Yes! I see Kenny with the awesome green hat. I’m excited I get to hear him speak rather than moderate this time. I wandered into Links Up! because who doesn’t need links and David Klein is always fun to listen to. I’ve heard of Scott Polk before too so it sounded right up my alley.
Although it was tough. I really wanted to listen to Wil Reynolds in “How to Use PPC in your SEO Goals” because I know he has good info to share… Ahh, hopefully someone is live blogging it.
Hopefully this live blog helps out one person who missed this session. We are up!
Kenny is up first. He goes over his background. He wants to tell a story about personas and results that he got from it. Normally, in these types of sessions, he likes to talk about outreach. A process that he has used for years and he’s going to talk about something that was used for a test. Since it was scrapped it doesn’t matter that he’s talking about it.
Text your email to 323-676-0777 if you want the link to the download… obviously, he’s going to market to you after. 😉
He goes straight to a pic of Donald and Hilary. LOTS of crazy stuff in the media lately especially with politics. He says they look like zombies out there getting so upset. As marketings, we are trying to play to people’s interests and get high quality links out there that reflect well on us.
There was a couple that went viral on XOJane.com and it went wild because it was a liberal girl who fell in love with a conservative. She hates his views, can’t stand what he thinks but the sex was good so she’s going to go with it. Then, a follow up article came on XOJane, it was the same type of thing. He wanted to vote for Trump and they broke up. So the love story went all the way to national tv. It had Juju Chang going over it on ABC News. The funny thing is that the couple was both friends with Kenny. WHAT IS GOING ON?
So.. what’s the outreach method?
- Find outreach targets
- Craft Headlines
- Pitch the content
If you are a decent writer and have good content, it’s the perfect relationship. They get something out of it and so do you.
When you get into this though, someone might look you up when you reach out… and find exactly who and what you are and what you are doing. If you are not bad at it, it works. When you are bad at it, you can’t be yourself.
So going back to the story, Rachel was fake. Kenny created her as he didn’t want to attach his name to his client. His profile got outed on Jezbel, he messed up the pictures. The first photo he had consent from a Russian woman that he knew and he was allowed to use it. The next photo was his buddy’s girlfriend. The TV interview was a personal friend of his and the pictures didn’t match up. You can read it on Jezebel.
It all came down to Adwords policy. You have to have value. He was working in the dating vertical and couldn’t send people through affiliate links (zoosk, elite, match, etc). For it to be accepted in Google, he needed to build the content and reviews and fake a site. Since he’s an SEO, he had writers ready to go, they all had to look real.. It started in November 2015 and was killed pretty quickly. He got some great links from domains.
Key Takeaways
Outreach is about forming relationships. We know the value of links but they are all about relationships.
Content that performs well is always good. It doesn’t matter what it is. With Jezebel, it’s great for Kenny because the content worked for him. It was fake but it’s not going to harm him because people looking for him will realize what he was able to do. Don’t worry too much about crafting the perfect thing but if it performs well, it’s always good.
If you lack substance, get creative. It’s easy to work with someone who has a good voice who is writing on a blog. It’s easy to teach them and watch it go along. If you don’t have something like that, then you really have to get creative.
Kenny wants you to get links. If you want to talk about it further, text him or email.
Next up is Scott Polk from Marketing Nomads.
Scott goes over his background and how long he’s been at PubCon. Earlier he went into a case study (darn, I missed it). So he wants to talk about why you should fire your SEO agency.
Not good:
- Article directories
- Directory submissions
- Link wheels
- Private Link Networks
- Hacking into websites
This crap still happens? (Yes!) Fire them.
Scott goes over some of those examples and how to spot them. Just for fun, he went and looked at how many EDU sites have Buy Viagra on it. 24,500 results have it which means they were all hacked.
Someone in the audience comments that there would be big business in cleaning all that up! Oh yes, indeed.
Scott is out. DK is up.
First of all, he wants to know who everyone is in the audience. Out of 110, 4 or 5 are link builders. 50% are SEOs. Another handful are Agency. Now he’s looking for site owners or a marketing department which is about half again.
He pitches the Pubcon Poker tournament because it’s great for link building.
David goes over his background and tries to get the audience going. I feel everyone is sleeping a bit.
He wants to go over what it takes to do this thing. Who is smarter than the Google engineers?
DK asks who knows how to get a link from Huffington Post and BusinessInsider? More than half the people know that it’s $2,000 to get a link from the HuffPo and who to call to get from BusinessInsider. If the link is easy to get, Google watches those patterns. That’s why if you get a link from the directory, it’s just not that valuable. Scarcity to Google is extremely valuable.
He goes into examples. Trying to rank for payday loans, go 1 degree out to topics that might like that. Look at those inbound links, velocity of links, and find a topic. Now that you have the topic and you create an amazing piece of content about it.
Go get their contact information (don’t use software, it’s illegal from the CanSpam law) and go ask them to look at the content. Since Google says they don’t want to see guest posting, DK doesn’t like to do it.
DK uses the audience to throw out topics and people help out with the tote bags for examples.
Todd takes over and asks your favorite tool:
Ahrefs
Google (free)
Link Research Tools (paid)
Kenny likes Majestic but the tool would be using advanced operators for search to find targets.
DK likes Ahrefs, authoritylabs, link research tools
A few more Q and A’s happen but I didn’t write them down! Off to Remarketing.
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