How much do you spend on link bait?

Is is worth it to create a blog to generate links/leads/sales?

Many companies are, rightfully, sceptic when someone tells them that they should be blogging.

Finding good information and creating good articles costs time and money. Resources that can not be spend on things that might be more appropriate.

How will this money come back? It is hard to directly tie everything digital to sales up front. An analysis after implementation can tell us this but it remains a very though exercise:

• How much is a link from a top website worth?
• What's the value of being amongst the first page search results vs being on page five?

That said, you still need traffic to your website. Some sites put up infographics, other create tools or even complete services to generate traffic and increase sales.

E-mail as a loss leader

And one of these traffic driving products is one we use every day, e-mail.

At Inbox Love, a conference about all things e-mail the big providers said the following:¹

• Hotmail drives traffic to Bing and promotes new features for Office
• Yahoo Mail drives traffic to its website and Bing
• Gmail is the main driver of Google Enterprise sales and it encourages sign-in which gives Google more data on search
• Facebook messaging system: part of the broader ecosystem

The story is likely a bit more complicated than just considering these products as loss leaders. But the main take-away is that these companies are willing to spend huge amounts of money on these products to get a whiff of traffic or data.

Then the question is: how will you use that hard earned information?

Sources:
1. The Problem With Email: It's Not A Money Maker

Does your site really need badges and points?

Maybe you didn't care when you last got that Language Expert badge because you spelled your name right.

Maybe you don't care about that collection of secret items you've built up on that newssite.

But that's exactly what's wrong. These elements were put in to make you give a shit. If you want to make your app or site truly engaging, there is a lot more to it then just slapping points on.

I enjoy reading and writing about gamification. But the more the concept is spreading, the more people are doing it in a wrong way.

Not saying I got the magical formula, I've been there and tried to implement parts into an app and I know it is very hard to do right.

So it is good to see this presentation call out the bullshit and show how it can be fixed.

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents