Think Visibility: My Humble Offering – Now in Technicolor!

Final update from ThinkVis 3 – a copy of the slides from my presentation (seeing as it seems to be the di rigeur thing to do!)

Obviously the notes aren’t there, but here’s an overview of my points:

1. News is one of the critical components of what people do on the web – and by leveraging content and deploying news online you can build links, traffic and rankings
2. When we’re talking about “the news” it has to fit certain criteria. It has to be timely, factual and relevant to a reasonable number of people (“Sue from accounts won a meat tray in the company raffle” doesn’t cut it!)
3. There are two kinds of news: Auntie Barbara News (“a celebrity got out of a car and you could see her legs!”) and Uncle Dave News (“Gordon Brown causes heart attacks!”)
4. Getting into the traditional media such as The Times etc is an expensive business for PR companies and online press releases generally don’t cut the mustard except by chance
5. If you do get into the trad press you might not get much traffic, but the authority is nice
6. Google changes its rankings in response to spikes in search volume around current events (“Corey Haim dies”) – this is called QDF. Sites with timely content, authority and links can get a shot at the first page
7. If you’re in Google News you can be the first item on the page and get lots of traffic and links back to you
8. Google News is flawed because there is no editorial control or review for libel/privacy laws etc
9. Getting into Google News is pretty straightforward
   1. Consult the website for technical requirements
   2. Host on a subdomain without commercial nicknackery and messages you have on the main site
   3. Identify authors
   4. Have some frigging news on there!
   5. Contact details
10. Writing tips – headlines are critical to get clickthroughs… have a point of view… make sure your facts are straight
11. The News Cycle – portentous title for a graph!
12. When a story breaks make sure you’re covering it
    1. Sign up for Google Alerts
    2. Spend time on major news sites
    3. Look in Google News
    4. Write content as soon as you can
    5. Look for other sites covering the story and create a database for linkbuilding
13. As the story goes mainstream cover it in greater depth and linkbuild
    1. Look for angles relevant to your market that are unusual and/or fun and build new, more in depth coverage (“Michael Jackson: a life in hats”)
    2. Go back through your database of people who covered the story and look for link opportunities
14. The story ‘dies’ – but if you did enough work in the first stages you will have established authority enough to maintain rankings
15. If you have, your content will continue to pick up links as people will generally link to ranking content out of laziness
16. Repeat this trick often enough and your whole site will gain authority and trust
17. This can be seen as a continual cycle (cue diagram!)
18. Applause, bouquets, plaudits
19. Head for the bar
20. Drink too much