There was some buzz about social marketing lately, and, coupled with the link bait issue, it may form quite an impression that creating content to spread virally and to get links and Diggs is the way to go.
However, you also need to consider the marketing strategy and brand image of your product or service. Let’s see how you can leverage the word of mouth aspect of marketing to your advantage.
Creating viral content
Though it may be tempting to create content, tools, audios and videos just to get some quick links from the linking people, it should be much more helpful in the long run to create longer lasting content. More quality content, such as research articles, product comparisons or any other content that truly helps the customers can provide much more value to the customers and will result in a greater response.
Of course, great content will get links as well, but it will be getting links not because it was designed just for links, but because people truly appreciated it. Also, real, eternal content tends to get more links overtime, so it is another advantage of quality content as well.
the Digg part
As you probably know, Digg is a popular social bookmarking service, where people can submit the stories they find interesting. The most interesting stories are dugg’ by other members and have a chance to appear on the homepage. Once on the home page, the story may get thousands of visitors.
Online marketers have enjoyed this behaviour and try to create stories just to get to the homepage and get those amount of visitors. Some also create circles of friends just to get their stories to the home page of Digg. That’s why the Digg algorithm is as guided as Google’s and is aimed to prevent any cheating of the system.
As mentioned before you should focus on creating quality content for your visitors and promote it naturally. Submitting anything to Digg is self-serving, while a really interesting story may be normal.
Also, apart from being frowned upon by quality-focused marketers, the Digg strategy has one drawback. Mostly, the most popular stories on Digg are related to technology and tend to be on topics of Google, Microsoft, various tools, videos, scoop stories, etc. That’s why it makes it not worth trying to get to the homepage for the majority of the (business) site owners with informational or educational content.
And that’s why it is yet another reason to focus on creating unique, quality content for your visitors.
Conclusion
While it may be impossible to focus on absolute quality from the start, it is a good target. You can find the right balance between quality and begging for links with your article, which will fit your marketing perspective and your business.
Of course, this shouldn’t stop you from creating useful tools or videos or any other material. But you can reap the most benefits from the viral aspect by truly focusing on the benefits to the customers. This will make your viral marketing much more effective.
Read more and discuss the topic at “Is link bait ruining the Web?” at the Cre8asite Forums.
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Yuri Filimonov is a freelance website optimization and usability consultant, who writes about improving websites to gain more visitors,
customers and profit at his blog, http://www.ImproveTheWeb.com.
