As a blogger one of your main goals should be to get as much backlinks as possible from other blogs, through any means necessary. A way to achieve this is through, what is commonly known as “link baiting.” I short link bait is remarkable and “sticky” content that has a large probability of getting linked back from other bloggers. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention,” and I couldn’t find a better definition for it myself.

The term itself has been long time regarded as black hat technique, but there’s actually no reason for calling it so, it’s just the process of making unique and remarkable content with the purpose of building links. Think of it better as SEO with a twist ;). Actually try to visualize linkbaiting like fishing, you’re sending out in the pond ( the internet), through your raft (blog), bait ( content) and patiently wait for a bite (linkback). Before any real ‘fishing’ can take place you need a link baiting hooks and they come in all shape and sizes:

• News hooks
• Resource hooks
• Humor hooks
• ‘I’m a idiot’ hooks
• Tools and hacks hooks

News Hooks

For this to work you almost exclusively have to break the ice on the matter, that means to you have to be the first to break the news. Weather it’s the latest gadget or the latest Britney Spears goof if you’re first and it’s big enough you’ll get more link beef then you can chew on.

Resource Hooks

Do some research and build a great, unique and remarkable article in a field on which you’re a expert. It’s important you know what you’re talking about or else you’ll get trolled. The most sought for articles are the how to dos type or tutorials, while lists are you’re best friends when building resources.

Humor hooks

This is the easiest type of link bait, just blog about a funny video or story and you can get some major exposure. But it isn’t as easy as it looks, the niche is really crowded and that means you really need to have something truly funny on your hands and a lot of luck

Tools and hacks hooks

This implies making a very helpful tool or plugin, you don’t need to build something really complicated like a CMS or something like that. You can hire a coder for a simple wordpress plugin, in example, and release a really practical and helpful tool for the community. Do a little promotion and you’ll have a lot of inlinks on your hands. If you’re good with design and CSS you can always make a theme or template, their one one best link building methods, although they’re a bit different.

‘I’m a jackass’ hook

Make some wacky statement, troll someone famous in your community, be controversial no matter what or just be a plain ol’ jackass you might get some “here’s what this idiot had to say” linkback. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’re a really good jackass, they’re plenty of assholes out there so you’ve got some pretty stiff competition.

These are just a few, most used, link baiting hooks. You can see a list with popular hooks at Jim Westerngren’s blog.

Here’s a few examples of excellent link baits: Fifty Most Influential Bloggers, 19 Year Old Speed Skater to Appear In Playboy, Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time etc. I could go on with lists like these all night, but I guess you’ve got the picture. Browse a bit through those websites and after you’ve had a good look at the structure of the content let’s take a few minutes and analyze it. Here’s a few tips on how to improve your link building techniques.

Building Content. Don’t even start a link building campaign before you’ve got a unique and remarkable post to showcase, be sure to write down something that’s never or in small quantity been made before and of course something interesting as well. That means do your homework and research every possible angle, if you get first page on digg you’ll get all the shit kids complaining you did and that, they’ll still keep coming no matter what, but at least cut the ranks down by making sure you feel all the empty gaps your post might have.

Building Lists. What you should notice is that the best link baits are lists, actually 60-70% of the top stories at digg.com or any similar social bookmarking service are lists. That’s because people love to read lists, their easy, fast and spot on. If you can harness the art of list making you’re one step away from building effective link baiting. Beware, before building ‘best …’ or ‘most …’ lists be sure to make you’re research as solid as possible, leave no room for subjectivity and doubt.

Building Controversy. Everybody loves twists and gossips, if you know how to intelligently (not really necessary) make a controversy starting from a certain subject, then you can build up some valuable link bait. What you need is some really solid arguments, backed up by facts and research, or else you’ll get ignored.

Promote your link bait. Now you’ve got some link bait but it’s not like it’ll spark every webmasters attention, you need to do a little promotion work. That means submitting your posts to popular social bookmarking services like digg, stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit etc and ask your friends to vote your story, e-mail as many webmasters in your niche as possible (don’t spam them), post on forums etc.

Do you use linkbait?

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The Link Baiting: About, Tactics And Tricks by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.