Bramblog

So I’ve been really enjoying the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest. I’ve met some new people online, and there have been some fantastic analyses of different link building techniques.

Greg Boser took the controversial approach, and is sitting pretty at #3. He did this in the (much more competitive) Dave Pasternack contest last year, and the technique worked really well for him. Greg says he’s not competing, but I think he can’t keep himself from making sure the on-site is right for his GREAITW page, and the people he’s friends with definitely know how to make sure the anchor text linking back to him is on point. I’m sure that, if he really wanted to win, he’d hit up some 301′s right before the contest ends, and take home the gold. If he does that, I wonder what he’ll do with the REW prize?

Matt Cutts wrote a great post about linkbaiting a couple of years ago that still rings true today. He talks about the controversial angle a couple of times. At the beginning, he states:

“You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it though).”

The contestant from Seattle is sitting @ number 2 right now, using a technique I’d like to call “trolling with stinkbait.” Ardell commands a decent sized audience, and they love to say, “me too!” She started off with a post bashing the contest for offering up what she considered to be a “bogus prize.” This got her more than few links…she found a perceived weakness, and it got people talking.

The contest sponsor (Morgan) saw Ardell’s take, and remedied the perceived problem she highlighted. So Ardell threw a few more lines into the water. Blog commenting, she blasted SEOs as people who “game the system” with one hand, and had friends encourage others to link to her with specific anchor text with the other. She talked more smack in blog comments & blogs, and went 100% negative while failing to offer any constructive criticism.

What was that Matt Cutts?

“You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it though).”

yaaaaawwwwwwwn

So this is really goofy and immature, but I like it. Check out the URL, and you’ll figure out how to make it say whatever you want to.

StumbleUpon Does What I Tell Them

I crashed another server on my cheesy Realtor business cards digg. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at Inmotion. The sales team was very knowledgeable about the digg effect, and they assured me that my new plan would be able to handle it with no problem – no matter if I had a WP blog querying DB’s or not. And….it crashed.

To their credit, Inmotion’s support team was awesome. I had been meaning to install super cache for a while, but didn’t think to do it before the last campaign. They shut down the server, installed super cache on the blog, and fired it back up. By this time, the post had made it down towards the bottom of the page, so I wasn’t actually sure if it was the plug-in, or the decreased traffic.

But then, yesterday I pushed another piece. I did it kind of spur of the moment, and put it on a blog that I put up specifically for diggbait. It’s at 1000+ diggs right now, and the server stayed strong throughout the whole ordeal. So…I think we finally have the final piece to the digg proof puzzle – super cache!

Check it out!  We just skinned and launched puurple.com.  This site is intended to be a real estate industry niche social bookmarking site.

Do the diggers hate your stuff?  Don’t feel bad – They hate everything!  Come on over, where it feels so gooooood.  If you have real estate related content, this is your place.