Link Building/Increase Your Linkability
This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are “static” – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
Is this still relevant?
Increasing your linkability is definitely still relevant, and adding a blog is still a great tactic. With the popular areas of the web acting more and more as aggregators rather than destinations the value of unique and useful content just keeps going up.
Will white papers and thought pieces necessarily increase linkability? All depends on the content, but consider the time it takes to create them plus the fact that they aren’t social. Many produce white papers and thought pieces, so this is a highly competitive landscape to expect decent returns without an audience to share it. It’s a perfectly fine tactic, but a publishing platform feels like step one. To merely create white papers without already having an audience to share them with means they may have a hard time getting links in the first place.
Check out what Darren Rowse recently created as a great example – he built a workbook that was made up of content already published on his blog, and yet his community still supported him in sharing it even though it’s material that is already public. He repurposedblog posts into a more formal/packaged format and is now selling the final product. This makes a lot of sense – publish the content bit by bit to attract links, traffic and subscribers as you go, then at the completion turn it into something polished.
As far as aggregators are concerned, so much of the web these days is made up of aggregation sometimes I wonder if enough is enough. Do we really need more? At this point my sense is that compelling content is in greater demand than new aggregators. Unless you can serve your niche is an incredibly useful or interesting way you may spend a lot of resources on this tactic with lukewarm returns.
