Ashton Kutcher Just Tweeted My Client’s Story
So I have been working on this air conditioning website and as you can imagine good air conditioner scoops are few and far between, so when Jeff the owner called me up with a bit of a story I knew I had to do something.
He found the story on a website called KRGV.com, you can read it here. It’s about some women in Texas who found an image that she believes is the Virgin Mary on her air conditioner.
There weren’t very many details really so I just re-worded it pretty much, blew up the tiny photo to a decent size and published it, you can see my post here.
I really didn’t expect it to go anywhere, I mean look at the image, it does in fact look more like death then the Virgin Mary, but to my amazement it did. The bait was just about crap enough to actually work. I got people talking about this image all over the web. Check out the discussions at Reddit, Propeller, Mixx and Plime.
I went to bed last night thinking oh well it’s not going to get any good links but at least it sparked a bit of discussion and sent Airconco a bit of traffic. When I woke up this morning and checked the stats, everything looked pretty normal, 1,500 from Reddit, 90 from Mixx etc. but then I saw Twitter.com 500 clicks. Now I don’t know a lot about Twitter, but that looked like a lot of traffic, my previous actual decent baits had gotten 50-100 clicks from Twitter at the most.
About an hour later I refreshed the stats. again and now Twitter had sent over 1,000 clicks. I decided to do a bit of investigating and found the URL that was sending the Twitter traffic: http://bit.ly/NVE6h, I searched Google for the URL and found Ashton Kutcher’s twitter profile aplusk.
Ashton Kutcher is a big time movie star, he was in that movie Dude, Where’s My Car and he is married to Demi Moore. He is one of the most popular Twitter users with over 2 million followers. Getting some of my work linked to by him is awesome.
The Airconco website has had 5,172 visits from Twitter.com so far and he only linked to the story about 9 hours ago – Link
Update: The traffic has started to calm down now and the post has had just under 10,000 unique visitors from Twitter.com, about 4,500 uniques that are unaccounted for and a couple more thousand uniques from other social networks. Altogether the story has had over 16,500 visitors and there are 60 comments on the post.
How cool is that. You are going to be a superstar to your client now!
Nice work, I thought it was an air conditioning unit which looked just like an air conditioning unit to be honest!
But great result with the traffic, they must have seen something I missed 🙂
The real question here is… how many more air conditioners did they sell? Ultimately, did this increase their revenue at all?
@Allison ultimately it is all about links, links = rankings, rankings = profit.
The real question is, quality or quantity? If you want people to check out your content on the internet do you create and publish it to your own creative standards and allow it to spread on its own merit or do you edit and censor your content and try to conform it to a specific power users interest.
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@David Eaves
Yeah, because all the links they’re going to get from this story are going to use the anchor text “air conditioners” or even be from related sites?
In my opinion, ultimately & most likely, this will probably end up costing your client money (not a lot, but still) through bandwidth and hosting costs.
That’s the problem with a lot of traffic that comes from social networks… high bounce rates & low conversions. Sure, you may get a couple links out of it, but most likely they won’t use the anchor text you want or even be from relevant sources that search engines will value.
Hi Simon, it’s about building up authority, it doesn’t matter if the links aren’t going to the homepage or using the right anchor text. Once a site has a few successful link baits on it the Google authority score is increased and it is allowed to rank higher on more competitive phrases.
I am going to do a post soon about one of my clients Premier Holidays, thanks to a very successful link bait campaign they are now able to compete on Google with major brands and old authorities. You should check it out.
I still cant understand why so many people would find any interest in this image.. 😉
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As an SEO virgin I don’t understand why:
1) During linkbuilding you’re told to get links from related sites. Yet
2) Linkbaiting will attract the majority of its links from UNrelated sites. But that’s OK. Why exactly?
Hi Jeepster, all popular blogs and stuff have lots of links from unrelated sites and its perfectly natural, I think what they are trying to say is make sure you have some good relevant industry specific ones as well, like if you have a web design site, getting a link from the UKWDA would be a very good thing to do.
I think the main reason why people say it is because you will get targeted traffic that can convert from the links which really has little to do with SEO and everything to do with marketing your company.
In terms of the Google algorithm, I think that generally relevance has little to do with how much juice, trust etc. is passed through links, it’s mainly about the PageRank and authority of the linking sites and the anchor text they choose to link you with.
Thanks for the explanation Dave. Follow-up question:
…it’s mainly about the PageRank and authority of the linking sites
I thought it was chiefly about the linking pages, with site authority being a distant, secondary factor?
It’s the authority ones that count the most like from NYTimes.com, BBC or Boing Boing. When I say count I mean links from those domains will pass more trust, authority etc.
What you have said doesn’t make any sense, high authority sites will have high authority linking pages.
In my experience any kind of straight editorial link from a high authority site like the BBC or something will help a lot with Google SEO, regardless of how popular or linked to the linking page is.
Obviously links from popular, well linked to pages are better because they send more traffic and pass more pagerank. But I can assure you that the domain or site that is linking to you is important, powerful sites make powerful pages.
Wow – he is actually tweeting instead of paying attention to demi – I am surprised she allowed that – well she has bruce as well.