Prepping Your Viral Linkbait for Success

Welcome back!

Seems as though everyone these days is catching on to the social media bandwagon lately.  Twitter was a huge one last week, what talk show DIDN’T talk about it last week, really?

Whether you consider yourself a guru (which you probably really aren’t…sorry) or not (most likely), you’re brainstorming and you’re putting together stuff that’ll hopefully make it in front of many twitterers, diggers and the like.  Getting your piece ready to be launched and receive the proper attention is all about what you do beforehand.  Preparing your linkbait, widgetbait, whatever is what will make or break the success of its outreach and exposure.

Here are a few things you should consider doing before pushing “submit” on your favorite social site.

Prep it for the Right Audience

Your article on “20 Insects that Could Karate Chop Your Face Off” would definitely look at lot different than my “Reasons Why Kathy Lee Should Not be on TV” article.  They are each geared towards different groups of people and different groups (as well as niches/industries) view things…well, differently.

If I had a piece that was highlighting the top 10 NFL Highlights During Madden’s Career, I would definitely have a video clip attached to each of those.  Your average, sportscenter-fed football junky is going to want hardcore detail and maybe a even a pretty girl or two.

On the other hand, if I’m producing content related to the Swine Flu, whether it’s a Questions & Answers or just Current News, you’re going to want to give detail, tons of it.  You can also go the route of directing people to where they can find that information, if you’re not going to be the main provider.  Mashable did a really good job on this.

Make Sure Your Graphics & Images Make Sense!

I’ve already proclaimed my love for infographics in a guest post I did over at 97thfloor.  Infographics are 100%, completely reliant on the image.  Sure, you can throw some text in there to help it along, but it’s important that you have your images, charts or graphics in the appropriate place so that it complements the text that surrounds it.

Graywolf does a good example of this on his blog.  Each of his blog posts is welcomed with a 600px wide image related to the article.  If your article is image-heavy, make sure they are organized and de-cluttered so they compliment and don’t distract from the article.

Bottom line:  places images to enhance, not to confuse.

Keep it Organized

I’ve covered some bad examples of viral articles that had great ideas and poor execution.  I won’t here because they are literally everywhere (just got to Digg’s Upcoming Recent page – 9 out of 10 of those listed on each page has probably neglected some sort of preparation that will keep it from going anywhere).

With that said (and if you have a Wordpress blog), here a few things to use that can clean up you piece if you don’t have much swagger in the HTML department:

• NextGen Gallery – organize those images!
• ShadowBox – display larger versions of any media over your content
• WP-Polls – get that feedback!

A Little SEO Never Hurt Anyone

Now I know that SEOs have a bit of a bad rep amongst a bunch of the members of these social communities, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put basic SEO practice into each of your articles.  It’s getting more and more tricky to make sure that all that lovely link juice gets to YOUR  article and not some mirror site (or stolen from Digg).  Simple practices such as:

• Proper H2/H3 tags throughout major points within the article
• Metatags – duh! (All-in-one-SEO Pack is great for this, unless you’re running the phenomenal Thesis theme!!)
• ALT tags on your images (be sure to host your own images too, don’t leave it up to Flickr or another site)
• WP Super Cache – this should just be on everyone’s plugin list without question!

Get Your Metrics in Place

I’ve worked with a few clients on their social campaigns who insisted on me correlating with their SEO team to handle changes, recommendations, etc to the site.  I was shocked at how many of them didn’t even have Analytics installed!  The last thing you want (especially if this is for a client) is to be caught with your pants around your ankles because you forgot to add the analytics code before you got started!  Beyond Google Analytics, here are a couple places I would highly recommend visiting (and installing) to get better detail on your article’s exposure:

• BLVD Status – LIVE statistics geared towards social tracking.  A definite must-have!
• Crazy Egg – great for heatmaps to see the activity on your site

All of the above have been quick-fixes as far as preparation is concerned.  If I wanted to double the size of this article, I could go off on long-term preparation musts like building your network, participating in the various social sites, researching a killer title, the right day & time and a ton more.  Instead, here are a good list of people who’ve already covered those:

• Why Your Social Linkbait Isn’t Baiting – Greg Finn @ 10e20.com
• 45 Blog Post Ideas that Always Generate Buzz – Adam Singer @ TheFutureBuzz
• Design & Appearance Affecting the Results in Social Media – Patrick Winfield @ 10e20.com

Here’s what some other experts had to say when I asked them “What is one thing you always do to prepare your linkbait for viral success?“:

Cameron Olthuis: Good question. This is actually a little difficult to answer because no two social media campaigns are alike. There are always different approaches that vary from campaign to campaign. With that said, one thing I will usually always do is show an outsider the creative. Someone that’s not a marketer. It helps to get real world feedback because often times as marketers, we see things a lot differently than the target audience might. Kind of the whole ‘my crap smells like roses’ analogy–sometimes your viral content is really crap but your blinders don’t let you see that.

Chris Bennett: Making sure that the piece is perfect, and that all my analytics metrics that I want to track are in place

Mat Siltala:  Research out similar topics on all major social/sharing sites and see results.  I research good ones that failed, and ones that did well, but could have done better.  It’s all about researching your topic.

Technorati Tags: blog content, preparation, social media

Tagged as: blog content, preparation, social media