Tag Archives: linkbait

The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You

Posted on April 8, 2008 by in SEO

Today, on the Business of Software forums, a newer software developer asked how I managed to get people to link to me.  The motivation in getting links is both to get visitors directly from the websites you are linking to and to influence the search engines into prefering your site over the other fifty zillion on the Internet when they decide “Who is worthy of this searcher?”, on the theory that someone who has convinced unrelated webmasters to link to them must be doing something right.

But getting links can be a little challenging for some small businesses.  For one thing, us software developers don’t typically start with massive amounts of marketing or sales talent, and getting a link is effectively selling someone on the proposition that you’re worthy of them spending their time, attention, and social capital on you.  

As my anonymous questioner points out, “it is quite difficult to get people to link to a website which is selling a product.”  There are a variety of reasons why many people believe that to be so — one is that many people who are otherwise free with links resent the commercialization of the Internet.  Another, I feel, is that folks who make money with websites are not that great at explaining the value of linking to that website to people who will not see money from the link.

Let’s see if we can’t fix that.  I’ve been successfully building links to Bingo Card Creator for going on two years now.  Apparently my ideas on the matter were consistently interesting enough to convince Aaron Wall (a SEO and marketing professional of some note, who writes SEOBook) to give me a free subscription to his service if I kept posting them there.  (So I guess that is one way to get a free link — flatter folks and give them stuff for free.  Guess what, all joking aside, this works great!  But I digress.)  So I want to walk you through some of the things I’ve done which I have found successful and which I think you can adapt to your own businesses.

1)  Make some friends, fans, or fans into friends.  A while ago I had this idea that all anyone really needs to succeed in business on the Internet is to have about 1,000 fans.  I was going to blog about that and then got beaten to the punch by 1,000 True Fans, which is just an excellent article.  The author talks about how 1,000 people buying what you write, be it music or software, is enough to support an independent IP creator.  

I want to approach the idea of how fans can support you in a bit of a larger sense.  One way a fan can support you, without ever spending a dime, is by considering you worthy enough to tell their friends about.  For example, your fan might have a blog with a readership of a handful, a few dozen, or a few hundred people.  If your fan were to develop an emotional attachment to your success, for whatever reason, they might decide to blog about you just to share their passion with people that they care about, because that is often what we do with our friends. 

For example, my participation in the uISV (small software makers) community has gathered me a handful of very good friends and fans.  Vanishingly few of them will ever need what I sell, but they like the advice I give on this blog, they like that I am generally generous with my time for helping other folks trying to start up businesses (even in the cut-throat, dog-eat-dog market of selling bingo cards to elementary school teachers), and hopefully they like my personality.  So many of them will, for example, cheer when I have successes and actively try to bring them about.  One way they can is by spreading my ideas (i.e. linking to me), and they often decide to do that with no special prompting from me.

Truly an amazing phenomenon, that, and this is one absolutely anybody can participate it.  Find your local community, for any value of local you can name, and engage in it.  Use all of that collected wisdom from kindergarten — share, play well with others, don’t pull little Suzy’s ponytails.  Give folks a reason to like you, and the links will follow it.

2)  Blogging for your customers and people like them.

Blogging for your customers is different than what I do on this blog, most of the time.  For example, the typical elementary school teacher will never understand the value of getting their personal page linked at — it just does not advance them towards a goal that they value.  But suppose I got around to fulfilling my many-times-postponed resolution about opening a teaching activities blog on Bingo Card Creator. 

This would immediately make the site more linkable — blogging is quintessentially about having a conversation on the Internet with the basic utterance containing hyperlinks.  Its like they invented a form of communication to line up with what Google thinks is a sign of value.  Since your blog will typically not be commercially focused, but rather focused on providing value to your customers and/or people like them, it avoids much of the difficulty of getting folks to link to your product pages.  There is easily explainable value to linking to a post which is useful (“My readers will find this useful”), emotionally resonant (“Wow, this is emotionally resonant and I want to share this experience with other people”, well-written, funny, etc. 

(Incidentally, the only difference between your customers and “people like them” is that the second group hasn’t given you money.  Yet.  I say have an optimistic point of view about things.)

3)  Create resources your customers/people like them can use.

The very first thing I ever did to get links to my site was to create a list of Dolch sight words.  In brief, that is a piece of information that almost all my customers understand the value of (all you need to do is say those five words, bam, they think “Ooh, I want!”) but that few of them have memorized or written somewhere convenient in their notes.  Generating them was trivial, as they’re in the public domain.  Writing them up nice and pretty took me an hour.  That page has been linked to about 65 times according to Yahoo, probably half of them by people other than me.  These include school districts, libraries, teacher blogs, a government agency or two, and other folks who Google (in its infinite wisdom) decides to value the opinion of highly.

(Speaking of which, a particular competitor of mine had an interesting twist when he copied this idea: he bought an available domain just for that one resource, which makes it look like the official place to find the information and gives a pretty sweet bonus for ranking for the exact query [dolch sight words] in Google.  I think that tactic is worthy of the most sincere form of flattery, particularly if you know a resource is going to be very popular.  Domains are cheap, bordering on free when you consider how many thousands of people you’ll be showing your software to every year if you own the right ones.)

4)  Creating resources that other people like to use.

This next one is a bit of a mind-bender for many folks: while topical links are the best kind of link, in general, links which are not topical are still worth something, too.  Potentially a lot of something.  Thus, particularly when you are in an industry which is naturally link-poor (say, something in which the typical customer doesn’t own a blog and where most websites are 5 pages large, hosted on Geocities, and have Under Construction signs on them), you can get a lot of value out of expanding the reach of your offerings to include folks who are link-rich.

There are any number of folks who are link-rich.  Most readers of my blog are programmers, and we tend to be near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve.  If you find folks who are near the bleeding edge of the tech adoption curve for programmers, the odds that they give out links on a regular basis approaches 1.  (Heck, they probably have already gotten bored of some Web 3.0 ways to do so which I haven’t even heard of yet.  Maybe you can telepathically insert links directly into the eyeballs of anyone who has ever used Twitter to access Facebook through an iPhone these days.)

On group which I happen to belong to is Rails programmers, and when I write useful information on how to solve business problems in Rails (such as how to make Rails even more friendly to search engines than it is out of the box), they flood me with links.  (I think that page has gotten about 100.)  Granted, it doesn’t go direct to my product pages, but it increases my domain’s overall trust and I can control the links on the page to channel some link juice wherever I want it.

5)  Do it with style.

Always remember that there are, according to rigorous scientific studies, approximately 53,234,324,658,342,190 web pages out there that people could be looking at rather than your site… and those are just the ones that include pictures of cute kittens. 

Visually engaging your readers works.  The Internet, I swear, it sucks the literacy straight out of people, but arresting photography, stunning site design, cute icons, and the like make it much easier to rise above the Don’t Care threshold and get folks to recommend you to other people.  You subconsciously trust almost anything more if it is presented in an attractive fashion, and in some cases you might decide to share something just because it is pretty.  (It certainly worked for Clicky getting a link from me earlier this week.  Looks like it has now worked twice!  Just a pretty, solid site design there.)

Speaking of sharing things for the sheer beauty of it, it is sakura season here in Japan.

Photo of Sakura in bloom (mankai) taken in Gifu City, Japan

(I took that one two years ago in a park in Gifu City.)  We now interrupt your photo viewing enjoyment to continue with an important message from the article proper.

6)  Do it to scale

Imagine you have one really good idea for a resource to attract links.  Maybe it is one beautiful picture of sakura.  Now imagine that you could expand that to pictures of a hundred sakura, all beautiful, organized in some effective manner which both shows folks the ones that are most beautiful and hints at the richness which is only a mouseclick or two away.  Do you think you would get linear returns to the extra photos, i.e. 100 times the worth of one photo?  No.  I think this strategy is super-scalar — if you are good with information architecture, and site design, and in quickly communicating the value of what you have to the reader, I think that doing things in larger numbers turns you into something qualitatively different instead of just quantitatively different.  When you need a picture of beautiful sakura (and who doesn’t?), you don’t go to the guy who has one picture.  You go to the guy who has a hundred pictures, because he has established himself as the Authoritative Source on Pretty Cherry Blossom Photos.  (That title may be copyright and trademark of this lady I found on Flickr earlier.  Simply stunning.  More broadly, the whole “we aggregate a few million pictures, most of them are stunning” thing has certainly paid off for Flickr, since when I wanted to find someone with pretty flower pictures I went straight to Flickr to search because even artistically-disinclined me knows that Flickr is the place to go when you want pretty pictures.) 

Its not just pictures.  One resource which, oddly enough, helps you sell a Bingo Card Creator is having a large collection of printable bingo cards.  Accordingly, I have a few hundred on my site and am adding more all the time.  I can, and have, elaborated on how specific choices of my site design work to convey the richness of the offering to prospective visitors and linkers.  More on that on another day.  It is working out fairly well for me, and as you can see from this handy graph my visitors love it and it is getting more popular all the time.  (I don’t have a graph of inlinks as a result of that resource but if I did its shape would be similar.)

7)  Make your content easy to share

You might not have noticed, but that kitten photo above was built with the Lolcat Builder, because I am a lazy bum and do not want to get out Paint.NET just to make myself a one-liner.  My sloth is their gain, because the straight-line path to getting that joke onto your screen is to link to the image hosted at Lolcat Builder. 

Most of you are programmers.  With just a little bit of ingenuity, you can make your content easy for your customers to embed on their sites.  This could range from anything from programatically composing linking directions (see, for example, the instructions I give to folks for share these cards on my site) to making a widget that lets people get even more goodness out of your content.  (Heck, the widget itself could be the content.) 

For example, Delicious (I hear there are periods in there somewhere — and, darn it, I refuse to use them) makes it really easy for you to embed Delicious links in your site.  Something like, say, this one, which if you click on it will let you bookmark this article. 

 
Whoopsie, WordPress.com has decided to protect me against Javascript injection by not letting me post this widget here. Grr. See here for instructions on how to do it on your site, or you can take a look at my site where I have examples running.

You might find that useful — if you do, please, go right ahead.  If not, marvel on the fact that without any coding whatsoever I was able to add functionality to my blog post by doing Delicious a favor, and do some thinking on how you can get this dynamic to work for you.  (One of Aaron Walls suggestions to me was that I make widgets to distribute my most popular bingo cards to teachers with blogs and the like.  That is definately on the list of things to do after I achieve any level of expertise with Javascript.)

8)  Write like an Authority

In any field where the cost of replicating a success is zero there is going to be one far-and-away winner and then there is going to be a massive cliff separating them from second place.  Content creation on the Internet typically fits the bill pretty well — winners win, because why would you go to the second best place to get something you need when the first best is, well, better at the same price (free). 

(This does not mean first place is necessarily actually better than second place.  Wikipedia is quite rarely the best single resource on the Internet for something you want to know about, but it is often the first that springs to mind, and thus it is the best at being Just Good Enough For Right now, which is apparently a market segment worth owning.)

This is the basis for the Filthy Linking Rich phenomenon — the page which achieves authoritative status for a particular concept, query, or idea will typically tend to achieve self-reinforcing authority for it.  I am linking to Filthy Linking Rich because I was explained the concept by someone (who I have forgotten!) who used Filthy Linking Rich to explain the concept that someone else (who I don’t know!) used Filthy Linking Rich to…  etc etc, the rabbit hole goes pretty deep, and that article will continue getting backlinks until the end of time.  (October 2004 — that is practically antediluvian in Internet years.  Yikes, back in 2004, we didn’t even have Youtube, did we?  And yet there is that article from Internet prehistory still merrily humming along.)

I like to call content which tends to stand the test of time evergreen content.  While there is some merit in producing things which will be almost useless in a week (like many of my holiday bingo cards — nobody wants St. Patrick’s Day bingo cards 50 weeks out of the year), particularly if you can be the first or best or both at it, most of the longterm value is in the evergreen content.  (Or being the authority for breaking news, because the authority status you earned is evergreen itself, as long as you keep writing — I think I’ve been visiting Instapundit for 7 years now because Glenn Reynolds is to me what newspapers were to my grandfather’s generation.)

I’ll write an article on writing like an authority later, hopefully sometime this week when I have a bit of time to spare.  If you’ve got any particular questions about it, or any of the other points here, please feel free to drop a comment.

SEO Tips for Ruby on Rails

Posted on October 29, 2007 by in Rails, SEO

I’m working on this article as another bit of linkbait, and its about 33% of the way finished at the moment, but I thought I would give you guys a sneak peek.  If you have any comments, please, feel free.  If you want to blog or otherwise link to it, go right ahead, although it is very much a work-in-progress at this point.

The excerpt:

There is much to love about the Ruby on Rails framework. Don’t Repeat Yourself. It Just Works. Massive productivity gains, happiness returning to the world of boring CRUD apps, and a certain sense of panache in programming. However, while Rails has sensible defaults it doesn’t get everything right out of the box. This article focuses on how you can improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your Rails site the Ruby way and get a

  • more usable,
  • more popular,
  • and more profitable application — with less work!

You can read the rest of it at Rails SEO tips, located at Daily Bingo Cards.  Why did I put it over there?  Frankly, I expect this to make the rounds a few times in the Rails community, many of whom have their own blogs, and I expect it to get linked to heavily.  There isn’t a Definitive Rails SEO Resource yet, and that page has delusions of grandeur. 

My blog is PR5, has a few hundred inbound links, and has little direct impact on my monthly bottom line.  Daily Bingo Cards is PR0, has about two inbound links, and has the potential to double my take-home pay.  Choosing to get the links over there rather than over here was not a hard decision.  Granted, the inbound links will not be that targeted to start out, but they’ll greatly help get the trust-ball rolling while I wait a few weeks to start ranking for my targetted snowflake queries.

P.S. When I post this to the social networking sites, for the ones which value a little bit of controversy with their morning coffee, the title is going to be “Default Routes Considered Harmful, and Other Rails SEO Tips”.  If you’re in the less-geeky end of the pool the reference might not make sense to you, but trust me, Considered Harmful is a (heated!) conversation starter around the Slashdot set.  I’m not saying it just to be controversial, though — leaving the default routes in a publicly-accessible Rails application is a bad idea, for the reasons I go over in the article.

That Shouldn't Even Be Legal

Posted on October 27, 2007 by in Uncategorized

So I was checking today whether Daily Bingo Cards has started to pick up any search traffic, and aside from the name it is starting to rank for some long tail queries, including #5 on “bingo cards make yourself“.  I was kind of suprised that it did that, because while that is certainly a snowflake query it is one that I have seen before on my other sites.  So I Googled it to see if there was any major competition for the term, and yep, there apparently is — me, myself, and I…

Google Search Results

 This is not overwhelmingly significant from a commercial standpoint, since there are only about 10 of that particular snowflake every month.  However, I get eight of them, which provides me with a bit of amusement.  I also chuckled that, for at least a minute on an insignificant query, I totally controlled the above-the-fold part of a Google SERP. 

Multiply this by a couple thousand different snowflakes and you have my marketing strategy for Daily Bingo Cards in a nutshell.  Fifty billion snowflakes all I need is one…

Developing Linkbait For a Non-Technical Audience

Posted on October 21, 2007 by in marketing, SEO

Meet The Linkerati 

The old computer science joke has it that there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those that understand binary, and those that don’t.  There are 10 kinds of people on the Internet, too: those that link, and those that don’t.  Those that link are called the Linkerati, and they have the power to make your business vast sums of money, if only you show them the way.  This post is a wee bit theoretical, a wee bit how-do, and a wee bit of a direct inducement to the Linkerati themselves.  Or, as my college friends would say, “Dude, its, like, meta.”  I promise that they were not under the influence when they said things like that, unless postmodern theory counts as an intoxicant (then again, it probably should).

The Linkerati (what a wonderful word — I believe it was coined in an amazing blog post at SEOMoz which you should read) is the fragment of the online community which disseminates ideas.  I’m a Linkerati — look at us, here I am telling you to go read an amazing blog post and, what’s more, because you trust me and you trust my judgement you’re probably inclined to go off and do it.  Linkerati use Digg, Reddit, and the other social services.  Linkerati own blogs.  At the shallower end of the pool, they IM their friends and email their colleagues links.  They are tremendously influential online, owing to the biggest Linkerati of them all: Google.  Offline, perhaps you would call them “opinion shapers” or “early adopters”.

Google orders its search pages based on a variety of factors, and between the meta tags and URL structure and inbound links they all boil down to this: trust.  Trust is the currency of the web and the currency of SEO.  Linkerati gain trust from their circles of Internet friends, from the one-on-one message in an AIM window to the blogger with a million RSS subscribers, and Google sees physical artifacts of trust (i.e. links) and attributes a bit of that stored trust to the guy on the other end of the link.  This results in you getting higher positioning in the search results for keywords of interest to you, and that translates pretty much directly into money in your pocket.

So what does this have to do with linkbait?

Linkbait is, simply, the act of putting something online to influence the Linkerati.  Typically the desired action is to get them to link to it, write about it, talk it up with their friends, etc.  People who are much smarter and more effective than I am have talked about doing linkbait for the Digg demographic to death.  You know who I’m talking about: 16-24 years old, male, plays World of Warcraft, owns an iPod, can’t tell you what Steve Ballmer’s title is but know he once threw a chair in a meeting, yadda yadda.  This article won’t talk about them because, frankly, they’re not too valuable to me. 

Linkbait For The Rest of Us

I sell simple software which makes bingo cards for elementary school teachers.  Teaching eight year olds to read is crashingly dull to the Digg demographic.  My target demographic is older, 90%+ female, highly well educated, and as a bit of a generalization not extraordinarily technically-minded.  There are Linkerati in my demographic, though.  The challenge is reaching them.

When I was just starting out, I created a few pages of free resources which I knew would appeal to teachers, in the hope that they would come across them and pass them around to folks they knew.  This worked well, but there were some stumbling blocks: because I was engaged in laboriously hand-crafting the free resources, I only ever produced about a dozen of them, and they could be consumed in a single browsing session.  Indeed, 60% of the visitors to my site flitted out within seconds after finding what they were looking for (such as Dolch sight word lists, for example), most never to return.  So one of the main goals of my linkbait project was to make it sticky — to have something which screams to the primordial teacher soul I want to come back here.  Most things which are good enough to come back to are worth recommending to your friends, after all.

Positioning:

Linkbait needs to quickly communicate its value both to the general user and to the Linkerati.  Both demographics consume Internet content at quite a clip and if you can’t grab them in the first thirty seconds you have probably lost them.  Accordingly, you want to have a positioning for your linkbait which informs everything you do: its more than a title, it is the core essence of what you are offering boiled down to a thought fragment.

Ideally, I would love teachers to come visit me daily.  Thus the positioning: Daily Bingo Cards.

Those are three simple words which quickly get across what I am offering: it’s bingo cards, and you want to come back tomorrow because there will be new ones tomorrow!  (Note that I just took 17 words to explain a concept covered in 3 words.  This is why I abandoned my childhood dreams of becoming a newspaper columnist.)

Build Something Remarkable: 

So you’ve got something which grabs the attention of your targeted Linkerati in the first thirty seconds.  Now you’ve got to get over the hump of getting them to burn a wee bit of their trust with their audience and link to you.  You  do that by providing them something of value which they can’t get elsewhere. 

Back when I was starting out, “something of value” was free bingo card activities and free word lists.  Those are indeed valuable to my niche.  However, they’re not very remarkable — the Internet is full of them, and if the selection at a particular site is limited to a half-dozen you can decide “Eh, not quite what I was looking for” in an instant.  What took “Eh” to “Yeah!” was the decision to take things to an industrial scale.  The idea hit me when I was coming home on the train: what if, instead of handcrafting each set of cards and each page myself, I could somehow create hundreds of cards, for hundreds of activities, of every type and description.  That is, after all, what Bingo Card Creator is all about: an infinite diversity of possible lessons (well, as long as the lesson includes a bingo game), made quick and easy. 

So I created a system to automate the production of web pages about the resources, and I hired a team of freelancers to help me write good word lists.  That let me scale from 15 word lists (what I was able to write myself in a year — obviously not fully devoted to this one aspect of my business) to 70 word lists at launch and a new word list, you guessed it, daily.  (I suppose I could have dribbled them out one at a time, in keeping with the name of the site.  However, why waste the first two months having a site with a handful of word lists when I can just scale straight to the point where the site is remarkable?  No need for foolish consistency when fudging the name a bit makes life better for everyone.) 

The general idea is to so overwhelm my visitor with abundance that they think “Wow, I can’t possibly take it all in right now, but I’m going to remember this place because its sure to come in handy later!” 

On Breadth over Depth:

Like I mentioned, there are hundreds of free bingo activities on the Internet.  Most are collected in ones and twos scattered across a variety of sites, from the extraordinarily influential to the smallest Mrs. Smith’s First Grade Class Home Page.  For some microniches, like Halloween Bingo Cards, the search rankings are quite competitive.  For others, like Astronomy Bingo Cards, they are not competitive at all.  You mark my words, I’ll be in the top 3 on Google for that phrase in a matter of days or weeks.  And I’ll stay there for, well, probably forever, happily picking up a wee little trickle of search engine traffic.  Multiply a wee little trickle by hundreds of parallel pages and it isn’t a trickle anymore.

That is, in my humble opinion, the secret which differentiates linkbait for non-technical audience from linkbait for the Digg crowd.  The Digg crowd has the attention span of an ADHD squirrel on illegal substances and has negative a billion interest in yesterday’s news, with the possible exception of classic Nintendo games. 

You can practically write a mathematical formula for the number of links a post on Digg gets you: 2D/ r  * L, where D is the number of Diggs received, r is the ratio of people visiting to people Digging (so 1/r has the effect of multiplying — incidentally, a ballpark figure is r=.01), and L is how linkable the site is (think a lot less than L=.0001, typically). 

Note the term that isn’t present: time.  Very few Digg posts are relevant 48 hours later.  However, people will play Halloween Bingo in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, etc etc.  That page will essentially never get old.  It will just continue quietly helping searchers out, collecting links, and making me money.  It is an evergreen of value.  If you have a non-technical audience, you are in the evergreen farming business.  Plant them, water them, and watch them grow.    

Of Snowflakes and Snowballs:

Earlier on my blog I talked about snowflake queries, the totally unique but still generalizable search engine queries that comprise the Long Tail of search.  There might only be one teacher in the world searching for “4th grade astronomy bingo” (and, if so, she downloaded Bingo Card Creator yesterday).  However, presenting her with an entire site full of things tangentially related to the thing which directly stimulates her interests might induce her to link to it, or otherwise recommend it.  That link to that one individual resource lifts all of the other pages on the site a wee little bit, and in turn as they rise in the rankings they will attract links themselves, and eventually the site is not a collection of a hundred snowflakes, it is a massive snowball speeding downhill.  It might never be in the top 5 for the competitive “bingo cards” search (I actually hope not — I would hate to out-compete myself!) but it will roll over and crush sites which are not trusted or particularly optimized on those Long Tail queries.  That attracts motivated potential prospects directly to my product.

Shouldn’t You Put This On Your Main Site? 

If the goal of linkbait is to get hundreds of inbound links, it would certainly make a lot of sense to put it on your main site.  I didn’t, this time, largely to have the freedom to play around with Daily Bingo Cards without worrying about jeaprodizing the business proper.  You see, it is possible to over-do on-page SEO, and I’m probably coming pretty close to the line.   Consider my Halloween bingo cards page:

  • Title is “Halloween Bingo Cards”
  • H1 tag is “Halloween Bingo Cards”
  • Halloween Bingo Cards is bolded
  • The word “Halloween” is on the page six times
  • The alt tag for the image mentions, yep, Halloween bingo cards
  • The URL for the image does, too
  • Did I mention the URL is http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/holidays/halloween ?

Yeah, I might be pushing it just a wee bit.  Then again, the page really is about Halloween Bingo Cards, and hopefully Google’s algorithms will understand and appreciate that, rather than deciding “Oh, he is a spammer not contributing value, let us put him in the supplemental index”.  Links from real people are one way to get trusted enough to avoid that.

Should I step over and get all those results kicked out of the main index by Google, I really don’t want that to cost me $1,000 a month.  Six months from now, if the site takes off, I can always 301 redirect it to a subdomain of my main site.

Make It Linkable:

Help the Linkerati link to your site.  The very first barrier is making sure it can be linked to — putting linkbait behind a sign-on or on a page which requires a session ID means you fail, period.  The second barrier, and one which trips up a lot of people, is giving the page a good, accessible URL.

What does accessible mean?  Well, here is a wonderful article by Bob Walsh, who I’m only picking on because he is generally brilliant, is a professional colleague, and has mentioned a few times that he doesn’t get why this is a big deal:

http://www.47hats.com/?p=476

Now quick, without actually reading it, tell me what that article is about.  Kind of a tough task, right?  But that is exactly the kind of link you get when a non-technical person just copies and pastes the link into their blog or IM window, and it tells their audience nothing useful.  You don’t feel any need to go read it right now and miss out on this article, right? 

Now, without clicking on this link, tell me what it offers you:

http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/people-and-careers/celebrities

Not a very hard task, is it?  Not only can you tell what is there (hey, bingo cards!  And about what?  Celebrities!  Celebrity Bingo Cards!), but Google and the other search engines give major weight to the words printed in the URL.  Better for your users, better for the Linkerati, better for the search engines — take the extra time to make pretty URLs, you will be happy you did.

As an added bonus, those URLs work exactly how the folder metaphor on the computer has taught people to think that they work: chop off celebrities and you get

http://www.dailybingocards.com/bingo-cards/people-and-careers/

which, like you would expect, gets you bingo cards about People and Careers.  Chop off people and careers, and you get bunches and bunches of Bingo Cards sorted into categories, letting you build your way back to an individual card.  How I did this is an interesting little implementation detail which I will cover in another article later.  (Since that little implementation detail is specific to Ruby on Rails, whose community is absolutely overflowing with Linkerati, I’ll put that article actually on the Daily Bingo Cards site and promote it directly within the community.  Win for them, they learn a good way to improve their own websites, win for me, I get free link juice.)

(Sidenote: If you run WordPress but your URLs look less than helpful, you can do something similar for yourself in thirty seconds: log into your control panel, click Options, click Permalinks, and select “Date and Name based” then hit confirm.  Presto-changeo, instant link readability.)

Grease the skids for repeat visitors:

I want people to bookmark my site and send it to the friends.  Adding “Bookmark this site!” and “Save to del.icio.us” buttons at appropriate places was very easy, and my copy actively encourages folks to come back tomorrow.  Did you know every save on del.icio.us is worth a (minor) inbound link?  I sure wouldn’t mind ending up on the popular bingo card page, and the barrier to getting there (precisely BECAUSE the delicious-using teacher population is tiny) is pretty low.  All I need to do is make a website, add in a dash of discrete text links, and let simmer for a few months.

Promotion:

If a tree falls in a forest but no one is around to hear it… I forget how the rest of that quote goes, but I am pretty sure it does not continue “then the Linkerati will blog about it”.  Just putting up a site about Daily Bingo Cards doesn’t mean anyone will actually visit it.  However, and here is the meta part of the blog post, I happen to have a decently well-read blog which has many blogging readers and many more transient searching visitors looking for things like Free Bingo Cards.  And if you want free bingo cards, well, you know where to get them!  That is enough to get my snowball rolling… but why do things by half measures.

  • Prepare a sitemap for Google and the other engines (they crawled me on the same day I submitted one, and I’m already in the index for at least the term Daily Bingo Cards (#1), with exactly ONE inbound link in the entire world prior to this post).
  • Talk to your existing customers.  I suppose I technically could mail the 400 people who bought Bingo Card Creator in the last year and say “Hey, I love you guys!  Here is a site full of free bingo cards which you can use with Bingo Card Creator.  Enjoy!”  However, I promised not to spam them and that is pushing it.  I came up with a compromise — when they get bugged to update their software to Bingo Card Creator 2.0 (which includes the daily bingo lists), the page the upgrade takes place on will mention the site and suggest they link to it.
  •   Use niche social sites — like Digg, for people who don’t find 37 Improbable Devices To Run Linux On to be very interesting.   For example, there is a site called qoolsqool.com which is, against allexpectations, actually populated by educators.  I’ll be typing up a brief entry there.  Then a Squidoo lens, yadda yadda you get the drill.
  • Blog it.  It helps if you have readers already, happily, I do.  The “secret” to that is basically linkbait writ small: produce things of value, repeat at regular intervals.

Ditch the ads:

An acquaintance of mine suggested I put AdSense ads on Daily Bingo Cards.  I can’t see how this could possibly be worthwhile: first, to have decently performing AdSense ads you have to either a) have a site which functions as a glorified search engine or b) break your site so that people want to leave it as quickly as possible.  This is not compatible with my overarching strategy, to get people to come back tomorrow!  Much of the Linkerati is also a wee bit anti-commerce (a feature they share with many teachers) and they don’t want to be “tricked” into linking to a billboard.

It is funny, though — the whole site is one gigantic advertisement for how Bingo Card Creator makes your life easier, and I plug it on essentially every page.  But it doesn’t look like what you expect an ad to look like, and the very act of consuming the marketing message is intensely valuable to my target customer!  That has to be the holy grail for marketing — people so want to be marketed to that they’ll come to you for that express purpose and tell their friends!

Finally, while I could extract CPMs in the $2 or so range by selling advertisements to competitorsof Bingo Card Creator (that is what I pay Google for my own advertisements, after all), if this page performs as well as my existing free resources page I’ll have an effective CPM of about $40.  $2 vs $40… not a hard call.  Plus, I expect the page to significantly outperform my free resources page.  If you’re a budding uISV wondering whether you can achieve big profits through advertising, you certainly can, but remember: every cent spent on advertising on the Internet comes out of a dollar that someone made through something that was not advertising.  You can have the cent or you can have the dollar — choose wisely.

Postscript:

I have been putting off this blog post for two weeks.  Every additional delay had a good reason: I was wretchedly ill, I was busy, I was swamped at work, I was entertaining a friend from out of town.  However, I’ve decided to go to back to my core foundational principle and say “You know, when all else fails, launch the sucker.” — it makes little sense for a marketing experiment to go into week four when the product I’m marketing was launched on schedule on day eight!  So consider the sucker launched. 

Now begins the battle of inches, where I test, iterate, and refine while the resource keeps helping people out. 

If you found this article valuable, feel free to tell folks about it.  If you want updates on whether all this theorizing actually amounts to anything, subscribe to the RSS feed because I’ll be giving regular updates on how the site performs (with real traffic numbers and the like — I’m very big on transparency, so if Google hits me with the banstick you’ll see the implosion in transparently painful detail!)  And if you know anybody looking for bingo cards for class, you know where to send them.