I tried to have my outsourced PA service transcribe the first of our new-style formal board meetings… It’s not looking particularly promising. The best bits are:

You have no executive directors in the use of the sounding boards for your (illegible) sister in laws.

So there’s not anything that you should have surprises as much as you shouldn’t come unprepared on your own stuff and make it up. You should worry about anyone else’s surprises and you can have comments you’ll have to make it up.

Actually, that last paragraph sounds exactly like something Duncan might say…

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Know what today is? iiiiitttt’s…. Analogy Friday!

Tomorrow night, the Distilled crew is coming to my house for a party. It’s called Boardgames and Beverages. Rocking. While I stayed up all last night decorating personalised menus and filing the party bags with appropriately luxurious gifts, I was reminded of all those times I’ve stayed up all night crafting the perfect bit of content*. As it happens, the analogy holds:

1. Scout the idea.

If no-one’s interested, there’s no point. “Hey guys, who’s up for a party at mine?” If this happens, come up with a better idea. The same applies to linkbait: if no-one’s the slightest bit ‘baited’ by your content idea, it might be worth having a rethink.

2. Make sure you have some reliables.

Before I emailed everyone at Distilled, I checked that a few reliables were keen to don their party hats and would attend without fail. I don’t know about you, but I like going to parties that I know lots of my friends are going to. It’s kind of the same with social networking: people attract people and traffic attracts traffic. If you’re really lucky, your friends, followers, whatever, will also attract lots of new visitors to your site.

3. Plan something wonderful

There’ll be boardgames, there’ll be beverages. Who knows, I might even get out the indoor remote control helicopter. Similarly, you should try and impress with your content. Think about who it’s trying to attract and go all out to blow their socks off.

4. Build up the hype

I’ve sent round a few emails about my party, dropped it into conversation here and there, pointed and laughed at the people who can’t come, that sort of thing. There are two things to think about:

• Anticipation is often better than the experience itself
• If people think they’re going to have fun, they’re much more likely to actually have fun.

5. Go go go!

Timing is critical. My party is neither on a schoolnight nor in the morning. That would be silly. When you launch your linkbait, think about when you’re doing it. If your audience is US centric (so, Digg), it’s a good idea to launch pieces at around lunchtime here. Get a few diggs and comments going (hey, that’s like inviting a few people to your party early to get the atmosphere going) and that should hopefully attract the attention of the US at the start of their day.

Once the launch is underway, there’s no going back. You need to be on call for the next few hours at least to nurture the linkbait on its young unsteady legs.

6. Follow up and recovery

Phew, party’s over. Hopefully, we’ve all made some new friends and/or found out something new and interesting. Every time you launch some linkbait, you should try and build some new connections and/or learn from the experience. This can seem quite overwhelming to begin with, but a thoughtful comment here and a genuine shout there can really add up.

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*I’ve not ever actually done this. I do dream about linkbait quite regularly so that sort of counts, right?

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In this post I’ve taken a step back from practical tips, to discuss something more strategic that’s been on my mind for a little while, regarding the occasionally skewed view of Search Marketers to think only in terms on rankings, and not broader website success – but this doesn’t by any means apply to everyone in the industry.

In many ways, the post is a précis to some research that I’ll publish here in due course.

It’s not what you do, it’s why you do it

The work that Search Engine Marketers do for clients can be fairly well defined, and has a clear value to them. By improving their ranking for certain keywords, we attract more visitors to a site  – visitors who have expressed an interested in a subject relevant to the site.

However, there are occasions where building the search engine visibility of a site is not a suitable marketing strategy; if you want people to enter a competition or watch a video that won’t be around for long, then the site may be able to receive more visitors or a higher quality by referrals from other websites. Thus, linking to the site from relevant, well trafficked sites can be very valuable.

For the Internet Marketer (it should already be clear that I believe a a title beyond ‘SEM’ is required) building links for traffic can be rewarding, as well as a fun break from traditional thinking. Analytics logs will show you exactly how many visitors (and conversions) each link resulted in – this means you quickly refine your link building strategy to focus on the techniques that give most worthwhile returns.

Additionally, the close relationship between creating a link and receiving visitors means that the middleman (Google, with her impenetrable algorithm) is out of the equation. This means that you are suddenly free from concerns about:

• links behind logins on forums
• nofollow links
• image links without anchor text
• penalised sites
• links from bad neighbourhoods
• exactly on-target anchor text.

In addition, you can now buy links with impunity. They are just an advert (just make sure you nofollow them, to avoid impacting on the traditional SEO work being done on the site.) Again – given that you can assign an exact value to the visitors from each link, you’ll soon know what’s worth spending resource to create and what’s not.

2 Birds, 1 Stone?

So, the links we build are broadly either for traffic, or for search engine strength. In fact, in the ‘random walk’ model of link graph analysis, all links should do both. A link from a page with visitors will deliver some of those visitors to the linked site.

However, the web has failed to continue to work like this, in both directions. I will often place a link knowing that it will provide significant search engine benefit, but will barely ever refer visitors (e.g.: from a strong, but low traffic directory) and some links, such as  ad banners, tweets and Wikipedia references bring traffic (and lots of it) but no search engine benefit.

A savvy Internet Marketer should be building links for referred traffic as well as rankings, because it will ultimately benefit the target website, making it more successful and profitable.

A savvy website owner hiring an IM/SEM should not get hung up on their search rankings or (god forbid) how many links have been built. They should care about – and judge their Internet Marketer on – the amount of high quality traffic that arrives at the site.

A question that I will answer in a future post is: is there a correlation between the search engine benefit a link provides, and the traffic it sends? Is there some way we can identify links that provide the best overall benefit, and avoid spending time and money on those that provide neither?

In the mean time, I’ll be trying to discover if website owners would really prefer to increase links, rankings, visitors or conversions.

Your contributions are invited, and these are particular questions that I’d like to have other people’s thoughts on:

• If your job title looks like ‘Search Marketer’, is that really what you do?
• If you are involved with / in charge of a website that you own or for a client, how is success of the site measured? Does this correlate with how you are measured? Does it correlate with the work you aim to do on the site?

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Quick headscratcher this one – on a wordpress blog I’m looking at in my top content report I see visits to an image:

This image has been posted to reddit and has received lots of traffic from there which is why it stood out. My question though, how are these visits being tracked in analytics? There’s no javascript being called on the page since the page just consists of the image?

Is the google analytics plugin doing a server side google analytics call? It’s possible but I think unlikely.

Am I being dumb? Anyone else seen this?

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