Creating linkbait, or getting website to link to you on their own, and with Google starting to devalue paid links, it couldn’t be a better time to start utilizing linkbaits.
Creating linkbait can be difficult and pushing it through can be even more difficult. This post will go over a few of the popular linkbait type (with examples), where to find inspirations, how to get your post noticed, and some cautions to keep in mind.
Common Linkbait Types:
- Current media, news, information, and interviews
- Facebook (and its advertising) have been making the news on a daily basis. Our post on Facebook stats this past week attracted links from techcrunch.com, ypulse.com, adrants.com, marketingpilgrim.com, cpyu.org, and a few other small sites.
- Politics and the presidential election have also been “hot.” Our post on 2008 U.S. Presidential candidates and social networks received 28 diggs, numerous stumbles, and links from web-strategist.com and communityguy.com.
- Breaking news
- Freezing Hot was one of the first blogs to break the news of E-loan canceling its affiliate program. As a result, it got links from 5staraffiliateprograms.com and scottfish.com.
- Humor
- Posting anything funny, that hasn’t or is just now being widely viewed almost always work. Sometimes posting the new viral video will cause other blogs to link to yours – just be sure to embed the video.
- Shocking/Sexy
- A video that promoted porn industry stats (note: PG: 13) made stats sexy and thus created tons of links, including a full post on techcrunch.com
While none of the above are superb examples (besides the porn industry stats) it goes to show that just about any blog, even if it’s fairly new, can get quite a few sites with leverage (and readership!) to link to the post.
Need some inspiration to make a hot post? Here some great places to look:
Once you’ve made your awesome post, here are some tricks to get it noticed:
- Pitch it to relevant blogs. About once a month I’ll write a REALLY good post that involves hours of research and writing and something no one else has posted before. Write 2-3 sentences “pitching” the post to bloggers. I usually say something to the effect of: “I saw you recently wrote about [insert topic here] and I too posted about [topic] on my blog at: [link]. I think it’s something you and your readers might be interested in.” Of course it’s not exactly like that, but you get the idea. Make each email personal, by saying “Hi [Name].” I usually pitch a post to 10-30 blogs with about a 10-30% post rate.
- Submit it to digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc (however, make sure it’s relevant and your an active user on the site – only submitting your own sites pages is highly frowned upon and is sometimes considered to be spam)
- Email it to colleagues and friends that are interested in the content. Sounds simple, but I’ve emailed colleagues blog posts and have them pass it along to others (who often have blogs on a related subject).
And some cautions of linkbaiting:
- Google doesn’t like intentional or manipulation oriented linkbaiting. John Chow’s linkbait is one of the main reasons he was delisted from Google.
- It takes time and isn’t always guaranteed. Yes, creating good posts takes time, BUT it’s usually worth the time.
Hopefully you now have a better idea of what linkbait is, the common forms, where to get inspiration, how to get it noticed, and some drawbacks.
Dave Rigotti is the owner of an internet marketing company called Freezing Hot.
In my opinion, Google loves organic and smart linkbaiting. If that linkbaiting is designed to link bomb the Google algorithm or manipulate rankings in a transparent manner, then it is not organic, nor smart.
Well said, Loren. Having others link to you (and counting that) is essentially what made Google great.
Nobody would want to go back to the days of searching every page of a site to find something related that might not be there. Google does this for us very well so we don’t have to.
Thanks, I really like this nice and straightforward post!
Being involved in Memes has helped me in the past. Google still loves me….. for now!
Not getting much search traffic though!
I have heard that offering free tools like financial calculators works.
Good post with quick ideas but do more that spell check your text…. “make sure it’s relevant and your an active user” You are responsible for your text.
Thanks for picking out the typo. That’s one of my pet peeves… I’ll have to start proofreading better.
Sometimes it’s the 5-10 minutes “top ten” list that is more linkbaitable than the 5 hour research report.
Sometimes a top 10 charts work really well in linkbaiting. However, thanks for the detailed link bait article
Having origonal content is debateable since it goes against the principle of syndicated rss content, which is the basis of the xbox site. Aggregated in stock xbox.