By now, you likely know that you want to get incoming links to your site. It has all those SEO ranking benefits, as well as natural traffic you can get from people clicking that link from one site to yours. Link bait is content that is structured to hopefully get a bunch of people to link to it. It is content that is created specifically to attract links.

By creating content in this manner you are hoping to attract webmasters with their own websites, blogs and networks and will refer to you content on their platforms and create links back to the original source.

It does not mean that this content is going to be worthless, it is almost the opposite. Typically most link bait has incredible value and that is why people will naturally link to it. It is a good resource content and people want to share good information with their readers.

Now you are probably thinking that is the goal of everything I post on my website. That may be true but link bait is specifically designed to bust through all the content clatter on the net and make readers take notice. The basic concepts for link bait content come in the forms of various hooks like: News, lists, Resource (education) and Humour.

Why do need Link bait content?

Links to your website are the life blood of internet traffic. If you want traffic to visit your site and make use of the products, services or content you need to have links which allow people to reach you. If you do not have natural links bringing them to your site you will have to spend a considerable amount of money on advertising. These natural links positively affect where your website shows up in search engines for various search terms.

The more links you have, the more relevant your site will be viewed by the search engines and the higher it will place in search results. If you want your website to have high traffic popularity, a solid link building campaign using directory submissions and content is essential.

What Are the Steps to Link Bait?

If you want your link bait to be effective you need to do more than post it and forget it. There are specific steps you can utilize to bring attention to your content, which will increase the odds of getting traffic to view it and links that reference it.

Some of these include the usage of relevant forums, blogs, press releases, article submissions that reference content and link building to the content. There are quite a few types of link bait that you can create. Some of the more popular are when someone creates a training guide like an article series, a PDF crash course, or a quick start guide.

Once that is created and it is valuable enough so others are not really going to waste their time making it, they will link to yours.  That is one element of link bait and why it is great to create really good content that others will want to link to.

Other types of link bait that are very popular and get a lot of links are resource lists or lists of tips.  Numbered lists get a lot of attention, and it is an old copywriting secret that numbers and some specific amount that is not rounded off with a bunch of zeroes gets more attention and pulls the reader into the copy. When you do resources and guides, it is really about creating things that other people will not take the time to do.

Interviewing multiple experts is a great theory to get traffic and links to your website. You can seek out some of the top experts in your market and do a group interview on the phone or you could ask questions via email and then compile them all together. You will want to find some of the most influential people in your industry that will reach tons of people.

If they participate in the interview they will feel obligated to link to it. Once you publish that interview you will want to send a nice email to the person. Thank them for spending the time with you on such a great interview.

Another good way to get link bait is if you run a special survey about some controversial event or something that gets a lot of attention. Once you get enough votes to stabilize the poll, then other people are going to be more likely to link to you. It is too much work for them to go out and drive a bunch of people to a poll to get the same results.

Lastly use the tried-and-true theories of piggybacking. Look for examples of link bait that are successful and then emulate them. Figure out what they did and then basically do what they have done, and you will shorter the path to success. You do not want to clone someone or rip off copyrights or anything like that, just build upon the good ideas that are out there already.

Jeff Yeomans

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Jeff has been in the internet marketing for 12 years as a marketer & a consultant. We can help you get into the top 5% of success with internet marketing. Start learning leadership and Marketing strategies under our mentoring system.

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