I have a confession to make. I am a celebrity gossip addict. I love to look at pics and see what people are wearing. While browsing one of my favorite sites yesterday I came across what looked to me like pay dirt for some great link bait.
Target famous celebrities and bloggers that millions of people read and consume, get exposure for your brand, and LINKS. Looking at it a bit closer, I see some missed opportunity that could have been capitalized on and began to realize that this probably wasn’t intentional link bait (in our world-the Internet world) at all. More “attention-bait”.
Magazines, newspapers, colleges, government, have been employing “attention-bait” since the beginning of media.
First, the story itself is not featured on the site, which forces a link to the homepage. Perez Hilton (one of the most popular blogs on the interwebs) actually wound up linking out to a newspaper article about the article to give his readers a sense of what it was about.
In the same way fashion designers used to shudder at white shoes after Labor Day (thank you winter white for doing away with that one!), I got cringy when I got to the Animal Fair website and saw the missed opportunity.
When clicking though from Perez we get here:
- It’s not obvious we are in the right place.
- We don’t get the story we came to see.
- There is a banner for the current issue but no way to dig further into it.
- There is no direct link to the article itself.
There are only a handful of blogs linking to the site. Even though they got some good press coverage, they lost out on a tremendous opportunity to generate viral buzz and links back to their website.
I did a little imagining, and this is the way things would have looked if I were in charge.
- Pictures of the celebs and their dogs (you don’t even need to have the two together!).
- Call to action to get the rest of the list (since their goal was to sell magazines, make that the call to action).
- Big subscribe button above the fold (like this – we’ve got more).
- List of the other content in the current issue (which would not have been given away for free on the site).
- In addition to notifying the traditional press, I would have contacted all of the publicists and fan-clubs of those in the article, pet forums, and celebrity forums (get them excited and give them content to write about).
In all fairness, when you do get to the Animal Fair website, the first thing that comes up is a notice that the site is under construction so I assume that the new and improved site is going to be a little more robust.
My post is not about calling Animal Fair out. It’s more to drive home the point that with a little extra effort and planning you can take the same idea and generate twice as much buzz and results. The next time that you finish a viral piece, make sure you have thought of all possible opportunities to make it easy for people to 1) access it 2) spread it 3) link to it. You’ll be glad you did.
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Danielle, The new layout looks awesome. So much more user friendly and what we’d come to expect on a well thought out site.
I love the reworked list you did.
Also – great point about “attention-bait” being around forever…
I freakin’ love this post!
I read *and love* Perez everyday and saw the post you are talking about. Awesome job explaining the missed opportunities for Animal Fair
Wow, they went to a lot of trouble to supposedly rig a contest and don’t take advantage of it. They could own the celebrity pet world. Nice rework by the way.
Great post Danielle, missed opportunity for sure. You should be getting a call to manage all online work for Animal Fair soon…
Danielle- I love this post. Its so clear how they missed a great opportunity.
Everybody loves Perez, but when are they making those fake dogs in the Charlie version so I can get one?
Sadly this is true more often than not. I see this everyday from big media and large companies. You would think with all that “Red Tape” to get things approved someone along the way would chime in.
Great post.
Thanks everyone! I wonder if Animal Fair is going to get a ton of pitches from SMM’s now!
Such a good idea to go after Hanna Montanna and Perez.
I cannot IMAGINE the traffic Perez would get if his site wasn’t so shitty in the SEO department… scrapers outdo him in Google… been telling graywolf for years now I’d love to get a hold of that website
It would be tremendous. He probably doesn’t even know what he’s missing! Although he seems to be having a blast.
Perez did actually used to have a link to an internet marketing company (that does seo) in his left sidebar
At various times I’ve done studies of what people write about and query about online: some examples are the AOL search data and several days worth of livejournal posts.
If you hang out around supermarket checkouts, you might think that people are obsessed with celebrity gossip. Well, they are, but they’re obsessed about a lot of other things too, like Halo 3 and shopping for shoes.
There are a few exceptionally troubled celebrities that get searched for a lot, but the media industry cares a lot more about Paris Hilton that media consumers. Celebrity Gossip is much bigger offline than it is online.
This is a really great post!
We’ve been doing humor hook linkbait on the web since 1995 at Zug.com
It would be great to get your feedback on the comedy linkbait angle!
Shelah
Marketing Assistant
nice stuff