Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers

A-Lister Tactics: How to get 200 trackbacks for a single post

I personaly know many of the A-listers, and some of their tactics and tricks. In this post, I will analyze how they do this so you too can aspire to be a leader on digg or techmeme.

Step 1: Find a topic that you’re not an expert at
Step 2: Assert your knowledge and domination over the topic
Step 3: Be outrageous, be absolutely “polar” in a “gray” topic
Step 4: Try to insult or attack a specific vertical or industry (bonus points for insulting the SEO industry)
Step 5: Tell everyone
Step 6: Back it up, don’t step back
Step 7: Do it again!

If you do this right, you could get 212 tracebacks for a single post, or wait, and deploy at the right time and get up 267 trackbacks for a single post. Alexa confirms a traffic boost to the domain.

I’ve been in training this last week, and part of this week, and I’m learning that data, research, and backing up by assertions with facts, figures and information will be a daily part of my job –then to be vetted by other people who know the topic as well or better than I. Although appropriate, as a former blogger, I’d often give me ideas and opinions based upon my personal and professional experiences, I’m looking forward to balancing both.

18 Comments so far

  1. Tyler October 10th, 2007 3:33 am

    A direct stab at somebody in particular?

  2. jeremiah_owyang October 10th, 2007 3:39 am

    One person really sticks out, but he’s just the loudest one donig it, there’s many others

    The example given is nothing personal, just an observation from an outsider.

    I’ll repeat that again, it’s not personal, just an observation.

  3. Bryan Eisenberg October 10th, 2007 3:42 am

    Hmmm… love the assertions backed by data. Thanks for the chuckle this morning.

  4. Tyler October 10th, 2007 3:56 am

    Aha, I see Jeremiah. We had our own similar rinse and repeat scenario in South Africa a few months back: see this.

    A well known SA columnist David Bullard attacked the blogosphere and then set up his own blog. Pretty sneaky tactic.

  5. allen stern October 10th, 2007 4:31 am

    Jeremiah - great post - I thought that creating fact-driven posts would reduce issues, with the person to which you mention, it increased them for me.

    I love hunting down facts for an article - I think of myself as columbo on those days :)

    The best time is when I have an idea that something is wrong and then can back up my hunch with raw data.

    I can only imagine the wealth of data you are now sitting in front of - you might never sleep again!

  6. Squint (a Lightpierce Communication Channel) October 10th, 2007 5:08 am

    All PR (Pagerank) is good PR or Here’s the new boss, the same as the old boss…

    When I first started reading Jeremiah Owyang’s latest post, I thought it was going to be a humorous take on bloggers and their tactics. But when I got to really thinking about it, the 7 steps he outlines as tactics……

  7. jeremiah_owyang October 10th, 2007 5:26 am

    Allen, you rock bud, too bad we didn’t get to meet up in NY

  8. Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media October 10th, 2007 5:27 am

    I was appalled by the Web 3.0 post. Sure, it’s driving traffic to his site, but it was so gratuitously self-serving, it genuinely lowered my impression of him…

  9. Dan Schawbel October 10th, 2007 5:54 am

    Controversy always seems to work. When I posted about Donald Trump or Britney Spears, it gets the most attention.

  10. allen stern October 10th, 2007 6:13 am

    you going to blogworld? sshhh - but I am going to be a speaker!

  11. Mark Cahill October 10th, 2007 6:15 am

    That’s called “Doing a Dvorak…”

  12. Geoff Livingston October 10th, 2007 6:28 am

    This is exactly why I don’t read A-Listers. THere full of BS.

  13. jeremiah_owyang October 10th, 2007 7:39 am

    Allen, Yes, I’ll be a speaker at blog world expo in veags, I can’t wait to see you again!

  14. ian lurie October 10th, 2007 1:11 pm

    Hahaha. Jeremiah, this is your best post so far this year.

    It’s doubly ironic when you refer to training regarding facts and numbers. HAH! We don’t need no facts!

  15. Conversation Marketing October 10th, 2007 2:03 pm

    BLOG STUPIDHEAD DUMB POOP BLOG!!!!!!!!!!…

    Made you look! That headline made no sense, of course. But you looked. That seems to be the way to get attention in the blogging world these days. When top-ranking Yahoo folks make the astonishing claim that fewer downloads will make a page load faste…

  16. […] smarter than me complete my thoughts in the comments section.Sure, you can be confrontational, and link-bait to generate traffic, but I like the notion of what Stephen Marino, of Ogilvy’s 360 Digital […]

  17. […] PS: I got thinking about this because of Jeremiah’s post about gaining trackbacks. […]

  18. Jennifer Davis October 11th, 2007 12:02 am

    Why wouldn’t this be true in the online world, as it is in the off-line world? Bad publicity is still publicity, right? If it weren’t for disparaging headlines or those who act in “extremes” and get ridiculed for it, we would hardly know some of our tabloid celebrities. Doesn’t surprise me that this is the past to online “celebrity” (as measured by trackbacks) as well.

Leave a reply