Right now, tens of thousands of Americans are searching for Joe The Plumber. You can thank John McCain for this, though I'm not sure Joe will in the long run. SEL is live with a post about the search impact. See Joe The Plumber, The Presidential Debates & Search.The sudden spike in searches for JTP (That's my shorthand for ole Joe), can help illustrate the Search Flow Link Building model. Yesterday, nobody had heard of Joe. Today, everyone knows Joe. While this will bring out the worst in the SEM world, it can also bring out the best. So what's the best? What's a 100% white hat method of taking advantage of Joe's good fortune?
The obvious beneficiaries are Joe himself, or this site http://joetheplumber.com (ironic isn't it that the Joe mentioned during the debate is not the Joe who owns JoeThePlumber.com). But, other sites specifically devoted to plumbing, like this one Plumbing Supply.com have much to gain, if they know what to do and how, when, where, and why. And I don't mean the thousands of soon-to-be-issued press releases that will have the "Joe The Plumber" phrase all over them in deep anchored glory. Not at all. And I don't mean the thousands of blog posts, just like this one, that will use the phrase "Joe The Plumber" in their titles. That's just pandering to the search flow, rather than utilizing it strategically.
One way a plumbing supply site could take advantage of the Joe frenzy is this. Set up a Google news alert for the phrase "Joe The Plumber". Toggle to by sort by date. If you are confused, here you go http://snipurl.com/4ewqi.
Now, as those alerts arrive, visit the sites found and look for a contribution opportunity. If the site is the New York times and the article allows for comments, you go in with this one or something more to your own opinion.
“ Listnening to the candidates say Joe The Plumber over and over in many ways demeaned Joe and for that matter the plumbing industry. I know I felt sorry for Joe after the 18th time McCain said it. Our industry is not a bunch of idiots. We know when we are begin used like a volleyball for someone elses purposes. Exactly like what I'm doing here. Regards, the staff at PlumbingToolsAreUs.comBefore you jump me about nofollow and linkjuice, I know this type of link is not going to help your rank. I'm not after rank. I'm after the traffic flow. Publicity driven link building. If I wanted links that would help rank, I'd use a different tactic, and I know what it would be. Do you? I'll follow up with it here soon. Eric
Woe to the real Joe. And what a windfall to the Joe who owns that dommain.
ReplyDeletethis is brilliant. indeed. there's so much of an emphasis on whether a link is no follow or not, that it's quite easy to miss out on opportunities like these for traffic.
ReplyDeletewill have to figure out how to take advantage of this.
Yes, Eric, your post 'Joe The Plumber and Link Building Best Practices' is definitely a timely momentum, and thanks for that.
ReplyDeleteIn link building we have to deal with actuality as well as seasonality.
As the actuality is gone after some time we could regret that, but I think this isn't that important as long as the actual post has been well-linked to from many other sites.
There might be a distinction here between posts on blogs, like this one, and old fashioned static web pages, that can be outdated of cause, but which might have a more permanent 'image' seen from the site of search engines like Google - What is your take, Eric, on this?
Another thing is that we have something a little similar with seasonal issues, like summer vacation, Christmas, autumn etc.
In my experience if you build your links in a decent way and offer useful content at the site the links will help you immense to be 're-found' when the season is approaching next year, even if the links haven't been used that much most of the remaining part of the year.
Wow great post. I guess the only problem with traffic from the type of links you mentioned is how targeted it would be.
ReplyDeleteif you are a small plumbing business there is little use in someone on the other side of the country interested in a news story they saw on the news going to your website.