ThinkVisibility, Linkworthy Stories and a Link Opportunity to Share
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ThinkVisibility, Linkworthy Stories and a Link Opportunity to Share

7th September 2011

I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at the recent Think Visibility conference, and did so on behalf of SEO PR Training, a second company that I run in partnership with Claire Thompson. By way of background, at SEO PR Training we put our mutual PR experience to use offering training for SEO professionals seeking to learn more about the media knowledge and skills utilised by PR professionals, that can be turned to our (SEO) advantage to secure high-quality links in online editorial.

If you weren’t at ThinkVisibility and are interested in “How to Find the Angle“, I wrote up my presentation on the SEO PR Training website. In summary we looked at what constitutes “newsworthy” including (amongst other things) stories that have human interest. After my session a webmaster/publisher whom some of you may be familiar with, namely Jason Dale of Loquax competition directory – came to speak to me, as he was in agreement with a particular point I made, and wanted to make me aware of a good link opportunity on that site, which I can share with the community. First, a little context…

Competitions

Competitions can be useful marketing activities generating publicity, newsworthy stories and of course links. I didn’t labour the rudiments of this mechanism for link-generation as much has already been said at recent conferences about the first-order results. My fellow blogger Sam Crocker presented on this subject at a past BrightonSEO event, therefore I suggest you check out his presentation for a guide to using competitions to generate links.

Instead, I spoke about one of my favourite ways to use competitions to generate links is to work with the “human interest” angle that can often be discovered in the winners’ story.

When you notify a competition winner as to a win, have them take a picture of themselves in receipt of the prize. Speak to them about the win, ask open questions such as “describe how you felt when you found out you had won?” “What does this mean to you?” You may uncover a genuine human-interest story that has potential for news and local news website coverage. Perhaps your client designs wedding dresses and offers one for a prize. It could be that your prize winner had recently been made redundant and forced to postpone her wedding until the win changed everything. It could be that the winner of your creative writing competition is a young person who has struggled to overcome learning difficulties. Stories such as this are emotive and have the potential for sector-specific and local online media coverage and of course quality links; which brings me to Loquax.

Loquax: Share Your Winners Story (with link!)

In addition to being a competition directory, in which you can list your competition, promote to entrants and get a link. Loquax would welcome good stories about your winners, to share on the blog which remains on the site (which also gets mentioned in their newsletter, Twitter and Facebook – so good audience potential too.)

If you have a decent prize, a moving story, a deserving winner, a video or picture or even a competition that was flooded with automated entries and had to be pulled; all such things make an interesting story to share with the Loquax community. In return your client gets the online coverage including a link or two where natural and reasonable within your story.

Use your creativity and judgement as poor/non-stories (Bloke wins £10 Voucher) that are crammed full of links, will simply not be accepted and published.

Here’s a few good examples:

Someone won a car!

Video competition.

Automated entries cause issues – newsworthy too.

http://blog.loquax.co.uk/automatedentries/automated-competition-entries-disqualified-1200.htm

Send your story to jason-pr@loquax.co.uk

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Nichola Stott is owner and co-founder of theMediaFlow; online revenue optimisation and audience services (including SEO, SEM and SMM). Prior to founding theMediaFlow, Nichola spent four years at Yahoo! as head of UK commercial search partners.
Creative Content Marketing Strategies
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