What Homer Simpson Couldnt Tell You About Linkbaiting

Can you imagine an episode of the Simpsons with Homer spending the whole show trying to think up a good title for a blog post?

Honestly I have spent almost as much time thinking of the title of this lensas working on the contents.

Whilst the content is important, without a title that will attract attention your work will never be seen.

So What Is Linkbaiting?

Linkbaiting (or Link Baiting) is all about getting links or traffic to your blog or website. Darren Rowse has a fairly long introduction to linkbaiting.

Whilst he mentions some methods that are trying to trick or trap people into linking to them, most methods are far less extreme, fairly honourable, and extremely effective.

There are 2 aspects to it, the hook and the bait.

The bait is how you attract someone to your content, with carefully chosen headlines and content.

The hook is how you encourage people to link to your content and to pass the word around encouraging others to do the same.

Bait

Just like fishing really ;)

A lot of this comes down to research and here are some key things to look for.

Take a look at the most popular links category on Del.icio.us.com
You can get a good feel for what kind of topics people are bookmarking, and also some great ideas for headlines. Don't forget with headlines that it still has to refer to your subject, or at least should if you want to be honest and get targetted traffic.
Take a look at Digg.com
Browse Technorati, and pay special attention to tag clouds
When you are reading blog posts, look for the ones that attract the most comments. That is a good indication of the amount of traffic and real interest there is in the topic.
Read posts on a forum related to your primary subject and look for problems you can solve. This is actually a core strategy for product research, but sometimes giving information to solve a problem can also be worthwhile.

Most popular on Del.icio.us (current)

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The Latest Tech Stories From Digg

Digg is a great place for research, not just for content, but also for headlines.

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Meaty Bait

You need to have some content that tastes nice

All kinds of content can be part of your bait, whether it is an article you have writting about something (or quite often someone), or maybe a tool or piece of code you have written.

Whatever your content is, it has to be good enough for someone to want to recall it in the future, inform others about, or buy/download the product.
Your content may also play a greater or lesser role as a hook, maybe as a redistributable ebook, article or piece of code, that will somehow encourage additional visitors, or provide a backlink. Many aspects of this are also in some circles referred to as viral marketing.

The Hook In Your Site Design

Websites and blogs should be designed to have hooks

When setting the hook, you want the user to take an action.

In Internet Marketing 1.0 that action was typically to join a mainling list, bookmark the site, or hopefully buy a product.

Internet Marketing 2.0 adds a lot of additional actions for a user to take.

Social Bookingmarking and rating sites
Commenting (and so joining an email list)
Subscribing to RSS feeds (which people actually read)
Providing trackback facilities which encourages a blog publisher to mention your site and share readership.

The Hook In Your Content

Making an article freely distributable under the terms of a Creative Commons License
Providing an Ebook or special report that can be freely distributed
Downloading an application or maybe a blog plugin that provides backlinks or encourages further interaction

Always remember that your content is not just bait, but can also contain some form of hook that can be distributed and appear on other sites or a users desktop as a link back to your site in the future.

Reader Feedback

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A Quick Poll

This is a serious example of an additional linkbaiting hook within the content of this page.

p.s. icons to Digg this and bookmark at Del.icio.us are in the navigation menu

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