Chris brought a nice change of pace to the seminar as a whole. His agency mainly deals with big brands, so their approach is a little different, though much can be learned, even for those who primarily work with small and medium sized businesses.
His approach is straightforward: the client came to you for SEO services. Let them know upfront that you know what you’re doing and to make sure they are ok with putting their brand behind it, and what red-tape will need to be jumped through to get things moving.
It turns out, from the discussion during Chris’ Q&A session that many of the infographics we’ve seen lately have come from none other than Chris Bennett’s agency, 97th floor. It’s not surprising then that the majority of his presentation revolved around the creation and distribution of infographics.
When thinking about outreach, make sure to think about how you can scale. It’s not unrealistic to have a person managing just prospects with someone else managing writers and content. But, be sure to share the success with the entire team and keep everyone aware of the success of each project, to keep everyone motivated!
So you have a beautiful infographic, now what?
Time to go hunting.
Use Advanced Google Searches. (Not sure how? No worries. Check out Ontolo’s Link Building Query Generator). Find Blog lists – http://Invesp.com/blog-rank – Look for blogs that have had guest posts before; they will likely be more willing to allow another guest post.
When reaching out to blogs with your content for placement, don’t be afraid to show them examples of what you’ve done before, as a matter of fact, Chris encouraged showing Social Success of past content as a leverage to get them to agree to do a guest post.
This should go without saying, but if you are doing a guest post make sure to make it exclusive to their blog. Bloggers do not take kindly to guest posts that are not unique to their site.
How To’s, Guides, Top 10s, are all really good types of content for guest posts. That being said, the point of all this is link building right? 95% of links will be in the Author Bio, which is fine. Eventually, as your relationships solidify and develop, you’ll be able to put links in the content and no one will say a word.
Guest Virals
Guest virals are those types of content that are so good, that you almost don’t want it to go to another site. BUT they’re perfect for sites that are huge in your niche, have high PageRank/mozRank, millions of inbound links, etc. so in essence you need this quality level to get on there.
Unfortunately, you will likely need to offer more than just the typical trade of content for links. In this case, you should offer for your team to promote it socially, even be willing to pay for stumbleupon ads to get the ball rolling.
A great example: The Top 10 Most Ridiculous Items Taken Away By The TSA.
(Notice that guest virals tend not to be “How-To” in nature).
Also be mindful of the content you produce and how it might go viral. If the viral content is on a site that is overtly commercial, it may not take off on the social web and become viral. A finance company Chris worked with had a stellar infographic (Obama’s $787 Billion Stimulus Plan), but their main site was too commercial, so they launched the infographic on a site that more content-oriented.
So what makes a good infographic?
- GOOD data/info
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Topical
- Complex Ideas ARE GREAT. (Doesn’t need to be sexy, or cool, or edgy, it can be from boring industries, those are actually quite perfect for this).
- Absolutely NO False/Confusing Data.
- If it will lead to wrong conclusion, better not to do it at all.
Infographics are not dead. Chris kindly explains that crappy content is dead. Fake infographics. (Read: Info[crap]hics).
As proof that complex ideas are ideal, Chris presented an infographic a client of his, mozy.com, had him put together. This company had more photos stored on their servers than facebook. They began throwing around the term ‘petabyte’ and when Chris asked what exactly a ‘petabyte’ was, an idea was born.
How Much Is A Petabyte – Infographic
Lesson to be learned: Don’t feel like you can’t have viral success in EXTREMELY boring industries.
Some other infographics Chris highlighted: Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page & How To Win Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Lastly, after getting your content placed on someone’s site, be sure to thank them for linking, comment on their other stuff, follow them on twitter, basically anything that keeps you on their mind. Next time you have a killer piece of content you hit them up.
Test everything, hit hard, and be in a lot of places.
