In my opinion, there are two types of content marketing. The traditional, century-old form is to publish content in order to acquire customers. More recently, publishing content in order to acquire links has also been labeled as content marketing, but I think that this is fundamentally different from the original. Sure, it can eventually lead to the same results (more sales), but the initial goals are different. You’re either marketing your product through content, or you’re marketing your content.

Build it, and they will come?

Simply create compelling content and links will follow, right? In an ideal world, yes. But not in the real world.

I often see people trying to use content in their marketing strategy, then struggling with it, quickly followed by giving up when the results are unsatisfying and finally stating that “content marketing doesn´t work for them”.

Well, everyone can use content to effectively build links in a profitable way, but only with the right strategy. When defining the most suitable approach, this is the process I always follow.

Step 1: Situation analysis

Different situations require different approaches. Try to find out what you need most in your situation, by taking a close look at your competition with tools like CognitiveSEO or MajesticSEO. Not to see what you can copy, but for a SWOT analysis. You know, just like in old school marketing. To identify weaknesses in your link profile that need to be addressed, but also to spot opportunities or threats.

If it turns out that your link profile lacks relevance (you’ve got lots of links, but almost zero from your own industry), you’ll need a different approach than when you simply need volume. And the needs of an established, authoritative website are different from a relatively new site.

If you have defined your needs, you can move on the the next phase.

Step 2: Concept

With a clear SWOT in mind, you can try to come up with an idea that might help you to reach your goals.

Why do people share?

Before you start thinking about ideas that you can use, it is very important to get a crystal clear image of your target audience. Who are they and, more importantly, what makes your audience share stuff?

This usually differs between industries and between website types. For example, a travel affiliate site shows linking and sharing behaviour that is different from a finance blogger. And keep in mind: websites or companies don’t share things, people do.

In general, there are five reasons why people share stuff. Self definition is without a doubt the most important sharing motivator. You are what you share, and people continuously build their personal brand online. Just take a look at what you share online. I can probably get quite a good picture of who you are just by analyzing what you’ve shared in the past.

Another sharing motivator is Personal benefit. This does not necessarily have to be a financial payment, but sharing something because you want to get something in return, to create goodwill, or simply to get noticed are personal benefits as well.

Altruism (often reciprocal altruism, since real altruism is very scarce), Connectedness (maintaining relationships) and Evangelism are other reasons for people to share things online.

If you’re interested in finding out more about why people share stuff, I’d recommend reading this study from the New York Times.

Not all shares are created equal

With that in mind, it is also important to think about what attracts the right kind of shares. A photo of a cute cat might get thousands of likes on Facebook without attracting a single link, while an extensive resources earns hundreds of links but only a handful of shares or tweets.

Just take a look at the list below and ask yourself what you’d prefer. Usually the more effort a share takes, the more valuable it is.

* Facebook Like: “Here’s another photo of a cute cat.”
* Retweet: “Someone I trust likes it, so it’s probably awesome.”
* Facebook share: “It’s good enough to make me break my pattern of clicking the like button.”
* Tweet: “You’ve made me say something on Twitter.”
* Facebook post: “I have been triggered enough to create a post on Facebook.”
* Regular link: “I just logged in to WordPress / Tumblr / used DreamWeaver / whatever and unleashed my HTML-knowledge on something that exceeded 140 characters.”
* Google Plus: “Oh Google, I love you.”

I’m not saying that you should focus on links only, but selecting a concept that’s only capable of getting Likes or Shares on Facebook is probably not your best option.

Personas?

For individual content items, you probably don’t need to create full-blown persona profiles, but you should definitely think about it.

Ask yourself this: “If I create this, who will link to it? And why?”. If you’re not able to answer this straight away, you’re probably better off creating persona profiles first.

Step 3: Creation

Once you have a clear picture of your target audience, you will be able to create content that is much more effective.

Content requirements

You need content that is made to stick. Or rather, content that is made to be shared.

Success is almost a guarantee when your content is:
Simple
Trustworthy
Recognizable / identifiable
Unique / unexpected
Commerce is secondary (at most)
Triggers action-emotions

There’s already been written a lot about these concept requirements (I’d recommend checking out Ross Hudgens’ Content Marketing Checklist), but the last one could use some additional elaboration.

Target emotions

If you analyse different examples very succesful content, you will find that there’s one common denominator: they all trigger action-emotions.

Our normal behaviour is to digest content. Read, see, view, move on. But strong emotions can make people act different from their normal behaviour. It can make people take action, in stead of proceeding with their passive, digestive behavior. The stronger the emotion, the more effort someone will take to get the word out (Like vs. Link).

If you target the right emotions, you might be able to (subtly) persuade them to take action, by sharing your content. This might sound manipulative, but this is all what marketing is about: persuading people into taking specific actions.

There are dozens of different emotions, and some are more easy or effectively to target than others. In general, most emotions can be devided into six different categories; Pride, Pleasure, Passion, Fear, Anger and Sadness.

Keep in mind that there are also a few emotions that you rather want to avoid, including Lust, Relaxation, Boredom, Regret, Stress, Guilt and Embarassment. These are all emotions that most people prefer to exerience privately, and not in public.

Step 4: Promotion

If you have put enough effort in the first three stages of this process, the promotion will be a breeze. You knew from the start who you’d be targeting, which made it easier for you subtly make them share your content by triggering their emotions.

Sure, you’ll still need to send out dozens of emails and make a few promotional calls. And you’ll probably also want to spend some ad budget on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Outbrain or whatever is relevant in your situation. But all of this will be much more effective and lead to better results when your content is carefully crafted for your situation, and properly targeted at the right audience. Which will save you time and budget for the next content item.

tl;dr

1. Define your needs
2. Find out what makes your target audience share (and link!)
3. Create something that matches #1 with #2
4. Promote the hell out of it
5. Rinse and repeat

Need help?

As you can see, content marketing is a *lot* more than just ‘creating good content’. Especially when you don’t have a lot of experience with creating and promoting content, it can definitely be overwhelming. Need help with it? Then you might want to check out this page.

The post Content Marketing: it’s All About Targeting appeared first on Wiep.net.

First: find mentions

Do you still use Google Alerts for brand monitoring? Then you’re probably missing out on 80% of your brand mentions. With a service like Mention.net you’ll be able to find *much* more.

And you can also use Mention to monitor specific keywords, instead of just brands, and identify relevant articles or blog posts almost instantly after they have been published. Track two brands for free, or monitor 20 keywords for just $20 a month.

You can also use Google to find brand mentions. Simply search for the keyword that you want to monitor, exclude the sites that you don’t want to keep track of, and refine to the last 24hrs, the last week or maybe even last month.

Then: identify the non-linking mentions

Now you have a list with pages that mention your brand, but the link builder in you will have a specific interest in mentions that don’t link to you. Obviously, those are easy link targets.

Simply use the export function in Mention.net to get a full list of the URLs that mention your brand. If you use Google, set your preferences to 100 results instead of 10 first. Then use SEOquake or Mozbar (both are Firefox plugins) to easily save all URLs in a csv file.

With SEOtools for Excel, you can crawl these pages and search for sites that don’t link to your site. Use IsFoundOnPage and search for your URL.

Please note that this can take a while, depending on the size of your list. If a zero is returned, the string (your URL) could not be found on the page, which means that they don’t link to your site. Yet. Because you will ask them to, of course.

I’d definitely like a link from Example.com…

 
Pro tip: in stead of using Excel, you can also get someone at Freelancer.com or Odesk to build you a tool that does the same for less than $50. That tool will probably be faster and will give you more options to retrieve additional info or data from the pages that you’re checking.

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During this time, I think I have learned quite a bit about link building, SEO and marketing in general. Most of this can be boiled down to just seven key learnings, which all are pretty much ‘basics’.

1. Always be honest

To everyone! To your clients. To link targets. To Google. To yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with crossing Google’s lines every now and then, as long as you’re being honest about it. To your clients, that you’re putting their sites at risk. To yourself, that you’re really giving your clients value for money. To Google, that when you’re filing a reinclusion request, you accept the consequences of your grey hat tactics, instead of denying that those advertorial links had been purposely un-nofollowed.

Also be honest in your link requests. Stating that “you’re an avid reader of website X” is somewhat hard to believe after you’ve just misspelled their name (happens regularly). And while we’re at it: things like “if you use this anchor text, we will both benefit of the relevance”, “I will provide you with free, high quality, relevant content because I like your site” or “no, me paying you to link to my page isn’t against Google’s guidelines” are not principles of persuasion – that’s lying. Stop doing that.

2. Place yourself in the other person’s shoes

The amount of link requests, PR-pitches and other link-solliciting emails I receive every day is rediculous, and I’m not even a journalist! However, the vast majority of these emails is about as relevant as a portable cassette player in 2013. Not even a little bit.

I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration to state that, if the sender would have placed him or herself in the shoes of the recipient for just two seconds before hitting ‘send’, over 90% of all link request emails would never have been sent.

What would you do if you received the email? Would you delete it straight away? Then don’t send it.

3. Get rid of your toolbars

Metrics like PR, TF, MR or WHTEVR can definitely help you to determine the value of a page or site, but should never be leading. The amount of comments, the quality of the content of the website or the thematical relevance cannot be measured by a toolbar (AFAIK), but are – in most cases – more important than any abbreviated scale from 0 to 10.

Try finding potential link targets without looking at the Alexa ranking, Domain Authority or anything similar every now and then. You’ll be surprised to see what sites you’d normally have discarded straight away, but now turn out to be decent targets.

4. Never assume

You can learn a lot from following smart folks on Twitter, reading SEO blogs or even attending Google Webmaster Hangouts, but don’t take these tips and advice as the truth. Question things that are seemingly common sense, or unknowable.

There are many excellent studies and tutorials out there, but always try to take it with a grain of your own salt. Things might work out to be different for you – online marketing does not work in an IFTTT-format, unfortunately.

5. Say ‘thank you’

Has someone linked to you or mentioned your client in a positive way, regardless of whether you’ve asked them to do so? Make sure to thank them. Send them a short email, give them a call to say thanks, or maybe even send a gift as a token of your appreciation.

It’s polite to say ‘thank you’ when someone has done something nice for you, but it’s also a great way to create goodwill and to build a solid network.

6. Think ahead

There’s one ground rule in link building: no matter how effective a link building tactic is, there’s always (ALWAYS!) a dumbass who will ruin it for everyone.

Infographic link building, guest posting, broken link building and (for some) even getting advertorial links have been very effective link building tactics, but have become drastically less efficient due to overuse.

Now that guest posting has become main stream, lots of blogs now have rate cards for publishing guest posts and infographics, making them the ideal target for lazy link builders of low quality websites. That’s not a good development for those who have just put all their eggs in the guest posting basket.

When you find a link building tactic that works, you shouldn’t be thinking “Awesome! How can I exploit this tactic in the most easy and most profitable way?”, but “Good to know that this works. Now let’s find another tactic that works!”.

Think ahead, and always look for new techniques, new tools, new approaches or other ways to distinguish yourself from your (or your client’s) competitors.

7. Take some time off

Spending 10+ hours a day staring at a monitor isn’t good for you nor for your clients. Get away from your desk every now and then. Some of the best ideas occur when you’re not doing any real business – when you’re doing groceries, taking the dog for a walk or just talking to someone else about ‘offline things’.

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92 Ways to get (and maximize) press coverage – Chris Winfield
Content is how you scale link building – Todd McDonald
12 Google link analysis methods that might have changed – Bill Slawski
The psychology of online sharing – Clarissa Sajbl
How to creatively & effectively build links using public data – David de Souza
Broken link building guide: from noob to novice – Anthony D. Nelson

The post Link Building Reading List, Part 2 appeared first on Wiep.net.

Link Prospector, a collaboration of Citation Labs & Whitespark is an advanced link prospect finder. Having problems finding good link prospects, or do you simply need a list with link targets very quickly? Read the review here to see if Link Prospector suits your needs.

CognitiveSEO is a brand new link analysis & link management tool and publicly launches today. Any serious link builder should sign up for cognitiveSEO’s free trial straight away, as they combine a intuitive UX with some great features that I haven’t seen anywhere else yet. Read the full review of their link analysis toolset here.

The post New Link Building Reviews appeared first on Wiep.net.

• Strategic link building: why you don’t need to outrun lions – David Klein
• Building links, gaining trust – Debra Mastaler
• Utilizing second tier link building for massive ROI – Ross Hudgens
• Backlink data – Who is the best provider of them all? – Branko Rihtman

The post Link Building Reading List, Part 1 appeared first on Wiep.net.

In general, when you lack one (or more) of the elements, you’ll have to compensate it with one or more of the others.

So if you have maximized Budget, Content and/ or Outreach, these are the link building styles that would probably suit you best. (click to enlarge)

Link building can be difficult to keep up with, and the rules and techniques are changing every month, you can see an example of a growing business in rad140 and understand how this strategy works. On March 2016, Google Senior Search Quality Strategist Andrey Lipattsev confirmed that content and links are the first and second most important ranking factors. The full quote is:

“Yes; I can tell you what they are. It’s content, and links pointing to your site.” (Search Engine Watch)

Everyone loves to see their sites being ranked on the first page of Google. Once your website is active and running smoothly for a few months, you may be in shock when you analyze its performance. You will usually find you’re not getting any valid clicks and visitors, and notice that you’re still not ranking for the search terms you’re targeting.

“When it comes to search engine rankings, backlinks always play a vital role.”

Link building is one of the keys of success to websites being ranked at the top of search engines. There is a lot of useless information regarding link building which might be a waste of time and money and could get your site banned and blacklisted from search engines.

If you’re tired of using the old traditional link building tactics and you’re looking for free link building strategies, the processes and approach below will be of great help. I have been using these link building strategies to achieve and maintain top 10 rankings for thousands of keywords!

Start Dominating the Search Engines Today with These!

The post The Different Styles of Link Building appeared first on Wiep.net.

I’ll keep sharing my favorite stuff from the blogosphere every once in a while, with this being the best link building articles I’ve read during the past few months:

• Link building with the experts, the 2011 edition – Rae Hoffman-Dolan
• Content based outreach for link building – Justin Briggs
• The complete guide to link building with guest posts – Ben Wills
• Get over yourself and give me a link (please) – Debra Mastaler
• Competitor backlink analysis in Excel – Ethan Lyon
• Scalable link building for corporate websites – Jason Acidre
• 9 Ways you can improve your pitches to blogs & websites – Jeremy Bencken
• Link building tactics in 2011 – Ryan Clark
• Better understanding link-based spam analysis techniques – Justin Briggs

The post Link Building this Summer appeared first on Wiep.net.

• Linkbuilding in competitive niches using communities & content – Pete Wailes
• Creating exceptional content for boring topics – Michael Gray
• 21-Day Link Builder Relationship Challenge – Jeremy Bencken
• Its not about link placement as much as link discovery – Paul Madden
• The link builder’s guide to tracking, documentation and productivity – David Wolf
• How to unnaturally naturally vary your anchor text – Ross Hudgens
• Link building in 2011 – Maria Walters
• Creating encyclopedic content – Michael Gray
• Why some sites link, and others don’t – Mark Johnstone
• 25 Ways to quality great links – Adam Melson
• Can competitors hurt your rankings with bad links? – David Sottimano
• 5 Ways to track link building success in the social world – Kieran Flanagan
• A model for link building: beyond “great content” – Ross Hudgens
• Journalism, ‘churnalism’ & the sticky subject of anchor text links – Nichola Stott

And a few conference recaps:

• Distilled link building seminar (New Orleans)
• SMX West (San Jose)
• Think Visibility (Leeds)

Please leave a comment if you think there’s anything missing in this list.

The post Link Building this Month (03.2011) appeared first on Wiep.net.

As soon as you’ve hit the launch-button, you hold tight to your chair and hope for hundreds or thousands of links to appear out of nowhere, but in stead… **crickets**

Ouch.

If linkbait fails in a forest, and no one is around to hear it…

Now there’s two things you can do, and they work the same way as when you are trying to get your own name out there. You can try to find out what went wrong and give it another try, or you can try to hire a professional service that can help you get the ball rolling. When it comes to getting your name out there, perhaps in the lookout for a nice job, you can hire LinkedIn Outreach services which is a great way to get started. Similar services exist for this as well. After all, if your campaign didn’t succeed the first time, no one will know you’re fishing with old bait the second time.

Obviously, this also works for existing content on your website that wasn’t intended as linkbait (or was more succesful), such as white papers, evergreen content, great images or extensive resource lists.

Advertising

There, I said it. The a-word. The word that lots of SEOs and link builders hate, as paying for traffic is not in their vocabulary. But it can be *very* fruitful, even when it comes to link building.

We recommend trying out SEO Tools Centre that is an amazing tool that will allow you paraphrase everything you wrote and make it sound way more professional. You can use this tool for your business website articles.

One of my favorite advertising platforms to promote linkbaity content is StumbleUpon. A succesful StumbleUpon campaign is the gift that keeps on giving. You can buy Stumbles for $0,05 each, and if the people who get to see your content like it enough, you get rewarded with more (free) stumbles. And since Stumblers usually don’t pay attention to post dates, you can use if for old content as well.

I got another reminder of how wonderful StumbleUpon Paid Discovery (what their ad platform is called) works only recently, when a campaign resulted in around 100.000 stumbles, and counting. The costs: a mere $100.

Now everyone knows that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t the best in the world. However, although the 100.000 earlier mentioned Stumblers had a bounce rate of ~95%, they also attributed for a few thousand Facebook likes, a couple of hundred Tweets and a few dozen links. Not bad for $100, if you ask me.

When the traffic seems to be dying off, you simply pour in a bit of extra paid stumbles to get it going again. A regular refill can make sure that your link profile grows steadily as well.

Create a new boost in traffic (and social attention) with some extra ad budget.

Obviously, StumbleUpon isn’t the only ad platform you can try. Use AdWords or Facebook ads, but also advertorials, promoted Tweets, Reddit ads or whatever you think can convert to social votes or links.

Also, think about relevant journalists or bloggers writing an article that’s relevant to your content, and make sure to show up during their research. Give them the content they’re looking for and (hopefully) earn a link.

Alerts

In theory, Google Alerts are amazingly useful. According to Google, you receive “updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic”.

So when someone publishes an article that’s relevant to your website, you instantly receive an email with a link to it. You can then go check it out, and -when applicable- contact the owner to suggest adding a link to a page with further reading material. Again, in theory, as creating a Google Alert usually means that you receive notifications of your own blog posts or two-week-old Tweets in your mailbox…

Bing discontinued their alert service, but Yahoo! still offers it, as well as lots of individual news websites. Services like Trackle, SocialMention and Tweetbeep (for Twitter) can also be quite useful.

Another solution would be to create your own alerts service, for example via Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes has lots of options, which examples like this and this show, but creating your own would allow you to include sources of your choice as well.

Future (guest) content

Do you have some blog posts, guest content or interviews planned for the next few weeks? Make sure to include a link to the content page you’re trying to (re)promote.

Chances are that people have missed that page in the first place. With guest content or interviews you can deliver it to a whole new audience, which is yet another chance of your page getting picked up by others.

Make sure to take a look at your most popular pages as well, and include a link to your had-to-be-popular page here too – if it’s relevant and adds value, of course.

Al these options are great ways to get some good anchor text links to the page, which hopefully increases its search engine visibility. This in turn increases the chance of content researchers finding your piece and mentioning it in theirs. Chances of this happening are very small, but you simply never know. Sometimes it’s just a tiny snowflake that creates an avalanche.

Newsletters

Sending out newsletters regularly? Don’t forget to include to add links that are relevant to the main subject of your mailing or eZine.

Not everyone is in a shopping mood, so make sure to include some reading material for the people who just want to be entertained. If your mailing list is of a somewhat respectable size, you just might have some influential linkerati amongst your subscribers.

Make linking easy

Now this should be a no-brainer, but apparently some companies still have difficulties with this. Facepalm indeed.

Making linking easy goes further than this, though. Encourage your users to link to you, for example by providing embed codes next to your images or infographics, or by creating ‘Our company in the media’ pages – which are basically reciprocal 2.0 pages.

Link building

Now if all of the above fails, you can always revert to good ol’ link building. Contact relevant resource pages, link pages or any other website you deem appropriate, and kindly ask if they’d consider adding a link to your page.

Agreed, it’s not the most fun part of the job, but since most of your competitors probably think the same (and therefore don’t do it), not neglecting this part can actually lead to an advantage.

However, if you’ve made it to this part of your list with promotion options, chances are that your content wasn’t as good as you thought it was. Try to find out what was wrong with it, and fix it for the next time, so you don’t have to run through this list again.

Do you have other ways to promote your existing content (or failed linkbait campaigns) to share?

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