jamesburrow.com

You may have seen the recent buzz about the the 2 bottled ghosts sold through New Zealand ebay clone Tradme to an electronic cigarette company. Besides wondering wtf an “electronic cigarette” is (do you plug it in or is it virtual, like that zippo iPhone app?) I immediately thought, “Holy Shit, whatever an e-cigarette is, those guys are viral link building geniuses”.

The most expensive colored water on the planet

Well after the story had went viral, I started looking around on Google to see what kind of link juice this company was getting from all of this press, which includes virtually every major news organization on the planet. Imagine my horror when I discovered that 1) the company was referred to over and over again as “electronic cigarette company” and 2) this company has no web site or web presence what-so-ever.

So, after reading like a gillion articles on this thing, I finally found the name of the company – Safer Smoking New Zealand. Checked Google NZ, nothing.

I understand you may be a new company starting out, haven’t got the web site up yet, just trying to make a splash with a big gimmicky auction buy, but dude, at least make sure the reporters know your freaking name! It’s called a press release! Instead of taking advantage of an almost priceless viral marketing opportunity, they just paid about $1,400 USD for what appears to be 2 small bottles of blue food coloring and will probably not sell one more electronic cigarette than they did the month before.

The moral of the story, always make sure you are in a position to take advantage of marketing opportunities at a moments notice. Maybe in a future post I will expand on that topic.

For many SEO’s and SEM’s the coveted .edu and .gov links are the holy grail of back links. For the most part these links are hard to obtain because these sites are considered authorities and are of course very picky about who they link out to. Just emailing and requesting a link to you blog is probably not going to get you anywhere. You can forget about buying them as well. Other than maybe getting a link on a student blog you are probably out of luck.

So what is an ambitious Search Marketer to do?

Do your research. Look at the edu’s that have linked to your competition and find out why. Depending on your industry, there could be a variety of reasons why a school, professor, or student may link to your competition and if they link to your competition then they likely will be open to linking to your site.

Job Postings. Most every school has a place for job postings somewhere on their site. My attitude is that every business that has employees is always hiring, or at least reviewing resume’s. So, get busy on Google and start searching using a query like inurl:.edu “job postings” and you will see thousands of school job posting pages ripe for the picking. And who knows, maybe you can get a hot intern out of it.

Open Your Wallet. If theres anything that both schools and students love and need, its money. If you or your client belong to a relatively large company, then you can probably afford to contribute something to some department or organization affiliated with a school. Start with a local school and find out what they need. Not only will you likely get a link from the .edu, but you will likely get some additional publicity out of it. If not, you can always crank out your own press releases praising your altruism.

Well, that’s 3 ideas that should be good for some .edu’s to any site that is actually worth linking to. Good hunting!