If you’re worried about spending too much time on social media and updating your website, but you know you need to keep your business account active, this is the guide for you.

This guide is an in-depth look at how I produce weekly content for my clients’ websites, their Facebook pages, and their Twitter accounts, and how I effectively manage the process in just a few hours each month. I have been using this method for years, and it has been honed over time. If you like it, please share it with someone else by clicking Like, +1, or perhaps you could blog about it using our guide!

Goals of This Strategy:

The focus of my strategy isn’t to attract tons of new Facebook fans or Twitter followers – though you’ll definitely attract more. You’re going to have to get a bit more aggressive to do that quickly.

This strategy is focused on helping busy website owners keep fresh content on their blog, Facebook feed, and Twitter feed, so it doesn’t look like the business has shut down. We all see those businesses that haven’t updated anything in 8 months, and we have to wonder what that says about their business? You don’t want to be the guy with no content – you want to be the business with cool stuff being shared for your followers. This is the fastest and most effective way I know how to do that.

There’s a side benefit to this strategy: it’s SEO-conscious. By using the blog method below, you’ll steadily add new Facebook likes, Google +1s, and Tweets that all reference your domain. Those are organic search indicators and they help your search rankings. I will also speculate, without any hard evidence on hand, that they increase your trust and authority in the eyes of search engines, especially when they link to deep pages on your site.

The key to this method is that you’re going to focus on curating content for your fans and followers. In other words, you’re going to find high quality content produced by other people and share it with them.

You’re going to do this using the following 5-step process:

1) Set Up Your Content Stream “Leads”
2) Post it to Your Blog
3) Post it to Your Facebook Page
4) Post it to Twitter
5) Maximize Your Efforts – Get the Most Value From Your New Content Stream

Step 1: Set Up Your Content Stream “Leads”

As I mentioned before, the key to this guide is that most of your content will be produced by other people. You’re going to happily give them credit for their content and use it to keep your own social streams full. You’re going to get your content from a few sources:

1. Google Alerts
2. RSS Feeds
3. Your Own Company

Google Alerts

This is going to be the primary source for your content. You’re going to pick 1 to 3 keywords that talk about what your company is about. If you operate a vacation rental in Maui, then ‘Maui‘ is going to be one of your keywords. If you run a plumbing business in Rockford, IL, then ‘plumbing‘ is going to be one of your keywords, and so is ‘Rockford.’  I also highly recommend that you have an alert set up for your company’s name, such as this option which alerts me to references to my company as well as my domain: “Hood Web Management” OR “hoodwebmanagement.com”

Now, you’re going to go to Google Alerts and set up the following alert:

Create an alert just like this for each of your 1 to 3 keywords

Just like the photo above, you want:

• Type: Everything
• How Often: Once a Day (“As it happens” is typically way too many emails for such a broad keyword)
• Volume: Only the best results (try testing this one if you’re not getting enough good content from your alerts)
• Deliver to: Your Email Address.

Also, be sure to take a look at the results preview to make sure that you’re getting relevant content. If you’re having trouble getting quality content, or if there’s a bunch of junk mixed in with the good stuff, learn how to use advanced Google queries to make your searches more specific.

Every day you’re going to get an email. The email is going to come every 24 hours after you first set it up, so if you set it up at 2pm it tends to come at 2pm everyday. Everyday you’re going to scan this email for anything that might interest your fans.

What type of content do you care about? To continue the Maui Vacation Rental example, here’s the types of Google Alerts content that I would definitely decide to post:

• Awesome photos taken in Maui that are getting popular on flickr or mentioned in newspapers (it happens all the time with newspapers that have a user-generated content section)
• Post about the upcoming street festival so your guests know what kind of awesome things go on around your vacation rental
• A recent Reddit thread talking about best places to snorkel in Maui
• Just to be redundant – anything thing else remotely interesting that mentions Maui

You get the idea – anything about your keywords can be considered. After a few weeks of this process you’ll start to get an idea of (A) what type of content tends to be more valuable to you and (B) how often cool stuff comes along (it may be daily, or it might be every other week). That’s OK if you’re not getting floods of content from Google Alerts, you’re going to fill in any gaps in Alerts content with the next items. If you’re not getting anything good from Google Alerts in the past month, start rethinking your keywords and testing new ones in the Google Alerts preview window.

RSS Feeds

Google Alerts is the most important, but if you have additional time to dedicate to managing your content (or an intern), you’re going to set up RSS Feeds or email updates from a few key news sources. If your business is focused locally at all, you’re going to subscribe to the local blog and/or newspaper updates. If your business is a wine store, you’re going to sign up for updates from each of the prominent wine magazines or blogs, and from your state & area wineries for their updates. Anytime we can feature complementary businesses we’re going to do so, so be sure to think of complementary businesses in your areas (these aren’t competitors – they’re typically businesses that sell to the same demographic) and sign up for their mailing lists and blogs.

In your email software – Gmail, Outlook, etc. – set up a folder or label titled Content (or whatever you like) and set up filters so that all of these new emails to go into that folder automatically. For the websites that don’t provide email subscriptions to their RSS feed, use a service like FeedMyInbox.com or RSSforward.com

The standards for RSS feeds is the same as Google Alerts – anything remotely interesting that is about your business or that might matter to most of your customer base is worth considering. For example, my customer base is small business owners, so an article about small business marketing, even if it doesn’t have anything to do with my specific services, would be very useful to most of my customers.

Your Own Company

Interesting stuff happens to your company daily whether you know it or not – you’re going to quit neglecting that content. Every time a customer writes a new review, every time an employee has a baby or gets married, every time a cool blue bird lands on your office window and you snap a sweet picture of it, you’re going to twist that into content. So, start taking note of these moments and post them! This is your chance to give customers an inside scoop into your business, which makes them feel like they know you better and gives your business a human touch that most websites just don’t have.

If your business is mentioned in the news, on a blog, or maybe you’re interviewed by a reporter, all of those should absolutely get posted as well.

The less important examples don’t necessarily have to go to the blog. If it’s just a picture of the bird on the window, post it to Facebook, link to that Facebook post on Twitter, and be done with it. It’ll get a few likes and maybe a retweet or two, and it’ll add one more update to your social streams, which is the goal of this strategy.

Step 2: Post it to Your Blog

You’re going to publish your new found content to your blog in the following format:

• (A) Good photo that is somehow relevant to the content (you’re going to find that elsewhere)
• (B) An introduction and commentary on the content written by yourself
• (C) A key quote from the content (if it’s written). If the content is video or an infographic then you’re going to embed it here.
• (D) A link to the original content, and credit for the photo that you used.

(A) Find a Great Photo:

To find the photos you’re going to search for Commercial-OK Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr. To do this go to http://search.creativecommons.org/ and type your keywords in to the search box. Make sure the “use for commercial purposes” checkbox is selected – you don’t need to check the “modify/adapt/build upon” box unless you plan to edit the images heavily (which you’re not going to do because it sucks up your precious time). Click on the Flickr box to do your search.

Once you have found an image that you want to use, you’ll want to download an appropriately-sized version for your website (500px is a common width for many blog content sections). You don’t want to hotlink to the photo because (A) it might get taken down someday and (B) you can likely snag some Google Image search traffic by hosting the image yourself. You’ll want to rename this image file to something useful – Flickr filenames like 5906108613_b45a038729_b.jpg are total junk – choose something descriptive but not spammy, such as maui-beach-photo.jpg. Be sure to optimize the image alt tag to match the file name, and insert the image at the very top of your blog post.

Quick Tip: Adding a comment to the Flickr photo and letting the photographer know that you used their photo for a blog post is a great way to get a quick link from Flickr and it’s courteous to the photographer. Here’s an example for the photo we used on this post.

(B) Comment on the Content:

Think of something witty, useful, or whatever, and use it as an introduction to the content. For example:

Take a look at this article released by the local paper today. They’re suggesting that 35% of visitors to our town who stay for more than 3 days will come back again!

This doesn’t have to be long, but try and make it more than 1 or 2 sentences if you can.

(C) Quote the Content or Embed It:

Use quote marks, make the text italic, and use some sort of block quote formatting like this:

“We’ve conducted a bunch of great research and found out that blah blah blah….”

Don’t quote the entire article unless it’s very short. Try to pull out a couple great paragraphs that show why it’s interesting.

If the content that you’re sharing is a photo or an infographic or an embeddable video, feel free to include that here instead. Be sure to format the width to match your blog’s maximum width or smaller.

(D) Link to the Content and Photo Credit:

Underneath the quote, you’re going to put the words “Click here to read the original article at ContentWebsite.com” – the underlined portion will be the link back to the original article. This part is very important, because if you don’t like to the original post, you’re stealing their content. If you do link to the original post (and don’t quote the entire page), then you’re sharing their content, which is the goal here.

On the next line, post the credit for the photo like this: “Photo Credit: Flickr user awesomephotodude using Creative Commons License” – the underlined portion should link back to the original Flickr image page.

That’s it for posting to the blog. Be sure to think of a good catchy headline, add tags to the post and a category, etc. and don’t spend too long on this part!

Step 3: Your Facebook Account

When you post to Facebook, you’re going to click “link”, add the URL of your new blog post, and then click “add” (you may have to adjust this process slightly once Timelines for Facebook Pages is released). Facebook will automatically select a photo for you – be sure to use the left/right arrows to choose the best image, not the one they select for you. Make sure to add a new unique content that doesn’t match the one you put at the top of the blog post, and click publish.

Tagging Other Businesses:

Here’s one super powerful way to increase the value of this strategy. Let’s say you’re running your Maui vacation rental business, and you post about a set of photos that someone posted on their photo blog, and you notice that they have a Facebook page. You’re going to tag their facebook page in your post. First, you have to like their Facebook page using your Facebook Page (if that sounds complicated, just read this guide). Then, you’re going to tag them like this in the comments of your Facebook page post:

Check out these awesome new photos from @John Doe Photography – we loved them!

Here’s an example of how we tagged the West Seattle Blog in a Facebook update recently:

The @ symbol lets Facebook know you want to tag someone or something - once the blue part hovers below, click on it to make the tag complete

By doing this, your status update will now show up on not only your Facebook page, but their Facebook page, too. This can come off as spam pretty easily, so you have to be a little flattering when you do it, but not only can you develop a good relationship with other businesses by doing this tastefully, you can also get traffic from their fan pages!

Step 4: Your Twitter Account

Posting to Twitter is fairly simple, I use the following format:

Sample Text for a Tweet - Don't over think this one too much

The first part can say “New Article” or “Just Posted” or “New Blog Post” or nothing at all. Keep the whole tweet as short as you can, and add 1 or 2 hashtags if they fit: #maui or #photography or #whatever. Use a link shortener if you want to track clickthroughs, though Twitter’s shortener (http://t.co) will work fine for most purposes.

Step 5: Maximize Your Efforts – Get the Most Value From Your New Content Stream

Step 5 is about wrapping up loose ends, and making sure you’re not missing any opportunities. I’ve designed this to be a relatively passive system, so implementing these additional tips will pay dividends over the years.

Optimize with Social Buttons

You’d better have Facebook Like, Google +1, and a Tweet This button at an absolute minimum. I like using the counter format like you see at the top of this page, because there’s an element of social proof – if readers see that lots of other people found the content helpful, they’re more likely to jump on board. If you don’t know how to set these up on your own using straight code, just use a WordPress plugin.

Depending on your demographic, consider adding Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn buttons, too. At the time this guide was written in late 2011, it is generally accepted that Facebook Likes, Tweets, and Google +1s will all contribute to your organic search traffic. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon, so make sure you’ve got buttons in place to maximize the value of your posts. Believe it or not, you’ll keep getting people clicking those buttons for many months, which helps deliver longer term value to your efforts.

Allow Comments

Allowing comments on your blog post will ideally give you a lot of unique text on your page that will increase the SEO value of your post. Be sure to moderate for spammy links and use a spam plug-in like Akismet for WordPress. This shouldn’t add a ton of management time unless you get significant traffic to your blog.

Monitor and Follow Up

Keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter after you post. Respond to any questions or references to the post and click “favorite” on anyone that retweets it. If this is a passive system for you, don’t waste too much time worrying about getting more retweets – those are just a bonus.

Test Test Test!

If you notice one type of content doesn’t work well with your fanbase, use it less and test out other types of content. Don’t overdue it on any one type of content, either (like tons of photos or tons of boring content).

That’s it! Now Rinse and Repeat!

If it sounds too simple, it’s because I designed it that way. This is an easy and effective way to keep your website’s social media accounts active and up-to-date. If you implement it, you’ll no longer have to worry about losing potential customers because your Facebook feed hasn’t been updated since June 21, 2010.

So you got all the way to the bottom, huh? Congratulations! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

This guide is over 3000 words long and took awhile to write, not to mention months and years of honing my strategy, and instead of making a stupid e-book out of it and demanding your email address, I’m giving it away for free!

So, if you liked this guide, please consider tweeting it, sharing it with your Facebook fans, or maybe even using a quote from this article and sharing it on your blog, Facebook, and Twitter!

Still not sure if you’ve got the time to bother with this stuff?
That’s cool, just hire me to do it instead.

Photo Credit: Bookshelf photo by flickr user gadl released under Creative Commons license.

The 5-Step Guide to Publishing Tons of High Quality Content (For Blogs, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and More) is an article by Kane from Hood Web Management. Hood Web Management offers website management solutions including website maintenance, SEO services, linkbuilding, social media account management, web design, and more. Find out more by visiting us at Facebook.com/HoodWebManagement and following us on Twitter @HoodWebMgmt

Does your website own traffic like this?

A frequent question I hear from small business owners is “Why should I be spending money on SEO and linkbuilding when I already pay for Google Ads?”

For a long time I answered with the typical descriptions of how SEO works and how the two differ from one another, until I finally came up with the following analogy:

Pay-Per-Click advertising is like renting your website traffic: The second you quit paying for it, you’re left empty-handed.

Organic rankings from SEO is like owning your website traffic: Even when you decide to hang up your SEO hat, you continue receiving the dividends of your past Search Engine Optimization efforts, often for many years.

They finally get it! This analogy helps small business owners understand that PPC and SEO are both great, but SEO is the real long term win for small businesses!

Now, don’t get me wrong – I absolutely recommend that all businesses test and utilize both forms of search marketing. PPC has huge benefits including instant traffic and results, granular targeting and analytics, and just like renting, it offers liquidity: you can stop buying a keyword instantly. That makes it a great way to test a keyword or niche before you invest more money into it.

But that said, SEO is a long-term investment in your business and your website. So, are you renting your website traffic, or are you building equity in your website traffic?

SEO vs PPC: Quit Renting Your Website Traffic and Start Owning It! is an article by Kane from Hood Web Management. Hood Web Management offers website management solutions including website maintenance, SEO services, linkbuilding, social media account management, web design, and more. Find out more by visiting us at Facebook.com/HoodWebManagement and following us on Twitter @HoodWebMgmt

Why Links Matter: The Executive Summary

Links (both from other websites as well as the links within your own site) are important to small businesses because there is a direct correlation between high quality and high quantity links to your site, and more search traffic to your site.

For most small businesses, more search traffic means more customers. Need we say more?

Why Links Matter: The Complete Version

When Google started, their method for ranking websites in search was primarily based around the number of links a webpage had. The basic concept was that the more links a webpage had, the more likely that webpage was to have good content.

Essentially, links to your websites are popularity votes, and the more votes you get, the more popular you are with Google.

So why not run out and create thousands of links?

Simple: not all links are created equal.

Which of the following two links do you think are more valuable?

1. A link from an article on NewYorkTimes.com to your website after they interviewed you.
2. A link from suzeyqsblog.blogspot.com which has 4 blog posts from a year ago.

I should be pretty obvious that the New York Times link is more valuable. Just like befriending one of the cool kids in high school, a vote from a popular kid (or webpage) is far more valuable to your overall popularity than a vote from the class nerd.

OK, I get it, popular webpages win, unpopular webpages lose. So how do I figure out which links are valuable to me?

There’s a lot of factors that contribute to the value of a link, but here’s a few aspects that make a link from a website valuable to you, the small business owner:

1. Relevance: If you’re an electrician, getting a link from a website dedicated to electricians is more valuable than a website dedicated to fishing. Links from relevant websites help search engines figure out what your site is about, which helps you rank for that topic. So, if you’re looking to rank highly when people search for “Seattle Ice Cream,” then links from websites about Seattle or about ice cream are great for your site. Search engines are smart, though. If you get a link from a local blog that is based in Seattle, or a website that is about desserts, they can figure out that desserts are related to ice cream, and that a blog based in Seattle is writing about a business located in Seattle.
2. Authority & Trust: Similar to the NewYorkTimes.com example above, links from trusted and authority websites are more important than less-trusted websites. Local and regional news organizations are a good example of trusted sites. Often linkbuilders will talk about links from .EDU and .GOV domains. The reason these are considered so valuable is that they typically come from very trusted websites such as a university or state governmental agency – both of which tend to many “popularity votes” – do you see the pattern that’s forming? So, as a general rule of thumb, you should go after links from more important websites.
   Note: This is why linkbuilding services that claim to build “1000s of links per week” or “submit your website to 2000 directories instantly” all for the low low price of $99 are a waste of your time – these links are never valuable, and worse, they can come from spammy sites, which can be considered a mark against your website!
3. Diversity: Search engines like to see you get a wide variety of links. It’s an indicator of trust, and websites that don’t have a natural “link profile” can be red-flagged by search engines. So what types of links should you target to make sure your link profile is diverse? Consider the following types of links:
• Bloggers talking about your business
• Website directories
• People sharing your website on their Facebook page
• Reviews on sites like Yelp, InsiderPages, Google Places, etc.
• Comments that you have left on blogs and news websites
• Links from local organizations like your Chamber of Commerce

All of those links and many more will help you form a natural link profile, which means better performance in search engine rankings.

So let’s say I can go get a bunch of quality links over time. Then what? Am I done?

Nope! For better or worse, the job of linkbuilding is an ongoing one. For one, your competitors are only going to become more search savvy as time goes on, and it’s easy for them to see what links you already have if they know how (or if they hire someone who does).

Search engines can tell when you stop getting links to your site, and a website that hasn’t gotten any links in awhile it starts to look stale. In November 2011 Google announced that they have updated 35% of their search results to be more focused on ‘freshness’ and updated content! That means you can’t afford to be defensive, your business has to be proactive when it comes to building links.

Does that mean you need to hire a linkbuilding company like us to help you to build links forever? Not necessarily, but if you don’t have someone tasked with the responsibility of making sure your website is performing well in search and building links, you had better be doing something to make news in your community to keep the links coming!

OK, so what’s next? Tell me what to do!

We offer linkbuilding services here at Hood Web Management. Every month, we’ll spend a set number of hours building quality links to your website and promoting your business around the internet. As a result, you’ll receive more traffic to your website from search engines, many of which you’ll be able to turn into new clients and customers.

Call us today at (206) 905-4053 or fill out our contact form
and we’ll get your site ranking!

Why Links Are Important for Small Businesses is an article by Kane from Hood Web Management. Hood Web Management offers website management solutions including website maintenance, SEO services, linkbuilding, social media account management, web design, and more. Find out more by visiting us at Facebook.com/HoodWebManagement and following us on Twitter @HoodWebMgmt

Halloween is obviously a creative time of year for costumes and pranks, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be a creative time of year for linkbait. Here’s 6 8! great examples of Halloween linkbait, and hopefully some inspiration for your own holiday linkbait.  Don’t forget to check out the key takeaways at the end of the post!

Pumpkin Giving Birth:

Posted to Facebook by Blessed Birth Doula Services from Savannah, GA. Unfortunately someone else got the strong link from ComedyCentral.com via the Tosh.0 blog. A great example of linkworthy content in a business that a less creative linkbuilder might think was difficult to build links to, now someone needs to follow up on mentions without a link.

Pumpkin Giving Birth by Blessed Birth Doula Services

Linkbuilding Tip: If you can’t think of a way to turn a jack-o-lantern into your product, you’re not trying hard enough!

Halloween or Williamsburg

Continuing the blank or blank tumblr trend, Halloween or Williamsburg managed to get links from Kottke, The Daily Beast, and plenty of other domains. This doesn’t seem like a long term project to me, but a good concept with good execution will get enough links in the short term to justify creating it. This is content that can be built upon throughout the year and re-promoted every Halloween.

On a sidenote, I think the Williamsburg reference is too obscure, I would have titled it Halloween or Hipster to avoid losing potential traffic. I live in the Pacific Northwest, where we have plenty of hipsters, but I didn’t immediately catch the Williamsburg, Brooklyn reference (a hipster hotbed in NYC, apparently), so I imagine there’s a lot more people like me who will skip over this due to poor choice of name. Takeaway: If your linkbait has universal appeal (like laughing at funny hipster outfits), don’t segment yourself into obscurity with a localized content title!

Picture courtesy Halloween or Williamsburg

Exploding Pumpkin Experiment (Youtube)

This exploding pumpkin video was uploaded in 2009, but it’s still getting links this year, going to show that your holiday-based linkbait can be valuable for years to come (if you don’t stick the year in the content title, of course).

Axes of Evil

Here’s a great way to get links out of a demographic that normally wouldn’t spend much time linking to Halloween content (statistics geeks). So far I only see links from BoingBoing and a few smaller blogs, but I imagine it will keep earning links it makes its way around the internet. Axes of Evil Comic:

Image by Grant Snider

Croshame

Another one picked up by BoingBoing, this one is a direct promotion for some evil crochet work on etsy. A good example of how to promote unique e-commerce products, especially if you’re trying to sell them year round.

Evil Crochet Goth Person by Croshame on etsy

Instructables

I could have any one of the thousands of Halloween costumes or decorations posted on Instructables, but here’s one on making creepy halloween decor. Halloween is a pretty big DIY holiday, so if you can tell people a crafty way to make an awesome costume, they’ll spread the word. You might not have the same search engine traction as Instructables, but you’ve got the power of reddit/digg/twitter behind you if the instructions are good enough.

Creepy Halloween Decor from Instructables

Halloween SEO Characters

This post is the perfect example of playing the flattery card and catering to a niche. Mitchell at Maple North snagged over 60 tweets and certainly some traffic from his Internet Marketing Halloween Superheroes post, and at least a few links to boot.  I think Wilverine probably has the best name, and the best costume:

Wil Reynolds Image courtesy Mitchell at Maple North

Jimmy Kimmell: Tell Your Kids You Ate Their Halloween Candy

Another great piece of content – this one may not have been intended for linkbuilding, but it certainly worked some marketing magic. Do a search for “Jimmy Kimmel” kids “Halloween candy” right now on Google and you’ll find 222,000 results for this video: (Not bad for a piece of super simple crowd-generated content, huh?)

Takeaways:

So, what have we learned from the above examples?

1) Stick To Your Niche:

Halloween (or any holiday) can be applied to anything! Take your niche, and make it halloween-y.  It’s easy, watch:

• Wedding niche? Post ideas for a Halloween-themed wedding (or better yet, photograph a halloween wedding)
• Photography niche? Post some awesome creepy Halloween photos and promote the heck out of them. If you’re smart, you’ll also release the photos under a Creative Commons license and make it super easy for people to embed the photos with a link to your site, and get the word out to big time bloggers and encourage them to use your photos as stock photos in their Halloween posts.
• Music niche? Are you in a band? Cover any awesome Halloween song and send it to your mailing list, or better yet, release an entire Halloween-themed video for one of your songs.

OK, so those are easy ones. How about some tougher businesses?

• Construction Company? Build an amazing haunted house in your backyard with scrap lumber (bonus points if it’s built to code). Post the entire process, along with costs, instructions, etc. and distribute the link to woodworking websites, craftsman sites, etc. This, like most linkbait, will work a thousand times better if the haunted house turns out awesome.
• Law Firm? This might be too expensive for other businesses, but if you’ve got a big marketing budget like a law firm, it could be done for a few thousand dollars pretty easily. Build a replica of your website, and have a web designer redo the graphics so it looks like your original website, except “haunted.” I’m thinking cobwebs on the logo, haunted house touches like broken window shutters, darker color scheme, black cats, whatever else you like. Then recreate the content so that it’s focused on Halloween creatures. For example, “dog bite liability cases for werewolves,” or maybe “libel and slander protection for Salem witches,” or “burn victim legal action for Frankenstein.” You get the idea. Get a good domain (I’m guessing Halloween-themed law domains haven’t been snatched up by affiliate marketers yet) and find a creative way to tie-in links to your regular site.
• Plumber? I wouldn’t recommend posting pictures of the most disgusting things you’ve pulled out of clogged drains, though it would fit the bill for Halloween. How about dressing up as Mario & Luigi and posting some photos to your site of you doing actual plumbing activities? I’d bet you could rent the costumes for $100 for a day (a month before Halloween when it’s cheaper) and then do the photo shoot. Submit the page to reddit, digg, and a bunch of video game enthusiast sites, every Mario Brothers-related Facebook page, etc.  It’s one day’s worth of work, and a few years worth of links…

You can see from the examples above that ideas can range from pretty simple to a bit more complex – the one thing they all have in common, though, is a bit of creativity.

2) Think Long Term:

Holiday content is evergreen content, so be sure to follow best practices for evergreen content so you can keep promoting it year after year (That means no “Halloween 2011″ in the title unless the content is actually 2011 specific).

3) Be Smart Beforehand:

Design your content so that it’s easy to direct links and references to your own site. In the first example, the “pumpkin giving birth” photos were posted to the business’s Facebook page. As a result, it was reposted elsewhere and emailed around without proper attribution (aka a link to their website!). Have a dedicated page on your website for the content, and consider finding a tasteful way to watermark the content with your URL if it’s a photo or video that will get embedded outside of your site.

4) Be Proactive:

Once you post the content and it goes viral (fingers crossed) pat yourself on the back, but don’t move on because your work isn’t done. Now you need to hunt down all of the places where the content was posted without a link.  If they don’t already have a link to your site (or if their link is to a middleman site), contact them and ask if they’ll add/change to your link. Search for the title of your content in quotes on Google and you’ll find many of the references. If your content is an image, Google Image search now allows you to drag and drop images to find where that image has been posted online. Here’s a tutorial: Google’s Search By Image.

8 Great Examples of Halloween Linkbuilding (and Takeaways for Your Website) is an article by Kane from Hood Web Management. Hood Web Management offers website management solutions including website maintenance, SEO services, linkbuilding, social media account management, web design, and more. Find out more by visiting us at Facebook.com/HoodWebManagement and following us on Twitter @HoodWebMgmt