As an experiment, Eric’s creating a list of SAbloggers who link to his popular Mobile Q&Asite.
This got me thinking about the most basic and easily replicatable viral formula for online social media:
- Offer a prize in return for people linking to you from their blog or social-networking page.
- Set criteria – e.g. “Valid for first 100 mentions only”
- Tell the blogger to notify you when it’s up.
- Follow through on your promise of reward.
You can really get creative with this structure – for example, by asking people to create their own banner ads as links for the promotion/competition.
Do you think that this type of promotion will pollute the conversations happening in the blogosphere?
I saw a much more effective method on John Chow’s (http://www.johnchow.com/) site the other day. Unfortunately I can’t find the actual page, BUT, I can explain.
He offered people prizes for linking to him, in the same way that you are describing here, but much more efficiently I think. He made it so that you have to add him to technorati, which enables you to see precisely who is linking to you. That’s rather cool don’t you think?
I agree with you wholly, it will work, and if you keep the prize small enough then your ROI should be much higher than the expenditure of the prizes, maybe not monetary, but defenitely in pagerank and google love.
Another nice idea, which is a sort of adaption from an offer some folks on some webbie I have no recall about did. They offered a product, and were willing to give you a discount on the product if you link to them, BUT, the discount worked on a sliding scale based on the pagerank of your site linking to them. SO, if you do the linking scheme, then you offer a bigger prize if webbie linking to you has the highest pagerank. Because we all know that higher pagerank sites linking to you is good for your health. This whole thing can be easily calculated with several free scrippies out there. w00t!
Google Juice is valuable stuff!
I really like the idea of rewarding people who Technorati favourite you. Another iteration of that could include adding your site to del.icio.us with a tags that describe you well.
The ranked link thing is a great idea too. A promotion I did a while back involved people getting a free muffin and coffee at a new restaurant (Caffeinespot.wordpress.com) in return for linking to the blog… the response was great, but some people created new blogs simply to claim the free muffin and coffee… sneaky!
Thanks very much for your input Adrian!
LOL… was on John Chow’s site this morning, the blogosphere is so tiny
interesting to stretch the parameters & see what’s possible – I know quite a few guys who have done some interesting experiments like this.
Paul O’Flaherty (whom I adore madly for including me in his podcast) is an Irish blogger in Denmark ( http://oflaherty.com ) who is well-versed in playing with the outer edges of algorithm testing. The results and how quickly Google moves to fill the gaps are intriguing to watch!
Let’s see where this1 with mobile Q&A goes