What is Link Bait and how you should use it
What is Link Bait?
Link bait is the processes of achieving more links organically through viral content. For example say you posted an interested article on something and people found it very interesting, controversial, or just flat out liked the content most generally if someone likes something well enough on the internet they will link bookmark it or link to it (speaking they have a website). And of course that is the purpose of link bait is to get people to link to it sometimes if they don’t link to it they’ll bookmark it like I mentioned and they’ll tell there friends about it and it will spread virally so one way or another it will probably end up on other websites. Believe it or not there is a lot of people that create link bait on accident with out even realizing it I’ve seen numerous websites hit the Digg home page that was not even made out to be link bait it was generally just some blogger that through some interesting content up and submitted it to Digg and it got digged by several other users of course. Which don’t take me wrong there is several people that focus hard on link baiting, and most generally your first piece of work will never be link bait it takes time and practice unless your the odd one that just gets lucky every time which it does happen.
If you ask me though the whole purpose behind link worthy content is to just focus on building nothing, but high quality content and then every once and awhile take out them extra hours to write something up very creative and just see how it works. Just stay persistent and that right there is what will get you links and get you going. Link bait is not something you can just jump right into unless your someone thats lucky like I mentioned in the last paragraph, but most generally it takes time and practice of working with content (such as promoting in general) and experience then as you see what starts to work you’ll start to see the patterns better.
After you start to see how link bait works and social networks work you’ll have a better chance of promoting baity content. The reason I say this is because you have to figure out how your going to promote the content whether its through forums, organic search engines, PPC, or social networking sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Stumble Upon. And these things can take time to learn, take a look at the list of items below on what you should pay attention to when promoting link worthy content.
- Titles, The title is what sets your craft off. A good title will give you great results think of a title that will draw peoples attention and get them into your article. Think of something different - its actually pretty simple you just need to be creative with it for example lets say you make a title on how you made over $3,000 dollars a day on the web for the last two years people are going to click on that night and day, but I’m just using that as an example so use something thats creative and exciting.
- Creativeness, When you craft your piece make sure its creative looking use images, video (if applicable), and anything else that will be creative. Keep your craft interesting and linkable.
- Motivator, Be someone that can motivate the minds of others to spread your content virally. There is a good write up on this over at Search Engine Guide called Making Link Bait and Viral Marketing work (Read this whole article).
Which there is several ways to approach link bait, but the idea behind it all its to create link worthy viral content like I have mentioned a few times of course. Post content that people will love, take your time out and do it right. And don’t get all caught up in the negatives if your content does not catch links just keep on trying until you hit that goal, and once you start to get the hand of it you’ll start achieving links more often from your content.
How Should you Use Link Bait, and Why?
I’ve been asked by people why would I want to create link worthy content, yes believe it or not I’ve been asked that by clients or just people in general such as family, friends, and etc. You should use link bait for whatever your doing you can use it to leverage your brand such as increase product sales, increase e-mail list, rss feeds, or even use it to build a more powerful community driven website (my all time favorite).
You should use link bait to increase your sales and awareness. When using link bait you can create more traffic not only virally, but even through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN because the result of more links will result in higher rankings of course, and search engines love high quality natural linkable content (the more the better). The idea behind using link bait is to build the link worthy content around whatever your trying to do for example your trying to sale scooters create the craft around the topic scooters so you will get more traffic in them directions.
If you ever heard of leverage in marketing thats what its all about just find your leverage and pull it in that direction. If your wanting to increase your RSS feed then pursued it in that direction, if your wanting to increase your sales then pursued people in that direction. It can be done just takes a lot of practice like I mentioned above, and any one can do it with time and effort.