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I’ve seen all manner of overtly commercial sites trying their luck with linkbait, only for it to flop. You see, linkbaiting your e-commerce store is a difficult thing to do and unless you have built your brand from the ground up to infiltrate integrate on social media sites, successful linkbait and the bounty of oneway goodies it affords may continue to be nothing more than a dream.

I suppose in one way it is our own fault for perpetuating this fallacy of marketing. Reading through the plethora of posts about linkbait makes this particular technique seem like some crazy next-generational solution to marketing any site. The reality is, however, very different. You’ve got to work incredibly hard to make linkbait on a commercial store work and be prepared to sustain your efforts even though many of your baits get no traction and go precisely nowhere.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Digg et al have moderators and systems in place to identify commercially motivated linkbait, and even if they don’t, the community itself definitely doesn’t want to see our ’spam’. The good old days of pushing ‘10 Cooking Tips From Holywood’s Hottest Celebs’ to help promote some recipe book store are long gone.

Don’t get me wrong: linkbait is here to stay, but we must progress. The broader SEO community may have only recently caught on and crowned linkbait as the white-hatted linkbuilding prince, but we’re only getting started down the road of punchy titles, angles and hooks compared to our friends in the traditional mainstream media.

So if you are responsible for marketing an e-commerce store and want to try linkbait, be prepared to work harder than you have before to create unique, interesting, timely and resourceful content that real people actually care about and want to read.

Here at Setfire Media we specialise in building online stores. So as ‘Head of Search’ I’ve been in the trenches for long enough to hone the process of linkbaiting an e-commerce store and can say with surety that there are things you can do to help improve your success rate on social media sites - a checklist if you will.

Here are a few things I’ve learned that you can apply and hopefully find more success.

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There are times when your website might experience short periods of very high traffic. This could be the result of TV exposure, or your linkbait just hit the front page of Digg. The worst thing that can happen at this point is that your site can’t cope - this becomes a huge missed opportunity.

Here are some tips to help you plan to stay online and available.

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Email marketing to a subscribed list gives businesses a fantastic return on web marketing spend. A quality email list partnered with a targeted, well written email can out perform SEO, PPC and just about any other marketing activity every time.

The key to successful email marketing is building up your list of newsletter recipients. The equation is simple, the more people you email the more sales, and response you’re going to get. Every subscriber counts, and if you’ve got your analytics rockin’, and measure the sales you get from email marketing, you can attribute a per subscriber value to your list.

Here are 15 ways you can increase the number of people signing up to your mailing list:

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Linkbait is widely regarded by many SEOs as the premier weapon in their quiver of marketing and promotional tools, and justifiably so. When linkbait is successful it can be incredibly powerful, driving an initial spike in (arguably entirely useless) traffic and links, followed by a long and steady stream of backlinks.

That’s the best case scenario. But what happens when your linkbait just doesn’t cut it? Digg, which is the granddaddy of social media sites, is where most linkbait gets peddled. Digg is also subject to random system maintenance and drastic algorithmic changes. Other popular social media sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon can also be hit and miss: what works one day might have no hope the next.

Of course, it isn’t all dependent on where you distribute your linkbait. It may well be the case that your ‘101 Reasons For Choosing Acme Exhaust Manifolds’ just doesn’t appeal to the crowd and is destined to fail, even if it does get 275 diggs and all manner of thumbs up.

So what if this is where you find yourself? What should you do if your linkbait, on which your client has spent good money and you’ve invested copious amounts of time, goes nowhere? Well, for what it’s worth, here’s what I would do.

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What are we looking for:

What we offer:

We’re incredibly proud to announce that On the Beach Holidays, one of our clients, has just achieved a Hitwise Top 10 Award!

The Hitwise Top 10 Award recognises websites from over 160 industries that are leaders in their industry and brings with it the benefit of using the Hitwise Top 10 Award shield.

The award is based on market share of visits among all UK websites in the Hitwise Travel: Agencies industry. It’s a fantastic achievement for them, and of course us as their development, hosting and search marketing company. Well done to everyone involved!

Google have finally released a new Froogle Performance Tool which shows a host of useful data about your Froogle impressions, clicks and feed items. You can find it by logging into your Google Base account and clicking on the new Performance section.

Google Product Search, or Froogle as it’s far better known, is a price comparison site with a big difference – it’s completely free. This makes is an attractive channel to reach your customers; all you need is a product feed.

Like so many other digital marketers, I’ve been waiting on this tool to optimise Google Product Search for ages – I’d even gone as far as to previously develop a dirty Excel hack that queried Froogle data. The new froogle performance tool now provides all this data in a choice of slick graphs or CSV downloads.
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Having just made the jump from Windows PC to Mac, I thought it might be helpful to share some of my findings from the other side.

Screenshots

A basic one, but well worth mentioning - as well as the usual screen shot familiar to windows users, there’s also the option to select a portion of the screen with your mouse cursor. To capture a portion of the screen, just press cmd+shift+4. You’ll get a crosshair that you can drag and click with to select a rectangle. This is then saved as a file. To save to the clipboard, just use ctrl+shift+cmd+4.

Remote viewer

Something slightly less well known about Leopard is that it has a good VNC client built in.

• Go to finder, press cmd+k and you’ll get the connect to server window.
• Type in vnc:// followed by the ip address of the desktop you’re trying to connect to, then press connect.
• I use this when we’re testing something in Browsercam, as it’s much better than the Java VNC client they provide.

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If your website has suffered a drop in rankings recently don’t panic, read through this guide and get a better picture of what is happening behind the scenes. Prepare yourself for any future search result hiccups with our 10 Emergency SEO First Aid Tips and avoid paying someone else to diagnose the problem.

Assess the damage

Check site:www.yourdomain.com on Google to see if your website is still in the index.

If you see nothing at all or just your homepage then it’s serious – you need to work fast to salvage your online presence, especially if your business is e-commerce. This is a good indication that your site has been banned from the Google index… have you been a naughty boy?

If you see lots of your pages in the Google index then you can breathe a small sigh of relief – it’s unlikely to require surgery, just a course of antibiotics and a bit of physio. Search for your domain name (but without the site: prefix) and if you’re not there you’ve probably had your wrist slapped for dodgy SEO tactics. Consider it a gentleman’s warning that your rankings have plummeted, and you should take the opportunity to fix things as soon as you can.

If you are in both the index and the normal search results, but you’ve still lost significant rankings on quite a few keywords, then it’s likely Google has devalued a bunch of high profile links to your website. Check any under-the-table paid links you might have purchased. If they’re of no value anymore then put the money to better use.

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What happens when your site is added to the Digg autobury list? Should you just give up on your social marketing campaign? No, absolutely not! Digg is undoubtedly an 800lb social media gorilla, but it is not the only place that can send traffic and generate links. Far from it!

Coming from an SEO background and wearing my stylish tinfoil hat, I am forever looking for ways to reduce reliance on any single distribution channel: being hooked on the Digg crack is just as bad as relying solely on free organic traffic from Google.

Are you wasting time?

Getting onto the prime patch of internet real estate that is the Digg front page is, of course, very desirable. But does it scale? Think carefully about the time you have to dedicate for the promotion of your submission, time that you could be using to create another linkbait.

Submitting your linkbait to Digg where highly volatile users bury content with the slightest sniff of being commercial can be a huge time-suck, and one that can do your linkbuilding campaign more harm than good. Preach that truth to yourself before wasting hours IMing, emailing, shouting and begging for Diggs only to get buried in the 23rd hour! I should know, I’ve been there.

What’s best for your linkbuilding campaign?

My point is this: what would you rather base your marketing strategy on? Can you really depend on steady exposure to Digg’s infamously immature user base while dodging curveballs from their moody algorithm? Or should you break the habit and find more reliable methods of distribution? My money’s on the latter.

It could be said that I’ve spent a bit of time looking for alternatives to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit. And yes, they do not send as much traffic but that doesn’t mean you still don’t get links and exposure. So here they are, in all their glory. Fire up your engines and spam submit your content!

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