As you might already know, link baits are content, tools or webpages specifically created to pull in links and traffic from other websites and popular social media websites like Digg or Reddit.
Creating an effective link bait can take a lot of time and effort and I think initial control over the distribution process is very important. You want someone who has influence or connections to submit or promote your link bait to the social community you are targeting.
This increases the potential for eventual success on many levels. Submitting your link bait using a very weak account on social voting or news sites will not allow you get the prominence you deserve, primarily because there isn’t enough initial support to propel your link bait into the limelight.
However, sometimes even power users might not have the ability to make your link bait go viral. Blame it on the saturated of news, the inherent bias against your domain or the inappropriateness of your article.
There are dozens of reasons why your bait didn’t succeed but trying to pinpoint them definitively is futile, particularly when some of the factors lie outside of your control (e.g. editorial/management prejudice).
Why You Should Resubmit Your Content for Social Media Popularity
Re-submission or re-insertion of link baits and valuable content into the social community gives your website a second chance. Didn’t make it big before? Now you have another shot. Note that there are also some concrete reasons why you should consider resubmission as a promotional strategy:
Correct Weak Submissions. You might have submitted your own linkbait with a new profile that doesn’t have much clout. Or someone else with a small circle of influence might have submitted it before you. Even though your article is awesome, it may still go unnoticed on the social site. Resubmission with a stronger profile is a good way to bring it back from the dead for round two.
Resuscitate Your Archives. Maybe you’ve written great content in the past but never bothered about social media marketing. Your favorite articles might have already been submitted by other users but now that you’re more social media savvy, it’s time to dig out some of the older, timeless articles to give them another go-around on the social sites.
Feed Current Interests. Say you have an old Apple article which intricately explores the history of all their mp3 players. You’ve just found out today that Apple is releasing a next generation iPod with great new features. Pull out your old article, do some edits and resubmit it to ride the social media buzz.
Kickstart a New Domain. If you’ve moved all your articles and content over to a new domain or brand, resubmission is an excellent way to immediately get some attention to your new website. All your permalinks will be different, which will faciliate the resubmission process. This was something I personally realized after completely restructuring my category and permalinks.
Remember, the aim of every linkbait is to bring in links and traffic. Re-submission doesn’t deviate from this principle. Ergo, your content must still be incredibly appealing and link worthy. This must be the number one rule to keep in mind.
You’re essentially giving your article or webpage another chance. You’re asking the social media audience to take another look, because they might find something valuable that was overlooked the first time round.
How to Resubmit Your Content for Social Media Popularity
Take a stroll through your site archives to examine the webpages or articles you have created. Look at the ones that are exceptionally well written or still relevant to the current climate. News-oriented or topical posts will probably not work well with audiences who expect content that is relatively fresh or new.
You can also make minor (or major) edits to the articles you want to re-submit, in order to increase their relevance or attractiveness. This will also legitimize your article, particularly if it received a decent amount of exposure the other time, while failing to eventually develop massive popularity on the specific social site.
Pick some of the articles you like and then submit it to the social news websites through a strong social profile. Submit it yourself or get someone else to do it for you. Some of the social websites block the old url so create a new URL for your linkbait page and 301 redirect the old URL.
And you’re done. Depending on the strength of your article and the influence of the submitter, you will now have a better chance going big on any social website.
More Articles on Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies
This first social media marketing strategy is something that anyone can implement for success. I’ve been meaning to write about resubmissions for a while but haven’t had the chance to do so until now. A special hat tip to Chris Winfield, who reminded me of this method in a conversation we had earlier today.
I’ll be writing a little more on social media marketing and will be providing more tips on how you can better improve your potential for getting traffic, attention and links through the various social media outlets.
As you might have heard, Twitter launched their own photo sharing service in August, which is hosted by Photobucket. Since then Twitter has obvious seen a huge rise in their photo sharing service and the third party Twitter photo clients that were dominating the market are starting to die.
Market share of all the major third party Twitter photo sharing services have dropped, Twitpic, Yfrog and more. It simply now seems that these services are finding it very hard to diversify and innovate within the space. These services really need to change their model or core service or they are going to fade into obscurity very quickly.
As males are usually the ones playing video games (or so it’s assumed), it makes sense that guys would make up the majority of the gaming industry. The number of women employed in the field is paltry in comparison. However, the Entertainment Software Association conducted research in 2011 showing the number of females in the industry is on the rise, and women now make up 42 percent of all gamers. Females over the age of 18 are one of the quickest growing gamer demographics. Although video game studies aren’t so prevalent a field yet that there are any PhD options online, dedicated game development education is also growing and seeing an influx of female students. Despite this swelling of the ranks, women still have a hard time finding their way into the professional field of video games. Not only do they remain in the minority, they’re also paid less than their male counterparts.
Females are rarely treated with the same respect as males in the gaming industry, both in online and real-life interactions. Women working in the world of gaming aren’t taken as seriously as men. What continues to makes things even worse is the prevalent portrayal of females in video games: many are dressed in provocative clothing to accentuate extra-large busts, like the archetypal Lara Croft. Tammy Yap, a video game programmer for six years, says she asked one of her male colleagues (she was the only female) why women were always dressed like Vegas show girls. After all, this might offend some women and drive them away from gaming. The reply she received was: “What difference does it make? Women don’t play games.” Her colleague’s retort serves as a good example of the general attitude of most men when it comes to women gamers.
Unfortunately, female gamers aren’t getting their opinions attended to in the video game world. With so few women working in the industry, the video game market is close to being entirely ruled by men. Without having a female representative making her voice heard in the industry, female gamers won’t find as many games that they’re interested in on the market. Famous video game producer Denise Fulton thinks if more women played video games, then more women would start landing jobs in the industry. The consensus is that they would if more games were available that were more appealing to female players.
Playing video games is still branded as a boyish hobby. Women looking to enter the gaming industry already have it tough, but the rate at which they are finding jobs may stagnate if fellow female gamers aren’t willing to step up. Thankfully, this path has already begun being forged by prominent gaming women such as Morgan Webb and Denise Fulton, and indeed the evidence suggests the number of girls playing games is rising. Perceptions are already changing, and it may be only a matter of time before women’s presence in the game industry better reflects their growing numbers among players.
Spotify, can you please add Gapless playback to your music player! This is one key feature that has been missing from Spotify from the very beginning and I really want to see it added very soon.
When reverse phone look up services were first introduced, they seemed completely frivolous. Why use a reverse phone look up service when everyone has caller-ID these days? While the service may superficially seem far fetched, it actually has some pretty cool uses.
These services, such as Anywho’s reverse phone number finder, essentially finds the person who belongs to a phone number you may have. Why would anyone have a phone number, but not a person attached to that number? For plenty of reasons, including:
Prank-Calls
Prank calling is predominately a thing of the past thanks to Caller-ID, but it still happens more than you think, and it can be quite annoying to repeatedly receive calls late into the night. Instead of answering the phone and threatening whoever is calling you with hopes of scaring them into stopping, simply type their number into a serve like Anywho, find their info, and send it over to your local police station. Those pesky calls will be sure to stop in no time.
Telemarketing
Telemarketers are some of the most relentless callers on the planet, and have been known to contact the same individual up to three times in the same day. If you find yourself receiving frequent calls from mysterious numbers which you are sure are telemarketers, don’t answer to receive an earful of sales pitches. Reverse phone look up the number to find out the exact company name and then put yourself on their no call list. If they continue to harass you, you can then take their information to the BBB.
Found Numbers
Do you ever come across numbers that you have written on miscellaneous papers or notes. Instead of having to call the number and giving the person the tenth degree before figuring out who they are, you can now simple type the number in to a reverse phone look up service. You may find out that the number is innocuous and simply that of your family physician, or you may find that it is the number of that man or woman who wouldn’t stop bothering you at your last conference – the one whose number you wrote down simply to be polite.
Services like reverse phone look up exist because they actually do have a few great uses. If they were completely worthless, companies, like the one that runs AnyWho, would waste their resources to keep the site up and running. The service is free too, which gives you all the more reason to use it the next time an unidentified number comes across your smart phone.
Most people who own iPhones are most likely also sporting iPods, iPads, and other Apple products. The brand seems to make extreme loyalists out of its users; however, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Apple and all of its products are the best.
Apple is great for users because the products sync up nicely and offer an easy-to-use interface. While this is great for those of us who aren’t incredibly tech savvy, it does leave much to be desired by those who want greater control over the devices that they often rely upon to get them through basic day-to-day tasks.
Cloud Computing Services have recently been brought into the forefront by Apple’s release of the iCloud in June. While the iCloud is a great service for those who are looking for a place to store all of their information, many are forgetting that they already use cloud services on a regular basis.
Email, GoogleDocs, and other programs such as Flickr are all based in cloud computing. The only difference between these programs and the iCloud is that the iCloud provides one central location for all of these programs to meet. With the iCloud you can store music, photos, and documents all in one convenient location and then access these files from anywhere.
While the iCloud sounds great, it does come with a monthly price which can be quite a deterrent – especially when there are other free or more inexpensive programs available. Google and Amazon will both offer similar products for significantly cheaper prices, but the programs to look for are those that offer open source software.
Both Rackspace and OpenStack offer cloud computing services for free, and they provide some of the great features associated with other clouds that cost upwards of $25 a month. By remaining open source, these types of programs also allow for quicker updates and the streamlining of problem solving should any issues arise. The users who use these programs actually care about them and want to make sure that they offer the best service available.
While Apple and Amazon may offer a great product, you can bet that these companies are more concerned with the profit rather than the product.
So before you haul off and buy a subscription to a cloud, consider what you are actually going to be using it for. If you own an iPod and a MacBook and want a place to store all your iTunes, then paying for a piece of the iCloud may be worth the expense. But if you simply want a place to store all your files so that you can access them from anywhere, consider some of the free and equally functioning and secure cloud services provided by other companies.
Computers are just like anything else, they need attention and maintenance. Even though Mac’s are known the world over to be reliable and quality computers, they still need some pretty routine things done. Just like a car, you can’t perpetually ignore it and expect that it will run forever. Here’s a list of some of the routine operations you should be doing regularly to your Mac so you can make it run better and longer:
Disk Space
Checking your disk space is the first thing you should do. Every model comes with a different hard drive size. You can go online and look up your model and see how big your hard drive is. You can check this simply by double clicking on your HD icon on your desktop. In the bottom bar of the window that pops up, you’ll be able to see how much is left. If you have less than half of your space left, then you should probably start cleaning up your hard drive. Go through all of your files and applications and see what you don’t use or programs that you just don’t need anymore. Rarely does anyone do this and all that extra junk is cluttering up your computer and making it run slower. You should be doing this on a regular basis.
Programs
If you’re noticing slow performance, look at how many programs you run at any one time. Some people set their computer to automatically start programs when the computer is turning on. Though this feature is handy for those who need specific programs all the time, the majority of users simply have too many programs running at once. If you only open up the programs that you need at the time, then you’ll see a noticeable difference in the way your computer runs.
Widgets
Widgets are the little icons that rest below the screen. They’re quick links to the applications and the sit in your dock. If you’ve ever seen someone with practically every application on their computer just resting in their doc, then you should realize that these widgets consume critical power from the processor and memory. You might have thought that it’s harmless to keep all of those applications resting in your dock, but in actuality, it’s taking up a lot of your computer’s resources, even when they’re not active.
Disk Utility
This is another way to speed up your Mac’s performance. You can go to the disk utility and select your computer’s internal hard drive and then click Repair Permission. This will take some time, but the results will be substantial. Doing this every month will check and fix your Mac’s internal hard disk space and do wonders for its operations optimization.
All of these steps are good to do regularly in order to keep things running smoothly. If you ever have an issue with performing any of these tasks, then you can go online for some Technical Support. Not everyone is computer savvy and there’s nothing wrong with that. You could also look online for other ways that you can optimize your computer’s performance.
I just came across a great interview by Jimmy Fallon with Sean Parker at the NExTWORK conference. Sean Parker is the co-founder of Napster, former Facebook President and now on the board of Spotify as well as being a VC.
