How I got 80 Links by Talking About Wine.

April 15, 2016

Do you like wine?

I love wine.

I especially love wine because it has helped me gain placements in The Daily Mail, Business Insider,  Yahoo Finance, Shortlist and pretty much anywhere you’d want to get a placement…

This isn’t a unique trait of wine. It’s a process that can be applied to any subject and any industry. Let me show you how I used wine to grow my client’s visibility online.

STEP 1. Think of a Problem to Solve

People love sharing things that solve problems. There’s a reason ‘Life Hacks’ are so popular, and why ‘How to’ is the most searched phrase on YouTube…

For Cult Wines, I decided to focus on a problem I have… despite being a big fan of wine, I don’t know a lot about it.

So I put together an infographic called ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Wine’ and began seeding it to image sharing sites like Visual.ly and Imgur.

beginners guide wine

Within a few days, the graphic had been picked up by some major publications, including Business Insider and Yahoo Finance and Shortlist.

The graphic went on to gain 30 further placements in publications as diverse as Life Hacker, Design Taxi and Gizmodo.

Proof in the power of solving a commonly held problem…

STEP 2. Make Something Definitive

Next up to continue the promotion, I created a second infographic called ‘Around the World in 80 Drinks’.

This takes the national drink of each country and represents it in a stylish gallery.

around 80 drinks

Again, this was seeded to image sharing sites, as well as social media.

Within a few weeks, the graphic had gained major placements on publications such as The Daily Mail, Life Hack, All Top, Business Insider and others.

In total, it gained around 46 placements.

So how does this benefit me?

Or rather, how would something like this benefit YOU, a business owner…

Essentially, publicity like this on the web leads to more sales.

I’ll explain how…

The more sites that share your awesome content (like the infographics above), the more likely they are to mention your site in a positive way and provide links to it.

These links are how Google measures a site’s trustworthiness, and the more links and brand mentions you have from high authority sites, the higher you will rank for your keywords.

This is the effect of all these links and brand mentions on the search engine visibility for this client across all keywords (the X’s mark the launch of the graphics):

wine investment visibility

The Return on Investment

So the big question is, how does this affect a company’s bottom line? What does this earn the company?

Well it shouldn’t take a genius to work out that increased visibility in search engines will lead to more sales. (90% of online business begins with a search, after all). So that’s the big benefit.

However, if you want to put a price on the kind of coverage these infographics received, consider the following:

 

A placement on a high-authority blog or mainstream publication like the ones listed above is more or less impossible for a small business to buy. The only way to get these to talk about your brand is on its own merit, or by paying tens of thousands of pounds.

Content Marketing like this creates a reason for these publications to talk about you.

Aside from the 6 or 7 ‘mega placements’ above, the graphic received placements on a couple of dozen other high authority sites, which might charge up to £1,500 per placement.

There were also about another 25 placements on more general blogs, and although these don’t carry the same authority as The Daily Mail or Gizmodo, I’ve never met a blogger who wouldn’t charge a minimum of £100 for a post of any kind.

 

That makes a total of about £12,500 in measurable coverage.

Another testament to the power of Content Marketing.