The Barry Schwartz Effect

Posted in Search Engine Land, Link Building |

Given that this site is focused on links, I want to document my own link building endevours, and what better way to do that than to use LinkJuicy.com as an case study. Hopefully this will provide insights you can put to use in your own link marketing.

I’ll document as I go. Any suggestion, feel free to comment.

Strategy

OK. I have a new site. I have no visitors. At all. I know a few people.

As much as is possible, I want to grow links in an organic way . Hopefully, people will link to the content if they find it interesting. So my main strategy, in the words of Seth Godin, is to try and "be interesting". I think the web is generally a better place if interesting stuff is seen ahead of not-interesting stuff.

However, the problem on the web, as in life, is that being interesting, or having "quality content", means different things to different people. "Quality" content doesn’t rise to the top by virtue of possessing the attribute "quality". If it did, how could anyone explain the singing career of Britney Spears?

So, given a very dense web, I’m also going to need to push content, and pull people here, by way of marketing channels. Hopefully, we’ll find out, along the way, which channels and techniques work better than others.

The desired end result? If you’re wondering about link marketing strategy, I’d like this site to spring to mind.

Step One

All good things on the web start by "being interesting".

To achieve this end, I’m going to be inviting some of the webs top marketers to give their views on link building and link marketing. I started by asking a good friend of mine and highly knowledgeable chap, Ralph Tegtmeier, to do an interview. It pays to have interesting friends.

Publicity wise, I decided to seed from one point: Barry Schwartz of SEL - another good friend and top chap. I consider SEL to be at the authoritative center of the search universe, and they’re very well connected. So, I asked Barry what he thought of the site, and if he found it interesting, perhaps he could tell others. Subsequently, I submitted a story to Sphinn, and posted an announcement on both V7N Forum (at which I’m a moderator) and SearchEngineBlog.com (which is another site I own).

The result? Barry and SEL have already sent a great flow of traffic here. The blog has peen picked up and linked to by a number of SEO blogs. We are the top story on Sphinn - with no encouragement or "networking" from me - received some nice comments, and been Spunn ten over 22 times (and counting). Curiously, StumbleUpon has sent me the most visitors. I have no idea how that happened, but no doubt it is another Barry side-effect.

So, that’s off to a good start.

Lessons learned so far? It pays to know Ralph and Barry Although I knew that already.

I guess the wider point is - when link building, it pays to a) have interesting content and b) to leverage your existing networks.