MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

When writing a blog or content for your site, who do you write for? Expert blogs say that you need to consider your target audience and write for them, but who are you targeting? To know who you’re targeting, you need to know what your content or blog aims to achieve.

Blog posts can help you achieve several things: they can increase links, or focus on quality links, increase traffic, or focus on the right kind of traffic. They can be sensationalist and heighten your visibility or brand awareness, they can help you get bookmarks, and they can impact on the durability of your site/product/marketing campaign.

Once you have a goal in mind, Wiep Knol recommends that you determine how you’re going to go about drawing the right kind of attention. This, in essence, means that you have to determine who you’re targeting, and how best to approach them.

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz) coined the term “linkerati” to refer to the people you should aim to impress. They’re your target audience, as they are the people with the power to make or break your site or blog. According to Fishkin, you can’t underestimate the importance of bloggers (especially popular and high profile bloggers, who are the experts of your industry). They reach a wide audience and are very important when it comes to spreading reviews and opinions that will have a direct impact on your business. Other members of the linkerati include: forum contributors, web news writers, content creators, resource editors, journalists, social taggers, and viral connectors.

The linkerati have also been described as connectors , who link related and sometimes unrelated information from all over the Internet. This makes them very powerful allies, provided you can win them over to your side.

They aren’t easily won, however. Because they spend enormous chunks of their lives reading content on the web, they’re finely attuned to what’s bad and what’s good, and they have no patience for what’s not good. To catch their attention you have to be original, occasionally controversial and you need to have intimate knowledge of your subject.

Obviously this kind of expertise doesn’t happen overnight. You need to invest vast amounts of time and energy to become broadly knowledgeable in your field. Not only must you be prepared to spend hours researching topics, you must also be willing to spend hours honing your content. Perfecting sentences and nailing down killer headlines will help you in your quest to conquer virtual space. Slapdash pish-posh will not.

Lisa Barone talks about the difference between link bait and link magnets. Link magnets are link bait all grown up. The purpose of link magnets is not to merely attract attention, but to attract the right kind of attention from the right kind of people – in other words, the linkerati. To create successful link magnets we have to go back to research, and lots of it. We need to find out what content works best where and what content works best in our industries.

Barone says that the difference between a link magnet and link bait is how targeted it is. Link magnets focus more on quality, while link bait is more about quantity. It’s only after careful research that you’ll know how best to optimise your content, and which angle you should use to attract the linkerati’s attention.

We go back to Wipe Knol, who suggests that choosing the right hook, approach or magnet is vital when it comes to attracting attention and achieving your content goals. He sums up some of the most effective angles or “hooks”, as well as their areas of potential.

· News hooks are very time and research intensive. You need to be either very on the ball or very lucky to be the first to publish breaking news and your expertise needs to be unquestionable. How else will you be able to recognise a rising trend of great import when you see it? News is good for creating buzz and attracting traffic in the form of loyal readers. It’s not that good in terms of durability. People get bored easily and you need to keep coming up with original content to keep them interested.

· Taking the informative approach, i.e. educating people about your field, will lead to high quality links and, provided you prove yourself to be a creditable source of information, will improve your brand. This approach also demands a lot of time, and once again, your expertise needs to be beyond reproach. It’s more durable than news, as people love to learn and will keep coming back, as well as recommend you to others.

· An entertainment-based approach is ideal for pure fun and building hype. Expect lots of links but don’t expect lots of quality links. For obvious reasons this approach is not great in terms of durability, as novelty wears off and people generally prefer substance over fluff.

· Controversy is great for creating brand awareness and attracting traffic, but Knol cautions that this approach should only be used if you already have a strong brand or have an easily disposable one. It can backfire, as criticising others effectively places a bull’s eye on your back for others to target you. Still, if all you are interested in is amassing links, controversy is a pretty good way to go. All links count, even the bad ones, just don’t expect this approach to last.

· Eye candy, according to Knol, deserves its own category. Powerful images, beautiful men and women and mind-blowing site design all fall under this banner. This approach is very good at attracting traffic, but once curiosity is satisfied, people seldom return, so it’s not that good at attracting quality traffic.

These categories aren’t set in stone. They’re flexible, interchangeable and can be mixed-and-matched. The key to a successful online campaign, according to Knol, is to find the hook or approach that best suits your goal. Then you need to optimise the hell out of it to make the linkerati sit up and take notice.

The inescapable point is that you can’t sit back and expect online success to come to you. Scraping the bottom of the content barrel with top 10 lists and targeting the front page of Digg won’t bring you the linkerati you so desperately need. Proper SEO takes hard work (blood), research by the ton (sweat) and no small amount of creativity (tears). But anything worth doing is worth doing well, and in the end, a job well done is its own reward. It has to be because we sure aren’t in this business for the money.