marketing is equal parts creative genius and pure pig-headed stubborness. Make sure you use both. DON’T QUIT THIS
- 59. CLOSE THE LOOP Sometimes, seeing your great content once isn’t enough. So you need to close the loop by showing readers the same stuff a few times.
- 60. FACEBOOK EXCHANGE Re-targeting networks are a great way to do this.
- 61. Outbrain Visit Pixel Facebook In this example, a reader sees your article for the first time via Outbrain. Then they Ad go to Facebook. Because Facebook Exchange retargeting uses Outbrain data, we can show that person an ad for the same content again. Share/Like If they come back, they’re even more likely to re-share.
- 62. FACEBOOK CUSTOM AUDIENCES You can also build and target Facebook campaigns based on your ‘house’ e-mail list. That’s even better targeting. These people already like you. They just need a gentle reminder that your stuff is there.
- 63. Subscribe Facebook Ad
- 65. THE INEVITABLE
- 66. Can you even prove it works? Of course, someone will ask if I can prove this works. I wonder why? When the same person spent $500,000 on TV ads, or $25,000 on a print ad, or $5,000 on a Yellow Pages ad, did they demand that level of measurement? Nope. But anyway…
- 67. TOO MUCH NOISE There’s too much noise to know for certain when someone links/re-shares content because of a paid campaign. The ‘noise’ in this case includes clicks from social networks in the normal course of business, visits from organic search bolstered by the brand reinforcement of previous content marketing, etc.
- 68. BUT
- 69. Here’s a quick case study. I posted this article, then promoted it the ways I’ve talked about in this presentation.
- 70. That got me 195 links to this page. 18 from unique domains. Including one link from Reddit. I spent $200 promoting it. IS THAT WORTH $200?!!! HELL YES.
- 71. ON AVERAGE WE SEE AN INCREASE OF 2-3 LINKS ABOVE NORMAL ACQUISITION PER 3000 PURCHASED PAGEVIEWS ON STUMBLEUPON.
- 72. $9/LINK On average, campaigns like this cost $9/ link. Pricing by the link is a little silly, since social shares matter too, and link value is so inconsistent. But people insist, so there you have it. I dare you to find a less-expensive way to acquire authority this fast.
- 73. AND…
- 74. EVERYONE CONVERTS Plus, you’re getting more than just ranking authority. You’re getting real brand authority, because potential customers/ clients learn how much you know, subscribe to your newsletter and come a step closer to full conversion.
- 75. i dunno, ian. Isn't there an easier, faster way to do this?
- 76. THE SHORT CUT Of course there is! It’s much less work if you…
- 77. Hire a nice, friendly SEO spammer.
- 78. Or just search for ‘buy links’ and then go buy some. No one at Google WILL EVER SUSPECT A THING. cough
- 79. Let’s build links Bzzzzt Let’s build links Bzzzzt Let’s build links In other words, you can just keep grabbing the wire. Bzzzzt The problem, of course, is that you’ll continue to get shocked.
- 80. CHANGE THE CONVERSATION Instead, I suggest we change the entire conversation. Talk about smart marketing and authority building. Talk about diversified strategies. Help people test results. Never use the phrase ‘crank out’. Accept a different definition of ‘content marketing’.
- 81. Questions? Catch me on Twitter or Google Plus. Me: @portentint plus.google.com/+IanLurie