Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [194]
The more votes your article accumulates, the higher up the list of popular topics it goes. If it gets to the front page of these social-news sites, then you are well on your way to getting thousands of visitors to your website. The intended result is that of these thousands of visitors, some will link to your website with their blog, social media accounts, Facebook pages, or Twitter. (Social media will be covered more in-depth in Chapter 18.)
This is an area where getting the recommendation is a way of gaining visibility. Gaining links comes when people recommend your article to others by a voting link or a recommendation. In a marketer’s perfect world this happens organically and people love the article that you write.
In reality, this takes time to master and time to build a following. Simply writing articles and attaching social-media icons do not guarantee that people will recommend them, vote on them, or link to them. Although having social-media links on your articles may look nice and provide some decoration, it does not guarantee the action. As with any form of marketing, it takes trials, testing, and tolerance to understand this medium.
It all comes down to content. You have to produce something that the market wants. If you are able to do that, then you will gain some followers. The ones that have been able to do this quickly are ones that are not building a typical business or run a brick-and-mortar business. In addition, you can never predict the subject matter that rises to the top in these circles. Off-kilter, funny, and off-beat does very well on the big social-news sites. Highbrow, detailed analysis of important issues of the day typically does not attract large numbers but will attract a small number of interested readers. You need to decide how you will reach people and what type of content you will use to reach them.
For many sites, developing funny or sensational content simply isn’t possible, or it is out of the question. This is where developing a community and finding the opinion leaders can be more of a targeted approach to link building than simply generating eye-catching articles. That is where online PR skills are needed.
Conduct Online PR
Online public relations (online PR) came as a natural outgrowth of developing PR campaigns based on offline PR strategies. However, it developed with a significant difference. Where PR professionals had their lists of media contacts and would pitch stories or articles to those professionals, they tended to do it on a mass scale. Hundreds of reporters, news organizations, and opinion leaders would be on the distribution list, and the press release or the pitch would go out to them all.
The Internet and the rise of free blogging software enabled tens of thousands of people to become self-published news sources within a very short time. Many well-known bloggers simply started with a love for a particular niche topic and started to write frequently about it. In doing so, they developed an audience that enjoyed their opinion and style.
Some PR professionals immediately seized upon the opportunity. Instead of pitching the same idea to hundreds of reporters, why not pitch to the blogger who has a direct pipeline of readers? Bloggers have become the new opinion leaders of the digital age. Online PR was born, as the pitch became focused on approaching a few quality news sources rather than on hundreds of typical sources.
The approach to a blogger or an online publication had to be refined. Bloggers were not people who were getting paid to report the news or publish. The vast majority were writing because of a love or serious interest in the topic. Because they took a personal investment in the topic, they responded to more personal inquiries. A PR pitch that was not crafted especially for them or even identified them personally as a valuable resource would be simply discarded.