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When you are running a start-up there are a lot of firsts and a lot of records set. Either way yesterday was a banner day for us a piece of content that we ran about what not to send out in a press release. I saw the initial piece on the The Next Web and went to the source.
My personal reaction was all the indication that I needed to know that this was the perfect place to mine for content gold. It was topical, and most importantly uninformed and stupid. Hate to point that out, but it is hilariously funny how bad of a fail this is. Especially if you are motivated enough to go look at the Twitter account itself. It’s obviously an RSS feed set to auto publish with a ‘RT’ stuck in front of each title. Zero engagement, contrived vanity metric, and let me draw attention to myself. And 157 followers, SEO Bandwagon has 270+ or so far, but we aren’t bragging on it.
What we are bragging about is how we were to promote a great piece of shareable content. It was our best piece of content in terms of traffic before it was even indexed by Google.
Sharable Headline – really helped on Twitter to get traffic. It reads like an Onion article and that probably helped with some familiarity. Who hasn’t shared something from the Onion? Of course I’ll do it again, that was hilarious.
Tweets about “https://seobandwagon.com/2013/local-man-idea-press-release/”
Find the right audience – we did poorly on reddit and on our own social networks, relatively new with a limited, but focused following, but when we got on Hacker News we got a couple of upvotes and sent out on a couple of Twitter accounts with thousands of followers and they got more shares.
Authority – If you don’t have any, find someone who does. Stand next to them, and make sure someone sees you or take a picture. Familiarity doesn’t just breed contempt, it can also develop trust. Hacker News + The Onion people are a lot more likely to send that along to their followers and audience.
Do It Again – How do you follow up with your best piece of content ever? Do it again. Bill Watterson churned out Calvin & Hobbes 7 days a week for years, keep writing, keep creating, and give your audience what they want. It’s a lot of pressure to be “on” every day, but the job demands it.
Don’t Overdo It – It was my first submission to Hacker News, that probably helped with their community. Don’t go back to the well too much, it will run out.
Quality will pay off in dividends. Be unique and get your links out in front of where your audience is. Twitter is an easy example. Find other high traffic sites that align with your demographic audience also.
Remember high traffic doesn’t always equal high conversions, you need to be prepared to capture the information
And remember, just our best so far. The best is yet to come.
