Will today’s launch of Spotplex be the beginning of the end for Digg? Probably not, but this new social media site might prove a more civilized "trafficracy" alternative to the mob democracy of Digg.

For those seeking attention and traffic, Digg has long been the crowdsourcing 800lb gorilla. Unfortunately, explosive growth in the Digg community and a certain amount of paranoia on the part of its administrators regarding good verses bad story submissions has led to many marketers, businesses and bloggers of all kinds turning away from the once loved poster child of social bookmarking.

The Digg community is out of control. Nobody would argue otherwise, it just remains to be seen whether they can turn it around and get the more aggressive and abusive elements of the mob to stop frothing at the mouth long enough to realize that they’re ruining the site.

Enter Spotplex, a site currently in beta that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington says "arguably sorts news in a better way than Digg does." The big difference between the two sites is that Spotplex does not require site owners or its own members (it has no members system, even) to submit stories. Instead, stories get added by carrying Spotplex’s JavaScript code snippet on their pages. This allows Spotplex to monitor the traffic stories are getting and rank them accordingly. Heavier trafficked items rise to the top of the upcoming stories list, then make it to the homepage.

The opportunity here for Spotplex is that looking at traffic, rather than just voting, might produce better rankings. Vote gaming is one of the majors headaches for Digg right now. Members are running amok with the “bury” feature, which allows them to vote down stories from sources they don’t like, for any reason, and without accountability. In theory, a Spotplex homepage would reflect the most popular posts of the day by measuring how many people had actually read them, rather than how many read a headline and then just pushed a Digg or Bury button.

Hooray! Ok, not so fast. There are a few obvious problems here:

• Gaming Spotplex: How hard is it to trigger a JavaScript snippet automatically? How hard would it be to game such a system and artificially boost a sites traffic?

  Not very.

  And how might you combat such actions? Well, you could give Spotplex visitors the right to vote down stories they feel are …. oh dear, he we go again!
   

• What is a blog post? The site says “Find most visited blog articles today,” but do they really mean to only list blogs? And if so, can someone tell me if sites like Engadget and Techcrunch are really still blogs anymore? If they’re included, as TechCrunch is, then won’t we have a homepage just full of the biggest blogs around? Is this a good thing? Hell no, part of the beauty of the blogosphere, and the usefulness of systems like Technorati, is in the discovery of smaller blogs, new blogs. I don’t need a service to point me to the new old media.
   
• It’s Not Inclusive: You won’t find Search Engine Land or my own Clickinfluence blog in Spotplex right now. Many other blogs aren’t in there as well. TechCrunch’s article on Spotplex shares how there are 1,000 admission slots now open, but those will go fast. Even if everyone was allowed in, you only get to play if you agree to install the Spotplex code on your site.

  Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen more and more people pushing back on having to carry all this JavaScript and other widget eye candy. We’ve also seen concerns about how widget-based services like MyBlogLog can bring spam into your site, share information you’d perhaps rather they didn’t have or slow your pages from loading. Some sites simply won’t want to carry the code, making Spotplex have gaps — maybe important ones — in the blogosphere.

Those are problems relating to content at Spotplex. Aside from that, Spotplex designers seem to have fallen over themselves to put AJAX navigation in all the worst places! You cannot link to individual tags. Sheesh.

Oh, and one more thing: I don’t need Spotplex, or anyone else, to decide to open links in new windows for me. It shows desperation and a contemptible lack of respect for readers.

It’s easy to kick the tires and shout “boo!” at a new product, and goodness knows all new ventures have their problems. So let’s give Spotplex a break and look at what’s good about it, and how it might be a great thing for businesses looking to engage the tech community.

The really big thing Spotplex has going for it is that it takes away that ugly, fearful side of crowd media that Digg fosters. Digg is an unfriendly, scary place for most, filled with children grown wild and violent. Spotplex could take all of that nastiness away and let a traffic-based meritocracy – a trafficracy — drive the discovery of new content.

In particular, Spotplex lacks the commenting feature where the ugliness at Digg especially can come out. In other words, any story featured on Digg has its own page, where people can talk about the story. At Spotplex, stories get featured, but the service is designed to then solely drive people away from Spotplex and to the blog or site hosting the actual story. I think this is a great thing, though making it easy to find blogs linking to these stories would be very cool.

Lastly, let’s not forget the pretty graphs! If you click through on the bottom link of a listing to a page like this, you get stats about the content site that hosts that story. These could help people get a feel for the source of a story. Does it have many well rated stories or just the one?

All in all, Spotplex has its work cut out for it. It’s far from finished and has some massive hurdles to jump. But it’s worth putting on your watchlist as potentially a real contender and possible powerhouse in driving traffic to viral marketing campaigns, product releases and help bloggers discover new content in a simple to understand way.

Well done Spotplex, and good luck.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for Search Engine Land and the CEO and senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a dedicated social media marketing agency.

The effects were subtle. The average person searching on Google probably didn’t notice. For most, the results of last Friday’s rollout of the long-tested, debated and awaited personalized search results for the masses was an entirely unremarkable event.

For the search marketing industry, it was cataclysmic.

In short, it’s a game changer. Those who adapt quickly or are already ahead of the curve will thrive in the new environment. Those too slow or in denial will perish.

“One page fits all” is now a thing of the past.

Personalized search is now the default and none too easy to escape from either through opt-out. This means that every search result you click, every link you bookmark, every RSS feed you subscribe to using Google services can be used to improve your personal search results.

For most, this should be very welcome, as it promises a far better search experience that will adapt to your interests and evolve over time. For search marketers, it means new skills and techniques are needed to achieve search visibility.

The following three survival tips come with two caveats:

• There is no way to tell yet what works well and what doesn’t. Some things are obvious and will undoubtedly help. Others are pure, albeit educated, conjecture.
   
• This is not a "how to rank in Google guide." There’s quite a bit more to it than this. Having said that, for the new personalized search pages, I think these should stand you in good stead.

1) Optimize For Google Services

The three Google services you might want to socially optimize for are:

• Google Personalized Homepage, the widgetized box of AJAXified customizable tricks now advertised on the main Google.com home page.
   
• Google Bookmarks, an unexciting but marginally useful bookmarking tool.
   
• Google Reader, the Bloglines-beating RSS reader I recently fell in love with.

As Danny covered in his write-up on Google Personalized Search last week, information from the first two is now used to influence your search results:

Beyond your search history, Google also looks at the content on your Google Personalized Homepage – what gadgets you have there, feeds you are reading and so on — in order to shape your personalized search results. This is a new signal they’ve just started to use. Another new signal is Google Bookmarks. Pages you save in these also influence the results.

Google Reader information isn’t apparently being used, but it would be very odd if Google doesn’t use your clicking and reading habits from that in the future to also influence search results.

Given the new importance of these services, making your pages easy to add to them makes sense — if you can bear having to promote Google services on every page in your site just to get a leg up the search results!

Personally I tend to avoid such things, reasoning that a clean page sets tone for content. But in light of this recent change in the order of the Googleverse, I may have to rethink.

Want to get going yourself? Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage have a helpful page explaining how to create buttons for those services. Put these on your site and encourage those subscriptions.

Google doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of Google Bookmark buttons that I could find. But there are third-party solutions such as AddThis, AddToBookmarks and 3spots. Also check out Graywolf’s Social Bookmark Scripts & Widgets guide. If you use FeedBurner, FeedFlares are an easy way to add Google Bookmark buttons to your site, as you’ll see done at the bottom of this column.

2) Optimize For Social Search

Social search sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Bluedot and StumbleUpon are often accused (particularly in the case of Digg) of sending largely useless and even unwanted traffic. And for some kinds of sites they’re just wholly inappropriate. However, if you can, you should get traffic from them to help with Google.

Help with Google? Yes, and here’s why.

It’s not about Digg anymore. It’s about all those slavering technoyobs with the Google toolbar installed, using Google bookmarks or Google Reader. It’s also about how thousands and thousands of bloggers use Digg and similar sites to source content and stories for their own blogs.

The knock-on effect, as we’ve come to know it, is what social search is all about. Thousands or even hundreds of thousands of bloggers and geeky web folks can hit your pages and use Google services to tag them, subscribe to your feeds, shag it™ or just have their interest in your page recorded more quietly. That’s quite possibly very good news indeed.

3. Optimize For Social Networks

People are widely acknowledging the growth and buzz about social search and how those sites can drive traffic. But what about social networks?

Social networking means finding the movers and shakers, those who can swing traffic your way on the blogosphere. It can also mean finding them through formal social networking sites like MySpace.

Establishing a presence inside relevant social networks can be a daunting task. However, more and more organizations are taking the plunge. Here are a few first steps you can make this week:

• Establish a MySpace profile
   
• Identify and engage with the blog influencers in your niche
   
• Start blogging yourself. You can take notes from these guys
   
• Institute a viral link building program to help propel your blog into circulation
   
• Build a remarkable widget that can be embedded into profile pages on social networks like Bebo and MySpace that will drive traffic to your site.

The list could go on, and that’s what’s so wonderful about the current changes we’re seeing in search and web marketing. Technical skills are still needed, but imagination and knowledge of the social spaces our customers inhabit are gaining in value, which ultimately means that the sky is the limit on what you can do.

In future articles for Search Engine Land, I’ll go into more details on this last point. In the meantime, do drop comments and questions in the box beneath. I’ll be happy to continue the discussion there.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for Search Engine Land and the CEO and senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a dedicated social media marketing agency.

When we talk about creating viral link building campaigns, we almost always speak in terms of volume of links from blogs or the number of visits generated from social media sites like Digg or Netscape.

In the case of “how to” articles such as this one, we also tend to use easy examples, if we use examples at all.

The reality is that the majority of people that approach you for such campaigns have pretty ordinary sites at best. They rarely if ever have sexy technology sites already popular with the digerati.

So can viral link building link the unlinkable? Sure it can, but the rules, and goals need to be adapted, as they do with every campaign. Keep in mind that while this is written for those who work with clients to generate publicity, it’s equally applicable to anyone doing their own publicity in house for an "unlinkable" site.

Quality, Not Quantity

Far too much emphasis is put on quantity of links and visits when what we should really be talking about is quality. After all, the ultimate point of such campaigns is rarely raw traffic right? The ultimate goal is almost always increased sales.

By concentrating on the quality of links, their placement, their social or academic weight and the quality of the traffic they generate, you can create campaigns that achieve both improved search rankings and increased conversion rates more easily.

You can link the unlinkable.

If you haven’t done so already, put Digg to one side. Viral link building does not start and end with the manic hordes of the digitally unwashed. Digg has its uses, and in truth it’s a great site. But when dealing with non-tech linking, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

What you want is for every site in your peculiar little niche, every blog, and every specialized social network, wiki and resource page to link to you with great anchor text and where possible, a recommendation or endorsement of the value of your content.

Easier said than done of course, but that’s the goal.

The more unlinkable the site, the harder you have to work. Whereas it’s sometimes appropriate to walk away from a proposed project until other factors have been addressed, you can still help most people by just going the extra mile, and then going a bit further even than that.

Some of the things that can make a site difficult for people to want to link to include:

• The subject matter is highly industrial/academic/uninteresting
• There are few other sites in the same niche
• The site is a brand new player in a very cliquey sector — the other kids wont play with you.

To get links to these kinds of sites, you have to work smart. The shotgun social media approach will not work well.

Strategies & Examples

So, we’ve done plenty of waffling on about how hard it is and how much work it is haven’t we? Good. It is hard, but it’s not impossible so let’s talk strategy. In my 2007 Guide to Linkbaiting, I mentioned three different approaches to viral link building:

1. Textual
2. Tool / Resource
3. Widget

For unlinkable sites, textual link attractors are simply not enough in most cases, and widgets are very likely overkill, as your target group is relatively small. The two best strategies are:

1. The extended textual resource, and
2. The on site tool / utility

The Extended Textual Resource

Let’s say that your client is an industrial, environmentally friendly pesticides manufacturer whose target market is the agricultural community and government food agencies. (Caveat: I have no clue about this field, It’s just an example.)

Here are three examples of the kind of extended textual resources you might help create:

1. An exhaustive list of environmentally harmful pesticides and their environmentally friendly equivalents. Include a color coded map of the country to represent market penetration — red for unfriendly, green for friendly. List states, or customers that support your alternatives, use social pressure and the “green link” to gain attention for the resource.
    
2. Pick one state, county or government department and write a publicly accessible report on how that entity could “clean up its act”. Be helpful and supportive, and above all, very, very local. Focus tightly on this one small area and essentially map out how they could totally turn around their environment damaging practices and save money. The good news is that the company probably already does things like this as part of their sales process. You just have to take it online and seed its promotion.
    
3. Take 7 very common foods and list the traces of harmful pesticides found in them. By pointing out some ugly truths about things we all eat everyday and evangelizing the benefits of a less harmful pesticides policy, this could quickly go viral amongst the green bloggers. Similar posts have almost certainly been made, as it’s an obvious one, so do your homework first!

With all of the above, one key factor to bear in mind is that just “writing a post” is not good enough. If your client is not prepared to spend the time and money it takes to produce absolutely stunning work, then your best bet is to decline the job. Photographs, charts, verifiable facts and figures are all key elements of this type of textual data and without them, you’re sunk.

The Onsite Tool Or Utility

It’s tricky to use examples, as they don’t really apply to most people reading the article, but I wanted to demonstrate a point: That almost nothing is unlinkable. With that in mind, do try to adapt and think about these examples in the context of your client’s sites.

Here are three onsite tools or utility examples for our theoretical, link challenged, environment friendly pesticides manufacturer.

1. Use the Google Maps API to create a dynamically updated map of the country/region where when a reader clicks/hovers over an area, data on that areas usage of harmful pesticides is generated. Highlight areas where green chemicals are being used.
    
2. The calculator. Calculators of all sorts have been around since we were first able to script, but there’s a reason they still work: They’re useful. Why not build a tool to calculate the projected environmental impact continued use of chemical X will have on an area of land – display the results in context with the green alternative. There are literally dozens of variations on the calculator theme, it just depends on the data you have available and your imagination as to what you can achieve with it.
    
3. Create a simple form using categories and tiered dropdown navigation to recommend foods using green pesticides only – for example, I choose canned foods, then I further choose beans. Then the page suggests various brands that are considered environmentally sound.

Again, just to be 100 percent clear: I have done no research into this particular area. The ideas above are just examples off the top of my head to demonstrate the point that virtually nothing is unlinkable. If there are any pesticide manufacturers out there shaking their heads in dismay at the inaccuracy of my suggestions, my apologies :)

Now that you can see that nothing is impossible, it just leaves us with one last job in creating highly linkable content from highly unlinkable subject matter: seeding and promoting that content.

That’s a topic I’ll cover in a future article for Search Engine Land.

For now, if you have questions, do drop them in the comments below. If you’d like to throw out more unlinkable examples, I’ll be happy to suggest ways you might make them linkable.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for Search Engine Land and the CEO and senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a dedicated social media marketing agency.

The idea of using your competition to build links, trust and reputation and benefit from the knock on effect of better search engine rankings as a result may seem alien to many. Savvy web marketers have been doing this for years, however. Bloggers often do it without even realizing it due to the inherent social functionality of the medium.

Today, I’m going to show you three simple ways to become the center of focus within your niche, gain highly targeted link traffic and boost your search engine rankings.

1. Aggregating Your Competition

Presuming that blogs exist within your niche, be they competitor blogs, customer blogs or enthusiast sites, bringing the best of that scattered, authoritative information and reprinting it at one central location adds huge value for customers. In fact, the synergy created by such focused aggregation can create make your site an entire authority itself.

Bloggers may argue that aggregation can be achieved with feed readers, that anyone can simply subscribe to all the best content and aggregate it themselves. Although some will do this, the majority of the online population is still in the dark over RSS and feeds. In addition, while anyone can collect all this information, they might not be able to distinguish good information from bad.

That’s where you come in.

As the editor of such a publication, you add value for readers by choosing the very best information to reprint and editing where necessary to make it even better for your customers. It’s your knowledge of your subject that will make the project a success. You separate out the signal from the noise.

A few points worth noting before we move on:

• Get permission. Email, or better still, call and make that connection with the people you would like to publish. It could also well be a violation of copyright if you don’t.
• Edit. Really, don’t completely automate the process. Selectively pick content from your publishers that matches your customers needs near perfectly, not every post they publish. Remember, the value here is in your skill and authority on the topic at hand and your ability to distinguish between great information and dross.
• Edit. Yes, edit again. Rather than print the entire post, why not introduce it, post a few paragraphs and encourage your customers to check out the entire article at its source? How about a full author bio as a tail to the syndicated post? Providing value back to your publishers is extremely important if you want to keep them.

2. Summarize Your Competition

You can also become a summary site in addition to or instead of reprinting material. This again relies again on your expert knowledge of the subject and your ability to pick out the most amazing content within that niche. Most important, you need to tell your customers why the content you highlight is amazing. There are many ways of doing this, such as:

• One post per topic. If you think your customers can keep up, and there are enough great posts out there to keep you busy, post a link and commentary on each piece you find daily in a single post.
• Daily, weekly and monthly summaries. Though this still requires daily effort, it’s less intensive as typically you add less commentary to each individual item. Danny does it here at Search Engine Land with his Daily SearchCap newsletter. Really, as far as search goes, that’s all you need to know, daily.
• Themed summaries. If a topic has recently been getting a lot of attention and discussion between influential bloggers and sites in your sector, then add value by providing a complete summary of the debate with links to each participant and opinion of your own. Here’s an example of Danny doing this recently for the “Is SEO Rocket Science” debate that’s been going on. Warning: these topical summaries seem easy, but personally I find them quite exhausting to do as you absolute must cover the subject in its entirety.

An important note about summarizing. I often see webmasters blindly aggregating content, and equally as often, blindly linking without adding anything of value to the discussion. This is stupid. If you’re not adding value, why would I want to link to you? Why would I take notice of you?

The value in this kind of aggregation and summarization of themed discussion is in your expert knowledge of the field and your editing skills as you pick and commentate on what you believe worthy. Without that, you’re just scraping the bottom of the barrel and your results will reflect your effort.

3. Lead Your Competition

By now, you’re hopefully beginning to think more in terms of community than competition. Go ahead, mentally change all the subheads to use community over competition. Doesn’t that fit better?

This last concept is about tying together the ideas outlined in the points above and furthering your role as the focal point within your category. By taking the lead on important issues in your industry, organizing cooperation amongst players and recognizing innovation and progress by your competitors, you can take the concept of the community hub to the max. You won’t regret it n terms of links, traffic and the knock on effect those have for search.

Here are a few things to consider, though they can vary widely from topic to topic and industry to industry:

• Organize community events. Why not podcast discussions on industry issues conducted through Skype for example? Or arrange physical discussions. Have World cafe-style meetings on important topics podcasted or transcribed for all make compelling, linkable, and useful content.
• Answer the difficult questions, facing your industry and lead the way for others to join the debate.
• Institute an annual awards for your niche, spread the love around and then pass the baton next year.

That list could go on forever. The point is just to break out of the single-site mindset and start thinking in terms of the community surrounding your topic and how you can best place yourself at the center of it.

Conclusion

With every niche there are different challenges and specifics, but also there are opportunities. This kind of community play does not work well if somebody else is already doing a good job of it in your niche. Equally it does not work well unless heart and soul, sweat and tears are put into it.

Nonetheless, it’s a powerful way of gaining highly targeted traffic and creating a natural reason for people to link to you often and freely.

Done well, it will lead to press coverage and natural PR opportunities, blog links, Wikipedia citations and over time will put your site firmly in the center of the entire sector. It’s about letting go of your fears of the competition and embracing the opportunities that a less paranoid approach to linking and marketing in general presents.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for Search Engine Land and the CEO and senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a dedicated social media marketing agency.

Way back in 2005 we started talking about linkbait, a term that was coined on Threadwatch which I owned and ran at the time. Linkbait was used to describe viral, linkable content designed to attract thousands of links.

Shortly after that, I wrote The Art of Linkbaiting. It has been much cited over the last year or so. Today, though a few laggards are still blinking and looking confused whenever they hear the term, linkbaiting is recognized as the most effective way to build links for a site.

As linkbaiting enters its third year, it makes sense to revisit the topic and discuss how to succeed in 2007. The linkbait landscape of 2007 is different than two years ago, requiring some rethink and reassessment of strategies. Linkbait is the smart move everyone needs to be doing. However, the linkbait of 2005 may not cut it with today’s more desensitized audiences. The smart linkbaiters will pursue the holy grail of widgetbait.

The Linkbait Mindset

Linkbaiting is hard but rewarding work. If you’re prepared to make the leap, or already have done and want to improve your linkbaiting strategy for 2007, read on. If it all sounds a bit too difficult, it most likely is. Consider instead breaking out that email begging software that was soooooo cool in 2002.

The linkbait way of link building is a mindset. To do it well, you need to put thoughts of manipulating the system to one side and focus entirely on providing value to your clients users and making that value easy to link to.

Good linkbait is remarkable.

There are many components to good linkbait, and infinite strategies and hooks, but at the end of the day, it boils down to this one thing. Your content needs to be amazing. If you can hit that sweet spot for your audience then the links will roll in, and in, and in, and in.

Linkbait Risk & Reward: Time Versus Success

By this point, I hope there’s no doubt in your mind as to the amount of effort required to develop great linkbaiting strategies. The good news is, if you got this far, you’re in good company.

In 2007, the third year of linkbaiting, people need to start thinking about it in slightly more sophisticated terms.

If you’re going to market linkbaiting services to clients, then you certainly have a responsibility to educate your client on the risk versus reward aspects and structure your pricing accordingly.

What am I talking about when I say risk?

Well, not the spammy, search engine penalties kind of risk that’s for sure. Google’s Matt Cutts talked about linkbaiting here. As you can see, he has a pretty good opinion of it as a marketing tool.

The risk I’m talking about is cost versus probability of success. It’s not an exact science, and many factors can make or break a social media marketing campaign that utilizes viral linkbaiting techniques to generate links and traffic. Let’s run through a few examples.

Textual Linkbait: Low To Medium Risk

By textual linkbait, I mean posts or any other kind of page content that takes no more technical skill than being able to type. This kind of linkbait is very accessible as the only real cost is time. With good imagination and research into a client’s business, you can quickly devise a series of posts designed to attract links.

In general terms, the reward you get back from writing good textual linkbait is proportional to the effort you put in. Whereas it usually takes me a day to write a great linkbait post, it can take as much as a week or as little as a few hours.

The results, more often than not, mirror that effort in terms of links gained.

Textual linkbait often, but not always, has a limited shelf life as well, particularly when you’re working with time sensitive content such as breaking news or news reaction.

Site Based Tools & Software: Medium To High Risk

By site-based linkbait, I mean functional scripts that run on your client’s website. These vary widely in nature depending on the site. A good example in the search marketing world might be a link analysis tool or spider simulator. (neither of which, by the way, would make good linkbait today.)

Again the risk is proportional to time and effort. Coming up with awesome ideas for tools and widgets is one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of linkbaiting. If you can get someone to code your ideas up cheaply, then you could well be on a winner.

The shelf life of such tools varies. Needless to say, the best kind of on-page tools, like all link assets on your site, need to be regularly updated and maintained.

Widgetbait: High Risk, High Reward

The holy grail of linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget.

In late 2005 and early 2006, I came up with a linkbaiting concept to put my previous company, Performancing, on the social media map. That idea was the Performancing Blog Editor Firefox extension that has achieved nearly half a million downloads on Mozilla alone.

It was a high risk, high reward strategy that not only worked but worked so well that it went beyond mere “linkbait” and is about to become a standalone brand in its own right.

Widgets are small pieces of software that can be ported easily. This would include plugins for blog software such as WordPress or Drupal, modules that can be plugged into popular “start pages” such as Netvibes, PageFlakes or Live.com, desktop widgets such as Yahoo Widgets or Mac dashboard widgets and, as demonstrated above, browser extensions.

The whole concept of widgets is on a snowball right now. In late 2006, the World Wide Web Consortium drafted a specification for widgets. Why they did this is anybody’s guess, but they did.

There are also several specialist companies and websites competing for your widget focused attention as well as two or more conferences on the subject, such as Widgets Live.

As for the risk of widget building, it’s most often high. Abhilash Patel talked last week about how "widget bait" is an incredible form of link building but also how most site owners might not be able to pull it off on their own but rather may need to ride on the coattails of others. The New York Times also has an article about widgettailing out today.

Even if you don’t code your linkbaiting widgets yourself, it takes time and money to do so, and time and money for you, the ideas person, to come up with a concept that will gain links and targeted traffic for your client over a good period of time.

The rewards can be amazing though.

Pricing Linkbaiting Services

At the time of writing, there are only a very small handful of forward thinking SEOs and online marketers that are offering linkbait services. With genuine respect to the two friends who know I’m talking about them, they’ve got it all wrong.

As you’ve seen above, there is a risk of failure when creating viral, linkable content, be it textual or code based. This needs to be factored into the way you structure your pricing so that clients get the best possible deal.

Put your fixed cost price tags aside for a moment and let’s think in terms of risk and reward again.

If you spend a few days creating a great textual linkbaiting campaign for your client, but you fail to deliver the links you hoped to gain, should they pay?

Yes and no.

Your time is worth money, and after all, with the kind of pricing model I propose, there is a risk for both sides.

The Win-Win Way Of Pricing Linkbaiting Services

1. Sit down with your client and work out what exactly they want to achieve from a viral content campaign. Pay particular attention to what they mean, as we all know clients often say they want traffic, but the real goal is most likely increased sales.
    
2. Work out what that is worth to the client and what an appropriate fee for achieving that goal would be, including your costs of course.
    
3. Educate your client on the risk of the solution you propose, to both parties. Based on your assessment of your costs, work out a fair compensation for your time if your campaign turns out to be a dud (and it happens to the best of us, that’s the nature of the game.)

Linkbait is about creativity, imagination and skill. When pricing your services, don’t be afraid to put your money where your mouth is and share some of the risk with your client.

Equally so though, share in the reward. With this kind of pricing model you can, and should, charge a great deal more for your services than the flat fee or (shudder) hourly rate.

SEO Means Getting Links

There’s a raging debate about whether on-page SEO even works. Sure, there’s a need for that. Content management systems are still catching up on search friendly page construction, so there’ll still be plenty of work needed to put client sites in the right gear.

But few if any will disagree that links are where it’s at. You need links to really succeed with search engine optimization. That means link building. Or don’t we mean link begging?

Sheesh, rather you than me squire. I can’t think of anything more mind numbingly tedious, not to mention soul destroying, than sending out hundreds or thousands of link requests. Whether you do this by hand, or (heaven spare us) automatically, it’s just shit. Plain and simple.

Oh, and if the word "reciprocal" made an appearance as you read that last paragraph, then when you get to the end of this article, read it again and then once more just for luck. Seriously.

Why Linkbaiting Beats Link Building

Linkbaiting beats link building firstly as a much better use of your time. SEOs on the whole are a resourceful, creative and clever bunch. Rather than doing the digital equivalent of flipping burgers, you should be putting your creativity to good use and devising smart, viral content ideas that will gain your clients thousands of incoming links with good anchor text.

Sound good?

Let’s make it even clearer. Take these common SEO tasks:

• Writing link requests
• Responding to sent link requests
• Worrying about linking patterns and neighborhoods
• Doing searches to find potential link partners
• Building auto-submit tools for 3rd rate directories and other such horrors

And let’s replace them with these more enjoyable items:

• Having a beer and a jolly good think
• Going for a long walk and thinking about your clients business and how you can help it
• Writing really excellent posts that people will love
• Creating or designing really cool widgets that people will love
• Watching your idea spread in real time

Doesn’t that sound better? So with the creation of cool, linkable content — linkbait – you get anything from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of incoming links from a huge variety of sources. The result of which, if done right, equals targeted traffic, greatly improved search engine rankings and a healthier, less fragile linking profile for the site in question.

A Final Word On The Linkbait Mindset

In future articles, I’ll walk you through some of the best techniques for creating killer linkbait strategies. But I wanted to end today talking about ensuring that linkbaiting doesn’t get a bad reputation.

Recently a couple of good folks in the SEO field have had their sites hacked. One such victim said that other SEOs where wondering if it was all a big linkbaiting tactic.

This way of thinking about a highly skilled, highly valuable client service needs to stop.

You as an SEO have the power to make 2007 the year that SEO gets its mojo back, the year the industry puts its shady image to one side and starts becoming the respected, valued member of the social media scene it deserves to be.

Those of you already working on linkbaiting services are the rockstars of the industry, the pioneers of change, and you have a responsibility to yourselves and the industry as a whole to not let a wonderful win-win service gain an undeserved, shady reputation.

Nick Wilson is a contributing writer for Search Engine Land and the CEO and senior strategist for Clickinfluence, a dedicated social media marketing agency.