Today the Internet Marketing landscape is quite competitive and everyone knows how difficult it is get quality traffic. So Internet marketers and SEO specialists are often employing innovative ways to drive quality traffic and back links to their websites.
One such technique of garnering back links is called “Link Baiting”. We can define Link bait as a “technique to garner back links to a website naturally”. In link baiting, we create a compelling piece of content that arouses people’s interest, so they wish to link to that content from their website.
In normal link building we approach others to link to our websites or we exchange links with others, but in Link baiting the content that we create attract people and they are compelled to link to the site as they want to share it with their readers too. The goal of perfect link bait is to let people keep sharing it till everyone in the Internet sees it. A Viral link bait is quite useful and give result beyond imagination.
Types of Link Bait
There are various approaches the professional link baiters follow to create link baiting strategies (hooks). However these strategies can be broadly categorized into the following:
News Hook
This kind of link baiting strategy is dependent on the freshness of the content. You need to be pretty proactive in publishing the news as and when it happens. The news like a much anticipated product launch or preview of a gadget before it launch gets quite lot of attention in Internet community and can help you in getting lot of backlinks. The unveiling of iPhone 4 by Gizmodo is the best example in using this link bait hook. It has got 244K Facebook shares and more than 4000 back links from diverse domains.
Humor Hook
Put something in a funny way, make a cartoon of a celebrity or write a funny story or a joke and you will get lot of people talking about it. You can even make fun of yourself or fun of a renowned celebrity or the industry. But make sure your content is unique and special then million of other sites.
Resource Hook
Infographics, widgets and online gadgets serve as good link bait items. Resource hooks are the best and easiest link baiting strategy. There are lots of opportunities to do some ground breaking research and put your research finding in a nicely done infographics, which is enough to get you a plethora of backlinks. You can even write How-to-guides or an ebook and you will get backlinks for sure. Though this strategy is time consuming, it gives desired result.
Attack Hook
This strategy relies on negative views and comments to create buzz. But this can lead you to making few enemies for sure. Talking bad about someone or something creates a debate sort of thing and divides people into 2 groups who indulge in fighting among themselves and indirectly help in promoting the content. Political bloggers and critiques are good at this strategy.
Incentive Hooks
This strategy is employed by almost everyone at some point in time. Running contests on blogs, asking people to write review about your site etc come under this. When you give people something in return, they will never hesitate to write about you.
Elements of Link Bait
For maximum return from link baiting, the quality of content should be good and unique. It should be well edited and properly formatted. This will let others to skim over the content and decide to link to it. With that in mind, we need to consider following things:
Headline:
A strong and alluring headline is a must. So the first step is to decide on a catchy headline that will automatically divert people’s attention and they will think of reading. When people will link they may use this headline to link to your site which in turn will serve as an added benefit and will increase traffic inflow.
Main Content:
Remember that great link bait content cannot be produced in a few hours. The main content should be written thoughtfully and in an easy to understand manner. The information provided in the content should be thoroughly researched. The content should be well formatted and should be free of spelling and grammatical errors.
Graphics and Visuals:
Pictures speak better than the words. So complement your content with graphics and visuals. If you have an infographics in place for any research based article, do include that and talk about the infographics in brief.
Targeted list:
Before you publish the article meant for link baiting, build up a list of bloggers and web masters who will be able to help you in promoting by sharing the link bait. This way it will get more visibility and can go viral faster.
Launch with a Buzz:
Even if you have a great article, complemented with pictures and graphics, you cannot expect people to find it and link to it on their won. You have to put little efforts to make it viral. Social media is the best choice in the regard. Use social media like Facebook and Twitter and social bookmarking service s like Digg, Reddit etc. to submit the content and promote it. Make sure that you are not over promoting it, else it will be regarded as Spam and will be of no use.
Factors for Link bait success
The ultimate aim of link bait is to gain backlinks which helps in SEO. Because one of the prime requisite in SEO is gaining backlinks. The social media like Facebook and Twitter act as catalyst which trigger the link bait posts to be mentioned in traditional blogs and websites. That is when the actual magic of link bait can be seen. Link baiting is the natural way of building backlinks. Main purpose of any SEO campaign is to bring traffic to a website by employing various methods and link bait serves this purpose effectively.
One of the factors for the success of link bait is the people around you whom you are depending upon the promotion. The influence of the people matters a lot. For example someone with less follower in Twitter or having less friends in Facebook when tweets or share your link bait article might not get as many retweets and shares as compared to a famous celebrity like Guy Kawasaki or Justin Bieber.
Another important factor in the success is Time to publish. If you are not online in Facebook or Twitter when someone publishes, chances are high that you will never see their links. So you can schedule your post to be published at an optimum time. You can even consider tweeting and sharing it multiple time. Similarly schedule your link bait post too to be published when most of your target audience is online.
The concept based on which you are launching your link bait is very much a deciding factor in the success of link bait. You can do little research in Internet and among blogeratti and linkeratti to find out what is keeping them glued, burning midnight oil.
The Essential Do-It-Yourself Guide to Successful Linkbait Infographics by Blueglass is an excellent resource to learn more about linkbait.
Conclusion
Search Engines love links. The more links they find pointing to your site the more trust and reliability they have on your site. While ranking websites for a keyword, Search Engine gives much importance to the number of backlinks, so chances of ranking higher is better, if the amount of backlink is more. Hence building backlinks is an important part in the process of Search Engine Optimization. And Link bait definitely helps in gaining more backlinks to your website. When you are creating link bait, choose the above mentioned hook wisely that meets your site’s and business’ goal.
Before you actually spend time in creating the content, identify the target audience who will help you in making your link bait viral. One thing to keep in mind is that there is no golden rule that will ensure you will get awesome result from your link bait.
