Linkbaiting techniques

Linkbaiting is a natural technique to gain inbound links to your website. I like this SEO technique very much because when someone finds your post useful he links your website automatically. You website position will increase because its really more beneficial.

Linkbaiting should be well designed in order to catch people’s attention. Next step is to make linkbaiting useful so people would find reasons to link it. Today, there are couples of very popular sites dedicating to linkbaiting.

In this post I’ll share with you some of my favorite linkbaiting techniques. There are many others, but the concept is the same: Take a related issue to your website and make it interesting as you can.

Choose a respected location

Linkbaiting shouldn’t be looked at as something you do only once. Dedicate a respected location to your linkbaiting section. It can be a blog, sub-domain or even a whole website. Linkbaiting is the art of attraction. You can’t be attractive without resources.

My suggestion is to separate the linkbaiting section from your commercial domain. Add a long sub-domain such as ‘my-greatlinkbaiting-section.mysite.com’ so people would focus your blog name and not your commercial site.

Don’t make your linkbaiting section looks commercial

It’s very important to set a place without any commercial signs, such as logo or contact details of your commercial site. Make your linkbaiting section appears distinct from the rest of your website and dedicate it to interesting and useful stuff only.

People want to enjoy linkbaiting. They don’t want to feel you’re selling something. They shouldn’t smell your commercial intentions.

Use Free tools

Provide people cool tools that they can use on their websites or they can find them useful. Today it’s easy than ever to create sharable HTML code which website owner can embed in their website code. Useful linkbaiting have the longest lifetime. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to create a really good free useful tool.

Linking others

It’s can be a good Idea to link others, such as relevant industry, Wikipedia, or blogs, especially websites who have more authority than you do. However, think twice before you are linking to a competitor. You can use ‘nofollow’ tag and prevent the search engine to crawl the link, but sometime it’s important to be placed in a neighborhood of authorities websites. Consider those factors.

Create a Separate Google Analytics account

When you run a website you will rely on tracking conversion rates, per visit values and bounce rates. Don’t mix your linkbaiting section analytics data with your commercial website. You can combine it later if you would like to analyze your traffic transition. However remember your linkbaiting section visitors are different from your commercial website visitors. (You can also try this site analysis tool for free)

Publish unique news

A good way to create a linkbait is to write about the last news related to your website. Keep an eye on the latest innovations, weird phenomenon and scoops. Make your linkbaiting viral and linkable.
If you’re not a journalist don’t act like journalist. Don’t linkbait issues regarding to regular news. As far as it’s concerned to news, people prefer to link the big news websites and not niche websites. However, if you’re the first and the only source – go for it.

Add interactive content such as surveys

People like interactive actions. If you can create relevant surveys or quizzes – do it. You can add an option to share the surveys and make it more viral. It can be a good idea to give a personal feedback to users in the end of the survey. Let them feel your interactive features are beneficial.

Contests and Prizes

Challenge your visitors with contests. Add a competitive online element and offer a worthwhile prize. You will be surprise to the see the participation rate increases. Contests are very good technique to generating buzz around your website or blog site.

Top Lists

People like top lists because they are easy to read and very concise. A lot of blogs base their linkbaiting strategy on useful lists: “10 things you must do in order to…”, "20 tips for useful..." and so on. Find the basic factors of any relevant issue and people would like to read it and add a link to your clear list. Check out Digg and Delicious and you’ll find a lot of lists examples.

Use Humor - It's always working

One of the efficient linkbaiting techniques is humor. Check out the last 10 email you had forwarded this month. 5 of them must be funny things: Pictures, video, stories, news. People will like it. People always enjoy humor and would be glad to pass it on. Don’t be extremely sophisticated. Your humorous linkbait should be easy to understand.

Controversy

Your linkbaiting content must excite people: Get out of the routine limits and write on controversial issues, Hit the consensus! Attack other bloggers. However, when you choose to pick a fight do it wisely, believe in what you’re saying. Consider which reputation you would like to build. Don’t ruin your good name. Another effective controversy technique is shocking. Use it if you have something shocking to write about. Don’t fool people and ruin your reputation.

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