See what I did there? That’s called linkbait.
It doesn’t matter what I write down here in the body of the post. It could be three paragraphs of complete nonsense. It could be recycled BS from some lame e-book I am trying to push. It could be page after page of stock photos with lame captions nobody bothered to fact-check or spell-check. All that matters is you saw that interesting looking title and you clicked on the link, and now here you are.
Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly decided to join the snake-oil machine. I just wanted to bring your attention to something that has been bothering me for a very long time and is still going strong. Certain types of bloggers use this trick almost every day to pull traffic onto their sites. Not to educate you or hand over insights that will help you solve real problems, but to pull you in and trick you into giving them a bit of your attention. Why?
1. Too boost their blog’s search engine and technorati/Ad-Age/etc rankings, which in turn a) brings in more visitors and b) boosts their ego.
2. Because more visitors = more ad revenue. ($$$)
3. Because more visitors = more click-throughs on affiliate links. ($$$)
4. Because more visitors = higher “influence” scores, which can be turned into higher speaking and consulting fees, regardless of whether or not they actually have anything relevant to say.
It’s just a numbers’ game. There doesn’t have to be an ounce of real insight in the post. SEO-optimization? Yes. Well-placed links and ads? Yes. A well-placed share button so “readers” can push the piece back out to their networks without necessarily having read it? Yes. But relevance or expert commentary? Nope. That’s optional. Just bring them in.
“Content is king?” Bullshit. Traffic is king. “Content,” or rather the promise of content is just the pull, the pitch, the promise. The real carrot is the revenue from that traffic. When you feel about it that way, quantity quickly begins to trump quality. Blogs become automated cash machines. And because conversion rates tend to be mostly inelastic, that pushes the need for more inbound volume. So you start drafting titles you know will make people want to click, and what they read will have taken less than five minutes to write.
These guys don’t want to be boutique brands anymore. They want to be WalMart. What they give up in quality, they will make up in transient, commodity visitors. In spite of all that talk about humanizing the web and being authentic and having conversations, that’s the relationship model behind linkbait blogs.
So for the next two weeks, every time you see a title like this one, give some thought to why it was chosen, how the “content” of that blog post has anything to do with the Games or business lessons, whether or not it really taught you anything. Some will. Most won’t. It’s up to you to decide what’s what. The litmus test is simple: read the title and the post, then ask yourself what the writer’s intent really was when he (or she) wrote that piece and chose that title. Then go back in their archives and see how often they use that trick. It will give you some idea of whether or not the manipulation was a one-time thing or an M.O.
Intent matters, by the way. Intent is everything. Intent is the very foundation of trust between people. The question is always this: “does this writer really care about helping me out with something, or is he just using me to fluff up his numbers, with no consideration whatsoever to the value it brings to his audience?”
5 Essential Social Media Lessons from the Olympic Games
10 Digital Strategy Insights from NBC’s Olympic Coverage
15 Business Management Lessons from the London Olympics
The Olympic Games Top 20 most retweeted tweets.
25 Inspiring Facebook Updates from the Olympic Games
30 Ways of Bringing Olympic Excellence To Your Digital Practice
35 Brands Using Social Media at the Olympics
2012 Olympics: 40 Gold Medal Social Media Strategies You Can Implement Today!
… and on and on and on.
How about Top 10 Ways to erode Trust and Relevance on the Interwebs? That’s one that might actually be worth reading.
Today’s lesson, if there is one: respect your readers.
There is nothing wrong with making money off affiliate links and traffic, but don’t trick your readers. Don’t promise them relevance or expert analysis and then slap them with lazy, useless bullshit you wrote between brushing your teeth and checking your Klout score.
Remember that blogs are commodities and opinions are even lower in the totem pole. Self-serving schemes might work pretty well for a while, but they all lead to the same orbit decay. Sooner or later, you will have to work harder and harder to trick people back into coming to your blog. Instead of a healthy community of readers, you will have to cast your net wider and wider into the busy waters of digital attention. And what you will discover out there is that bloggers and writers who take the time to produce helpful, relevant content will almost effortlessly pull all that traffic you used to take for granted. Good luck rebuilding your reputation after that. The most painful part: You will have no one but yourself to blame.
The guys who bring the most value to the table win. Be on that team, if not out of self-respect and professional courtesy, at least out of self-preservation.
Cheers,
Olivier
PS: Sorry for the necessary subterfuge. I hope I made up for it by giving you something of value.
* * *
And now, for a little light reading…
Social Media ROI – Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in your Organization was written specifically to teach managers and executives how to build and manage social media friendly business programs and incorporate social technologies and networks into everyday business operations. The book is divided into four parts: social media program strategy & development, social media program operationalization, social media program management, and best practices in measurement and reporting. If your boss doesn’t yet have a copy, time to fix that. If everyone on your team doesn’t yet have their own copy, fix that too. It makes for a great desk reference.
(Now available in several languages including German, Korean, Japanese and Spanish.)
CEO-Read – Amazon.com – www.smroi.net – Barnes & Noble – Que
Brand Building and Online Marketing Blog 
I was excited that you wrote a blog post reason why I came into your blog. Since you always deliver something of value I got even more excited with the title.
I did leave with a major takeaway where I will use this post to share with others who have commented in the past few days on how bloggers try to take advantage of those visiting their sites to make money in multiple ways.
I am glad you took this approach it might make a few people change their minds!
Thanks, man.
Thanks O for the title suggestions. Do I have to pay you a monthly subscription fee for those?
You could join my community for $29.99/month and have access to those via my weekly newsletter. For only $199 more per year (bronze membership), you’ll even have access to my quarterly conference call. That, and a 5% discount on my next white paper. 😀
I’m in! Can I just leave my credit card info here?
Can you send travelers cheques instead?
Um, I wanted to learn 10 digital content strategy lessons from the Olympics. Now I’m hopping mad, Olivier.
Okay then. here they are:
1. Post relevant content.
2. Know your audience.
3. Wins generate attention. Turn them into stories.
4. Losses generate attention too. Turn them into lessons.
5. Build narratives with heroes and villains.
6. Use cool photos.
7. Titles should be catchy. Use lists when you can.
8. Quote or mention influencers with big followings so they’ll feel obligated to share your content.
9. Make the logo bigger.
10. Make sure to use as many keywords as possible in the body of your text.
How’s that? 😉
Great!
How much bigger should I make the logo?
🙂
This big.
You actually underscore one of the reasons I don’t blog regularly over at Area 224 HQ anymore: I don’t want to play games with people.
I’m also busy doing actual work, so tricking readers isn’t a priority.
Good post, as usual.
Same here. I write when I feel like it. Could be twice a day or once a month. If I have nothing relevant or helpful to share, I can always recycle old posts that need to be re-read. Blogging for the sake of feeding the traffic mill is just obnoxious.
Agreed with this. I’d just add that it’s not just just blogs that are posting crappy heat-seeking page view missiles. It’s a lot of online publishers, and unfortunately, I think things are only going to get worse. As long as page views and traffic are the most lucrative things for publishers, then they’ll continue to chase them while sacrificing quality.
I’ve noticed that with quite a few news outlet as well, yeah. Sad trend.
Your blog is brilliant, as is your writing. Everytime I read your blog I learn something new and something important. And I used to think I knew a heck of a lot as a copywriter and marketinging guru. I figure if I keep reading your blog I may! I don’t mind saying I stand in your shadow. Keep the quality blogs and education coming!
I cast a pretty lean shadow, actually. 😉
Another great post Olivier. It’s funny, I had this exact same type of conversation with my CEO and President the other day. We discussed the importance of quality over quantity, both in terms of traffic and in perception of a business.
For me, after reading this blog post, it reminds me of a strategy that is referred to as “newsjacking.” I understand the methodology behind it, but I’m not sure if I completely agree with it’s use. Like you mentioned in the post, some people get it and execute it beautifully (tying in the news story with their content and area of expertise), but many have very poor execution and simply use it as a means to improve their traffic numbers. It is beyond frustrating to see the amount of crap that is floating around out there with all of these inbound links because of their “linkbait” headlines that refer to trending stories on the interweb.
Your statement describes the current state of blogging (for many) perfectly: “It’s just a numbers’ game. There doesn’t have to be an ounce of real insight in the post. SEO-optimization? Yes. Well-placed links and ads? Yes. A well-placed share button so “readers” can push the piece back out to their networks without necessarily having read it? Yes. But relevance or expert commentary? Nope. That’s optional. Just bring them in.” Few people out there actually care about their readers/customers (and I mean truly care about providing value and insight that will benefit them both in the short-term and long-term). For those of us who know how the game works, the lack of quality really shows.
To judge the quality of a blog, I look for the size and location of ads as well as affiliate links. Ads above the fold and splattered across the top of the page? Ads mixed in the body of their “quality” content? More blue links on the page than black text? They probably don’t have my best interest in mind. As well as these obvious signs, I also look at the author. What are their social profiles like? What’s their actual expertise? How often do they interact with people online? How often do they self-promote their own articles vs. others? While this takes a little time, it helps me weed out those influential people to watch for and those who simply sell snake-oil. With the proliferation of social networks both professionally and personally, people now can be held accountable for their words and have their reputation and experience verified.
Lastly, I agree with @Area244’s comments that there isn’t really a need to blog every single day. I don’t know many businesses, if any, that can provide meaningful value via a blog post to their customers every single day (sometimes multiple times a day) and I think people are slowly starting to realize that. By posting so much, it dilutes the quality in my opinion.
And to parrot what @Jason Peck said, I think we need to figure out a way to fix our definition of “success.” Page views and traffic are the dominant metrics, and until we figure out a way to include better quality metrics into that mix, publishers, bloggers, and everyone else will continue to chase the former two while sacrificing the latter. I’m still somewhat new to the industry and am not sure how this should be done, but I definitely think the system is a broken and could use some fixing.
Dude. THAT is a blog post all by itself. Thank you for sharing!
That is what I was thinking, just write this on your blog and come share one paragraph and link to the rest 😉
Great post! But that is not a Linkbait, who would link to a page without any value? You click the title and got tricked, thats no Linkbait.
It’s trickery, at least. Damned wicked trickery.
Well, I already told you on one platform how much I love this post, so you don’t get THAT again (I still do though). However, another thought crossed my mind.
Don’t you think, at some point, that as the linkbait goes up up up, the breed of blog post that is about how to blog will die out by necessity? It will literally be starved out because many of those folks use these kinds of tacts to get you to their site, then to get you to take their class, etc. ad infinitum. And eventually, I’m thinking, people will get hip to that jive. Write thoughtful titles, but here’s my post on how to do that and it’s called 7 things the Olympics can teach you about blog titles. You should engage with your readers so here’s a post about how not to blog like Michael Phelps.
Honestly, the way I’m blogging now, most of the blogging for bloggers advice out there wouldn’t help me. When you’re blogging for business, you have to find a different voice, you have to actually know your stuff and prove that you do, and you have to decide how you want to deal with competitors in your business who may be romancing the same companies. In the end, posts like the ones you listed above are stripped of value. It doesn’t help me one jot to compare content generation with Gabby Douglas. Our clients don’t really care if so and so is a douche bag. And my personal meanderings? Phtt. Puhlease. Authenticity is nothing compared to “Can this help me with my business?”
Blogging, like social media, has a lot of growing up to do if it’s going to become/remain a vital marketing tool. That is what it should be, right? Not a means for ego massage? I think…?
If what you’re saying is that you can’t kill “Bad Girls” and “Pregnant at 16” by producing “Game of Thrones” and “Arrested Development,” then you’re right. Free-roam rotisserie chicken won’t draw people away from mechanically separated chicken and emulsified corn starch “chicken” nuggets either.
A certain percentage of the population loves to consume crap. They either don’t care that it’s crap or don’t know that it’s crap or just plain like it in spite of the fact that it’s crap. That’s the reality of the market. The assumption is that, given an unlimited budget, people will naturally want to pick the fresh wild lobster over the microwavable corn dog. Well that’s wrong. A chunk of the market will pick the corn dog every time. Against all logic, they like the bitter aftertaste of partially hydrolized corn oil.
So no, I can’t change that. And I’m not trying to change that. I can’t change human nature. All I want to do (all I can hope to do) is point out that something obnoxious is happening, explain what it is, explain why it is, and hope that it flips a switch in a few people’s heads. Not everyone, but a few.
If this helps even one blogger, CMO, PR professional, journalist, editor, student or business exec improve their communications or realize that they have invested in the wrong consultant, then the post was worth writing.
And no, I don’t think that crap will ever go away. It won’t die on its own. Crap doesn’t die on its own. It just keeps piling up. There will never be a time when snake oil runs its course, when people say “enough, what I want now is quality,” when we all hold hands and decide to try and be a little smarter, a little better, a little wiser. As individuals, we may be wired that way, but as a species, we aren’t. Conformity trumps all.
It occurs to me that Sisyphus (the Camus version anyway) may be somewhat relevant to this conversation.
Oh noes. Not Sisyphus. He and his rock show up everywhere! Truly depressing, dude 🙂
Point of order-
About daily posting.
Somerset Maugham said that he only wrote when inspiration struck. And in his case, he was blessed that inspiration struck precisely at 0900.
Every.
Day.
No, most of us ain’t got talent like old sm. But we could have that discipline to at least WRITE daily, even if we don’t post it publicly. If we gave enough of a shit about what we are riffing about.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree about linkbaiters, and I waste entirely too much time being rickrolled by charlatans. ~~~Shaky fist!~~~
But I do look forward to Seths daily missiles, and pressfields weekly salvos.
Itykwim.
Well, it comes down to the purpose of the writing, Tyler.
I write every day because I can’t go a day without writing. The words bubble up to the surface like oil from the ground. I can’t do anything about it.
Now, there’s a difference between words bubbling up and actually sitting down to give them shape, meaning, structure. That part is work. And yes, I believe in doing the work. The philosopher who ignores his ideas and his thoughts is squandering his gift. The runner who doesn’t run commits a crime against himself and the world. You have to do the work. You have to put hammer to chisel and chisel to stone and chip away at the idea waiting to be released. The stone isn’t going to carve itself.
But there’s writing and there’s writing and there’s writing, and then there’s why and how.
I write every day because I must, but I don’t necessarily write here. I have stacks of notebooks in which I write in pencil, in felt pen, in old-fashioned ink from fountain pens. Ideas, stories, fragments of stories, memories, dreams, character notes, business insights… on and on and on. I take notes on my iPad. Constantly. And nowadays, I am always in the process of writing or editing a book. Some days, I write for 10 hours. Some days, I only write for one or two hours. But I write every day.
Here though, on this blog, I write when the need arises. When I have nothing new to say, I don’t write anything. If too much time goes by without a post, I will look through my archives and repost an old piece that I think deserves another pass.
But what I won’t do is write crap for the sake of pulling traffic to my site. I won’t insult my audience or discredit myself by writing something blatantly lazy and self-serving. I also don’t think that we’re necessarily being all that helpful when we tell people to post something on their blog every day. Write every day, yes. Post every day, no. Not unless you’re really inspired to do it, and that comes and goes. It’s obvious from even Seth’s blog now that posting just for the sake of posting (which is to say out of fear that not grabbing some attention every day will erode your relevance,) has its limitations.
The struggle here, Tyler, is that two forces compete for your writing: attention and discipline. Discipline lives independent of attention, and attention lives independent of discipline. I don’t have to tell you which one is most valuable to us and our readers.
The day that attention takes over my reason for writing here, send the space monkeys to destroy a piece of corporate art. I’ll get the message. 😉
I think you will get a kick out of this. Do you know what I thought when I read the title of the post? “Did I just see ‘Digital Content Strategy’ in that title on Brandbuilder Blog… WTH!”
In my head I was thinking of these two posts (some favs of mine)…
I so love it when you get fired up 🙂 And I was shocked when I looked back to find those posts, and saw the date, feels like it was yesterday that I read these… *sigh*. Okay, I’ll stop rambling now.
Great post as usual. Thanks 🙂
Awesome. So those posts and conversations stuck. 🙂
The truly unfortunate thing about this is that it erodes the trust of blogger in general. Look at how print media is struggling these days. Why are they struggling?
They based their businesses on the model of building a huge audience and monetizing with ads. The SEO churn online these days is the same thing – hyperbole as a means to drive eyeballs to ads. Trust in the mainstream media is eroding (save the mouth-breathing sheep, natch). What makes bloggins any different?
It’s the ability to build a community, and community is more than just pageviews and comments. Take any marketing vehicle, use it to empower the audience, get out of the way.
Thanks for keeping it real, Olivier. This one is a MUST READ.
Yep. I’m hoping they’ll wake up (and listen to their own advice), but… not sure that’s going to happen anytime soon. Thanks, man.
It is now two days the Post was my inbox, Unread. I keep the email unread when I need to follow them.
At first I was bit surprised, how come Olivier sound like them. And then it is WOW.
You have also interrupted their treffic and instead have helped few more people to not get fooled. Thank you for respecting us, all the time.
Respect!
I’m thinking of one very specific, very well-known blog-oriented site that does this a lot. And I’m wondering, Olivier, if you’re thinking of the same one. I’m often a fan of that site’s content but purposely don’t click when I see an absurd post like the type you’ve written about here.
The ship is sinking and it’s going to take quite a few of us (I’m thinking those folks posting all the comments here) to bail out the water. When it first started gaining steam, online content publishing was awesome to C-levels. Targeted content, low overhead cost, pulling in ideal audiences instead of pushing out blanketed messages, owning the platform. And it’s slowly (or quickly?) getting degraded into being everything it wasn’t.
A lot of companies are doing it really well. But there are even more companies turning it into exactly what it wasn’t supposed to be.
It’s kind of like when you’re young, and you see a really cool, really dangerous rock and roll band at some small dingy club or basement venue. But it’s great because everybody there sees something in this band that’s unlike what’s on the radio. And then 5 years later, that band is watered down, and shell of what they used to be, and pumping out crappy pop music for confused tweens.
That punk band used to play because they loved to play and it’s all they wanted to do (well… and party, I imagine). The mainstream band today plays because they have stadiums to fill and albums to sell, and they start to focus on those numbers instead of doing what they want.
The irony of it is that it works for a while. The numbers grow and grow and grow, and then one day, you wake up and realize that you’ve become Nickleback. You’re playing state fairs and recording Christmas albums. Your job is to make money, and your craft has just becomes a means to an end.
Happens to the best of us, man. And evidently to the worst as well. 😉
Agreed.
If you’ve ever seen SLC Punk, when Stevo meets his very corporate dad for lunch in a very proper restaurant, he proceeds to call his Dad a sellout. His dad replies “I didn’t sell out son…I bought in.”
And for the record, no one should EVER have to endure becoming Nickelback. A wished fate I’d reserve for only my worst enemies.
Nice! 😀
Isn’t this the constant struggle? If you have to choose between interesting, helpful writing and strong SEO, what do you pick? I’ve always been a fan or writing first. Unfortunately, there’s too many people out there who aren’t. Hopefully some of them and their readers get the message.
It’s a cost-saving strategy that always results in relevance erosion and reader attrition. What they lose in organic traffic over time, they’ll have to gain back through advertising spend. The culprit: short term goals and bonuses trumping long term goals and bonuses. Every time.
Thanks! I agree with you – there can be real worth in both the linkbait and the content, but if you’re only marketing with gimmicks your credibility and the traffic/revenue it brings will disappear. Thanks for speaking honestly to this!
Reblogged this on germainemn.
🙂
Feliz aquele que vence o egoísmo, alcança a paz, encontra a verdade. A verdade liberta-nos do mal; não há no mundo libertador igual. Confia na verdade, mesmo que não sejais capazes de compreendê-la, mesmo que no começo vos pareça amarga a sua doçura.Com amor e caridade não tem tem erro aproxima as pessoas do progresso.Obrigado!!!