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The future of link building
WILL CRITCHLOW
Here are the kinds of things we’ve seen today
@hannah_bo_banna
Psychographic Online Mass Publishing
Info vs plain graphic
Much of What Makes Leaders Great Also Makes Them Great Marketers
Via the White House Flickr Feed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/8191317327/ - Inbound marketing in
action!
Where did my “submit link” button go?
Links are dead
I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying
Links are dead
If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down
It’s link building that is in trouble
I’ve been answering SEOmoz Q&A
since it looked like this
All the answers to “why don’t I
rank?” used to be “you need more
links”.
Now?
Dear GOD.
Not those links
I’m not here on a moral crusade
I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth
…and I’m not risk averse
I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)
This is the last linklove
The future of link builders
There’s a bigger problem
We broke directories
They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web
We broke comments
Now we all have to run akismet
We broke forums
Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam
We took a 150-year-old form of communication
“Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861
As practiced by respected newspapers
“The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008
Try to make the design support the data
Please tell me this was a joke
Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest
Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/
Guest columns have existed forever
Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]
We can’t even clean up after ourselves
Without hacking people off
information tied to verified online
profiles will be ranked higher than
content without such verification
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
You think: “how can I game that”
There’s an even bigger problem
Celebrities are better than us
@ladygaga
Brands are better than us
Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips
Loss leaders are hard to compete with
Snow Fall – How they made it
STOP
Stop worrying about your hosting IP
address
Start worrying about CDNs, edge nodes and site speed
Stop worrying about linking
C-blocks
Start worrying about how many journalists you have in your address
book
Stop worrying about anchor text
Start worrying about being misquoted
Stop worrying about nofollow
Start worrying whether anyone will click
Stop calling it link juice
For the love of
GOD
stop calling it link juice
Link equity plays much better in the board room
The future of link builders
Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll just end up with a bunch of blue pens
with your logo on them
We understand amplification
From Thomas Baekdal
If you aren’t naturally technical
Start here – incredible deck from Jamie @ SEOmoz
Earn attention instead of shares
Measure links based on engaged visitors
I made you a custom report and advanced segments for non-bounces and >2 pages
Engage spidey sense
We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate
We know why no-one is linking to you
Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are
We know how influential a person is
Haha. Just kidding.
Power searching
We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own
Homework time
Inspired by Entrepreneurial Design
By Gary Chou of USV - Course here and blog post write-up here
Make yourself uncomfortable
= 1 hour or less
= an afternoon
= day or more
See here
Not extrovert?
Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip
Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online
Present to a crowd of 200+ people
See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how
Present to a board
Bonus points for getting shouted at
Negotiate with a salesperson
Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)
Record a screencast or webinar
Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air
Reach out to a hero
get an answer
Visit a newsroom
Debate a business case
With 3+ colleagues who you don’t normally work with. We have enjoyed 2078 & 4168
Sell something door to door
Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls
Run a live usability test
Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them
Answer 3 customer calls
Read to a child
In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…
Not technical?
Install a web server
I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.
Build a web crawler
Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML
Search through some log files
Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot
Build a tool
Contribute to an open source project
Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git
Make something and sell a copy online
Work out who someone anonymous is
Run a conversion rate test end to end
I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results
Install and play with r
Take some Google Analytics data and strip seasonality
Not creative?
Film and edit some video
Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.
Make a graphic Get 20 shares
Make an interactive graphic
Build a wireframe
Try Balsamiq. If you can’t think of anything, rework distilled.net homepage & send me it
Before After
Remove someone
from a photo
Rewrite / redesign a landing page
Cheri Percy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations
Write for a publication you’ve previously bought
Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”
Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/440479819/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit/5443790000/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ballookey/265114990/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/latzko/6928444437/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theseanster93/5027792986/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timriley/246432530/
http://maddieonthings.com/post/45025427385/austin-tx-sxsw
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/3356358479/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/6170567978/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulmatsherm/2221223106/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/New_York_Stock_Exchange_Boardroom_-_New_York_-_Flickr_-_hyku_(3).jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrherndon/4630505899/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsroom.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfraissi/3710938389/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alreadytaken/1338047903/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcpl/5125999205/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png/1024px-
TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/3300485968/
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Seattle_Ugly_Mug_02.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2596039804/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosimmelink/1505553447/