Introduction
Wikipedia defines Link Bait as "any content or feature that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites."
For Website Owners and Internet Marketers, Link Bait is the holy grail - like a great press release, the effect of Link Bait is simple - other people doing high-value promotional work for free. Along with the obvious benefits this form of Viral Marketing brings, an additional bonus is the residual effect on search engine rankings to the website hosting the original material. Put simply, the more links to a given piece of content, the more likely search engines are to list that content in top search result positions*.
Not all Link Bait is commerical or premeditated - content published innocuously can become "link bait" without the publisher even realising it. However, the rest of this article deals with the factors surrounding premeditated Linkbaiting - a term I and others use to describe premeditated attempts to create a link bait effect.
There are essentially two factors to successful Linkbaiting:
- Production of content / feature that will create a strong motivational condition for people to share it.
- Carefully undertaking enough promotional effort (seeding) to reach a large enough audience of influential people to link to it.
Very simply, the higher the value / quality of the material produced (1), the less initial seed promotion it will need (2). It's a trade off between the cost of the production, cost of seed promotion and the value of resultant traffic / interest.
The Link Bait Series
Over the next few weeks, I'll be publishing a series of articles examing link bait, starting this week. Stay tuned to TGNWG to read the full series, I'll be updating this introductory post with links to all the articles as they are published.