We are really thankful for all of the feedback that we have received through our blog comments in 2009. We would like to share some of those comments (we refer to them as love letters) with you.
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I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers lately hyping up this new link building service called Tynt. According to a quick Google Blog Search, 1,083 mentions of Tynt have come up over the last 7 days. It is also getting enough buzz across the innerwebs that a client was savvy enough to email me about it this morning.
Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.
Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.
Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont
Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt
Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!
When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my Wordpress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.
So… where’s the link?
Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.
In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.
Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL
See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.
Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.
I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend Wordpress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.
After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.
As an internet marketing firm, it’s easy to stress to clients the importance of a regularly updated blog. The tough part comes in taking your own advice. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in client work that internal work can fall to the wayside…and I wouldn’t be surprised if most internet marketing agencies run into this problem occasionally.
So when it comes time for me to blog and I have a ton of other work to get done, my biggest stress is coming up with decent ideas for blogging.
Since I was strapped for time, I figured I’d do a quick blog about this awesome whitepaper I found over at Small Biz Trends called “137 Small Business Twitter Tips” (seriously, check it out). But…it kinda felt like cheating to me. I mean, I could do that for every blog post really if I wanted to, since there’s no lack of awesome resources on the web.
That would certainly take care of the stress of coming up with good blogging ideas anyway….
But then I had my “ah-hah” moment, and my blog post involved into one main lesson: the value of a blog post is really in the eyes of the reader! A blog post I felt like I was “cheating on” may be exactly what a particular reader needed!
So basically what I’m saying is this: don’t pull out your hair trying to come up with “amazing” blogging ideas…creativity just doesn’t work that way! Next time you don’t come up with a great idea right away, check out some of your resources, share a helpful story, relay a funny work story, whatever.
The whole point of a blog is to connect with your audience…every post you write doesn’t have to win a “Most Resourceful/Amazing/Remarkable Blog Post Of The Year” award (though some certainly should!). Great ideas for blogging will come…you just gotta let it flow sometimes.
