All About Link Baiting – Know How To Hook In High Quality Links With Enticing Link Bait

Link baiting is the process of creating and placing high demanding content in your website. It is the technique to satisfy the needs and the demands of a specific set of needing audience. Link bait is a piece of content that is designed and created for the specific intention of gathering links from other websites. With traditional link building, you ask webmasters for links, but with link baiting, you bait your high quality content which encourages others to link to your site. In other words, your content should have the power to obligate other site publishers to link your site. Link baiting is a great marketing strategy which not only provides you high quality backlinks but also provides you high quality traffic.

With the increasing popularity and effectiveness of social media networking the process of link baiting has become easier and more powerful. The ultimate aim of link baiting is to go viral. People should share you information in social media sites. Now if 500 people share your “link bait “content in Facebook, then you get 500 backlinks from Facebook. These 500 backlinks are very effective. So, social networking can really speed up the process of link baiting.

Link baiting requires compelling and attractive content which can obligate other website publishers to link to your site. It should also force people to share it on their social media networks.

Various forms of link bait

There are several different types of link bait content that you can use to encourage and attract linkers. Some are positive; “information sharing” based type of content, while some are controversial contents. In general, there are six common types of link bait content:

i. Attack: “Attack” link bait pieces are created to target a specific division of audience. These types of content are made to encourage readers to click on the links as well as to share the links.

ii. Humor: Humor is the best way to ease off your readers. Making people laugh is difficult, but humor jokes/emails are more quickly spread. This type of content has the capacity to funnel in the largest number of visitors.

iii. Contrary: It shows the other side of a popular opinion and views. “Contrary” contents are aimed to create controversies. But if backed with sufficient and related information, these types can come in handy to attract large visitors.

iv. Incentives: People like free things and providing them incentives is the one of the best way to lure them to link. Baiting publishers to provide free incentives for their visitors may convince them to link your content.

v. News: Offering high quality, fresh and updated news to your readers is an easy trick to get links. Provide them with news related information on the net.

vi. Resource: Establish yourself as the leader in your niche market industry by providing resourceful informative content. Resourceful “How to” posts helps to solve people’s problems, hence they can become a great bait in viral marketing.

Now that we have known different types of content that can drive traffic to the site, it’s time to know different types of link bait that you can use.

i. Videos: More than 90% of the internet users will halt at a website containing content. Videos are a great mean for links in social media networks. Hence, videos are one of the commonest types of link bait.

ii. Infographics: Providing information with great visually appealing graphics is a great way to attract web publishers to link to your site. Since link bait is mainly concerned with social networking, Infographics can be easily shared in these sites.

iii. Lists: People love lists. They simply adore them. “Top 10”, “Best 5”etc. such types of lists have always been successful as they provide users with lot of information within a short period of time.

iv. Curative posts: Curative posts are posts which recall the important news in a specific industry/market. Most publishers do not have the time to do it on their own. Therefore they link to the website in which such posts are present.

v. Guides: Guides are important for visitors. Both free and paid guides are a great way to attract links and visitors. If the content is evergreen and timeless, guides can be included in the site for a very long time.

vi. Surveys: People love to take surveys. Use surveys to extract different kinds of information from a particular market.

vii. Interviews: Interview high authority personalities that belong to your niche market. Interviews of such personalities tend to be viral at a quicker rate and are sure to drive you traffic.

viii. Freewares: Provide free softwares to people that can help them to make their life easier. You can also provide them with tools and wares. These types of sharewares are the most downloaded content in internet and they are sure to spread virally, provided they add value to users’ life.

ix. Giveaways: Distribute free E-books, guides, reports etc. for your visitors. Place them on your site and ask them to share your site, to avail such incentives.

x. Contests: Conducting contests is a sure way to get more links and traffics from social media sites. Ask their opinions, thoughts etc. in their contests, or you can also conduct quizzes and IQ tests on your website.

xi. Awards: Offering awards to contestants and winners will force them to return back to your site. This will also make them share your links in their social media for their friends and families.

xii. Widgets: Free helpful widgets tend to spread at a faster rate throughout the web.

xiii. News: Elevate yourself as an authority leader in your niche market by posting some important relevant and breaking news that relate to your market. Gain people’s trust. If you are first to report a major breakthrough in your market, then your site is certain to get large amount of backlinks and visitors.

xiv. Discussions: Get into discussions with your industry leaders. Pitch in some new views and likeable thoughts. If they adore your thoughts, then they will definitely link your site.

xv. Previews: People generally want others to suggest them on new products, services, books etc. which they want to buy. Write informative previews about some of the hot and recent items in your market.

xvi. Year in Review: “Year in Review” articles are the articles that recap the major events of an industry and how they affected the industry in a span of one year. It’s just like a summary of events that took place in a year.

xvii. Inciting a response: These are controversial link worthy content which are targeted over a single person or a company.

How to make link bait content available to the end users?

Once your content is ready, you need to find various ways to spread it over the internet. Here are some of the ways with which you can get your word out in the market.

i. Find relevant influencers on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Start engaging with them and try to know what they and their followers would like and share. Provide relevant and share worthy content.

ii. Contact industry related journalists who work for specific publications. Journalists can help in quicker sharing and linking of your content.

iii. Back with the basics with search engine optimization, to optimize your content for search engines. This is done so that people can find your informative content for related keywords. As you get more and more links, your visibility in search engines also increases and hence you get more traffics, links and shares.

iv. Avail the paid advertising facility provided by Facebook and Google. But make sure that your content is strong enough to provide you returns for your investment. Effective judgment is required in this case.

v. Find influential bloggers using Technorati and other blog directories. Ask them to share/link your content.

Ease the process of sharing and linking. Give them a snippet of codes and instruction set to place your link/images on their site. Place social sharing buttons on your site. Nobody will link you, if the process becomes harder. So it is your task to ease the process.

Link baiting is not as easy as described above. You need to have some concrete link-worthy material. It requires a large amount of creativity, innovation, resources and more importantly hard work.

If you wish to learn the entire process of link building with a step by step and a detailed approach, then read our Link Building Guide which will lead you in finding high number of quality backlinks.