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Link Building: The Content Itself
by Ruud Hein.
Since we know why people link we can now move on to finding something that is worthy of being linked to: the actual content.
No matter what your speciality at this point you will think one of two things:
- “Everything has been done already”
- “That’s just plain common sense: everybody knows that”
Everything Has Been Done
True. Ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote Phantom of the Rue Morgue the detective story has been done, written, covered. Over with.
Or is it? Don’t the detective stories by Agatha Christie stand by themselves? Was there really no more place for Georges Simenon’s Maigret?
Everything has been done but virtually nothing has been done your way. And that makes it different. With the right touch it even makes it unique.
Common Sense Nobody Has
Virtually everything you think about in your own realm is anything but common sense. It isn’t common sense and it isn’t common knowledge. It just appears that way to you because you’ve been around this material for so long and converse with so many people within your own realm of expertise that you have come to think of it as “common”.
99% of what you would expect “everybody” knows about whatever it is you do can easily be proven to be unknown to others. Simply ask around you.
Here are some things I would consider to be knowledge too plain to ponder or write about:
- how to make oliebollen, bake your own bread and brew a great cup of coffee
- how to add attributes that don’t even exist in any specification to HTML elements and have them do something and be useful
- what SEO, SEM and PPC mean
- who said “tear down this wall” and what he meant by it
- how to add invisible descriptive information into a photo so even without a database my offspring years down the line will still know who those people in the photo are
At the very least one of these you don’t know squat about. Maybe so little that you even go “say what?”
That is what we usually think of as “common” sense and “common” knowledge.
Your Unique Take On It
So your an online computer hardware shop and now what? There are pages upon pages of term definitions, “how does stuff work” type of explanations, Computers 101 for Dummies resources and what not.
Yes. But there is nothing like your take on those. “The Grandparents Computer Resource” hasn’t been written yet even though there is a dire need for it. Thousands of online savvy children will link to it, forward it to their peers because in the end nobody wants to be the always-on support, right? And think of the upsell opportunities. Once you have helped a grandparent identify the problem you can offer the solution.
YouTube is saturated with clips of animals that talk. Sure. But how many of those are presented in the context of a “try to say our brand and win $5000” contest? None, right?
When you look at things sideways they show a unique perspective. A knife becomes a letter opener. An empty bottle from your Caribbean vacation resort becomes authentic bottled Caribbean air. A rock becomes a pet.
I hang out at Twitter where I enjoy the company, the buzz, the nuggets of info and opinion we pass along.Join me on Twitter!
As posted in Content on June 21, 2007.
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