What is link baiting?Link baiting, according to me, is a process of creating such acontent which is sure to receive lot of attention (and hence, lots of backlinks) from various people. It may be some sort of tips, some breaking new, some conflicting comments by somebody or any such content.
Recently, Andy Hagans gave a presentation in a SEO meet on link baiting. Here are some of the things which I picked up from there. I hope it would be useful to you as well.
1. A great “title” for your link baiting article is half the work done. Please note that people like titles like “10 ways to… “, “How to do…”, “Ultimate guide to…”, “XYZ survival guide”. So use them in your title to grab attention.
2. Quality of the article should be not just fine but it should be really great.
3. Your article should be good looking. What do we mean by a good looking article? Your article should have some good colors used. It should have some pictures to grab the attention of the reader. Bold important heading (sort of summary) so that people who are in hurry can just go through quickly (called scanning the article).
4. Generously link to other websites from your link baiting article. Why so? People would like to bookmark such a page which has links to all those sites providing information on one specific topic.
5. Add social bookmarking websites (like digg, slashdot, technorati, reddit, netscape, del.ico.us, stumbleupon and others as well) links at the bottom of your article. If a person comes to your article from one social bookmarking website, he/she may like to add it to other places as well, if you provide this one-click adding.
6. Inform bloggers of the same industry about your article. It is handy to keep an xls file for information of all blogs in your industry with their owner’s name, blog url and email address. Send personal email to each of them. Just tell them that you have written this article and thought to let you know that you might be interested in this. Don’t ask for a link back.
7. Create a good title and description to be put on each of the social bookmarking site.
8. Launch your link baiting article. The very important step in launching your article is the timing. Please choose an appropriate time when you think most of the audiences will be online at that time. Secondly, remember to put your article on all of the social bookmarking sites (digg, slashdot, technorati, reddit, netscape, del.ico.us, stumbleupon and others as well) in one go. If you post on just few of them in one go, then there is a possibility that some person pick it up and put if on other networking site with not so good title and description. So the better thing is that you yourself do this work with good title and description.
9. Get additional Traffic and create a gust of traffic. Try to get additional traffic at that same time from some forums (making a post or adding link in your signature, but not spamming) or your own other websites. Try to create a huge gust of traffic in a short period of time. This will help ranking you on front pages of social bookmarking sites, which itself will create another gust of fresh traffic.
10. What to expect and what not to expect from link baiting article traffic
* Don’t expect a good click through rate from this traffic on adsense or other banners. Click through rate will be very less.
* Expect many quality organic backlinks to your article from other blogs or forums with different titles and descriptions.
* Don’t expect short-term search engine ranking advantage.
* You will surely get better ranking for your overall website in long-term.
* Expect brand exposure for your website (which will lead to mindshare quickly). This brand exposure can ease your visitors in buying from your website.
* You have taken your time to write quality content for that article, which will again help you in long term as search engines need quality content on the websites.
11. Rinse and repeat.
www.jimkarter.com
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