If you want your content to do well (link juice, readers, fame and fortune- whatever) you either have exactly three options:

• World Class Link Bait
• Pounding Out A Thousand Singles
• Don’t Be A Friend To Mankind

Baiting a Dull Hook

I know, I know, there are lots of articles about how to create popular content for so-called boring industries. Some of the better ones are:

• Is Your Industry Too Boring for Linkbait?
• SeoMoz’s Most Excellent Jane Presentation
• SeoBook’s Digg is for Dweebs

But you know, mostly that is simply not going to work. It’s not that this isn’t good advice, it’s just that you can’t really operationalize it. Some of your content has to be more prosaic to get keywords, concepts, and basic communications out to the reading public. So none of that can be linkbait.

And, some days, well, even the most talented writer is going to look at this headline:

• Top 100 Reasons Japonata Front Loaders Rock

And go to Red Robin and get drunk at lunch.

So then you’ve got to play:

Paycheck Baseball

When I was on the baseball team in high school my coach told me that you have to pound out every single hit to convert them to singles. There is no “trick” here – you just have to turn out content every day, post it to social networking and bookmarking services every day.

Pounding out the singles on the social networking sites has to be the keystone of your overall strategy, and is why I keep saying that you have to look past Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc and start efficiently using smaller sites (Rambling Irishman - http://www.the-ri.com/pligg/, etc). Some other people have started mentioning their top 18 or 20 sites, and that is useful to expand your horizon.

Go ahead, write the linkbait when you can (and it’s going to be a very small percentage of your content, realistically) but until then, get your content out and

Practice Retail Politics

If you want your very articulate article on why

• Japonata Front Loaders with NEW Silicone Impregnated Hoses Save You Valuable Maintenance Dollars

to get read, then you’re going to have to find “friends” online who are interested in stuff like that. Yes, they exist.

In other words, you have to go find people who have written or voted on articles on heavy equipment, maintenance, etc, etc. Not every one on these sites is only voting on Ron Paul and pictures of cats in the loo.

You need to find those people with similar interests, friend them, vote on their stories, “shout” to them when you post something in their strike zone, etc. Duh, I know, But go back to my baseball analogy – you have to pound it out over time to get a statistical advantage so you can win more than you lose.
How about next time you submit a story you go find one similar story, vote on it, and friend the author? Then you can shout them on your next post. Over time you’ll get a good network. You don’t really want to be a friend to the entire population of any site – it’s borderline abusive and it simply doesn’t work.

Remember, don't friend everyone in the world, make sure they submit or vote on stories that are in your strike zone. And you should expect many of them not to friend you back. Plus you have to respond to their shouts, not just shout to them. You learned all that in first grade.

So Now What?

Well, it’s not rocket science

• Create the best content you can, regularly if not every day
• Use a lot of social sites in an efficient way
• Utilize and contribute to friend networks for visibility

It’s not a Fast Food strategy, but over time you’ll outrun your competitors, especially the ones quick out of the gate with flash success and no long term focus.

Free SEO Tool To Help

So how can we help? Well, we've built a tool, Digg Friend Finder, that will help you search out and friend people on digg who have similar interests. We'll explain how it all works in the next post.