Will Critchlow, Founder of Distilled, and the presentation’s final speaker, came out with a bang. His opening statement: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Any sufficiently scalable tactic is indistinguishable from black hat).”
He discussed the idea of running your business model like a Flywheel, vs. Pedaling uphill. As an aside, read Good to Great for more on this. The idea is that you keep pushing at first and then let it take off till it won’t stop even if you wanted to.
However, you must be willing to give up short-term gain…
You begin to blog on day 1 when you’re unknown – and nobody reads it. You have to be willing to give up short-term gains for long-term wins.
Warren Buffett was asked when is the best time to invest in your pension. His answer, “20 yrs ago, but if you haven’t done it, best time is today”.
A highlight of his presentation was comparing the statistical data showing how many new pages of content the biggest sites need to create before acquiring 1 new link. You’ll be shocked by the numbers:
Site and Articles Needed To Acquire A New Link
BBC 12
NY Times 18
Mahalo 30
eHow 47
Youtube 150
Facebook 400
Cracked.com 2
So simply put, better OR more content will improve your linking. If you’re thinking of leaning towards more content, than Will highly suggested you read the Wired article on how Demand Media Works.
Basically they find the KW for a Topic, turn that into a catchy headline, and send it off to someone to write it, then run it through a plagiarism checker, and publish.
According to Will, scaling becomes difficult because managing the Bloggers and writers, not because of finding them. What to do? Add a level of automation. Have one person just managing the subject matter experts.
Another fantastic take-away is that apparently in the journalism field, journalists don’t write their own headlines – Copy Editors do that. Apparently, the mindset that is good at finding errors and grammar mistakes are usually good at writing headlines. Use the writers to write compelling articles.
Have your editors, have your writers, and have your headline writers. Build a system and separate roles.
Actionable tips: Scale your relationships using a CRM for link building. Check out Gorkana for a database of writers and Bloggers. Pay for the service so that when you have great content you can reach out to them easily.
Connect with Bloggers on social media, which is much easier and works better than cold emailing a blogger for content placement. As a matter of fact, Will says to leverage those relationships by writing a post about how you met said blogger through twitter by re-tweeting their stuff, eventually asking and getting a guest post. Approach the blogger and ask them to link to your new post about how you met. Two links for the price of one – sort of.
Friend or Follow will help you find your top followers by influence. And as Tom said earlier, have a wish list of people.
