Do you want to attract tons of traffic and Backlinks to your blog? And make a lot of REAL money at the same time? The rules are similar to offline public relation where you have to attract the attention of major outlets and medias. The same rules apply online: you must attract the attention of other bloggers, news sites, social bookmarking services, mass online medias. You do that by submitting a fantastic photo, a top 10 list, a web application, a new business, a great article, a crazy concept, a video … It must be of high quality.You must think viral marketing combined with current technology trend like web 2.0 social marketing. Your content is the viral part, the web 2.0 Tech part is something like Stumble Upon, Fark, Reddit, BoingBoing etc…

Your single piece of high quality content must:

• have viral capabilities and the potential to attract links by creating a discussion, causing controversy, making a mini or big revolution
• be Easy to link to, to blog about, to share
• be Useful, unique, just in time

Step 1:

Create the content. Make it be of high value. Help people a maximum. Your readers must benefit heavily from your content and want to share it to their friends.

Step 2:

People must link to your great content. If a big or medium player in your industry picks your piece of content and spreads the word about it, the smaller will follow and BAM! You’ve just will generated a big buzz

Step 3:

The traffic continues even after the initial buzz, not as huge as initially but it’s nice residual traffic.

Step 4:

When people all over the place link to you for your beautiful content, your search engine rankings begin to climb and climb and climb, and so does your pagerank and traffic

Here are examples of contents written by someone like you witch attracted hundreds of links and thousands of visitors, once launched:

web 2.0 Awards: Attracted 50,000+ one way backlinks (What he did: rated, ranked and rewarded over 200 Web 2.0 Sites in 41 Categories <– that’s a great link and traffic magnet)

Zillow.com Attracted thousands of links and visitors: Find out what the houses you’re interested in should cost and browse listings nationwide. A new Biz Mentionned by every real estate magazines and then the buzz was relayed by the smaller players

Vibrant.com’s servers in the movies Their site’s theme is hardware. That theme has something to do with servers. Movies are a general interest. So they combined servers+movies = servers in the movies. This is what it produced: “The Top Ten Servers that Changed the Fictional World: the source in the matrix, teletraan in transformers, skynet of Terminator, Viki of i-robot…” The right relevant content associated with a mass popular interest produces a big bang of traffic and backlinks. (Thousands of them)

Now, Distribute your hard work.

So you’ve created a fantastic post that you want the world to admire you for. You spent hours of research and hard work to produce that great content. Now you want to distribute it for it to achieve a critical momentum(buzz).

Your choice depends on the nature of your linkbait.

• If it’s techie stuff, submit it to Digg/ Techcrunch/ Slashdot
• If it’s funny, you chould choose Fark and Reddit first
• There are also netscape, BoingBoing, Yahoo’s site of the day
• More further…

How Do you create your great content:

• Brainstorm! You must have a luminous idea. Brainstorm several ideas and release them one after another. (I mean write 1 big post per luminous topic/idea you’ve found). Imagine if a journalist in the big medias like CNN read your content. Will they want to publish it or refer to it? If not, Brainstorm again.
• Make your work beautiful: a nice layout, a good usability, great images, write it like a pro, have good headline, put good order in it
• Build a reputation: Noone knows you yet. Even if what you’ve just finished writting is pure gold, if noone knows you, you’ll get nowhere. So, get social in the blogosphere, go social networking, network with new friends that have big connection and ask them for help (they’ll see your content is good and will surely recommend you)
• Create attention catcher headlines for your super blog post, and a good description, then submit it to social bookmarking services, relevant story submitting services, email bloggers (big players a la techcrunch)
• Avoid SPAMMING others (No repeated e-mails, don’t submit only your stories to social services)
• 1-Design/create, 2-format, 3-package, 4-launch, 5-market your great content,6-Repeat until you have 7-10 huge quality foundation articles for you to market to the world

Where to submit your high quality blog posts/articles

Be relevant. Relevancy is king. Make the difference between web 2.0 Story submission sites, web 2.0 social bookmarking services, web 2.0 social networking services:

My preferred story submission sites are digg, Marktd, Plugim, Sphinn. You’ve got a big list of sites at 3spots.blogspot.com

Here are more real life examples to see by yourself:

Danny Sullivan has more links than he needs now . Danny Sullivan checked the spam filtering accuracy of SpamCop, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. Putting in that work generates insights on the differences between the competing services. Danny got linked hundreds and hundreds times for his work.

You can be creative. Marc Hil Macalua wrote a creative app in which you can vote on head-to-head battles between SEOs. Marc did not do a ton of work. He had created something that grab people’s attention and generate discussion.

Saying something controversial. You can be cheeky, like Threadwatch, anti-Google like Google Watch and generate lots of discussion and emule like FuckedGoogle. They all grabbed their share of the backlinks in thousands. Be against something accepted in general and you’ll make people talking about your work.

You can make an interview of a well-known blogger.

You can build a kind of awards granted by your blog: attention, your criterias must be serious to avoid devaluating your award

You can build tools or games like firefox extensions, wordpress plugins or themes. The links and traffic build themselves once you release that great plugin you created.

One of the easiest way to create a link and traffic magnet is CONTENT. “Content is king”.

• Create with an unique angle, be highly informative
• Be on top of hot news in your industries and surf the wave by creating your own version
• Copy the best top hot stories (don’t plagiarize)
• Make a funny or highly informative video = Big Buzz Potential

Do give aways - Contests: Giveaways = give free something that normally costs $$$
Contests are short-lived except if you host one monthly.

Blogs and Forums:Provide goog quality and helpful content and they will all link to you

Lists are very popular: Here are a few examples of lists that have made it big, and still continue

• list of 200+ top directories where to submit your blog
• RssTop55 list where to submit your rss feed
• list of 30 top Video Sharing Sites
• List of 4 things winners will do in 2007
• and the list goes on :o)

Their results? Traffic, Links, Search engine rankings, branding, and ultimately more real money in the pocket.

Here starts your social media / social marketing campaign. Distribute en mass now!

Be it a blog post, a video, an image, a list, a complete how to, a contest, an interview and you can add whatever you want, Be sure that it is picked everywhere: You must have your distribution system in place. It is not set in stone. Have online friends or fellows help you social distributing your great piece of content, otherwise, it will stop spreading. Do it on a daily basis. NOT just once, NOT just twice, BUT on a daily basis.

This is your game plan:

• Be prepared to work hard at the initial stages, otherwise, you’ll fail.
• It’s all in the title: the title can make or break you. Brainstorm the title for at least 10-15 minutes. Make 4 or 5 titles and choose the best one. Have your online and offline friends give you their opinion about your title. Make it benefit driven regarding your readers. Give final tweaks until you’re completely sure it’s going to be irresistible. For example, message your mybloglog members and ask them for their feedback. (scale)

• Now Distribute at the same time to:
  • Digg + Del.icio.us + Netscape + Stumble Upon + Reddit + Sphinn + Marktd + Plugim and add your own preferred social services. The point is to generate the maximum buzz. People also have an account at each or at several of these social services, so if they don’t digg you today, they may stumble or sphinn you later. So, add the appropriate buttons to your post (”digg it” / “stumble it” / “sphinn it” etc…)
  • Write an informative article in forums (bloggerforum / theblogexperiment/ 5starsforum /earnersforum/ digitalpoint / warriorforum and any forum that you want to add. Sometimes a single forum post is viewed 40,000 times + so don’t underestimate this. The rule is post quality informative and helpful posts, and they will read and linkback/visit your blog), post an ad to craigslist, usfreeads, e-mail bloggers and let them know that you have a great article that may interest their readers.
  • Write a press release, repeat until you get used to it, submit to blog carnivals, write articles and submit to ezinearticles / goarticles / articlemarketer / [+...+]
  • Add your own twists, be creative

If content is the easiest to create, a content made to be a complete ressource is even easier to create: It something like a blog post where you put all the info about one topic, from A to Z. You put all the related links in that single post (resources). Hopefully, that post will do wonders for you : Repeat traffic - incoming links - incoming trackbacks= backlinks - the majority of the comments could be trackbacks, that means that there is ongoing discussion about your post out there and that people link to your post through out the time.
This kind of content is great when you run out of idea because your work only consists in putting what already exists in one place.

A perfect example of a link magnet “ressource” work is what is done at smashingmagazine.com where all their content is “complete-resource” type content. People like to refer and come back to these and there you have it! Repeat visitors, linkbacks, better SE rankings and more money.

The benefits:

1. You link to all kind of resources, and people will notice you and return the favor
2. Social Proof: you prove that you know a lot of great resources and build your reputation and trustworthiness
3. Of course, your purpose is to get links and traffic. They will come if your content is relevant, informative and well organised
4. You make a lot of new readers/friends because now they notice you

How to make a link magnet “resource post”?

• Make a short relevant intro to show that you know your subject
• Categorize. A well compartmentalized list is easy to read and navigate.
• Describe each resource with 1 line
• Proofread grammar and speling
• Don’t self promote too muc. Include a maximum of 2 of your posts in the list

Have proven past successful link magnets that others have produced before you, that have attracted 1000s of links and 1000s of visitors, copy their way of formatting their work, get inspired until you come up with your own template/way. After practicing a couple of times, you should be able to find your own style. Below are some examples that have succeeded explosively:

• seobook’s 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
  
• womenspersonalfinance’s 46 Things I Wish My Mom Taught Me About Money
  
• Project Management Source’s Lessons from Project Management: 101 ways to organize your life
• Brandon Hopkin’s 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007
  
• Jack Humphrey’s Top 50 Video sharing sites
• The servers that changed the virtual world: Servers in the Movies - Our Top Ten
• Smashingmagazine: almost all of their content is a big link magnet “resource post”
• seomoz’s web 2.0 2007 awards Over 200 Web 2.0 Sites in 41 Categories Rated, Ranked and Awarded

The most important thing is to make your blog become the authoritative source of all information for your industry.

The key to success is to control your promotion and distribution. Ensure you publicize well and get recommended by the relevant actors. Cast your line in social networks, do press releases, post in forums…
If you try once a week to do some form of great content producing, by at least writing a topical post or putting together a lengthy list that readers will find useful, you will see a steady increase of traffic and hopefully hundreds of backlinks.

You also understand that 1 great post/article is not enough. You should first work hard to produce at least 5 to 10 great piece of content before exposing your blog to the whole world. This is crucial if you want your visitors to have a first good impression and come back over and over again.

There you have it. This concludes this mini-tutorial on creating link magnet “great content”. Now it’s your turn to practice and come up with something that will amaze us all. Let the world know about your efforts and they will send some traffic your way.

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