Drama = Links – The Calacanis Case Study
Usually I try to stay clear of posting on search marketing drama, but today I want to make an exception. For those of you who are new to this business, you might not know that the small size and highly connected nature of the in the search marketing industry usually lends itself to fairly regular in-fighting. Frankly, it’s kinda like Springer but online and with a bunch of well-off computer geeks.
Please don’t think that these fight happen because search marketers are bad people, or because they suffer from a digital form of ‘roid rage. Truthfully, the drama in this industry is mainly all about one thing…links.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, starting controversy is one of many (and possibly easiest) ways to get links to pointed to your web site. And if you are picking fights to get links, you might as well do it with the people who: a) have blogs, and b) have a good amount of “link juice.” And ladies and gents, the most blogged and juiced industry out there is the online marketing community.
Last week, a familiar villain in the online community must have decided that he could use a few hundred more links, so he sat back and wrote a post that was bound to infuriate search marketers everywhere. The post was called Why people hate SEO and the author was none-other than Jason Calacains.
Now for those of you who don’t know of Calacanis, all you need to know is he is kind of a roving execu-brat who wonders around the internet world sharing extreme opinions and picking fights with folks to make sure his name gets onto blogs, newspapers, magazines, etc. (His background is in publishing, so he knows how to work the system).
Last week, Calacanis ticked off the entire SEO community by saying “90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman “ (this was after saying the SEO was B.S. in December at the SES Chicago conference in a room packed full of SEOs). Calacanis pointed to this fantastically terrible video of an SEO selling his wares as proof…
(you gotta admit that this video is pretty funny…in a sad way)
Needless to say, this made the SEO community flip out, especially Danny Sullivan, who sat down and wrote up a massive post about how Jason is a fool.
Aside from Danny’s post, pretty much every other major SEO blog pointed a link to Jason’s post and gave Jason a piece of their mind…and in turn, gave Jason hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars of worth of links to his site. ShoeMoney, another infamous controversy-for-links master, does a good job of pointing out the success of Jason’s link baiting – giving the example of the 64 links Jason got in just 24 hours.
This isn’t the first time Jason has provoked a group with link juice for a load of links. I saw Jason do it at the Blogging Business Summit this year, where he stood up in front of some of the biggest bloggers in the world (and many of the smaller ones) and basically said if you can’t get thousands of visits per day to your blog, then you suck. Needless to say, Mr. Calacanis ended up with another deluge of incredible links from this stunt.
So what have we learned? Well, first off, Jason Calacanis has profited well from his bratty persona, and there is no doubt in my mind that he will continue to provoke people to get links and stay relevant. Second, if you want to get some links to your site, and you want to do it by ticking people off, you might want to target the SEO community…it’s there that you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
Of course, if you are a lover, not a fighter, you could always paint your URL on your body and go streaking through an SES keynote…but you didn’t hear that from me…
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Comments
You're misquoting me from the Blog Business Summit.
I was specifically referring to people who complain and cry about not being on the "blogging A list."
I made a very specific point to say that if you're one of these cry babies all you have to do is stop crying about it and go to TechMeme (in the tech industry) and blog about one of the top stories of the day, every day, for 30 days and say something intelligent and you'll be on the A-list.
I did not say that if you don't get links you suck. Different folks blog for different reasons--I was talking about the small group of folks who complain about not being on the A-list. Not sure how you didn't get that...
best j
Posted by: Jason McCabe Calacanis | February 13, 2007 09:50 AM
Hey Jason - thanks for commenting and correcting my quote.
I guess I was posting more of the feeling that I got as an audience member rather than a direct quote. I heard what you were saying about the "cry babies" and I agree to a certain extent. I would think that it is a lot easier for a Calacanis (who already had a name in the industry before they started blogging) to get well known as a blogger than someone who is unknown. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but I did feel you kind of left that part out of your BBS speech.
Either way you gotta admit, you knew in the back of your mind that saying what you said at the BBS and at Search Engine Strategies was going to get you some links – just like you knew your SEO post was going to do the same. And that’s darn smart of you…no doubt about it.
I guess that’s why you are Calacanis and we’re not :)
Posted by: James Omdahl | February 13, 2007 10:05 AM