The Future of Link Building – Accelerating Great Content to *Earn* Links
Here is my most recent talk on the link building panel at SMX Israel 2014 entitled The Future Proof Link Earning – Organic Seeding, Paid Acceleration, & Automation. It was an incredible day full of great sessions. See the captions embedded within the youtube video and transcript below. Enjoy! 🙂
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uncVqRLZ5q8&rel=0&w=630]
Slides
[slideshare id=30492313&doc=linkbuilding-smxisrael2014-nahmani-slideshare-140127095846-phpapp01]
Transcript
♪[music playing]♪
– Um so, to my left I have Ari Nahmani, the CEO and Founder of Kahena
Digital Marketing. then Tom Harari who’s from Iacquire he’s the Director of
Digital Strategy. Um,
I used to work with Tom
at Resolution Media, in Chicago. So um, Ari is gonna start off and give
a quick intro to the new link building – the new of new age of link building and hopefully you all will have something to takeaway
[inaudible].
– [Ari] Good Morning!
– [crowd] Good Morning.
– I’m Ari Nahmani, Founder and CEO of Kahena as Aaron said. Um in
fact, we’re just up the street. So please introduce yourselves to our whole team
they’re going to be around, this rambunctious bunch wearing black t-shirts.
Introduce yourselves, network, and so on. So I’ve got about 15 minutes apparently
and around 100 slides so I’m going to go quick. I’ve got a ton of actionable
takeaways and I’m usually not nervous, but the only reason I’m nervous today is it’s
the first time my wife’s here watching me speak so.
[audience clapping]
– So here we go. Alright so, the web is no longer the great equalizer, right. It used
to be this place where you could put up a website, optimize your certain key words,
and compete with bigger brands. And back then, any small Mom and Pop shop could
build a site, optimize a bit, and rank pretty darn well. A few link building
techniques, tactics, they’d be ranked well and make a decent living online. But
quickly, things started to get crowded and with that competition came an increase in
spending on link building tactics that made Google start cracking down.
Recently it seems as if brands are really the only ones ranking. Particularly with organic
search. And I think that really… we have to start thinking, right? Because of
that its time for us SEO’s to start acting like bigger brands. And the problem is, is
many of us, the digital marketers, consultants, in house agencies, are stuck
with clients or bosses that think like this about SEO. “I wanna be number one on
the Google machine for shoes”, okay, or like this, and it’s because they’ve
experienced old hat, black hat techniques that maybe used to work. Real spammy,
flash in the pan link
building techniques.
But we can move beyond that. And so I’m here to start
before you can dive in and say stop working with BS companies. And if we’re
going to evolve as marketers from SEO tactics to holistic inbound marketing, we
need to be really selective about who we work with. And it doesn’t mean just big
companies that have a big product and established business, but something
that’s quality, that you can believe in. And I think it’s our job as marketers
to sort of demand and discover what the unique value of composition of
whatever you’re marketing is. Right, is it just to build a better mouse trap? Who’s
the target audience and why do they care? Why should I care? And once you know that
I think you can actually market that properly. Staying closer to in house
marketers, right.
Take five minutes of your boss’ time, sit them down and really
understand what they believe the product or the service, the site, is valuing.
Because in today’s day of SEO, today’s day of marketing, you can’t just
take a website and rank. If it’s not a real business, if there’s not something
really of value there. How many of you guys know what RCS stands for? Okay, a
few. Real Company Shit. And this is, this is Will Reynolds if you don’t know, he’s
from SEER Interactive. And I, I think that his message and a lot of, sort of inbound
marketers and SEO’s right now, are starting to understand his message very,
very clearly because we need to start acting like bigger brands.
And think about campaigns instead of tactics. Link earning instead of link
building. But you don’t need to be a big brand to do it right, you don’t need to be
some massive brand with a lot of budget. Um, this is a quick story, a small
woodworking shop in the UK right, um, they offered left over wood to local schools.
And to their woodworking shops. And they got on the phone, this one guy who was
also in charge of marketing this is the guy on the left. Um, and they got
interviews, they got local and national press and links, right. But it wasn’t just
about the links, and you don’t need to be a massive brand to do this stuff. So
[inaudible]
you guys know who this is? Oh no, well it’s the ugly picture of the Penguin from
Batman, I didn’t want to use a fluffy penguin picture
[inaudible].
Um, but there’s no more of those tactics anymore, no use for link building tactics.
So stop it, stop it. Article marketing spam, directory spam, really directory
still? paid link farms, and even guest blogging now seems to be on the chopping
block, right. And there’s probably still ways you can add value and do some guest
blogging, but not in the way that people have been doing it, at scale, trying to
automate the process. So let these guys do the link building tactics, right, let the
hackers in their mother’s basements do the link building tactics. Us as marketers
need to move on. I know, I know, content is king. Everybody says it, but its really
important before we dive in, that we understand, well I’m gonna talk about
everything surrounding content. The assumption is that, that in 2014 and
beyond we’re doing link building and link earning, its, its surrounding something
great that you have on your site or on other sites.
And so Aaron, and also Mary, who will be speaking earlier today, ah sorry, speaking
next about content and how you can generate ideas and create epic content.
What I’m gonna talk about today is this, real marketing is not set it and forget
it. You don’t just hit publish and, and hope that something happens, like links
will just start flowing to your site. That doesn’t happen. And neither is marketing
content SEO or inbound. You may notice uh, you really can’t see it that’s a shame.
The set it and forget it infomercials, yeah.
But what it comes down to is really hustling. Assuming you have great content on your site, assuming that
you’re putting out wonderful, valuable stuff for your users. You need to hustle.
And these are the three areas that I’m gonna dive into today and give you some
actual takeaways. Organic seeding, paid acceleration, and automation. And once you
have these down the sort of marketing snowball that occurs, keeps rolling and
shares, visits, and links start to occur naturally. Alright, let’s dive in. Organic
seeding. So you either have time or you have money. If you have a limited budget,
the most likely thing that you have is time. And so if you an take that time and
seed content in the right places, you’ll give and get a lot of visits, shares and
links. So there are a ton of content discovery networks and tools that have
come out now.
The, the web is just this ADD
place where none of us have enough time to read everything that’s out there, so we
want people to curate and edit that for us. And that’s what we’re seeing. So, a
few tools. Who remembers stumbleupon? It’s old right? We have a lot of people. But
guess what, it’s back, seriously. So here’s just a brief example. Here’s a feed
on Stumble and you know 13 clever hacks for things that you thought were trash, right.
Just a simple little article with 13 pictures, not a lot of text, and someone
got, you can’t see it, 18,000, 18,000 views, right.
On stumbleupon. Here’s the original post on apartment geeks, some blog. Really not
that hard to do. But just because that person just didn’t hit publish, they
actually took the time to seed it and build themselves up on stumbleupon as an
authority, they were able to get a ton of views and shares. Same thing again, 99
songs to make your homework awesome. This is actually a pretty decent sized company
that did it, 8tracks.com. 2.5 million views, just by seeding this on
stumbleupon. That’s it. Um now granted it already had to be a great piece of content
that got this nice amount of views but 97.5 thousand links, um share driving,
it’s awesome. But it’s not just shares, um, you can also link to this stuff too.
But it comes from that great content and seeding it in the right place. So like any
other network, any social seeding network, if you build a profile on that network and
build authority, watch how others do it, seed your content and you’ll start doing
great and you can pick up
[inaudible]
Um, alright, let’s go, more seeding sites. So there are a ton of these sort of apps
and sites out there now. Zite is one of them, it’s all mobile. Um and if you can
tap into a topic focused area, subject matter and expert content site, you can
actually seed your site there or your content and get a ton of shares and links.
[inaudible],
actually John Berg from Conduit told me about this. It’s an addictive plugin that
I use, every time you open up a Chrome tab you see another awesome piece of content
full screen. Um, and if you can get in front of those influencers eyes, which
Tom’s gonna be talking about, then, then you have this chance to get a ton of
eyeballs for free. Um, and it’s not just the end users, it’s the people sharing
content, the influencers, the brands, they got this huge audience they need to find
on Twitter and so on. So they’re using applications now to find
that content. Okay, this is my obligatory what do they call them? Seed memes. So uh,
alright, here we’re gonna do the case of how meth affects you. Uh, the color is
really off here, you can’t see how nice this is. Um, it was a, this is not our
client but uh, a client of a friend, drugrehab. org decided to put out this
infographic. Now by itself, just publishing it, the infographic, cool,
okay, fine. But then what? How do you really leverage that content? How do you
get more eyeballs? Um, take this infographic, alright, chop it up, so
imagine one long infographic or one wide infographic, chop it up into different
blocks, and throw it onto Slideshare. How many of you guys know what Slideshare is?
How many of you have used it to reach out and build content, or republish content?
Awesome. So, so Slideshare is an amazing way where you can just get more views and
just squeeze more out of the content that you already have on your site. And then
you take that embed and put it right on the same post that you originally had,
just another way to get people to digest or share that content. And another 11,000
views here just by chopping it up, it takes ten minutes. Um, Buzzfeed right, how
many of you read a Buzzfeed article in the last week? Right? Um, how many of you have
written a post on Buzzfeed? A handful, two, three. Two of which are you know. So,
so, so, you can write a post on Buzzfeed, right.
And Yakr, this is where I dig into you for only having one ‘cat power’ ….
Um, but ah, you can build up your equity on the network, and take that original
content, the infographic, and, and then publish a post. Now don’t just publish the
original post, here’s this infographic, done. No create another piece of content
on Buzzfeed or another network, um 42 mind boggling images that will melt your
brain, right. And embed that one as one of the numbers,
right, you get an external link there. So, yeah I’m running but I go real quick. So
that’s just another pro tip, Buzzfeed, embed on one of your recent content and a
larger content piece. Alright, that’s organic. I’d better pick up the pace now.
So you either have time or you have money, and if you have money, just a little bit,
you could accelerate what we were just doing on the seeding side, getting more
paid eyeballs. Right so, here we go, Outbrain, how many of you have heard of
Outbrain?
There’s[inaudible],
you should have all had. And Taboola? Taboola, you’ve heard of Taboola? How many
of you have used Outbrain or Taboola on marketing campaigns? One. two, what? Oh,
didn’t see you. So um, so you guys are familiar with this, you are at the bottom
of a post on CNN or Times of Israel or wherever you are, and you see recommended
posts right. You guys have all seen this? You can be there too for not that much
money. And, for 100 bucks, 150 bucks you can get around 700,000, close to a million
impressions and not that many clicks, but you can get clicks. And if your content is
good enough, if you think what you’ve done is great, then spend extra money to go the
extra mile to make that marketing flywheel happen right. You can get that initial
seed set of shares and views, and if it’s good enough, people will actually start
accelerating. And you can use these to also optimize for titles, right. So you
can publish a, an article without publishing to the public, it’s hitting on
your site. And then push it on Outbrain to find out which one is going to work the
best when I actually publish. And there’s your data, right. And so, right, and you
can optimize and decide who’s, which country to target, or just you know, hit
every single country in East Asia, but and optimize your CTR
[inaudible]
But in the end you get a ton more visits and shares and potentially links. And that
makes me really happy. Oh you can’t see it, sorry. Um, alright
next, Google approved paid links, maybe. So this is a solution of getting content
in front of bloggers right when they are at the point where they might link out. So
I’m a blogger and I’m typing up my post and I’m thinking, hmm I wanna add more
value to my users by linking out to this word that I just mentioned. So how many of
you guys have heard of Zymanta? Not that many, awesome. So, Zymanta is this network
and plugin that bloggers have installed, and let’s say they’re on WordPress. And
while they’re typing up their article, they’re gonna get suggestions for images,
or other articles that are talking about that. So instead of a blogger linking to
an article that’s talking about this
[inaudible]
or whatever it is, they’ll get into that article and finding another authority
article they’ll just get them right here. And they can preview them and click one
button and they’re linking out. So that’s a way, so just to clarify, those articles
in there are organically seeded too, but they’re also paid, so you can pay for your
impressions in front of bloggers. Pretty amazing. You need a decent budget for this
and you need a lot of content on your site, probably 100 articles to start with
Zymanta, but it’s awesome. So retargeting. How many of you guys do retargeting?
Google retargeting? A few, alright. I’m not just talking about retargeting for
your
[inaudible]
So this is Ari Roth’s post on our site
[inaudible]
7 Things I Learned Analyzing Penalized Sites, you see that it starts to have a
chance, organically, naturally starts to have a chance. How do we accelerate this?
Okay, I’m not gonna go too deep into this but setting up, uh, remarketing, one piece
of code change on your site in your
[inaudible]
code, get yourself a double click, you’ll then create an audience list for everyone
that’s visited your site in the last, I don’t know, 120 days let’s say. Next
you’ll create a custom segment, and does this look familiar to people who use
[inaudible],
right. For everyone who did not view that post
that I just showed you, and it turns out that 98.5 percent of people did not view
that post that Ari Roth published. So what do we do? We retarget those visitors who
did not read that post. Not with a banner talking about our business or brand, but a
preview of that post and they’ll see that roll across the web. It can get annoying,
you can do some things to tone it down, but its really valuable so that your
mostly engaged visitors you can get
[inaudible].
Uh, your mostly engaged visitors you can get back to your site to read more content
that they haven’t already. Once they view it, they’ll no longer see this ad. Okay,
let’s blow through it. Facebook advertising, so uh Mary you’re gonna talk
about this so I’m gonna go really quick, but um, instead of boosting your post,
don’t just hit boost post button. Right? Don’t do that. Go into the back end
Facebook ads. Choose the post that you want to publish, and then you can actually
demographically, target people who you have, are already your fans, the friends
of fans, that’s basic, you should do that with most big content. And, this is a
[inaudible]
one, i got it from your boss Mary, is um, is targeting journalists, right, you can
target people who graduated with Journalism Degrees, or who work at CNN or
New York Times or Buzzfeed, the real staff people not community pages. And that’s
awesome because those people when they’re trying to discover content in their news
feeds, will see our content, for cheap. Okay, that’s paid acceleration. Here’s
automation, very quickly. How many of you guys know what reverse image search is?
Everyone’s seen it? It’s a new thing where you can just drag someone’s face and see
their logo or image across the web right. How many of you have heard of ImageRaider?
Alright, if you walk away with one thing today it’s this. This is one of my
favorite tools. It’s the same thing as Google reverse image search, except you
can automate that process, and scrape, okay. So if I’ve got products, if I sell
t-shirts, or if I’m Barry and I want to track my SMX logos or my face so if
people are using them, using the image without linking back to me, ImageRaider
will automatically weekly, monthy, however often, crawl the web and give you a report
that you can download to excel, sorted by domain authority, of all the sites that
are using your copyrighted images. So if you’ve got, you know, your executive
board, you know, images that you’ve taken that are proprietary, anything that’s an
image that you have on your site, that’s yours, track it. Its dirt cheap, and
that’s automating reverse image search so you can get links and by the way, if it’s
not obvious, you email those people and say hey you have our image please link to
us. Twitter and Tweetdeck. There’s a lot of advanced searches you can do here
right. So um, this also been going around, it’s a nice tip. “For A Story”, okay, search
for “For A Story” and you’re gonna find journalists who are looking to publish
your stuff, um to, to interview you or to write a story. So this is a great way to
get um, to find out where journalists are who are looking for a story. And you can
change your, your search query, right, into
[inaudible]
Twitter search to find out when people are looking for this kind of stuff. Here are
just a few examples, and you can see why this would be really valuable. To some of
these insecurities space, , interview,
[inaudible].
Alright so what about automating that stuff, right? You can’t see R2D2, that’s
sad. Alright, so Twools is a way to pull in Twitter searches, or feeds, RSS, into
other automated tools. So If This Than That, how many people have heard of this?
Okay how many people use it for marketing? Alright, so put the internet to work for
you, right. If you’ve got any two apps, web apps, you can have them talk to each
other and automate the processes that you’re doing in half the time. Just go to
[inaudible]
um, it’s as crazy as every time somebody tags you on Facebook you could make your
lights flicker at home, and that’s kind of extreme but.
We all know about Google Alerts, its very simple, you can even do advanced operators
by saying SMX Israel anywhere on the web except my own site, but instead of sending
an email, deliver it to a feed, right. And when you do that, you can do some advanced
searches in Google Alerts and push it to an RSS feed and once it in an RSS feed,
with If This Than That, every morning when you wake up you could have a note in
Evernote showing you all the opportunities that we were just talking about. So
everybody who mentioned “For A Story” and my industry keyword awesome. Last couple of
things. So Pipes is another way to aggregate RSS feeds from other places.
Yahoo Pipes. Um, Zapier or Zapier I don’t know how you pronounce it, is another one
like If This Than That where you can take over 250 web apps, stick them together, to
get all the processes you’re doing manually done and delivered to you so you
don’t have to bother to do that work. So that’s pretty much it. Organic seeding,
paid acceleration, and automation. If you can do all that or even a couple of those
once you publish content, you actually have a chance of gaining shares, visits
and maybe links, out of the content that you worked so hard to publish on your own
site. But what it really comes down to is hustle, the bottom line is that it’s not
enough anymore to just have a great piece of content and hit publish. In the end,
you gotta hustle to ensure that you get the most views, the most shares, and earn
the links that you deserve. And that’s it, thank you.
[audience clapping]
♪[music playing]♪
