In 1964, Marshall McLuhan proposed the idea “that media itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study.” He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. He gave examples of various popular media forms of the time, describing ways in which people would react to the content given.
Back then, as hard as it is for some of you youngsters to believe, a movie was something that you watched from beginning to end. We didn’t have video clips on YouTubeYouTube
, DVD players, pause and rewind in the privacy of our living rooms. A movie also gave off numerous visual clues that could be obtained through passive viewing, requiring very little effort on the part of the viewer in order to understand what was being presented.In contrast to this, comics required more active participation as a reader would be forced to glean little bits of background information from the drawings, the words of the characters, and subtext.
Links are built through various methods, all of which are affected by very different aspects of their medium. In order to win at each one, it’s critical to see how understanding the active/passive components and using different techniques that are appropriate for your method can help you build better quality (and more) links.
Content writing
First of all, there’s the good old-fashioned content method. You write a piece that naturally attracts inbound links.
This is a passive method for the writer, but an active method for the reader, which means that it must be engaging and easy to follow. No one wants to read the same paragraph twice to figure out what you’re trying to say, whether it’s online or in print.
In fact, with the average attention span of a web user being somewhat low (to put it nicely) creating quality content that attracts links means getting to the point but doing so in a unique way. Aimaim
for the reader to be able to passively absorb your content. Who wants to waste time reading something that’s been read numerous times before?
To help make sure that your content is easily readable and absorbable (and linkable) it’s always good to write a quick outline of your piece, whether beforehand or after you write it.
Asking, begging, and possibly pleading
Secondly, there’s the proactive pursuit of inbound links. In order to succeed here, you not only need to have something worth linking to of course, but you also have to choose and use, proven methods for approaching webmasters and alerting them to your content. If you don’t keep up with the latest in the industry, this is going to be much harder. Also, from my experience using emailed link requests, even though you have your method (email) you still have numerous factors to consider, as each niche has its own unique aspects.
There has been a lot published recently about how well a simple phone call works in establishing enough trust to generate a quality inbound link. Let’s say that you have a very irreverent sense of humor that doesn’t always come across in writing. If your viewers are able to read your expression and those of others in the video, your humor might come across more easily. This is where social media is very useful.
Linkbait
Linkbait is particularly interesting here because of the manner in which it can be best presented. Using all of this as a guideline, you can easily see that a video that you shoot, one that is designed to garner inbound links, might be a better medium than a piece of content depending upon the topic. If your viewers are able to read your expression and those of others in the video, your humor might come across more easily.
In producing linkbait in your desired form, you could just let it sit there and wait for the links to roll in, which is passive, but in order to really succeed, you have to take an active approach and do the asking/begging/pleading bits.
Link building can definitely be done without much thought, but it will be done very, very poorly if you choose to ignore the basics and then the results, if you see any, won’t last. It’s kind of like yoga, if I may liken link building to one more thing.
Read the full article from Julie Joyce.
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