I believe that Link Baiting gets a negative wrap. It’s not a black hat method technique, it’s a white hat method and it’s really a great source of generating some targeted organic traffic to your website. The name “Link Baiting” really does sound like it’s bad, but we are here to debunk your thoughts.

What is Link Baiting?

Have you ever fished before? Well this concept is very similar to going to a lake, throwing a line in the water and trying to catch a monstrous fish. Basically when you create a new page or post you submit it to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. You throw it out to the public with the hopes that other blog owners will link to it. Sounds easy enough. So, how do you get people to link to your articles?

How To Start Link Baiting

What Type of Content You Should Generate

Determining what to write about is the first thing you need to do. Without having an idea, you are stuck up a creek without a paddle. There are 5 key types of content that the readers of these sites love!

News - People love breaking news. They like to read about things that are ground breaking.

Conflict/Contrary - You could refute an article that you have read. People love drama don’t they? They want to know what you have to say in rebuttal to another persons/sites findings.

Attack - This is more extreme than a simple conflict. This is a blatant attack on someone and is NOT RECOMMENDED.

Resource - Can you provide people with great information that is easy to read and can be of real value to them?

Humor - Who doesn’t like to read some funny stuff. You could post a list of funny pictures or some funny jokes. People eat that stuff up.

Use Catchy Titles

This is really important. You have to be able to catch the readers attention instantly. In general, articles about interesting things! If you can accomplish a catchy title, half the battle of getting people to read it is done for you.

Here are a few titles that people like a lot: “Top 10 ways…”, “How to do…”, “Ultimate Guide to…”. In general people love top lists; top 20, top 5, top 10, etc. So think of ones you can come up with for your niche.

Quality Content

No one will want to link to your site or content if it is crappy. People want to be able to read in English and not try to piece sentences together. Your content really should be outstanding.

If Looks Could Kill

The content should be organized well and should be easy on the eye’s. Using some pictures that are relevant to your post is very important. Try to find some cool pictures and put them in your content.

Add Social Websites

You may have noticed that at the bottom of all of our pages and posts we have a social networking bar so you can easily share the content with members of those sites. We use the Wordpress Plugin Sociable.

Timing Your Link Bait Launch

After following these steps it is now time to launch your article to the world and wait for the traffic to come in. However, it’s important to launch the article to all the sites at the same time. So choose the sites you want to launch to. Open up browsers for each site and submit the article at the same time to all sites.

Why? It’s possible that someone will rip off your content and put it on a social site you did not launch to yet. They will use a different title and a different description than what you used to try and steal your traffic.

Set Your Expectations

• Expect to get many backlinks from sites linking to yours.
• Don’t expect a high volume of clicks to your advertisements. People want to read the content and not see ads.
• Expect your brand to be exposed to the world. So make sure you are ready.
• There is no short-term search engine advantage.
• Your site will improve over the long-term.

I have a bad habit of trying to multi-task a lot. That’s mainly why I am writing about this topic. One of my personal goals for this year is to make sure I complete one task before I move on to the next task. This saves an incredible amount of time. Really, it does! Why? Well there are start-up times involved with each task you do. That’s why it is best to complete one task and than move on to the next.

Social networks are incredible. They connect you to so many people and so many ideas it’s no wonder you can spend all day on them. I was once asked by one of my twitter followers, who was having a hard time managing her time, how I manage to not get distracted and spend all day talking to people on twitter? and believe me, that is easy to do.

At the time this was a tough question to answer. Basically, I was getting distracted by my social media networks and I was not realizing it. I would have multiple sites open and be talking to multiple people at the same time as I was trying to do work on my sites, ebay, marketing, etc. That’s when it hit me! I needed to stay focused.

Staying Focused

Half the battle of staying focused is admitting that you are distracted. That’s what really opens your eye’s. Once you can admit you are not being as productive as you could be, you can begin to solve the problem and change your work patterns. Staying focused is actually really easy to do. Anyone can do it!

Tips For Staying Focused

• Make a list of the tasks that you need to get done.
• Arrange the list in order of priority – most important goes first, least important goes last.
• Determine how to spend your day.

There are two different approaches you can use to determine how to spend your day and it is based on the tasks you need to do and how much time you have.

1) Option #1

This option is best for people that are online for a long time during the day. It’s an easy way to split up your day and still stay focused. Plus, you do not get “bored” and tasks are no longer mundane.

Spend 1/3 of your day on creating new content and working on sites, etc.

Spend 1/3 of your day marketing your site.

Spend 1/3 of your day obtaining new knowledge.

2) Option #2

This option works great if you only have an hour or two here and there to work on your project. Spend all your time on doing one task. So, if you only have a few hours available than spend it writing new content for your site. Then, the next time you have a few hours available spend it on marketing your site.

Option #2 is really the better option. It maximizes your level of focus and you can really get some work done FAST! Option #1 is also great if you are working all day long on a site. Often times people can get bored fast, or run out of ideas quickly so it’s a good idea to mix up what you are doing. But, always remember to stay focused!

Some of those success stories may have really happened “overnight” but for the most part those that have become successful at blogging worked really hard at it, for a long time. There are some key characteristics that need to be looked at before you start blogging, to see if you have what it takes.

Dedication: This is really the most important thing. If you are dedicated than everything else will fall in line. With that being said, you can still blog part-time. You just need to stick to the tasks at hand. If you do choose to blog part-time than it’s a good idea to set aside 2-3 hours over the weekend and write several posts for the upcoming week. Then schedule them out to automatically post during the week. That way you can spend an hour here or there over the week marketing your blog.

I will say the most important thing is to have a list of tasks that you need to do. Stick to it and make sure the tasks are done in order. Cutting corners will not help you here.

Hard Work: If you are the type of person that has no problem handling a good size workload and working hard to accomplish your goals/tasks, than you will do fine in blogging. As in all business’s you must work hard if you want to succeed.

Persistence: With blogging the amount of work you put in is often correlated to the amount of success you have. Therefore you need to be continually improving the work you are doing. The more posts you do and the higher the quality of the posts are, the more traffic you will generate to your blog and you will get more readers. The more link building you do, the better your site will perform in the SERP’s. You get it? Success does not happen overnight!

Debunking The Myth’s of Blogging

Here is a short list of some common misconceptions about blogging.

1) You will need to invest a little money. You can start for under $20. Just buy a domain, get some hosting and find a free template. Although we recommend investing money in a premium template. Free templates are a great way to start.

2) You will not be able to quit your job for a while, if at all. Blogging takes time!

3) There is no easy way to make money overnight with blogging. Blogging is not a get rich quick scheme, sorry!

4) Most bloggers never become successful, in monetary terms. Many of them stop blogging after many weeks, even months, because they have not made any money.

The important thing to remember is how easy it is to start blogging. Really, it just takes time, some knowledge and your applied ability. How many business’s do you know that you can start for under $20 and potentially make a lot doing? It’s a very low risk proposition isn’t it? Which is why so many people try it and don’t make it. They simply don’t understand what it takes to be a blogger. Do you think you have what it takes to be a blogger?