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.