Matt will be speaking about “Social Media” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m a 26 year old web designer and developer who lives in Seattle. I joined SEOmoz in 2003 when it was just Rand, Gillian, and myself. I was responsible for creating all the SEO tools as well as designing the SEOmoz website. In 2007 I designed and developed a free online dating site called Mingle2. The entire project, from concept to launch, took 66.5 hours to create – in a typical work week this would amount to about a week and a half. Within 6 months of launch the site exploded in popularity and was acquired by a bigger company. Since then, it has become one of the world’s largest free online dating sites, having nearly one million users and receiving over 40 million page views a month. Currently, I work for Mingle2 and focus on viral marketing and linkbait. I create comics, quizzes, widgets, and viral microsites that build thousands of links every month and drive millions of page views. My latest comic built 14,000 links in 3 days.
https://0at.org/everything – All my linkbait it one spot
https://mingle2.com Mingle2 – Free Online Dating
https://0at.org My blog and portfolio
2) Are there some common themes / ideas that run through the large amount of excellent viral content that you’ve created?
Humor always works best for me, and I try to write content that appeals to everyone (not just one particular niche, such as the SEO community or people are really into CSS). I prefer linkbait that is visually appealing and well designed, as that tends to do better on social media sites. Quizzes that appeal to your sense of ability also work really well, such as “How many 5 year olds could you take in a fight:” https://howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com/
Recently I’ve had success with 10 panel comics that focus on one particular idea, such as “how to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you” https://www.catswhothrowupgrass.com/kill.php or the 8 phases of dating: “https://mingle2.com/dating/phases”
3) Can high-quality viral content overcome a “less than ideal” promotional process?
It depends on the site. On digg, it’s a lot harder even if your content is truly exceptional. If you create an amazing piece of viral content and you submit it to digg with a weak account or no promotion, there’s very little chance it’ll get promoted. StumbleUpon, however, is much better about giving everyone a chance. If you submit your content to SU it’s not as black and white in terms of reward. On digg you either make the homepage or you don’t, on SU there’s different degrees of traffic. Sometimes it’ll send a few hundred visitors, sometimes tens of thousands.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.