11 Easy Steps to Link Bait

Link bait is the hottest new buzz word in the SEO world.  When link baiting you create content that will naturally attract links to your site by getting others to discuss it on forums, link to it, talk about it, blog about it and post it on social bookmarking sites.

Link bait has been around for a while, but the problem is that most people just don’t fully understand what it takes to implement it in a link building campaign.  I get the impression that some might even consider it a black hat technique which might be why it is not used as frequently in building links.

Really link bait is a form of link building with a bit of a unique twist to it.  The twist is what makes link bait a fun form of link building.  Rather than having to search out relevant links, you are bringing links to your site through providing unique, valuable and popular site content.

For all you sportsmen it is like online fishing.  First you generate content and post it on your site, then let the internet traffic take notice.  Just like in fishing where you have to wait for the fish to bite, you wait for others to notice the fresh content and link to it.  Unlike fishing what we are hunting for is the link.

The key is the content and its promotion.  When link bait is done properly it can create a large number of links to your site without too much effort.

Creating the Hook

There are really five different forms of hooks that all the ideas we will cover  in the next section can be categorized into.

• The News hook - You report on news within your industry, but make sure it is a unique take on it and not just a rehashing.  Cover it in a way that no one else caught or several different viewpoints.  You might even try to prove another story is false.
• Contrary hooks - Contradict another’s point of view that is prominent and well known to make the article controversial while giving supporting evidence.
• Attack hooks - These go just a step beyond a contrary hook and take it beyond the level of just debunking a theory to the level of a personal attack or flame.
• Resource hooks - These are more of a collection of resources and information, breaking it down for people.  It is kind of a distillery of viewpoints broken down with a personal take.
• Humor hook - With this technique you can post funny stories, jokes or funny pictures and anything else that you think others may review and place a link to.

Ideas for Link Bait Hooks

• Make a valuable online resource with quality information, reports lists and history.
• Conduct interviews with famous, respected or knowledgeable people in the niche and publish it.
• Build a tool that people find useful.
• Run an event that is news worth such as a contest.
• Write an article that is interesting, controversial or explains how to do something.
• Be the first to report news on topics in your niche.
• Expose a scammer or unethical practices in your niche.
• Write some content that is funny or a joke about someone famous.
• Write from a view point that disagrees with a popular authority view.
• Make a free template, theme or software that visitors can download and use.
• Post a theory that is outrageous, but back up that theory with logic and facts.
• Become an expert in your niche and post valuable information and ideas.
• Be the first at researching and documenting a topic or idea.

Link Baiting Steps (the 11 Steps)

1. Put together a list of blogs which relate to the topic niche with contact information.
2. Put together a list of forums that also relate to the topic and sign up for membership.
3. Create some quality, value added content such as a free eBook, top ten list, how to guide, tutorials, free templates, free software, free internet tools, tutorials, etc as already covered.
4. Post the free value added content onto your website which visitors will have free access to.
5. Now write and submit a press release pertaining to your free content for distribution.
6. Use the contact list you compiled for bloggers in the same niche and send them the free content with a link to your site and a copy of your press release.
7. Go to the forums you signed up with and post a thread that notifies the forum members of your free content with a link to the content on your site.
8. Write several new articles which relate to your free content, embed links in them to the free content and submit them to article directories.
9. Do some link building to the free content on your site and use the title of the free content as the anchor text in the link.
10. Now you can sit back and with some luck watch the free backlinks appear and analyze how that brings additional traffic to your site.
11. As a last step in the process it may be a nice gesture to send a thank you email to anyone that may have assisted you (such as the bloggers) in the process and reward them with a link if you feel what they offered was useful.

If you want to establish yourself as an Authority Site and are concerned over the amount of link building that it might take to do so, you should consider adding link baiting to your arsenal along with quality directory submissions.  If you have the right content it can be an effective method of building your brand, reputation, links and most of all traffic to the content on your website.