Linkbaiting Case Study

Posted: July 29th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Linkbait Tests | 5 Comments »

As part of this outing of Linkbait Coaching – which will only run for a short period – I decided to put my money where my mouth was and build a bit of linkbait form the ground up, with members of the coaching programme having full access to the success or disaster of the event.

I decided to go with a brand new domain that would remain secret, although it was shared with members of Linkbait Coaching. Because I wanted to keep the domain a secret and so not contaminate the test, I decided not to use friends who I could depend on for links. This one was going to be done cold.

I decided on a one page website format, I found something interesting and decided to put my twist on it and give it a fresh theme. The production process took about a day, but I did think about it for about a week or so. I find letting the idea rattle around the head helps refine it.

I did a submit to digg and twitter and then someone else naturally submitted to Stumbleupon and Reddit.

It get a little action on twitter, relatively nothing on digg, well it wasn’t an infographic so… Twitter was actually quite nice to it and got a few retweets nauturally, from users with large number of followers who fit the profile of people who would like this kind of content.

The retweets have been constant, which is interesting as most of the campaigns I do tend to have a big uptick and then go fallow. But, I think because the content I created is actually quite useful for people and serves a need, it has an evergreen and not just-for-the-moment attraction.

But shouldn’t all content be like that? No, you need to mix it up, there is no guarantee that any content will definately work at the level you hope it will and so you create various content types in a variety of styles. This also helps the creative process which is vital and must be nourished and protected.

Lets talk stats.

The site was created on July the 10th
As of now Yahoo is reporting 225 links

Two PR 7 (both are Japenese sites)
4 PR 6′s (there are more but I stopped counting)
I will publish a full list in a month when the links have settled.

Half the sites seem to be foriegn and of Asian origin, this is proably because the content did not rely on text but a visual image and sound.

Total Visits to date, half of these are from Stumbleupon.
52,765
Pages/Visit
1.18
Avg. Time on Site
00:00:25
% New Visits
93.15%
Bounce Rate
83.75%

I will upload more info as we go along, it seems to one of those bits of web content that keeps on gathering links. I really didn’t think it would be this successful.

Although it’s not ranking for a money keyword and is not useful for much, it is useful as a demonstration of what linkbait can do. I’m just glad it worked as it was a live case study.

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