What's Topicjacking?

It creates a level playing field – literally anyone can newsjack – but, that new level favors players who are observant, quick to react, and skilled at communicating. It’s a powerful tool that can be used to throw an opponent or simply draft off the news momentum to further your own ends.
-David Meerman Scott, “Newsjacking”

The formula behind successful newsjacking is:

• Find a newsworthy event that has relevance to your business
• Create high quality content that is relevant to both your agenda and the news
• Release your content at the moment the news is trending in a channel where the news will be picked up

Clearly there are artful qualities to this formula that make newsjacking difficult to implement as a repeatable process. For one, you don’t know how hot a news story will be until after it happens so you’re left trying to predict how to be in the right place at the right time. Secondly, events that are “prime” to be hot will have hundreds of people trying to newsjack them so the level of digital noise leaves your content as the proverbial needle in the haystack. Yet we soldier on because newsjacking successes can amplify our presence and expand our digital influence in ways we can only dream of.

Newsjacking Success. Lessons Learned.

But are there lessons from newsjacking that we can apply to our other content marketing activities to accelerate the quest for greater digital influence and expanded reach in a repeatable, predictable way?

The most common best practice for content optimization is long-tail-keyword optimization. The idea is simple. If you want your content to rank for the term marketing because there are a bizzillion searches on marketing every day, you quickly find that there are a million other people just like you but with bigger PPC budgets and larger online credibility already ranking for the term marketing and so your content on marketing ends up lost on page 1000 of Google’s search results, never to be seen. Long tail keywords are the answer. Add more search terms to the keyword, marketing so that you make the topic of your content more unique, says ” marketing content optimization for social media”. Now you can rank in the top 10. But the problem is that no one is looking for that term yet. So you still don’t get found.

This is Topicjacking.

Topicjacking takes the principles of successful newsjacking, relevant, channel-specific, influential and popular information that can amplify your own content and brand by association and systematically applies these principles to your content to amplify your digital influence and expand your reach.

The idea behind Topicjacking is to find a topic that is related to the one you are writing about that is already popular, shared and authored by someone with established cred or digital influence on the particular topic (That’s important. Influence isn’t universal. It’s topic-specific). Then, link to that related topic from your already-long-tail-optimized content.

When you publish your content (containing the link to the related popular content), tweet the author, leave comments on a number of related highly shared blogs. Pretty quickly the hordes of people already reading those blogs and following those authors see your contributions and are likely to look at your content, your blog, your website and your social media channels. You’re borrowing the popularity of other topics to accelerate the organic process of being found, building credibility and expanding your own reach and authority. This is Topicjacking. You can read about one person’s experience Topicjacking here .

Make Topicjacking a Repeatable Process.

In order to create a repeatable Topicjacking process however, you need a few new pieces of information while you’re creating and publishing your content:

• A real-time index of relevant trending topics
• Profiles of authors writing or talking about relevant topics
• Analysis of your own content to find popular related topics
• Measurement of your own current digital influence and reach

SocialEars provides all this essential information in one easy to use application, plus a daily index of the top trending topics in your specific industry to stimulate ideas for new Topicjacking content. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. If you’re not Topicjacking, you’re missing one of the most powerful new techniques for content SEO.