The future of link building

WILL CRITCHLOW

Here are the kinds of things we’ve seen today

@hannah_bo_banna

P.O.M.PPsychographicOnlineMassPublishing

Info vs plain graphic

Much of What Makes Leaders Great Also Makes Them Great Marketers

Via the White House Flickr Feed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/8191317327/ - Inbound marketing in action!

Where did my “submit link” button go?

Links are dead

I want to make it 100% clear that this is not what I am saying

Links are dead

If you tweet that I said this, I will hunt you down

It’s link building that is in trouble

I’ve been answering SEOmoz Q&A since it looked like this

All the answers to “why don’t I rank?” used to be “you need more links”.

Now?

Dear GOD.Not those links

I’m not here on a moral crusade

I just happen to prefer flywheels over explosive unsustainable growth

…and I’m not risk averse

I have invested in all kinds of risky things (defined as “things that might not work”)

This is the last linklove

The future of link builders

There’s a bigger problem

We broke directories

They used to be the best way of finding great things on the web

We broke comments

Now we all have to run akismet

We broke forums

Many legitimate forums and communities closed under the onslaught of forum spam

We took a 150-year-old form of communication

“Distribution of the slave population of the United States”, 1861

As practiced by respected newspapers

“The Ebb and Flow of Movies”, 2008

And ruined it

Thanks @ChrisLDyson

Try to make the design support the data

Please tell me this was a joke

Incidentally, a good use of Pinterest

Maybe the only one I’ve found yet - http://pinterest.com/scottcowley/ugly-infographics/

Guest columns have existed forever

Does your process look like this? Please tell me no. [Hat-tip Carson Ward]

We can’t even clean up after ourselves

Without hacking people off

information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

You think:“how can I game that”

There’s an even bigger problem

Ad agencies are better than us

Honda Cog

Artists are better than us

OK Go

Celebrities are better than us

@ladygaga

Celebrities are better than us

@willcritchlow

Brands are better than us

Red Bull has videos of pigeons doing backflips

Image/Graph etc.

Loss leaders are hard to compete with

Snow Fall – How they made it

STOP

Stop worrying about your hosting IP

address

Start worrying about CDNs, edge nodes and site speed

Stop worrying about linking

C-blocks

Start worrying about how many journalists you have in your address

book

Stop worrying about anchor text

Start worrying about being misquoted

Stop worrying about nofollow

Start worrying whether anyone will click

Stop calling it link juice

For the love ofGOD

stop calling it link juice

Link equity plays much better in the board room

The future of link builders

Hire the right VP Marketing or you’ll just end up with a bunch of blue pens

with your logo on them

We understand amplification

From Thomas Baekdal

If you aren’t naturally technical

Start here – incredible deck from Jamie @ SEOmoz

Earn attention instead of shares

Measure links based on engaged visitors

I made you a custom report and advanced segments for non-bounces and >2 pages

Engage spidey sense

We can instantly tell Mom & Pop from Thin Affiliate

We know why no-one is linking to you

Your site is ugly, your content sucks, no-one knows who you are

We know how influential a person is

Haha. Just kidding.

Power searching

We can find out who people are, where they write, what they own

Homework time

Inspired by Entrepreneurial Design

By Gary Chou of USV - Course here and blog post write-up here

Make yourself uncomfortable

= 1 hour or less

= an afternoon

= day or more

See here

Not extrovert?

Get a journalist to run a story based on your tip

Call 3 journalists & tell them you thought they’d be interested in a story you found online

Present to a crowd of 200+ people

See Justin Briggs’ explanation of how

Present to a board

Bonus points for getting shouted at

Negotiate with a salesperson

Get more than 10% off retail price of something (doesn’t have to be a car!)

Record a screencast or webinar

Get it watched by more than 20 people. Camtasia / Google+ Hangouts on air

Reach out to a hero

get an answer

Visit a newsroom

Debate a business case

With 3+ colleagues who you don’t normally work with. We have enjoyed 2078 & 4168

Sell something door to door

Don’t want to go outside? Make 10 cold calls

Run a live usability test

Offer to buy a stranger a coffee. Resist the urge to coach them

Answer 3 customer calls

and website instant chat

I highly recommend olark.com

Read to a child

In some ways, they’re an easy audience. In others…

Not technical?

Install a web server

I’d start with Apache. Send enough traffic that it breaks. Fix it.

Build a web crawler

Crawl 10,000 pages. Discover how little of the web is nicely-formatted HTML

Search through some log filesImage/Graph etc.

Find 3 crawlers on your site that aren’t googlebot, slurp or bingbot

Build a tool

Contribute to an open source project

Github makes some parts of this really easy. The hard part is working out git

Make something and sell a copy online

Work out who someone anonymous is

Run a conversion rate test end to end

I recommend Optimizely. Don’t worry if you don’t get significant results

Install and play with r

Take some Google Analytics data and strip seasonality

Not creative?

Film and edit some video

Phone camera. iMovie / Premiere Elements. Lower third. Cut a scene. Improve audio.

Make a graphicGet 20 shares

Make an interactive graphic

Build a wireframe

Try Balsamiq. If you can’t think of anything, rework distilled.net homepage & send me it

Before After

Remove someone

from a photo

Rewrite / redesign a landing page

Cheri Percy wrote about our own conversion rate trials and tribulations

Write for a publication you’ve previously bought

Bonus points for calling yourself a “published author”

Thanks.

WILL CRITCHLOW

will.critchlow@distilled.net

@willcritchlow

Image creditshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/seandreilinger/440479819/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cabbit/5443790000/http://www.flickr.com/photos/ballookey/265114990/http://www.flickr.com/photos/latzko/6928444437/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/theseanster93/5027792986/http://www.flickr.com/photos/timriley/246432530/

http://maddieonthings.com/post/45025427385/austin-tx-sxswhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/3356358479/http://www.flickr.com/photos/99411713@N00/6170567978/http://www.flickr.com/photos/mulmatsherm/2221223106/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/New_York_Stock_Exchange_Boardroom_-_New_York_-_Flickr_-_hyku_(3).jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/wrherndon/4630505899/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsroom.jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/jfraissi/3710938389/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alreadytaken/1338047903/http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcpl/5125999205/

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png/1024px-TrakAxPC_Video_Editing_Software_Screenshot.png

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/3300485968/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Seattle_Ugly_Mug_02.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2596039804/http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugosimmelink/1505553447/