Every now and then I see a flurry of activity around certain individuals, usually on the back of something apparently wrong or outrageous.

Shoemoney, a   big fish in a little pond whilst debating with a guy named Randfish, another big fish in a little pond caused Andy Beard, yep, you got it, another big fish in a little pond to react and address the issue as he saw it.  I think Andy has been reading a few linkbaiting articles lately as the headline is a classic “Blogging Full Disclosure Debacle – Grow Some Brass Ones” now if someone is talking about you in such a way its very difficult not to react. In fact both did, Rand commented on Andy’s Blog and Shoe blogged  on it. The other thing too is that it stirred all of these people to chime in and give an opinion or two. David Naylor Twenty Steps Hamlet Batista Search Anyway Online Business Blog BlackBeard SEO CPA Affiliates Frank Watson  Dave Taylor  Shawn Collins 

People say controversial things all of the time for a variety of reasons. Some do it because they just haven’t really thought things through, others do it because they are a little bit thick and don’t realise what they are really saying and some do it because they know it’ll have the desired effect of stirring things up and gaining a little attention.

Doug Heil used to do it all of the time. He’d start threads in his SEO forum that attacked a well known face in the crowd. He’d call them a spammer or a cheater. He’d pour scorn on sites that he considered to be spamming and call them out it. He was a classic example of a controversy marketer in action. Others have used less charitable words, but the point is for a time it worked. For a time it did actually pull people into his site and they reacted to what he said. His telling like he saw it, however controversial got people talking about him.

John Chow and his recent aim at monetising his blog commenters by charging to de-nofollow commenters links, got some a little hot under the collar, various peoplein the blogosphere questioned what he was doing. What he was doing was considered to be very controversial and got people talking about him, in fact according to Y! site explorer its encouraged thus far 108 separate new inwardlinks. Whilst he may have caused some short term consternation with his readers and conversationalists, the reality is that his blog has attracted a little more love in the form of links.

Jason Calacanis is another, he had a platform at a search engine watch conference and said that SEO is Bullsh!t he subsequently blogged on it too and said that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman he stirred lots of discussion as result, with the likes of Danny Sullivan calling him out on it in lengthy terms. A little look again via Y! site explorer shows his post attracted 461 separate links now 462. 

We can’t all do it of course, some of us just aren’t built that way. Most of us tend to operate within the confines of safe social discourse. We don’t have the bulls or the energy or the stupidity in some cases to run around alienating groups of people or individuals. Reputations whilst often hard fought, can so easily be undone. Hell, some people  trade very nicely on being an ass, but if you are gonna be an arse, then it seems you’d better be a 1st rate one, else you’ll be sure to see your metrics plummet as people go off of your boil and see you for the arse that you truly are.

Anyways, the good news from all this stiff is that Ive now got my own disclosure policy too, so besides being the inspiration for this post I guess I should also be thanking Andy, Rand and Shoe for that too. Thanks guys.

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What a great idea, nuff said really.

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I read a very good blog post this morning from the old linkmeister himself NickW.

He talks about linkbaiting generally, what makes for good vs what makes for bad and touches on its newly born cousin ‘widgetbait’, a term I heard for the 1st time yesterday in a private discussion with Lyndon . More on widgets further on.

Anyways, getting back to Nick. For those of you who don’t know him or have never had the pleasure/displeasure to encounter his often acerbic wit, he’s the guy responsible for setting up Threadwatch , Performancing and the recently launched click influence and is generally credited with coining the phrase Linkbait. He’s a good egg, who tells it like it is.
Besides damn hard work a big aspect behind Nick’s success with these ventures has been his ability to stimulate debate amongst the community by writing interesting content that actually has something to say.

He gets people talking about stuff. Simple huh? Very rarely will you read a longish blog from Nick that doesn’t have something to add to the mix. He wins, we win. He gains links and kudos, we learn a little and maybe grab an idea or get incentivised to modify or adapt or use whatever it is he might be talking about. Does he hit it everytime? No, of course not, he’s human like the rest of us, but he’s certainly worth some closer scrutiny…

Linkbait

The term linkbait for example, is a classic distillation of a topic which when used correctly really can rocket you through the stratosphere and get you ranking for those all important keyphrases.

Before it was coined, no one really had any kind of label for it. You were either that educational person over there in the corner, that rude controversial person, that wisen sage, that idiot or whatever other singular label you had the displeasure to be slapped with. The very term linkbait is now recognised as the umbrella for the tactics used, or hooks that grab peoples attention. By seeing it for the broad strategy it is, it really does help in any strategic thinking process.

 
Just go and look at the link data for his 1st ever post on the topic. Then go and look at all the varying conversations it stimulated ha, google even has a little fun by asking, did you mean linkabit?

Getting those all important links

Which of course goes to the heart of what its all about and why baiting in general is such an important aspect of any online marketing strategy.It might be obvious to say that a good title will attract links, good links too, people won’t just linkabit they will linkalot. Blog posts are seen in places like Digg, in feedreaders, bloglines, MyYahoo, Googlereader, pageflakes and a whole lot of other platforms that share or distribute user content. A carefully crafted headline will therefore, grab the attention of its readers and provided that the content is there to back it up, will get you more readers and help grow your brand.

People like sensationalism, the success of tabloid journalism is a testament to this. In an online world where eyeballs often means increased revenues then one has to pull out as many of the stops one can. Online marketers need as many tools in their box as they can muster.
Widgets get you links, links get you traffic and grow your user base

Widgets pull new users and help grow brands and communities. They really are a phenomenal success and very popular indeed, especially amongst blog users and the myspacer users of this world.

Just look at the success of MyBloglog. Mybloglog is a recent Y! acquisition purchased for 10 million dollars, not bad eh? Look at its stratospheric growth over the course of the last year.

What really pushed it to the top? Some might say it was this neat little widget that enabled people to put their visitors faces right there on their blogs

Others might argue that it was a whole lot more than that, the point is though that people love neat and funky. Be it a wordpress plugin, a flickr photo include, a google map even, people will flock to them like birds to birdseed.

The lesson to be learnt would be to get widgetising folks,people like soloseo have the right idea, take a popular idea tweak it and add value. Aff marketing 101 perhaps, but as applicable as ever for building that all important userbase and content.

With organisations like the BBC prepared to invest heavily in the whole concept of social media, it really is one of those areas that are ripe for opportunities. For both bloggers and community content distributors alike.

If appropriate social networking opportunities arise, then we would look at them very seriously, because it’s a growing area of business that we’re not particularly in at the moment.

Interesting words huh?

1. Social Media Monitoring and Response Tool – YackSocial
2. Is Jason Calacanis a link baiting troll asshat idiot retard?
3. Brand Building – How social media sites help build your brand