Anchor text

Anchor text refers to the clickable part of a link from one web page to another. As an example, Figure 7-10 shows a snapshot of a part of the Quicken Loans home page.

Figure 7-10. Anchor text: a strong ranking element

The anchor text for the first link in the list of Popular pages in Figure 7-10 is Refinancing. The search engine uses this anchor text to help it understand what the page receiving the link is about. As a result, the search engine will interpret the link as saying that the page receiving the link is about refinancing, and therefore rank the page higher in the search results for that search query.

At one time, anchor text was so powerful that SEOs engaged in a practice called Google bombing—the idea that if you link to a given web page from many places with the same anchor text, you can get that page to rank for queries related to that anchor text, even if the page is unrelated and didn’t even include any of the words in the query.

One notorious Google bomb was a campaign that targeted the WhiteHouse.gov biography page for George W. Bush with the anchor text miserable failure. As a result, that page ranked #1 for searches on miserable failure until Google tweaked its algorithm to reduce the effectiveness of this practice.

Google bombing was not the worst consequence of the power of anchor text. The use of anchor text as a ranking factor is useful in the search algorithms only if the person implementing the link naturally chooses what to use; if he is compensated for using specific anchor text, the value of the link as a ranking signal is negatively impacted.

To make matters worse, SEOs started to abuse the system and started implementing link-building programs designed around anchor text to drive their rankings. As a result, publishers that did not pursue these types of link-building campaigns were at a severe disadvantage. Ultimately, this started to break down the notion of links as valid academic citations, and Google began to take action.

In early 2012, Google began to send publishers “unnatural link” warnings through Google Search Console, and on April 24, 2012, Google released the first version of its Penguin algorithm. These topics are discussed more in Chapter 9.

Anchor text remains an important part of search algorithms, but now the search engines look for unnatural patterns of anchor text (too much of a good thing) and are lowering the rankings for publishers that exhibit patterns of artificially influencing the anchor text people use in links to their website.

Relevance

Links that originate from sites/pages on the same topic as the publisher’s site, or on a closely related topic, are worth more than links that come from a site on an unrelated topic.

Think of the relevance of each link being evaluated in the specific context of the search query a user has just entered. So, if the user enters used cars in Phoenix and the publisher has received a link to its Phoenix used cars page that is from the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, that link will reinforce the search engine’s belief that the page really does relate to Phoenix.

Similarly, if a publisher has another link from a magazine site that has done a review of used car websites, this will reinforce the notion that the site should be considered a used car site. Taken in combination, these two links could be powerful in helping the publisher rank for used cars in Phoenix.

Authority

Authority has been the subject of much research. One of the more famous papers, written by Apostolos Gerasoulis and others at Rutgers University and titled “DiscoWeb: Applying Link Analysis to Web Search,” became the basis of the Teoma algorithm, which was later acquired by AskJeeves and became part of the Ask algorithm.⁴

What made this algorithm unique was its focus on evaluating links on the basis of their relevance to the linked page. Google’s original PageRank algorithm did not incorporate the notion of topical relevance, and although Google’s algorithm clearly does this today, Teoma was in fact the first search engine to offer a commercial implementation of link relevance.

Teoma introduced the notion of hubs, which are sites that link to most of the important sites relevant to a particular topic, and authorities, which are sites that are linked to by most of the sites relevant to a particular topic.

The key concept here is that each topic area that a user can search on will have authority sites specific to that topic area. The authority sites for used cars are different from the authority sites for baseball.

Refer to Figure 7-11 to get a sense of the difference between hub and authority sites.

Figure 7-11. Hubs and authorities

So, if the publisher has a site about used cars, it should seek links from websites that the search engines consider to be authorities on used cars (or perhaps more broadly, on cars). However, the search engines will not tell you which sites they consider authoritative—making the publisher’s job that much more difficult.

The model of organizing the Web into topical communities and pinpointing the hubs and authorities is an important one to understand (read more about it in Mike Grehan’s paper “Filthy Linking Rich!”⁵ The best link builders understand this model and leverage it to their benefit.

Trust

Trust is distinct from authority. On its own, authority doesn’t sufficiently take into account whether the linking page or the domain is easy or difficult for spammers to infiltrate, or the motivations of the person implementing the link. Trust, on the other hand, does.

Evaluating the trust of a website likely involves reviewing its link neighborhood to see what other trusted sites link to it. More links from other trusted sites would convey more trust.

In 2004, Yahoo! and Stanford University published a paper titled “Combating Web Spam with TrustRank.”⁶ The paper proposed starting with a trusted seed set of pages (selected by manual human review) to perform PageRank analysis, instead of a random set of pages as was called for in the original PageRank thesis.

Using this tactic removes the inherent risk in using a purely algorithmic approach to determining the trust of a site, and potentially coming up with false positives or negatives.

The trust level of a site would be based on how many clicks away it is from seed sites. A site that is one click away accrues a lot of trust; two clicks away, a bit less; three clicks away, even less; and so forth. Figure 7-12 illustrates the concept of TrustRank.

Figure 7-12. TrustRank illustrated

The researchers of the TrustRank paper also authored a paper describing the concept of spam mass.⁷ This paper focuses on evaluating the effect of spammy links on a site’s (unadjusted) rankings. The greater the impact of those links, the more likely the site itself is spam. A large percentage of a site’s links being purchased is seen as a spam indicator as well. You can also consider the notion of reverse TrustRank, where linking to spammy sites will lower a site’s TrustRank.

It is likely that Google and Bing both use some form of trust measurement to evaluate websites. It is probably done by different means than outlined in the TrustRank and spam mass papers, and it may be incorporated into the methods they use for calculating authority, but nonetheless, trust is believed to be a significant factor in rankings. For SEO practitioners, getting measurements of trust can be difficult. Currently, mozTrust (from Moz’s Open Site Explorer) and TrustFlow (from Majestic SEO) are the most well-known publicly available metrics tools for evaluating a page’s trust level.

Source independence

A link from your own site back to your own site is, of course, not an independent editorial vote for your site. Put another way, the search engines assume that you will vouch for your own site.

Think about your site as having an accumulated total link authority based on all the links it has received from third-party websites, and your internal linking structure as the way you allocate that authority to pages on your site. Your internal linking structure is incredibly important, but it does little if anything to build the total link authority of your site.

In contrast, links from a truly independent source carry much more weight. Extending this notion a bit, say you have multiple websites. Perhaps they have common data in the Whois records (such as the name servers or contact information). Search engines can use this type of signal to treat cross-links between those sites more like internal links than inbound links earned by merit.

Even if you have completely different Whois records for your websites but they all cross-link to each other, the search engines can detect this pattern easily. Keep in mind that a website with no independent third-party links into it has no link power to vote for other sites.

If the search engine sees a cluster of sites that heavily cross-link and many of the sites in the cluster have no or few incoming links to them, the links from those sites may well be ignored.

Conceptually, you can think of such a cluster of sites as a single site. Cross-links to them can be algorithmically treated as internal links, with links between them not adding to the total link authority score for any of the sites. The cluster would be evaluated based on the inbound links to the cluster as a whole.

Of course, there are many different ways to implement such a cluster, but keep in mind that there’s no SEO value in building a large number of sites just to cross-link them with each other.

Links across domains

Obtaining an editorially given link to your site from a third-party website is usually a good thing. But if more links are better, why not get links from every page of these sites if you can? In theory, this is a good idea, but search engines do not necessarily count multiple links from a domain cumulatively.

When Google first came out, its link-based algorithm was revolutionary. As spammers studied the PageRank algorithm, they realized that every page on the Web naturally had a small amount of innate PageRank. It was not long before spammers realized that they could create a website with more than a million pages, even if they had weak content, and then use every page of that website to link to the most important page on that site (known as a sitewide link) or even a page on a different site. Alternatively, they simply bought sitewide links in the footer of very large sites.

In the early days of Google, this worked really well. As Google learned what was happening, however, it realized that multiple links on one site most likely represent one editorial vote (whereas multiple sites with one link apiece likely represent multiple editorial decisions). As a result, Google put a dampener on the incremental value of more than one link from a site, and thus each incremental link from a site began to pass slightly less value.

In addition, over time, Google became more active in penalizing sites that use bad link-building practices, such as buying links, a tactic that is often indicated by the use of sitewide links. This meant that a sitewide link could potentially harm your site.

Link builders and spammers figured this out and adapted their strategies. They began to focus on obtaining links on as many different domains as possible. This particularly impacted a strategy known as guest posting (this is discussed more in “Guest Posting”), which is the concept of writing an article for another website and getting it to publish the article on its blog.

Although guest posting is a legitimate content marketing strategy when used properly, spammers abused it as well. A brief thought experiment illustrates the problem. Imagine that your market space includes a total of 100 websites. Perhaps 3 of these are high quality, another 5 are pretty high quality, 12 more are respectable, and so forth, as shown in Figure 7-13.

As you can see in Figure 7-13, even if your first posts go on the very best sites in your market, by the time you have done 66 posts you are writing posts on genuinely bad sites. It does not make sense for Google to treat this content as more valuable than an ongoing relationship with the high-authority sites in your market.

In the case of guest posts, as well as many other content marketing strategies, you are far better served to obtain a smaller number of guest post placements on higher authority sites, and in fact, get repeat links from those sites with ongoing posts. In fact, don’t “guest post,” but seek the more stable “regular contributor” status on respected blogs. We will discuss this topic more later in this chapter.

Figure 7-13. Mapping site quality in a market space

Source diversity

Getting links from a range of sources is also a significant factor in link evaluation. We already discussed two parts of this: getting links from domains you do not own (versus from many different domains), and getting links from many domains (versus getting multiple links from one domain). However, there are many other aspects to consider.

For example, if all your links come from blogs that cover your space, you have poor source diversity. You can easily think of other types of link sources: national media websites, local media websites, sites that are relevant but cover more than just your space, university sites with related degree programs, and so on.

You can think about implementing content marketing campaigns in many of these different sectors as diversification. There are several good reasons for diversifying.

One reason is that the search engines value this type of diversification. If all your links come from a single class of sites (e.g., blogs), this is more likely to be the result of manipulation, and search engines do not like that. If you have links coming in from multiple types of sources, search engines view it as more likely that you have content of value.

Another reason is that search engines are constantly tuning and tweaking their algorithms. If all your links come from blogs and the search engines make a change that significantly reduces the value of blog links, that could really hurt your rankings. You would essentially be hostage to that one strategy, and that’s not a good idea either.

It is a good idea to evaluate your source diversity compared to your competitors. Figure 7-14 shows an example of this using LinkResearchTools.com.

Figure 7-14. Comparing link diversity against competition

Temporal factors

Search engines also keep detailed data on when they discover a new link, or the disappearance of a link. They can perform quite a bit of interesting analysis with this type of data. Here are some examples:

When did the link first appear?

This is particularly interesting when considered in relation to the appearance of other links. Did it happen immediately after you received that link from the New York Times?

When did the link disappear?

Some of this is routine, such as links that appear in blog posts that start on the home page of a blog and then get relegated to archive pages over time. However, if a link to your site disappears shortly after you made major changes to your site that could be seen by the search engines as a negative signal; they might assume that the link was removed because the changes you made lowered the relevance or quality of the site.

How long has the link existed?

A search engine can potentially count a link for more, or less, if it has been around for a long time. Whether it’s counted for more or less could depend on the authority/trust of the site providing the link, or other factors.

How quickly were the links added (also known as link velocity)?

Drastic changes in the rate of link acquisition could also be a significant signal. Whether it is a bad signal or not depends. For example, if your site is featured in major news coverage, it could be good. If you start buying links by the thousands, it would be bad. Part of the challenge for the search engines is to determine how to interpret the signal.

Context/relevance

Although anchor text is a major signal regarding the relevance of a web page (though receiving greater scrutiny since March 2014), search engines look at a much deeper context than that. They can look at other signals of relevance, such as:

External links to the linking page

Does the page containing the link to your site have external links as well? If the page linking to your site is benefiting from links from third-party sites, this will make the link to your site more valuable.

Nearby links

Do the closest links on the page point to closely related, high-quality sites? That would be a positive signal to the engines, as your site could be seen as high-quality by association. Alternatively, if the two links before yours are for Viagra and a casino site, and the link after yours points to a porn site, that’s not a good signal.

Page placement

Is your link in the main body of the content? Or is it off in a block of links at the bottom of the right rail of the web page? Better page placement can be a ranking factor. This is also referred to as prominence, and it applies in on-page keyword location as well. Google has a patent that covers this concept called the Reasonable Surfer Patent.⁸

Nearby text

Does the text immediately preceding and following your link seem related to the anchor text of the link and the content of the page on your site that it links to? If so, that could be an additional positive signal. This is also referred to as proximity.

Closest section header

Search engines can also look more deeply at the context of the section of the page where your link resides. This can be the nearest header tag, or the nearest text highlighted in bold, particularly if it is implemented like a header (two to four boldface words in a paragraph by themselves).

Overall page context

The relevance and context of the linking page are also factors in rankings. If your anchor text, surrounding text, and the nearest header are all related, that’s good. If the overall context of the linking page is also closely related, that’s better still.

Overall site context

Another signal is the context of the entire site that links to you (or perhaps even just the section of the site that links to you). For example, if a site has hundreds of pages that are relevant to your topic and links to you from a relevant page, with relevant headers, nearby text, and anchor text, these all add to the impact, so the link will have more influence than if the site had only one page relevant to your content.

Source TLDs

It is a popular myth that links from certain top-level domains (TLDs), such as .edu, .gov, and .mil, are inherently worth more than links from other TLDS such as .com, .net, and others, but it does not make sense for search engines to look at the issue so simply.

Matt Cutts, the former head of the Google webspam team, commented on this in an interview with Stephan Spencer:⁹

There is nothing in the algorithm itself, though, that says: oh, .edu—give that link more weight.

And:

You can have a useless .edu link just like you can have a great .com link.

There are many forums, blogs, student pages, and other pages on .edu domains that spammers might be able to manipulate to gain links to their sites. For this reason, search engines cannot simply imbue a special level of trust or authority to a site because it is an .edu domain. To prove this, simply search for buy viagra site:edu; you’ll quickly see how spammers have infiltrated .edu pages.

However, it is true that .edu domains are often authoritative. But this is a result of the link analysis that defines a given college or university as a highly trusted site on one or more topics. The result is that there can be (and are) domains that are authoritative on one or more topics on some sections of their site, yet have other sections of their site that offer much less value or that spammers are actively abusing.

Search engines deal with this problem by varying their assessment of a domain’s authority across the domain. The publisher’s http://yourdomain.com/usedcars section may be considered authoritative on the topic of used cars, but http://yourdomain.com/newcars might not be authoritative on the topic of new cars.

Ultimately, every site gets evaluated for the links it has, on a topic-by-topic basis. Further, each section and page of a site also get evaluated on this basis. A high-quality link profile gives a page more authority on a given topic, making that page likely to rank higher on queries for that topic, and providing that page with more valuable links that related websites could then link to.

Link and document analysis combine and overlap, resulting in hundreds of factors that can be individually measured and filtered through the search engine algorithms (the set of instructions that tells the engines what importance to assign to each factor). The algorithms then determine scoring for the documents and (ideally) list results in decreasing order of relevance and importance (rankings).

Memes in your marketing campaigns

Unfortunately, some marketers are overlooking memes as a great way to integrate popular Internet humor into their campaigns. Marketers should take advantage of memes because:

• They are easy to create. With websites like http://memegenerator.net, you can simply create your own meme by filling in text boxes. You can upload your own image, or take advantage of the incredibly popular memes and get in on the fad.

• They are cheap—as in, completely free. However, there may be copyright issues in certain cases, an issue we will discuss more in a moment.

• They make people feel they’re in on a joke. The familiarity of the meme creates the expectation of laughter.

• They are a great way for your brand to seem relevant and fresh.

Meme marketing in action

Consider the following websites that have taken advantage of the popular macro meme Foul Bachelor Frog, which depicts a frog that reveals all of the sketchy, unsanitary secrets of bachelor life.

Diamond retailer Diamond Envy aggregated some of the funniest examples and used them as “advice” for young bachelors who relate to the single lifestyle but may someday want to tie the knot; see “Great Advice...If You Want to Stay Single!”.

Canadian real estate site Zolo tailored the meme to its own uses with “The Foul Bachelor Frog Bachelor Pad”, pulling popular examples of “redneck home remodels” and pairing them with Foul Bachelor Frog to poke fun at some DIY upgrades to the prototypical bachelor pad.

Travel club World Ventures employed a variety of memes in addition to Foul Bachelor Frog, such as “Success Kid” and “Socially Awkward Penguin” to tell a story in its article “Thank You, Internet Memes, for this Sage Travel Advice”.

All three companies found relevant, existing examples—and, in the case of Zolo, made their own to complement them.

Bear in mind that your meme-containing article is supposed to target (i.e., attract the interest of) online influencers who may choose to link to or reshare your meme in social media. Make sure you make this easy for people to do, by visibly including references (and the link) to the appropriate pages on your site within the core components of your meme.

Other types of memes

Memes don’t just come in the form of images; video memes are popular as well. Remember the “S*** People Say” video craze of late 2011/early 2012? Thousands of video parodies were created, each with its own specific punch line. The result was millions upon millions of collective views. Videos are easy to upload for free onto YouTube, which makes them incredibly shareable on social media sites. People send the linked videos to coworkers if there is one about their profession, or friends if it is about a shared hobby.

Twitter memes are among the easiest to get on board with and also among the easiest to benefit from. On a sociological level, each Twitter hashtag is a meme. The most popular hashtags of the day offer an easy opportunity to get exposure. Once people search for the hashtag and see your company’s response, they can either favorite it, retweet it (which means more free eyeballs on the promotional material with no effort on your part), or—the most prized action—subscribe to your company’s Twitter feed.

Physical memes usually are a certain body movement or gesture done in unique, impressive, or humorous locations, such as the current “twerking” phenomenon. They are a cheap way to participate through photos or videos.

Memes targeted to your audience

Before creating your own meme-inspired marketing campaign, it is important to consider your audience. McDonald’s had a Twitter fiasco in 2012, and it serves as a great example of a meme campaign gone wrong. McDonald’s encouraged its Twitter subscribers to share their McDonald’s experiences by using what Business Insider described as “a dangerously vague hashtag”: #McDstories.¹⁴ You can see examples of some of the problems that developed in Figure 7-24.

Figure 7-24. Example of a Twitter meme campaign that backfired

Memes in advertising

Some companies are realizing that the popularity and familiarity of memes can be used for their benefit outside of the Internet. For instance, a slew of companies have recently used meme-related images in outdoor advertising, mainly highway billboards.

Virgin Media took advantage of the popular Success Kid meme to initiate a familiarity with its desired consumers. Memes like this work well in advertising because the viewers already feel like they are “in on the joke,” and it feels somehow inclusive to them (but perhaps exclusive to others).

Brands have also integrated the idea of memes into full-scale television spot campaigns. For example, the popular commercial for UK dairy brand Cravendale featured “Cats with Thumbs”—one week earlier, a short video of a cat giving a thumbs up had gone viral. You can see a screenshot of this in Figure 7-25.

Figure 7-25. Cats with Thumbs meme

Intellectual property law

It’s important to consider intellectual property law before you embark on your meme mashups. Some works, like Futurama Fry, are owned by big Hollywood studios. Others, like Success Kid, are owned by the subject’s parent.

Also, commercial uses of a meme are, generally speaking, riskier than noncommercial uses. It’s possible that your use would qualify as fair use under copyright law—parodies, criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research are examples of potential fair use cases. Nonetheless, unless the work is Creative Commons licensed or in the public domain, it’s safest to seek the copyright owner’s permission to use the image. You can read more about this subject in the article “I Can Haz Copyright Infringement? Internet Memes and Intellectual Property Risk.”¹⁵

Find out where your competitors get links

Getting detailed information on who links to your competitors is easy. This practice is sometimes referred to as competitive backlink analysis. Simply use tools such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic-SEO, Ahrefs, or LinkResearchTools, all of which will give you a list of the sites that link to your competitors.

Once you have that data, look at the most powerful links your competitors have (as measured by PageRank; Open Site Explorer’s Domain Authority, Page Authority, and mozTrust; Majestic SEO’s CitationFlow and Trust Flow; CEMPER’s Power*Trust; or Ahref’s Backlinks tool) to identify opportunities for your site. Perhaps they have received great links from national media or a set of government sites. By seeing what has worked for them, you can get ideas on what may work for you.

Of course, contacting people who link to your competitors is a good idea, but do not limit your content marketing strategy to that alone. Contacting websites that link to your competitors may result in your getting links from 10%–20% (in a good campaign) of the people you contact, and chances are that your goal is to have your site beat your competitors’ sites, not be seen as 10% as valuable by the search engines.

The key focus is to extract data from the competitors’ backlinks that helps you decide on your overall content marketing strategy. Use this to enhance the list of sites that might link to you. For example, if you find that your competitor had great success by releasing a study on trends in the market, you might be able to create a market study that shows some different points that could also be successful. Consider, even, developing a contrasting study that piggybacks off of the competitor’s study, but by rebuttal instead of repetition.

You can also expand on this concept by looking at “similar pages” to top-ranked sites (look for the “Similar” link in the preview pane of the search result for the site) in your keyword markets. Similar pages that keep showing up for different keywords are squarely in the topical link neighborhood. Look at who is linking to them too. You can also try a related:domaintocheck.com query to get some information on other domains worth investigating.

Review your website assets

Now that you have a refined list of targets and a sense of why each group may potentially link to you, review what you have on your site and what you could reasonably add to it. This should include any existing content, new content you could create, tools, or even special promotions (provided that these are truly unique enough and you have enough presence for people to notice and care).

It’s important that the content be unique and differentiated. Content that can be found on 100 other sites is not going to attract many links. Even if the content is original, it should have something to offer or say that differentiates it from other content, rather than simply being a rewrite of someone else’s article.

The highest-value potential linkers probably know their business and will recognize such simple rewrites, and in any event they’ll want to focus their links on unique new content and tools. Content that leverages the publisher’s unique expertise or what he stands for, and presents a new perspective or new data, will be far more successful in the link-building process.

Think of your content plan in a business case format. If you were able to create some new block of content at a cost of x dollars, and you think it would provide you with some set of links, how does that compare to the cost of the content (or tools or promotional effort) required to chase another link-building opportunity?

Ultimately, you will want to build a road map that provides you with a sense of what it would cost to chase a potential group of linkers and the value of each group of linkers. Your chart might look like Table 7-2.

Once you have this in hand, you can quickly narrow down the list. You’ll probably pursue the high-value campaign, and should continue to consider the very-high-value campaign and the low-value campaign that costs only $4,000 to pursue. The other two campaigns just don’t seem to have comparable returns on investment.

Identify any strategic limitations

The next step is to outline any limitations you may need to place on the campaigns. For example, if you have a very conservative brand, you may not want to engage in social media campaigns through reddit (which is not a conservative audience).

Identify methods for contacting potential partners

You must undertake some activities to let potential partners know about your site. There are two major categories of contact methods: direct and indirect. Direct contact examples include:

• Email

• Social media sites (using the social media property’s messaging features to make contact with potential partners)

• Blogger networking (building relationships by commenting on others’ blogs)

• Phone calls

• Seeking out site owners at conferences or meetups

Some examples of indirect contact methods include:

• Social media campaigns (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.)

• Public relations

• News feeds (through Yahoo! News and Google News)

• Speaking at conferences

Execute aggressively

A world-class content marketing campaign is always a large effort, involving a large potential cast of characters ranging from creative content writers, graphic designers, video production teams, script writers, actors, web developers, social media marketers, and more—the possibilities are endless.

Publishers who execute aggressively inevitably gain an edge over many of their competitors. Of course, if other competitors also focus heavily on link building, it becomes even more important to push hard, or you will end up losing search engine traffic to them.

For this reason, analyzing the backlink profiles of competitors to see how they’re changing over time is a good idea. You can do this using any of the link analysis tools, such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, or LinkResearchTools.

Consider pulling link data for your major competitors on a monthly basis, and seeing how their link profile is changing. This can help you learn if they are investing in content marketing, and if they are, what types of campaigns they are pursuing. Competitive intelligence like this can really help you tune your own content marketing efforts.

Conduct regular strategic reviews

Content marketing strategies should be intertwined with the normal course of business, and evolve as the business does. As the implementation moves forward, you learn lessons and can feed this information back into the process. For example, you may have campaigns that did not work. What lessons can you draw from those?

Or, you may have one idea that is going gangbusters. How can you use that success to give you ideas for other campaigns that may work really well for you too? Sometimes the initial strategy goes great for a while, but it begins to run out of steam, so you should work to develop a constant stream of ideas that you are feeding into your content marketing process.

Applying what you learn from each campaign you try is a key capability to develop. No campaign is a failure if it helps you learn how to continuously improve what you are doing.

Create a content marketing culture

Publishers should also educate those within the organization about their content marketing plan, its goals, and how it will help the business, as well as identify the touch points for collaboration throughout the process. This will help engage the creativity of multiple team members in feeding the stream of content marketing ideas.

The more ideas you have, the better off you’ll be—and the quality of a content marketing campaign is directly proportional to the quality of the ideas that are driving it.

Never stop

Content marketing is not something you do once, or once in a while. In today’s culture, the search engine plays an increasingly large role in a business’s well-being, and inbound links are a large determining factor in the fate of Internet sites. Don’t be the business that implements a great content marketing campaign, gets to where it wants to be, and then stops.

Create high-quality, differentiated content

There is already a lot of content on the Web, and you can find some content on almost any conceivable topic. As an example, consider the results shown in Figure 7-29 for the search query intitle:“mortgage tips”.

Figure 7-29. Almost 7,000 pages focus on mortgage tips as a topic

This query requires the exact phrase “mortgage tips” to appear within the <title> tag of a web page to be included in the results, and Google reports that there are 6,850 such pages on the Web. Writing the 6,851st article on the topic is not likely to result in a lot of people deciding to link to you.

Creating high-quality, differentiated content can present quite a challenge, and one key aspect of success is that you either need to be an expert yourself, or employ/retain an expert to help you. Hiring a writer who knows nothing about your topic and asking him to write an article for you in two hours will not produce content that draws high-quality links. Only an expert can truly recognize what aspects of a topic are unique, and what type of content would bring special value to your target audience.

Being an expert or hiring one may take a lot of time or money, but presumably you chose to be in the business you are in for a reason. Hopefully, your passion for your work, or certain aspects of how you approach it, will naturally enable you to provide a unique perspective that others can benefit from.

Aim high

You want to get published on authoritative sites. As shown earlier in Figure 7-28, many sites accept bylined submissions, including some of the most well-known sites on the Web. While PageRank as it was originally defined is not what the search engines use to determine the value of the link, it still teaches us an important lesson: a link from a high-quality site can be worth 1,000, 10,000, or even 100,000 times more than a poor-quality site.

In addition, links from poor-quality sites can even be harmful to you. We will discuss this more in Chapter 9. When you first start out, you may not be able to convince the higher-authority sites in your niche to accept bylined articles from you, but getting on those sites should still be your objective—you may just need to do it in stages. You can think of this as climbing a ladder (see Figure 7-30).

Figure 7-30. Aim for placements on high-authority sites

The concept is to start at the highest level you can. Based on your current visibility and reputation, you may need to start with Tier 3 sites, post there for a while, establish some credibility, and then start trying to get published on Tier 2 sites, as you can now point to the Tier 3 sites where you have already been published. This process may take many months.

Continue publishing on Tier 2 sites for some time, perhaps six months, and then consider trying to reach out to the Tier 1 sites. Be patient throughout this entire process: it takes time. When you first try to move up to the next tier, you may not be accepted.

All of this requires that you are publishing high-quality articles throughout the entire process and are measuring your engagement to make sure you are performing well with the content you are publishing. Developing that track record is a key part of success.

During this process, make sure you never agree to post on a poor-quality site. Your reputation is not enhanced by such sites, and it is best to stay away from them.

If you run a small local business, your definition of a Tier 1 site may be quite different from that of a major national brand. Getting published in the New York Times may not make any sense at all for you. The Tier 1 site might be the local newspaper, and your ultimate goal might be to get a column there.

For example, Orion Talmay started by writing posts on her own blog, which you can think of as a Tier 3 site. After posting there for a while, she was able to start posting articles on Intent.com’s blog, which is an example of a Tier 2 site. Finally, she became a contributor to the Huffington Post—a clear Tier 1 site.

Remember that quality trumps quantity

Many people doing SEO used to believe that the best way to get value from guest posting campaigns was to get on as many possible domains as possible. The reason for this belief was that Google used to view each incremental link from one domain as declining in value, as multiple links from the same domain could well represent a single editorial decision—effectively only one “vote” for your site.

This led publishers to research large lists of potential target sites for guest posts, and work on getting one or two articles published on each. Of course, over time, even if you start by aiming high, this approach leads to the quality of the target sites declining over time, and the new links you obtain start coming from lower and lower quality sites.

Let’s take a moment to define “quality over quantity” here. If you were to tell your friend that you had just published an article in the New York Times, she would probably be impressed and excited for you. Consider her reaction, however, if you told her you had just landed a column in the New York Times. Clearly the latter scenario is a lot more impressive. The search engines know this too, and they will treat those ongoing posts on the top authority sites as fresh editorial votes for you. This focus on quality over quantity also brings the most benefit to your visibility and reputation, and this is your top priority in any content marketing campaign.

Perform research and analysis to pick potential targets

We have already established that you need to focus on producing great content, targeting authoritative sites, and emphasizing quality over quantity, but how do you go about identifying sites that might be willing to publish your content where users can engage with it? The first step involves no tools at all. Simply use your own knowledge, that of others in your organization, and that you gain by speaking with your peers, to identify the most important sites in your market space. Chances are that you will find a large percentage of the best targets using this process alone.

You can also analyze where your competitors are getting links. For example, you can make use of competitive backlink analysis to find out who links to your competition. This can provide not only specific sites to target, but also ideas for much broader campaigns to put together.

Competitive backlink analysis can help you determine where your competition is writing bylined articles. This tactic for finding link targets and content marketing campaign ideas is discussed in more detail in “Find out where your competitors get links”.

You can also look for potential targets by using a variety of sophisticated search queries. For example, you might try this query if you are in the business of selling “left-handed golf clubs” (see Figure 7-31).

Figure 7-31. Search results for a query on “left-handed golf clubs”

As you can see, this query returns over 300,000 results! While many of these sites would not be appropriate targets, it is likely that a number of them are. Remember to filter the potential targets you find from competitive backlink analysis and advanced search queries based on the criteria we have listed in this section.

How far should you go with your ideas?

Link-worthy content can take many forms: top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, how-tos, event coverage, exposés, personality tests, quizzes, contests, surveys, tools, and widgets, to name a few.

For example, BuildDirect struck linking gold with its top 10 post “Redneck Home Remodels,” created by content strategist Rob Woods, which featured photos of humorously ramshackle home improvement attempts. The right mixture of controversy and humor, along with a strategic promotion from a power user on StumbleUpon, sent several hundred thousand views to the BuildDirect.com site, nearly 20,000 likes to its business page, and hundreds of tweets.

With a contest, the devil’s in the details. You must get everything right: the prizes, judges, judging criteria, media partners, and so on. Most contests fall flat; they are simply unremarkable. Something about the contest must be worthy of being written about.

For example, in the Free Business Cards for Life contest that Netconcepts dreamed up for its client OvernightPrints.com, the site partnered with “Technorati 100” blogger Jeremy Schoemaker (a.k.a. “Shoemoney”). The contest was to design Jeremy’s business card; the winner received “free business cards for life.” The cost of the prize (and the contest overall, for that matter) was negligible: the fine print capped the winnings at 1,000 business cards per year for a maximum of 20 years.

The link exposure this contest garnered was excellent; it included keyword-rich links from Jeremy’s blog, shoemoney.com, and Jeremy also posted a video about it to YouTube. A number of design sites and bloggers listed or linked to the contest. The ultimate goal was the rankings that resulted from the links. As you can see in Figure 7-32, Overnight Prints still ranks at #3 in Google for “business cards.” Jeremy got something out of the deal as well: a killer new business card printed and shipped to his door courtesy of Overnight Prints.

Figure 7-32. Google organic search results for “business cards”

Potential linkers also love a good corporate citizen, so be one. Consider such activities not as an expense, but as an investment that will generate a return in the form of links.

Noomii.com created buzz with its “Daily Acts of Kindness” Advent calendar. Participants could subscribe with their email address to receive daily emails with an idea for a random act of kindness. With this amazingly simple idea and the catchy tagline “...because it’s better to give than to receive,” Noomii amassed views and high-profile mentions.

Do not be afraid to be bold or off the wall. You do not always have to toe the corporate line. Relevance is important, but obtaining some lower-relevance links is OK too, as long as the majority of the links to your site still come from highly relevant sources.

Encourage link-worthy content to spread virally

You can extend this approach to content distribution by creating something you can pass around. For example, a hilarious video clip might be passed around via email. Provided you make it easy for people to determine the video creator (presumably your company) and to visit your site, this type of campaign can garner a lot of links. Be aware, though, that if you host the video on a video-sharing site such as YouTube, most people will link there, not to your site. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, if you have a larger goal in mind, such as generating buzz and building your brand presence.

Criteria for an OPA strategy

Chances are that you are not going to pursue all of the aforementioned OPA ideas at once, so you have to make some choices. Here are some criteria for narrowing down your OPA strategy:

Size

This is the first thing that everyone thinks about, and of course getting in front of a large audience is, in general, a good idea, but only if you satisfy one or more of the other criteria that follow.

Relevance

It’s critical that you build an audience that is relevant to what you do, so the OPA you seek out should be interested in topics that are relevant to your business. If you are doing a guest post, in the ideal world, the site you are posting on is focused on the same general market as you are, or a site that covers the market you are in. Figure 7-35 illustrates the concept that relevance is an important factor not only in SEO value, but also in getting you more exposure to potential audiences. That’s a good thing!

Figure 7-35. The relevance of inbound links is important!

Quality of existing content

The company you keep defines you. If the articles on a site are poor, you don’t want yours there. Or, if the contributions to a social media community are all self-promotional, there is no value in being there.

Ease of getting started

This factor is actually one of the most important. You can’t do everything at once, and there are probably some ideas that will be easier for you for execute. Pick one or more of those ideas and generate some personal momentum.

Authority

The authority of the venue makes a difference. Speaking at the most important conference in your industry, interacting on social media with people already recognized as experts in your area, and writing a guest post for the top news site that covers your space are all great things. Some of that authority transfers to you by association. You may need to work your way up over time, but you want to be conscious of a venue’s authority as you are presented with opportunities.

Quality of content you can produce

Whether you are presenting, writing, or promoting, it is worthwhile only if you are able to deliver good content to that audience. You are not a fit for every audience. Don’t worry about it. Pass on opportunities where you can’t deliver your best, and focus your energies in the places where you can.

Opportunism

The most important part of building your audience is to get out there. Be a part of the community in your industry. This sets you up to recognize big opportunities when they arise. Watch for these and be ready to respond quickly, because leveraging opportunities is a big time accelerator.

Your business needs to have a strategy for building your own audience. Exposure to OPA is a great approach, because conjuring an audience out of thin air does not work. You need to map out a strategy and pursue it in a purposeful manner. You may need to do some experimentation to find what works for you, but it is well worth the time and effort.

The indirect benefits of building reputation and visibility

In the days predating the Internet, classic marketers used to say it requires seven impressions or touches to make a sale. If you are trying to build your reputation to the point where someone might link to you, you need to be prepared to mount a campaign, and not expect everything to happen just because you reach out to a stranger and ask for it.

Even in the case of guest posting, which is a methodology that provides a relatively direct way (in some cases) to get a link, the real benefit—getting exposure to other people’s audiences—is likely more indirect, as Figure 7-36 illustrates.

Figure 7-36. The indirect benefits of guest posting

On the left side of the diagram is a publisher who writes high-quality articles on several different high-quality sites. Each posting provides him with exposure to OPA (shown in the middle), and some of the people who see his articles are media people or blog owners.

Over time, they may see many of his articles, and eventually they decide to go check out his site. If the content there is of good enough quality, they might start linking to some of the articles there, or sharing them in their social media.

You can see how this process of building a reputation works. This same concept applies to participating in social media, speaking at conferences, sharing videos on YouTube, and engaging in many other types of activities.

By being active in communities related to your market space, you build your reputation and visibility, and over time, some of the OPA take an interest in your site and actively engage with your content. While this can be a long process, it is a very powerful way to look at your overall content marketing strategy.

Engaging the influencer

If you are a fan of content marketing, chances are that you already have your own blog and your own social media accounts. You probably already use these in tandem, and make sure that you follow similar content themes and share any new blog posts you write on your social accounts. When you do this correctly, you set yourself up for the type of virtuous cycle shown earlier in Figure 7-16.

Doing this effectively is a great start. You can grow your audience over time because people who are already connected with you will share your content, and it reaches their audiences.

However, this basic process works much more effectively when you get influencers involved. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Develop relationships with major influencers so they are subscribing to your blog or following/friending/circling you in social media accounts. You must have a history of creating content of interest to the influencer. The payoff occurs when he chooses to link to it or share it on a social network.

• Get permission from the influencer to provide him with a guest post and be published directly in front of his audiences—for example, in his blog. Like the preceding tip, this strategy also depends on having a credible history with the influencer so he will consider your article. The payoff here is quite direct, and happens as soon as the content publishes.

• Interviewing him and publishing the result on your site. This is a great tactic, as the influencer is likely to share the resulting interview via social media and perhaps via links as well.

There are many other variants of these ideas, but all of them depend on having a relationship of trust with the influencer.

Building the relationship

Building the influencer relationship is not really so different than making friends when you move to a new neighborhood. When you go to that first neighborhood party, you don’t walk around asking everyone there to give you $20. If you did, you’d quickly ruin your reputation in the neighborhood. This doesn’t work with your new neighbors, and it doesn’t work in building relationships anywhere else either.

Figure 7-39 illustrates the process of building a trusted relationship.

Figure 7-39. Building trust in a relationship

The major elements of the process are as follows:

• Start interacting with the influencer. Again, treat it like you are developing a new friendship. When it comes to business, focus on providing value to her. If she has a question, seek to answer it. Don’t spend any time telling her what value you bring—just deliver it to her.

• On an ongoing basis, show that you will be active in sharing her content to your audience. Even if your audience is much smaller, the give-and-take attitude will be noticed.

• Actively help out others. When you focus all of your attention on one person to the exclusion of others, it starts to feel a bit creepy. Give value to others on a regular basis. Publish great content, and share other people’s. If you discover great content from a little-known author, the influencer you are trying to build your relationship with will be more interested than ever!

Prioritize these efforts. How do you decide? You might fly to a conference to meet some critical person face-to-face, while with others you might simply interact on social media accounts. Figure 7-40 illustrates this concept of putting more effort into more important relationships.

Figure 7-40. The relationship building pyramid

Note that while it’s certainly possible to build meaningful relationships with people through social media only, nothing beats face-to-face.

Recognizing opportunities is also important. Your first chance to make a big impression on someone might be to respond to a blog post, a tweet, or a Facebook update. Better still, if your target asks for help with something in a public way online, make a point of taking advantage of that opportunity by being the first one to give it to him.

Once you have developed a relationship, you still need to do the right things to get someone to share or link to your content. No one is going to share everything you do, because not all of it is that good or relevant (don’t be offended: no one is great all the time). Figure 7-41 shows the factors that impact someone’s decision to reshare your content.

Figure 7-41. Factors influencing the likelihood a person will share your content

The major elements that go into that decision are as follows:

Relevance

If your content is not relevant to someone, she’s not going to share it, even if it’s great!

Uniqueness

People are not going to share content unless it’s unique in some way that is of interest to them. Achieving uniqueness may be hard to do, but it’s a requirement, so a key part of your content marketing plan is to figure out what you can do that is differentiated from what’s already out there.

Authority

It definitely helps to have established some level of authority. Of course, you won’t have that starting out, so you will have to leverage the other factors more to make up for it.

Quality

This goes without saying. Poor content will bring poor results, and no amount of relationship building will change that.

Trust in the author

This is where the relationship comes into play. You can create great content, but if you are not yet trusted, your share rate will be far lower.

Trust in the referring sources

How someone learns about a piece of content is a factor in the share rate as well. If an authority tells you about it, you are more likely to respond by passing it on.

Visibility

People can’t share what they don’t see. For example, if you create a great blog post and you tweet it once, only a small percentage of your followers will ever see it. Tweets are here now and gone five minutes later. Even the biggest tweetaholics miss some of their tweet stream.

Impressions

This is classic marketing in action. As noted earlier, traditional marketing experts used to say that it took an average of seven impressions per sale. This general principle still works today. As shown in Figure 7-42, if someone sees your content referenced by more than one other person, he’ll be more motivated to see what it’s about and more likely to share it.

Exclusivity

You can also get someone’s attention by offering her exclusive access to your content, or by offering her an early preview. People who publish blogs, or content via social media, love to be able to break news.

Figure 7-42. Creating multiple impressions increases the chances of getting shares

As you can see, the reach of influencers is long. Not only can they get you links, they can also give you shares that result in other people giving you links.

However, realize that every person out there has some level of influence. You can’t build deep relationships with everyone online, but you can be courteous to them all, and you can seek to help out others in ways that are appropriate. You never know, that person with 132 followers on Twitter might happen to know a major influencer who is really important to you. You should seek to leave a good impression everywhere you go.

Paid social media

Once your team creates and organically distributes content that is intuitive and engaging and serves well-conceived audiences, you have already made great progress. Distributing that content to organic audiences who love it and share it is also good. The problem is that, while there is some free social distribution, on many social networks the amount of available distribution is declining. Paid social media can help you significantly extend the reach of your content.

Potential customers can’t be motivated to read a fancy blog post if they never learn about it. Bloggers and journalists won’t link out if they never discover your infographic, blog post, Google+ Hangout, and YouTube video. High-authority social users can’t share your bit.ly link if they’re unaware of the existence of your carefully constructed, beautifully designed web app. The crowdsourced industry study in which you invested so much will have a limited effect without at least some distribution.

Social distribution

Sadly for marketers, free social media distribution has already been greatly reduced on sites like Facebook (as few as 1%–2% of followers of a brand page will see the content you post there). Why is free social content distribution now limited? To answer that, you need only take a quick look at Facebook and Twitter’s stock value and earning trends. As a result of the pressures of being public companies, these social media channels now force marketers to pay for the same organic lift that used to be free.

The good news is that it’s relatively inexpensive to regain that distribution through paid social media campaigns. Think of social pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as editorial, calendar-based, social content amplification programs measured against content marketing and conversion key performance indicators (KPIs), not just direct-response advertising tools.

Social content amplification steps

The social content amplification process is easy to understand and works really well in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. Start by posting great content on your social profile’s company wall.

The next step is to create an ad. These are not just any ads, because they look almost exactly the same as an organic post. On Facebook, these are called page post ads and they’re served to targeted users in either newsfeeds (desktop/tablet/mobile) or the righthand column (desktop/tablet). Twitter calls them promoted tweets, and LinkedIn calls them promoted posts. Google+ amplification ads are called +Post ads, and they are created via the AdWords Display network. YouTube calls the ads TrueView, and they result in targeted video views, subscribers, and external clicks if you buy call-to-action (CTA) overlay ads for the videos. Amplified social posts result in traffic to your external website and/or internal social traffic. The internal social traffic often results in new followers and extra sharing.

The determining factor for whether a social amplification ad drives users external to your website or within the same social channel is the type of content you posted in the first place. With image and video posts, it is usually best to keep users on your social platform to view the media. Well-packaged link wall posts with killer copy and amazing images can be effective at generating clicks to external websites. Pay attention to actions earned with social ads. Make sure you’re getting what you want by measuring the results and adjusting.

Psychographic targeting

What makes social media amplification different from search keywords is the powerful targeting capabilities, known as psychographics. Rather than targeting phrases, psychographics take clear aim at the attributes that make people who they are.

Most marketers’ first exposure to psychographic targeting was in late 2007 with Facebook Ads, which allow advertisers to target users by interests, affinities, proclivities, biases, predispositions, religion, sexuality, occupation, education, workplace, preferences, age, gender, likings, age, predilections, attractions, medical conditions, economic status, peccadilloes, desires, correspondences, empathies, relationships, appetites, weaknesses, tastes, inclinations, corporate loyalties, and numerous other highly personal penchants.

Facebook was the first to roll out this capability, but now psychographic targeting is everywhere. In reality, radical targeting has been percolating Internet-wide for years. Savvy marketers use digital media platforms (DMPs) and ad exchange technology to target users almost everywhere they roam on the Internet. It’s a lot like Facebook Ads, only better and Internet-wide.

More than 30 networks, consortiums, and other data brokers resell access to their targeting data, making users available to DMPs. The names of some of these networks are shown in Figure 7-43. If you don’t yet know the data providers in the following graphic, you will. Data objects from these companies can be layered using both the AND and OR operators to create stunning targeting combinations.

Figure 7-43. Examples of sources of targeting data

Consider the possibilities of layering data from such pervasive and definitive sources, in addition to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Imagine clarifying ecommerce marketing targets by financial qualifiers gleaned from Experian, TransUnion, and MasterCard. If you like occupation targeting in Facebook and LinkedIn, how about targeting users Internet-wide with Dun and Bradstreet and Bizo?

We live in a brave new marketing world, where it’s commonplace to layer competitive and symbiotic brand affinities with credit qualifiers. These powerful examples are just a small snapshot of the psychographic display-targeting ecosystem. There are thousands of ways to layer data for the targeting win.

Social advertising can drive links to your site

Another perk is that well-executed organic amplification of relevant content often results in links. Marketers are already learning to ditch old-style link-building efforts in favor of paid-organic link building to earned psychographic audiences, bloggers, and journalists. It’s easy to target media roles using the “More Demographics/Job Title” field of Facebook Ads and occupation targeting in LinkedIn.

Whether targeting journalists, morning show hosts, and news producers, well-executed organic amplification of relevant content nearly always results in links.

Note that paid-organic social content distribution does not replace good old-fashioned public relations and peer-to-peer outreach. Human-to-human marketing will always work. For SEO, most businesses need to sell with content. As a result, an increasing number of content marketing companies will adopt these practices as standard fare in the future. Great marketers already are.

As we’ve mentioned, social content and SEO distribution used to be mostly free. Now, in the unavoidable effort to monetize, social media platforms and search engines charge for the same distribution. That’s the bad news. The fantastic news is that the “ads” look very similar and are often barely distinguishable from the same organic page units that used to be free. Use paid organic-looking social psychographic content amplification to dominate distribution.

Build an initial list

If you’re active in social media, or if you are socially active in your industry, you should already have a good idea of who the big names are—the people who speak at conferences, who have huge Twitter followings, or whom everyone circles on Google+. Start making a list of influencers, and use the names you already know as initial targets.

If you are just getting started in social media, or you’re running a local business and don’t go to a lot of conferences, you’re going to have to identify influencers and begin following and interacting with them through social media. For instance, if you own a restaurant, follow all of the Food Network personalities, like Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay, and other celebrity chefs and related public personalities like Martha Stewart.

If you’re writing a science fiction novel, you could follow other science fiction authors, editors, agents, and publishers of science fiction. It would also be useful, though, to find news sources that report on topics like science, space exploration, medicine, and other subjects that could be related to what you’re writing about.

It will take several hours over the course of a few weeks to build a solid initial list of targets. You want to follow all of these targets on the platforms in which they are most active. Don’t push friend requests at them until you have established at least some level of interaction.

This list should be broad, as it needs to cover an appropriately wide range of topics and people. At this point, don’t pare down the list at all—in fact, make it bigger. Expand out as much as possible. Follow anyone and anything that might be related.

You should also expand out beyond social media a little. If you identify some extremely high-value influencers, subscribe to their blogs, RSS feeds, newsletters, and podcasts. You are not doing this so much to learn from these people (though there’s almost certainly something to learn from them, no matter how much of a guru you are) as you are to get to know them better. Only after you know them are you prepared to interact with them positively.

Begin interacting

As just mentioned, once you get to know some of the people you’re following, you can begin interacting with them. If they ask a question on Twitter, send them @ replies. If they post a link to something, comment on it. Retweet or reshare their posts. On Facebook or Google+, post thoughtful comments or links to stories with more information. Repin, tweet (with an @ mention), and comment on their Pinterest photos.

Don’t ask them to link to you or repost your content at this point. Later on, you’re going to contact these people directly and ask them to help share your content or write a review, but you’re likely to fail if you make your request too early. You will have a much higher success rate if you’re already somewhat familiar to them through social media.

At this point in the process, it’s about the relationship building. Give genuinely, and add as much value as you can. They will start giving back to you later when they are ready, and you can’t push it. This process will also raise your own influence on social media, and not just with the people you are targeting.

Refine the list

While you’re engaging your followers, begin to whittle down your initial list of influencers by using reliable metrics. How popular are their blogs and other domains? How much reach do they have beyond their social media followers and fans?

Instead of answering that question on your own, you may want to use a tool like Kred, shown in Figure 7-44.

Another useful tool is Klout, which creates a composite “Klout Score” that shows your own influence (the more influential you are, the better your chances of getting the attention of a more powerful influencer), as shown in Figure 7-45.

Some other tools that you may find valuable for this purpose include:

• Moz domain authority—as measured on Open Site Explorer

• Majestic’s Trustflow and CitationFlow Metrics

• LinkResearchTools PowerTrust

• Followerwonk, part of the Moz toolset

Figure 7-44. Kred shows you the most powerful influencers among those you’re following on social media

All of these sites use proprietary algorithms to measure the number of RSS subscribers, friends, fans, followers, comments, shares, and inbound links and weigh them according to their own opinions on what is valuable. Depending on your industry, product, and/or content, some of these tools may be more valuable to you than others.

Figure 7-45. Klout also shows your own influence levels

Ultimately, though, this is not a numbers game; it’s a quality game. If someone has only a dozen followers, but everything he posts goes massively viral, then despite the numbers he is a highly valuable influencer. That would be an unusual situation, but it’s possible. There are some people who are on only one or two major social networks, such as YouTube or Google+; these people can be deceptively influential.

It’s also not a numbers game in terms of how many influencers you must contact. Half a dozen really influential bloggers are more powerful than a thousand small-time bloggers.

Use Twitter as a warmup

Starting a dialog on Twitter is often a very good way to start, even if you’re not targeting Twitter specifically. If the influencer you’re going after is active there, then it can be very valuable to engage her there. High-value targets are almost certain to ignore a cold email, and will require a warmup on Twitter. If you make this effort to engage her with meaningful comments and retweets, it’ll help her become more comfortable and familiar with you.

Tweet @ people. When the influencers you’re watching say something to which you can respond intelligently, reply to them positively. Answer their questions. You can also thank people publicly for recommending something.

Watch their Twitter feed for a while so that you can be sure that they really are as relevant and interesting to you as you think they are, and that you like what they’re saying. You may discover that while someone seems to be influential, she mostly posts negative things about companies and products; that outreach effort could be a disaster for you.

When you are trying to build a relationship with someone, it’s often best if you don’t hide behind a brand account; use your full name (your personal account). Or, if you intend to have more than one person represent you on Twitter, you might create a public persona who virtually represents your company. This name will be your public face, and will get all the credit for your posts. If you’re going to create a persona, make it a woman; women (or female names, at least) have a much higher response rate in outreach email.

The Twitter warmup is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing effort that will take weeks or months to complete. Note that this same strategy also works well on Google+.

Use email to contact the influencers

Cold calls are always difficult, even when they’re emails. You want something, and you’re contacting someone who is in a position of power and asking him to give it to you. This is not a role that anyone enjoys being in, but the most successful salespeople and marketers put that aside and master the art of initial contact. Think about how much you want social media success (or the business success that is on the other side of social media success). What are you willing to do to achieve that?

All you need to do initially is get your foot in the door with one good, solid influential mention on social media. Then you’ll use that first big mention to get the attention of other influencers. Even among the top people on social media, everyone wants to be in with the “cool kids.” That first mention becomes the best method of obtaining mentions from others, so invest big in your first major influencer outreach effort. From that point forward, it gets easier.

Before you start sending emails, give serious thought to where you want to claim to be mentioned. On Twitter? On a famous blog? On Facebook? The social network or site where you want to be mentioned will help you narrow down your choices and customize your outreach message.

Leverage Pinterest group boards

If you are an active and established Pinterest user, you can use group boards to your advantage in contacting and participating with Pinterest influencers. You can invite a mutual Pinterest follower (someone whom you follow, who also follows you) to be a contributor to one of your boards. This creates a group board. You will always be the administrator of that board, but you can add as many mutual followers as you like. By the same logic, one of your mutual followers can invite you to pin to one of his group boards.

If you can find a way to get a Pinterest power user to participate in one of your group boards, you could inherit a lot of his followers as a result. Similarly, participating in the same group board as an influencer gives you much more trusted and intimate access to him, and a much higher chance of getting a review, repin, or mention from him.

Get contact information

Certainly, if you can get someone’s phone number and you’re fairly certain she’d be receptive to a quick phone conversation, then give her a call and follow up at an appropriate time with an email.

Some people are more inclined to respond on-network (a message sent on the social network they participate in), and some are more receptive to email. Sometimes, email is better because it’s more personal and is more easily noticed. Some influencers are so popular that they don’t check their in-network messages at all—they get inundated with notifications and frequent messages from raving fans—but they almost certainly check their email.

Getting someone’s email address can be tough and time-consuming. If you find yourself spending an unreasonable amount of effort trying to get the email address of someone who has taken great pains to hide it from the public, then fall back to tweeting @ her on Twitter. Once you have a relationship with her there, you can simply ask her if you can send her an email, and she may provide it to you.

First, try looking on the influencer’s blog or corporate site for an email address. Maybe it’s in an obvious spot.

Do you have his business card from an in-person meeting at a conference or event? People usually put their email address on their business card. Does his blog or corporate site have a “Contact us” page? That goes to someone’s email—if not your target influencer’s, then probably his assistant’s. If you add someone on LinkedIn, you can get his email from there. The reply to the invitation comes from his email address. You can also send InMail, which allows you to send mails to people you are not connected to (for a fee).

As a last resort, do a Whois lookup on the influencer’s blog domain name (assuming it is a real domain name, not a subdomain on a public blogging site like TypePad, WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger). Every domain has contact information for the domain owner; hopefully that will include the email address of the person you’re trying to reach.

Pay for reviews

If you are trying to reach a product reviewer, be warned: some high-level reviewers may ask you for money in exchange for a review. Among journalists this is highly unethical, but bloggers and social media power users don’t always fall into the “journalism” category. In the United States, anyone who posts a product review, whether she considers herself a professional reviewer or not, must disclose the fact that she received compensation (including a free product) for it. This is a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulation.

The FTC puts the responsibility for disclosure on the brand, not the publisher. That means you. So if you send a check with your review materials, or if you tell a blogger or journalist to go ahead and keep the review unit you’re sending, you must check back and make sure that she has clearly printed an appropriate disclosure notice. This even applies to endorsements on Twitter. The preceding paragraphs contain really important legal liability information about product reviews. Don’t skip this stuff. Read it twice. You don’t want to get in trouble with the FTC.

Paying for reviews, or giving free products to reviewers or influencers, is an ethical grey area. Usually it’s all right with disclosure if it’s posted to someone’s blog or social media page, but it could reflect badly on you depending on context. In some instances, it is definitely unethical—for instance, book reviews or any product review on Amazon.com that is done on a for-hire basis is against Amazon’s rules.

Google also frowns upon paid links, so if you are paying a blogger for a review that includes a link back to your site or product page, that is technically in violation of Google’s rules unless the blogger applies the nofollow attribute to the link in the HTML tag.

Some social media power users offer expanded services for hire. For instance, a popular Pinterest user might solicit money to do a photo shoot with an in-depth review or interview. Food bloggers might offer to publish a recipe and high-quality photos and a review of the resulting product. This is not prohibited by Pinterest, but if you take this route, make sure any links are nofollowed and the proper disclosure is printed.

Paying for this type of visibility, and doing it the right way by nofollowing the links, may not have direct SEO benefit, but it can still result in others seeing your content and choosing to link directly to it. As a result, this type of tactic might have a place in your overall strategy.

Create templates

First, you need good unique content. A lot of social media gurus will tell you that you should try to build followers by linking to interesting stories. That will get you a small amount of success. If you want major success, though, you’ve got to be the source of interesting information, not just someone who links to it first.

Start with a pool of unpublished articles that can be customized somewhat. They should be mostly or completely written, but don’t tell anyone about that. The point of your influencer outreach email is to ask for help or input on an article you’re currently writing. You will, of course, quote or cite the influencer as a source. Quoting experts for articles is one of the best ways to get them to link to you or mention you on social media.

The article you’re customizing should be relevant to a topic that the influencer covers or is interested in. Don’t publish it more than once; don’t try to repurpose a published article unless it is substantially customized for a different platform (for example, you can write a summary of it for a LinkedIn post, or a Google+ post, or other platforms, as long as you have substantially customized it to that platform).

Contact the influencers

Don’t mass-mail your target influencers. Personalization is hugely important. The message must be personalized. Absolutely do not send a generic message that starts with something like “Hello, fellow blogger.”

Not only are impersonal messages likely to be ignored, they’re also likely to be caught in a spam filter. The same message sent to many addresses on the same network (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) might be flagged as spam by the system. Not only will you have completely wasted your time, you’ll also have associated your email address with spam. Your whole domain could get blocked.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a standard message template that you start with. It does mean that the template must be customized significantly. To do that, read the influencer’s blog and social profiles; write as if you are familiar with her. Because you’ve been following her and attempting to engage publicly with her for a while, most of this work should be done.

The template should not be long—fewer than 300 words or so. Busy people don’t have time to read long messages from strangers.

Be genuine and polite in your initial outreach

Make the influencer understand that you took the time to read her work; express genuine interest in her. Mention something she did in the subject line: “Just saw your <title of last blog post>.” That will get her to open the email. You can also try mentioning her name in the subject line, or using an actionable phrase like “Need your decision,” “Need your feedback,” “Can I quote you for this article?”, or “One minute to read this upcoming article?”

For the message body, don’t talk about yourself or your background too much—to a busy stranger, that information is boring and skippable. Establish yourself in one sentence. If you referenced something she did recently, follow up that reference in the message body. Or talk about something else she’s done recently and how it affected you. Talk more about her than yourself.

If you’re writing to someone who consistently uses an online handle or persona, then go ahead and address her by her blog handle or persona first. If there’s no response to the first outreach, make note of that and use her real name in the follow-up email. Most people use their real names today, but in the old days handles were more popular. People want the credit; they want to be more transparent about who they are.

Close with a request for a reply. You want to encourage more dialogue. Don’t ask for more than that, though—never ask directly for something of value in an outreach email, such as a link or a review.

The time at which you send your message can make a big difference. Each industry has different prime days and times. Look at the posting schedule if you can, and try to figure out the editorial calendar as well (if it’s a big blog, the blogger probably plans out certain themes for content on certain days or during certain months). If it’s a tech blog and you know that the blogger publishes three stories a week, try to get her the day before a story publishes (or the day after), but not on the actual day. Most of the responses you’re going to get are early or late, when people check email. Very busy people typically check email on a schedule.

Spammers send their email late at night, so try to be off-schedule from that. Send your email during the day in the afternoon to avoid the spam rush, but before the last email check of the workday in your influencer’s time zone.

Follow up

If you haven’t heard back from your first outreach within three days, then you should send a follow-up. Following up is more crucial than many people realize. Michael Geneles, developer of outreach tool Pitchbox, estimates that following up increases your response rate by 60%. You should have a separate template for follow-up emails; don’t send the same message you sent before.

It rarely pays to go beyond two follow-ups—don’t send more than three emails to someone who isn’t responding to you. If someone doesn’t reply after the third attempt, there is a very low chance of a reply, and you’re better off spending that effort on the next influencer on your list.

Before sending your first follow-ups, get reinvolved on Twitter or another social platform to make sure you’ve got a solid connection.

Make a third attempt

If your first two emails didn’t get responses, then the third probably isn’t going to work, either. You’re going to have to take a different approach with your third attempt. Is there a different email address for this influencer? Some people list a Gmail account as a technical contact or as part of a regular Google account, but they rarely check it. Look for an alternate email address for this person, and explain that you’re trying to get in touch and wondering if you’ve got the right address.

You can also try to use in-network messaging through Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks in which this influencer participates. If you do this, come up with completely different content for your email; mention that you’ve tried to reach out and haven’t gotten through, note that you love his work and want his advice on something, and ask for a reply.

Track responses

The only way to improve is to measure. Keep metrics on what gets through and what doesn’t. If a particular template or a particular kind of influencer is not working out, then change your strategy. Was the response favorable? Was there a response at all? How often does the first follow-up work? The second? You may want to make a quick spreadsheet to keep track of this data.

Try other approaches

If you totally strike out despite your best efforts, then try a more indirect approach. Try to get through to the people whom your target influencer follows. These are her friends and close colleagues, and people she admires. Likewise, if you do manage to get a positive reply, ask the influencer who else she knows who could contribute to the article or provide a quote. Oftentimes you’ll get names, phone numbers, and email addresses of other influencers—and with a personal referral!

Nothing establishes initial contact like actual in-person communication. Go to industry conferences and meet your influencers in person. Have coffee with them. If they are not accessible in person, then build relationships with their friends; they will become your references. Take a long-term strategy. Or play golf with them—or whatever social activity is appropriate to the industry.

Watch for mentions and links

If you were successful in getting a positive response, then keep a close eye on the networks that you’re targeting. Watch for links and mentions that involve you or your company. This might not happen immediately. Often an article costs you a lot of money or time, so don’t wait too long to see if it gets published or mentioned. If you get an agreement, follow up after a week and see if there’s anything else you need to provide. If you don’t get a publication date, ask nicely for one.

Twitter is the hub for monitoring what’s new on the Internet, so that should be your place to watch for mentions. It may not come in the form of a hashtag or an @, so watch your target influencer’s feed closely.

Establish yourself on Google+

Google+ can be a good platform for outreach, but it requires a lot of work. While it is growing rapidly, there are still market segments that are not that active. If that’s the case in your market area, you might still want to get started there to build a relatively strong following and get an edge on the market, but it may not be a major focus for your outreach efforts.

However, there are many market spaces that are well built-out on Google+, and if that’s the case, the platform can play a significant role in your outreach efforts.

Purchasing links for SEO

Historically, one of the more popular spam techniques was to buy links. This had two significant advantages:

• It is easy. There is less need to sell the quality of the content of your site. The only things that need to happen are determining that the third party is willing to sell a link, and setting a price.

• Because the link is an ad, you can simply specify the anchor text you want. Anchor text is a powerful ranking signal, and this is one of the major reasons people engage in link buying.

The practice of buying links has fallen out of favor, even among aggressive SEO professionals, as the risks with this practice are very high.

Swapping links

Another dangerous tactic is doing a large percentage of your link building through reciprocal links. Once again, this is easy to do in principle. It is not hard to find sites that will accept the “link to me and I will link to you” value proposition.

However, the search engines potentially view this as barter, and therefore these arrangements are not considered real endorsements. The search engines are not likely to question a few selected link exchanges with sites closely related to yours. It’s a problem only when the link swapping becomes a significant portion of your backlink profile. That is a situation that looks manipulative, and the engines will most likely discount those links.

Using link farms/link networks

In the early days of search, publishers developed link farms and link networks as tactics for gaining cheap links. A link farm is a website or a group of sites whose primary reason for existence is to cross-link between themselves and other websites. Generally speaking, the links are created through aggressive reciprocal linking.

These sites are typically very heavily interlinked, so they can be pretty easy to detect. Part of the reason is that because they have little redeeming value, they typically do not have high-value links coming in to them from other sites, and most of the links result from various cross-linking schemes.

How can you differentiate a link farm from a legitimate directory? It’s simple: a link farm has poorer organization and more links per page than a directory. In addition, a human review will show the lack of a strict editorial policy in a link farm.

Link networks are a similar concept. The network exists for the purposes of creating links between sites, and it can be a bit more sophisticated than a link farm. For example, you could create a club where publishers agree to contribute a link in return for getting a link from somewhere else.

If managed with great care, the clustering of links between sites can be limited, and this can be a bit harder for search engines to detect. However, this tactic is highly vulnerable to a disgruntled webmaster simply reporting the scheme to Google.

A related concept is the notion of three-way link swaps (a.k.a. triangular link swapping), where Site A links to Site C in return for Site B linking to Site A. In this scenario, Site C may be the site the publisher is trying to promote, and Site B may be a site it uses to provide low-value links to people it trades links with.

This is almost always a scam, because Site B is probably a low-value site with little to recommend it. So, the publisher of Site A is providing a good-quality link in return for a low-quality one.

Think of it this way. Google employs some very smart mathematicians who understand graph theory.¹⁷ So you can rest assured that the Google algorithms will do a sophisticated job of detecting unnatural linking structures, such as the one in Figure 7-47, which is called a clique in graph theory. Notice there are five nodes (or vertices), each of which is linking to all four of its neighboring nodes. They never miss a link. It all looks so perfect. Naturally occurring neighborhoods on the Web aren’t perfect like that. If it looks perfect, it’s been engineered. Google will be suspicious of unnatural-looking neighborhoods.

Figure 7-47. Unnatural link grouping

Using automated link dropping

Spam tactics can include the concept of creating a bot that crawls around the Web looking for open forums and blogs and leaving behind automatically generated comments. Clearly this is spam, as no human is involved in the comment process (other than the programmer), and no effort was made to read the blog post or forum where the comment was left.

The great majority of these comments are deleted or nofollowed by the blog or forum software content management system (CMS), but the spammer does not care because she is operating on a large scale. If she leaves behind 1 million comments and 99% of them are filtered by one means or another, she still ends up with 10,000 links.

This is, of course, a very risky tactic. The search engines may be able to detect this behavior algorithmically, or competitors can recognize it and turn you in via a spam report. We do not recommend this tactic.

Hosting giveaways

Incentive-based link requests use an incentive as part of the process of requesting a link. In general, these are links that Google does not want to count. For that reason, this is not a recommended tactic. Note that bylined articles and content syndication (as discussed in “Guest Posting” and “Content Syndication”) are different strategies.

Widgets and infographics are two ways of providing a giveaway to third-party sites in return for links. However, in a YouTube video posted on August 12, 2013, Matt Cutts stated Google’s recommendation that links associated with these types of giveaways should make use of the nofollow attribute.

One popular way of implementing widget-based link building is to develop a JavaScript-based widget and then embed a link back to the widget publisher’s site in the <noscript> tags. Because this is the code the browser presents to users who do not support JavaScript, and the search engines do not run JavaScript, the crawlers see the link and not the widget.

An alternative method is to create an HTML wrapper for the widget with the link back to your site in clear HTML outside of the JavaScript code. This may seem like a more legitimate approach, but it is not approved by either Google or Bing for building links.

The reason for Google’s position was explained in an interview that Matt Cutts did with Eric Enge:¹⁸

Any infographics you create will do better if they’re closely related to your business, and it needs to be fully disclosed what you are doing. The big key is that the person publishing the infographic has to know, and agree with, including an endorsement to your site as attribution with the infographic. Even then, there is reason to believe that the link is more about the barter to get the infographic than a real endorsement of your site.

This is similar to what people do with widgets, as you and I have talked about in the past. I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, versus a true endorsement of your site.

If you are going to pursue this tactic, then it is important that you be aware that it comes with a lot of risk. The best thing you can do to help reduce that risk somewhat is to ensure that the content is very accurate and highly relevant to your business.

As another example, Google considers the use of so-called “sponsored” WordPress templates with embedded links, even if they are visible, to be spammy as well—unless, of course, the publisher distributing the WordPress template is in the WordPress template business. The key issue to address in these types of link-building campaigns is the relevance of the widget to the site receiving the link and the editorial endorsement—or lack thereof.

Facebook

People share links on their timeline and on Facebook pages. Links shared by users who have marked their content as available for Everyone (http://bit.ly/fb_control) are visible to search engines, as are Facebook Pages (pages for companies as opposed to people). These links are all nofollowed, so they do not pass PageRank, but they can provide visibility for your content.

Facebook likes are not at all visible to Google, as there is no place for it to crawl to see what content you have liked. However, Bing receives like data via an API feed, so it has the potential to use that data, though indications are that it is not doing so as of September 2014.

There are many reasons to use Facebook, but you should not expect it to directly impact your SEO ranking. However, a strong social presence can play a big role in your reputation and visibility online, and as a result can have a powerful indirect impact on your SEO. Facebook can be used to build valuable relationships.

In particular, Facebook has powerful advertising features that enable you to significantly increase your reach across the platform, and this can give you tremendous exposure.

Google+

Google+ was launched on June 28, 2011, and very quickly built a large user base. Like Facebook, Google+ also allows people to share links and generate comments and interactions on its posts. Shared content on Google+ can be evaluated based on the authority of the person sharing it, how many times it gets reshared, and the number of comments it generates.

Users can also indicate that they found a page valuable by clicking on a +1 button on the page (if the page has one) or next to the search listing for that page. The +1 button functions in much the same way as Facebook’s Like button, except that Google has direct access to the +1 data, as well as data about sharing on the platform. This plays a big role in personalized search on Google.

Google+ also offers brand pages, and these are used by many major companies to communicate with existing and potential customers. In addition, these pages show up in the search results whenever you search on a company’s brands, and this can be very valuable real estate. In some cases, it blocks people from using Google AdWords to bid on your brand name.

Consider focusing on connecting with major influencers on Google+, and using that connection to build a real relationship with them. Add value to their posts, and they are likely to pay more attention to what you choose to post. This will help your Google+ account build authority and influence.

Twitter

Twitter has established itself as the leading microblogging site. It allows its members to contribute microblog posts (a.k.a. “tweets”) that are limited to 140 characters. It has become an environment for real-time communication with a broader network of people. You can use Twitter as an effective platform for promoting your business, though links from Twitter are nofollowed, so no PageRank is passed. It is another valuable channel for communicating with your customers and market.

The basic goal is to become an active member of the community and build a large network of followers. As with other networking sites, many important influencers spend time on Twitter. If you can use the platform to develop relationships with these people, you can potentially gain some very high-quality links.

In addition, if you create some high-quality content, you can gain a lot of exposure through “retweets” (whereby people forward your message to all of their followers). Particularly interesting tweets can get significant visibility for you and your company.

reddit

reddit is a social link aggregation and discussion site, grouped into topical communities (“subreddits”) that are self-organized and independently moderated. There are millions of visitors each day, and reddit has hosted “ask me anything” interviews with many celebrities and a few politicians, including Barack Obama.

The site has a lot of traffic, a lot of users, and a lot of discussion. You must be a registered member of reddit (a “redditor”) in order to advertise there. It isn’t difficult to create an account, but the ad targeting is not very good because there is little capacity for users to provide revealing demographic data about themselves. In general, ad results seem to be less than stellar for any product or service that doesn’t specifically appeal to self-described geeks.

redditors are generally hostile toward self-promotion of any kind. If you try to guerrilla market by posting links to your site or Facebook page or anything that looks remotely promotional, redditors will slap you down very, very hard.

For that reason, it is best to not plan on any form of self-promotion on reddit. All you can and should do on the site is try to participate normally and submit your viral content and other people’s great content to the correct subreddits without the appearance of self-promotion.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a site for sharing pictures that has rapidly built a strong following. The demographic skews heavily toward women; they constitute more than two-thirds of the site’s users. The average income level on Pinterest is also relatively high.²⁴

However, even brands that are not naturally highly visible do well on Pinterest. For example, as of August 2014, the Wall Street Journal has more than 25,000 followers. Yet all of its “pins” are quotes either embedded over a newspaper background (see Figure 7-49) or accompanying a picture of the person being quoted.

Figure 7-49. A Wall Street Journal post on Pinterest

While Pinterest has a smaller audience than Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ due to its demographics, the site has proven to work really well for certain retailers, such as apparel manufacturers or restaurants. Now could be an excellent time to jump on board and build a strong following there before your competition does!

Wikipedia

You may not think of Wikipedia as being useful in link building, because it nofollows all its external links. In addition, it is not wise to simply go onto the site and create a page for your company. Unless your company is well known, the page is likely to be promptly removed, and even if it is well known, you would be in violation of Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest guideline. However, links from Wikipedia can be valuable because many people treat it as an authoritative site, and if they see your link there they may choose to link to you. This can include some pretty influential people.

Therefore, you may want to build trusted relationships within the Wikipedia community. This will require an investment in time, but it can bring some nice rewards. Here are some specific tips on how to proceed:

• Build up your credibility before doing anything that could be construed as self-serving. Develop a long and virtuous contribution history, and ideally build a user profile page that has earned Barnstar awards. It won’t benefit you to be altruistic on Wikipedia unless you do it publicly. You must have a visible track record (e.g., squash spam, fix typos, and add valuable content, but do not do it anonymously).

• Before making an edit to an article, contact its “owner” (the main editor who polices the article) to get her blessing.

• Use Wikipedia’s “Watch” function to monitor your articles of interest. Better yet, use a tool that emails you (e.g., TrackEngine or ChangeDetect).

• Make friends. They will be invaluable in times of trouble, such as if an article you care about gets an “Article for Deletion” nomination.

• Do not edit anonymously from the office. This could come back to haunt you. Tools exist that could embarrass you if you do so. One public domain tool, WikiScanner, is able to programmatically parse anonymous Wikipedia posts and identify the organization that created them. The tool cross-references the page editor’s IP address with the blocks of IP addresses of more than 180,000 organizations. Do not take the risk.

If you are serious about pursuing a Wikipedia page for your business, you should also learn about the Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE). This started as a Facebook group comprising marketing and PR people and Wikipedia editors, but it now includes Wikipedians, corporate communications professionals, academics, students, and other interested parties who are exploring the ways that PR and Wikipedia can work together for mutual benefit, defined narrowly as cooperation toward more accurate and balanced entries.

A consortium of PR associations and agencies signed a pact in 2014 to promise to work ethically within Wikipedia’s rules. A related ebook was produced by some of the participants as a guide to working with Wikipedia. The flow chart in Figure 7-50 shows how the Wikipedia posting process ideally works.

Figure 7-50. Recommended Wikipedia posting process

Wikis

Plenty of other wikis are a lot more edit-friendly than Wikipedia and let you contribute valuable content, get links, and build relationships. Examples include ShopWiki, the NewPR Wiki, and WordPress Codex. Some even pass link authority, which is a nice bonus.

Meetup.com

Meetup.com is a site designed to help groups of people with common interests “meet up.” These meetups can be excellent networking events.

Get involved with relevant local meetups and get your Meetup.com member profile page linked from the Meetups page, which will pass link authority to your profile and then on to your site.

Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat

New social media sites emerge on the scene all the time, and each has its own unique attributes. Like Pinterest, Instagram is a photo- and image-sharing network that skews toward women. For the right type of brand where visual content can play a big role (such as food, beauty, lifestyle, media, and fashion), Instagram and similar sites can be great places to build your presence.

Vine is unique because it constrains you to producing six-second videos—a perfect environment for people who want to see some really compelling and quick content. Vine presents an interesting challenge because there is so little time to deliver your message, but it’s very effective when you get it right.

Similarly, Snapchat videos disappear after you watch them. Like a message whose ink evaporates after you read it, Snapchat videos provide viewers a sense of exclusivity.