• Define your audience. Be able to answer the questions “who will spread this?” and “why will they spread it?”

• Know your linkbait portals. A post that would do well in Digg might bomb with Slashdot. Likewise, a list that gets a lot of Reddit love could be dead on arrival with Lifehacker. Each portal has its own audience. Figure out who hangs out where, and submit accordingly.

• Write a great title. You want to make sure that the title grabs their attention and demands their interest. This may actually be more important than the actual content of your bait.

• Make your bait beautiful. Spend some time on a unique design. Make sure your content is easy to read and informative. Have few, if any, ads.

• Create a place for discussion. You want people to discuss your idea, and what better place to start that than on your linkbait page? Plus, if you get a particularly good discussion going, you’ll get people linking strictly because of the ongoing dialog.

• Authority is important. Cite research and link out to reputable sources. It makes what you’re saying real, and people will feel good about referring people to it.

• Pick on people. If you can say something sufficiently funny, mean, or insightful about a popular internet personality, maybe you’ll get someone like Rand Fishkin, Greg Boser, Todd Malicote, Jim Boykin, Danny Sullivan, or Shoemoney to link to you. At very least, maybe they’ll check their trackbacks, like what you wrote, and link to it. A little validation goes a long ways.

• Ask for feedback. Ask popular bloggers, popular industry figures, and people who manage media sources to look at your bait and give feedback. If they like it, they may feature you, or at least send another authoritative link your way.

• Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Make sure your servers can handle the traffic that will come if/when your content goes viral. Also, don’t get banned from your linkbait portal by practices that might go against your portal’s terms of service. This might include getting all your coworkers to Digg your post, or Digging all of your own posts in quick succession. As a side note, you ARE allowed to submit your own stuff to Digg, which allows you to control the headline and description. That’s important.

• Retain the traffic. Follow up any good piece of linkbait with other quality content to reel in the visitors that come to your site. You don’t want your site to be a one-hit wonder.

This is my final post about PubCon (a week after it’s over, I know, I know).

This forum was one of my highlights for the conference. Not only were two of my favorite bloggers (Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org and Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com) on the panel, the topic was one that I’ve been hearing more and more about. I was definitely interested in what they had to say. And in honor of the forum, I’m going to post what I learned in list format in a post entitled “Ten Tips For Killer Linkbait.” Enjoy.

If you’re in eRetail, this was an awesome session to be at. A few key pointers:

1. Use existing resources to add content to your site. Some sources: replies to
   customer emails, customer phone calls, asking customers to leave questions.
2. When optimizing your site, prioritize your pages, starting with your home page first. Follow that by your info page (contact info, pictures, etc.), and then your top 5 product pages.
3. Offer free shipping and add text on your site to that effect.
4. Build related links.
5. Last and next links on product pages

Danny Sullivan is the guru of search, so it seems appropriate that he would talk about the future of search engine marketing. Here are a few points that I found to be compelling:

1. He was very particular about the difference between internet marketing and “auction marketing,” that is, you’re not just buying converting traffic by outbidding someone else, you’re marketing to someone who has a specific need that they have expressed through the search box.
2. Search companies like Google will try to pull internet marketers into non-search related fields live video and print advertising. Don’t let them do it of you’re not comfortable or experienced in it.
3. The future of search is vertical and social.
4. Danny’s new SearchEngineWatch-like personal site will be SearchEngineLand.com. New posts start next month as he finishes his tenure as the Editor-in-Chief at SearchEngineWatch.

This one was pretty strightforward. The story from each search engine? Duplicate content, while not necessarily malicious, isn’t a good thing. Essentially, if you have two pages across the web or on a single site that are similar or even identical, only one copy of that content will make it onto the results page. The moral of the story? Make sure you’re writing original, valuable content. Also, one type of duplication issue that I had never really thought about is the problem of having multiple URLs (for example, dynamic URLs) indexed by the engines that are pointing to the same page. Keep an eye on that. Finally, use robots.txt to keep the bots out of your duplicates (like printer versions), to avoid getting slapped with a dupe content penalty.

Presenters I heard: Tim Converse from Yahoo! and Brian White from Google.

NOTE: I just want to clarify that you are not penalized for duplicate content by the search engines. Rather, if you are using duplicate content, odds are, your page will not rank in the index because it is not the original. Thanks to Brian White for the clarification.

This was a really interesting presentation topic that is still crucial to internet marketers, whether you do SEO or paid internet advertising.

Gregory Markel - The Holistic Keyword Strategy

Gregory Markel is one of the best CPC gurus in the world. He has done a lot of work for major entertainment campaigns, including Lord of the Rings, Mazda, etc. Basically, he’s incredibly sharp and dynamic. Therefore, I really was interested in what he had to say.

1. Be clear about what your goals are. Know exactly what you want from the campaign. Pick a governing metric.
2. Understand your legal limitations for brands.
3. Use competitive analysis. What works for your competitors?
4. Mine your log data. It’s a valuable source for keywords that users are actually searching for.
5. Use the tools that are available, both public as well as proprietary tools.
6. Make sure when you launch you campaign that you’ve used existing data. That will help you to get a quick launch with positive ROI.
7. Not all keywords perform the same way on all engines. Find out what works where, and try that on other engines, abandon what doesn’t work.
8. Pay attention to any offline advertising and marketing that might affect what people are searching for.

Adam Jewell - Keyword Selections For PPC

Adam has a ton of affiliate experience, and apparently has been extremely successful with PPC channels, making him an extremely valuable presenter. He had some fantastic tips about what to do with your keywords once you get them.

1. Be careful bidding on brands. You’ll have a ton of competition.
2. Make sure you’re adding words to your keyword phrases that indicate someone who is ready to buy.
3. Use matching types. Exact match? Bid high on exact terms. Manufacturer part numbers are great for this. Phrase match? Use specific keywords and bid lower. Broad match is where you try to target people using “ready to buy” phrases.
4. Buy tons of keywords on a specific keyword and bid highly on that.
5. Buy tons of bottom feeder keywords and bid really low.
6. Link as close to the source as possible, hopefully the product page.
7. Buy every mispelling and typo available.
8. Use tons of exact match in Google.
9. Group keywords by length and use Google’s dynamic keyword on the short ad group.

John Battelle, founder of Federated Media and author of “The Search,” presented on search as a user interface. I thought he had some interesting ideas, particularly when it came to his vision of the future of search. The example he used was buying wine. There are hundreds of choices, and it’s easy to get ripped off. Imagine being able to read the wine’s barcode with your cell phone or PDA in order to have that code automatically searched by Google. Google then returns results, including average local price, reviews of the product, and where to buy locally. ALl in all, I thought it was pretty sweet. John Battelle has long been one of the big names in the search industry, and his insights into the future are, I think, a valuable indicator of what me might be seeing in the near future.

Guy Kawasaki

Today kicked off with a keynote by startup guru Guy Kawasaki. In his presentation, entitled “The Art of Innovation,” he talked about the necessary elements of successful innovation. I particularly liked what he had to say about defining yourself with a mantra, a two to three word phrase that encapsulates your purpose and reaon for being. I’m a firm believer that you have to know where you’re going if you ever want to get there, and so mch the better if you can actually remember that purpose. Guy spent some quality time making fun of mission statements, and the MBAs who create them, which reenforced his ideas about having a mantra. From a product development standpoint, he really emphasized that the best products are created by people who are trying to create something that they would want to use themselves. Overall, highly entertaining and inspiring.

PPC Ad and Landing Page Optimization

Christine Churchill - PPC Ad Copy

Here’s a breakdown of relevant points

1. Make your ads stand out by providing differentiating information - price, guarantees, service, etc.
2. Provide incentive to click - compelling headlines, etc.
3. Add a sense of urgency - “limited time”
4. Use the keyword in your title - It will be bolded in Google. This is the single biggest factor in CTR.
5. Talk about the benefits to the customer
6. Add a call to action. What do you want them to do?
7. Use brands when possible
8. Avoid self-centered copy
9. Prequalify visitors by providing information to eliminate freebie hunters, etc. Prices, age limits, etc.

Brad Geddes - AdWords Quality Score

I didn’t realize this, but Adwords has different quality scoring guidelines for content and search advertising. Apparently the landing page doesn’t figure in search ranking, only in the minimum bid, whereas with content, there is no minimum bid, but the quality score is important. Also, when inserting dynamic keywords, the quality score is based on the alternative that you provide with the dynamic code.

Tony Wright - PPC Ad Testing

This is an interesting concept I hadn’t really considered before. Tony suggested setting aside a small percentage of your advertising budget strictly for testing, allowing you to test out new areas and strategies with keywords and ads without putting your main budget at risk. One of these days when I work for someone who doesn’t allow AdWords to be self-perpetuating, this will come in handy.

Link Development and Optimization

Rae Hoffman - Managing Your Linkbuilding Team

This was an awesome presentation. She went pretty quick, but there was a ton of good information. She talked a lot about how to outsource your linkbuilding, but along the way, she dropped some important ideas about the things you should look for in links, even if you’re doing it yourself.

1. List the type of links you want to obtain
2. Track competitor backlinks to see where YOU should be linking
3. Decide what you’re looking for in reciprocal partners
4. Be goal-oriented as far as requests and actual links are concerned

Joel Lesser - Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking has kind of become the red-headed stepchild of SEO. It used to work well, but in recent years, its reputation has become tarnished as a completely useless way of building search engine rankings. Joes contends that relevant reciprocal linking is still helpful in search, and he also feels that it’s a good source of traffic as well. I tend to agree that having reciprocal links with related sites probably isn’t going to hurt you in the SERPs, but as to whether its going to help you very much, I’m a little skeptical. I’m going to have to test this myself.

Roger Montti, “Martinibuster” - Alternative Linkbuilding Strategies

Here’s the list:

1. Advertising or Linkbuys - He thinks that CPM is still a valuable hat tip in G, whether it’s an image or text, particularly if the ads are running on relevant sites. He also was very much against PageRank-based inquiries and advertising.
2. Buying websites outside your network. Look for inactive or underperforming sites.
3. Enter your sites into site of the month/day/week directories.
4. Get included in online-archived newsletters. It’s worth the small price.
5. Sponsorships - and if you sponsor a college event, you might even pick up some .edu links.
6. Proxy sites are good. Try leaving insightful comments on blogs, use trackbacks, blogrolls, and DMOZ listings.
7. YouTube and Google Video. Apparently, if you put your URL in the body of the description, YouTube and Google Video will turn it into a real, indexable link.

Copywriting

Ted Ulle - Managing Copywriting Teams

This presentation is obviously geared toward how to manage a whole team of copywriters, but the ideas about process are applicable to one-person operations as well as copywriting teams.

1. Have clarity of purpose. This is your guiding light.
2. Build a pile of content using forums keyword neighborhoods and emails to get a feel for the community.
3. Decide on metrics and goals at the beginning.
4. Build a solid information architecture. if you don’t know about how to do this, you should learn.
5. Build solid menus for your content.
6. Do graphic design last.
7. Now do the final HTML web edit to pull it all together.

Jennifer Slegg - Unique Content

There’s really only one thing to say about this: write unique content. That’s it.

Byron White - 30 Tips For Web Writing

Byron talked a lot about building community. A couple of points I liked:

1. The necessity of a good story. If you have a great story, you have a much easier time getting other people (your readers, most importantly) to believe in your message. There’s something about a great story that grabs people.
2. Related to the last point, part of finding a great story is taking a list of all the things that you’re not but you would like to be, plugging it into the following sentence: “We are not _____,” cross out the negatives, and tell the story of why the new sentence is true.
3. Try to get to your audience.
4. Respect intelligence.
5. Mine data anywhere you can get it. Search boxes, FAQ emails, site question submission forms, etc. are all good sources of data about what your readers are looking for.

So I’m at PubCon in Vegas this week, which I’m really excited for. This is my first conference, so I’m not entirely sure how this all works, but hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some good information and do a little networking.

I’ll try to post about some of the stuff I’m learning on this blog, so expect to see daily posts for the next few days.

Update: I think I’m only going to blog the stuff that I thought was of particular interest, meaning that some speakers won’t get a mention. Sorry.