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Getting Links with Linkbait – Part 3

The following is Part #3 of a 4 part audio transcribing (part #1 is here and part #2 is here) of an interview with Michael Dorausch, founder of Planet Chiropractic. The audio was transcribed from a phone interview which focused on marketing and tips for building traffic to one’s website.

Andrew: Okay so first thing is I go and offer to blog on other people’s sites. The second thing is I write top ten lists or top seven lists about influential, interesting people. And at the very least it gets me noticed by them and hopefully it gets them to link to me. What else can I do to get links to my site?

Playboy GoDaddy Girls and Michael DorauschMike: What else can you do? Link Bait. Now link bait is going to start getting, now I’m not a master of link bait, and link bait comes in many different ways. I’ll use an example in my industry that’s worked very well for me in the area of video. So video is hot. And people think, wow “I can create a video and put it on YouTube.” Now this was about a year and a half ago. I shot a video during lunch break in my chiropractic office with one of my staff members that took about 90 seconds to shoot. And all it was, was me doing a posture assessment on my staff member, lying on a chiropractic table. And I don’t know if your audience knows what that looks like, but what happened was she was wearing a skirt and high heels. And, we didn’t do anything purposely, you know it was just very innocent “hey we’re going to do a posture check.” But I got into it saying “hey, you’re wearing high heels” and people ask questions about that attractive woman.

We shot the video, loaded it into YouTube and didn’t do much about it. And I started getting calls to my business from people wanting to become clients. And I thought wow that’s impressive, YouTube works. So we started to play around with that and write about the video in our blog and then included it. Well what happened was the video got picked up by other people, and it went viral. So a marketing blog wrote about it and included the video in there, which drove more traffic to our site. And then a search engine website picked up that story and interviewed me and wrote about it again and linked to the video and my site, which drove even more traffic. And then another search engine site wrote about the video again which not only drove more traffic to the video and our site, but now the video shows up in the top results for the search term in my industry. So now, the traffic came in so hard that if you search for the term, like for the term chiropractic, that video shows up within the top twenty results and it’s a very competitive space. So normally you’re going to get an industry that’s like typing medicine. You type chiropractic you’re gonna get government, wikipedia, you know, you’re going to get several government sources. You’re gonna get organizations and things like that. What’s nice about that is Google rotates that video into the results. And since it’s universal it’s not on every single search, but it tends to show up consistently.

Andrew: What Google will link to is your YouTube video on YouTube, or your YouTube video on your site?

Mike: Well, exactly they will link to YouTube, but there’s that branding opportunity there. So they link to YouTube on YouTube, it goes to their property, but the video includes information about our url, which helps us get more traffic, but it also has a link to our site in the description tags over to the right. So it’s one more, and what’s nice about all of these, Andrew, is that these are free ways to drive traffic. We haven’t mentioned anything on buying traffic.

Andrew: Would interviewing other people in my industry help out? So, I have an interview of somebody who is a great speaker in my industry. I just happen to be at a conference, I hit my camera and I interview him, and then post it to YouTube with links back to me and my logo on there.

Mike: Yes. Not only will that work. That is back to the first story of what really exploded our site and our traffic. Back to the original person, when I had somebody at the college when I was a student and we shot plain old video. You can gather up people in your industry and sit down and do a three minute or five minute interview with somebody who is a guru in your industry. And you upload that video to YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be fancy, you can shoot it with an ordinary web-cam and just record it to your computer if you want to do it that way. Upload it to YouTube, make it short, make it sweet. Make sure you throw your url on there so they know what site you’re at, and promote it. Make sure it’s good, that’s the key.

Andrew: If I go to a conference or even at one of the mixergy events that I put together around here I should have a video camera with me and just videotape the interesting people in my industry, right? And then put it up online with a link back to my site and my blog.

Mike: That would be perfect. So, if I was doing your event, would be either yourself or somebody else, would be maybe three minute clips with people that are there, and just get their input on things. And now you would have a library of videos you could be uploading on a weekly basis.

Andrew: Okay, I love this. What else, what about what you and I are doing here, interview people in my industry and put it up on my site and hope they link back?

Mike: Yeah, you know the interesting thing about what we’re doing now is so under-rated. But this is something that even I, myself, is not doing enough. But audio interviews over the phone are really easy now. I mean here we get on Skype, you throw on a recorder, you record your interview, you can get free tools out there to edit, audacity comes to mind which is free open-source audio editing. And you could even edit that and throw in a plug and you know, at the beginning open up with some nice audio “hey, this is Andrew Warner and you’re listening to, you know, my Friday lunch special.” And it just fades into our talk and then it fades out and says don’t forget to visit our website, tell your friends and share this link with others. And the secret though, Andrew, is consistency. So, if we were to do that, that’s great. You want to pick somebody once every other week or once every month, you know when you’re starting out. And say ok, I’m going to add content on a regular basis. And that’s great. Now you’re giving the search engines what they want. You’re giving them blended content: audio, video, text, blogging.

Andrew: Audio seems undervalued by search engines.

Mike: Audio is undervalued, but what’s nice about audio is if you take a little work, you throw the audio on your blog with an mp3 player, which you can pretty much put on any blog for free. And you transcribe some of that audio. So you take the work to sit down and transcribe that and say, you know “here’s the four things Mike and I spoke about.” And you just highlight the four things and say, listen to the audio for the whole thing. And that way you’ve got content for your post.

Andrew: Okay, yeah, that seems like a much easier and cheaper solution than having a transcript up just so the search engines can search for it. You’re saying take the top seven things I’ve learned on this call, put that up, and then a link to the mp3.

Mike: Exactly.

Andrew: Okay, anything else for getting traffic over to a site?

Mike: I think that there we’re pretty good. We covered writing for others. We covered writing about others, which is like attracting others into your circle, so you write nice things about others. We talked about using video. We talked about doing interviews, both audio and video interviews. Given the option I would do video interviews over audio just because you could upload them to YouTube. But if you look around, you’ll find that there are videos uploaded to YouTube that don’t really include any video. They might just show a photograph but have an audio interview.

Andrew: I’ve noticed that actually, and that’s good for some traffic at least, right?

Mike: Sure, and again we’ve got to get back to, we’re talking entrepreneurs here, we’re talking guerilla, you know these are things that have worked for me without startup funding. This is stuff you can do and say “hey what can I do with the tools that are available.?” You know? You haven’t broken the bank yet here, you’re just working guerrilla style. And I think that’s where every entrepreneur starts out. It’s like, how can I do this out of my apartment? How can I do this off of a laptop? And you can accomplish all of this stuff without breaking a budget.

Andrew: Yeah, and you know doing the audio like you said, putting it up on YouTube. It makes it easier for me, I don’t have to go out there and hunt for a program that will play my audio. I won’t have to hunt for a program that’s universal, so that if any of my users want to take it and put it on their site they’ll be able to do it.

Mike: Yes, things have gotten easier, and they’ll continue to get easier. So, with that in mind, that brings us to one of the next things, utilize everything that’s out there. And, here I’m going to give away something that’s been a secret for me, but I would study what’s going on in social media and on other sites in general.

So let’s say, YouTube everyone is familiar with, you should definitely have a channel on YouTube, and you pick the most advanced channel you can get. And again, we’re talking free. So you get a user account, you make it nice, you personalize the page. Create an account that people want to subscribe to. So there’s that. I would do the same thing on flickr. Create an account on flickr. Use the name of your site on flickr so you have the same keywords and your branded. And you’d want to do that on YouTube as well. You use your branding on YouTube, you use your branding on flickr. Maybe create a picassa account, which is a photo account. Photoshop just came out with a new site, so you can have user-generated content on photoshop.com. So you can create your brand on photoshop. If it’s available I would crate your brand on Digg, so you at least have a presence on Digg. I would maybe look for other sites within your industry if you’re in a specific industry. But just taking those, let’s just take flickr and digg for example. Now you’re on flickr and you can upload all these photos from your event. Let’s say you interviewed somebody and you took a few photos or some screen shots. You upload those to flickr. You can put links from flickr to your video. You can put links back to your blog. And you won’t get juice from it, so you won’t get search engine traffic. But you will get users that are searching. And it’s just one more way to build that circle. Build a wider net.

Andrew: Do you recommend buying traffic?

Mike: Personally I don’t. I’ve never bought traffic, so I’m not an expert in that area. But personally my experience is that I don’t think you’re going to get the quality. Really, if you just genuinely get people who are going to support you, then you’re going to do great.

This is the end of Part #3. Part #4 will feature a few success stories.

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