By Michael Baker
How to Get Visitors To Good Content - LinkBait Technique
You have written some good content and posted it on your blog. You are so proud of it, and just sit there and stare at it. Then it hits you: Will anyone else actually see this? Now you have all sorts of thoughts about how and what you need to do to get visitors to your site. The way to make this happen is with a technique called linkbait.
By definition, linkbait is any piece of content created to attract links by its awesome quality, entertaining or humorous, or usefulness value.
Another way to look at it is by comparing it to fishing. When fishing, you put a bait on a hook and toss it out into the water. Then, you sit and wait and hope to catch something. Once something does grab that bait, they get hooked, and you reel them in. This is all linkbaiting is.
You are putting a link (hook) somewhere on the internet in the form of a cute phrase (bait). Once the person takes the bait, and clicks the link, you got them reeled in to your site.
Now, the best way I have found to be successful with linkbaiting is via the
social media sites. This is a practice known as social bookmarking. And for the record, it is OK if you social bookmark your website.
Once you have written the information on your website, you can then go to any of the social network sites and bookmark that web page of yours. This is where the linkbait part comes into play.
There are different types of hooks when deciding on the title of the bookmark and the description of the content you are bookmarking.
- Ego Hooks - If you talk about someone in a positive manner within your articles, then those people are more likely to bookmark your site or vote it up.
- Humor Hooks - Humor and news always battle it out for the top hooks people want to see and click. The benefit of humor is once funny, always funny. News will eventually get old.
- Contrary Hooks - Try to play the other side of the fence for once. I maintain a site about organic food, and wrote a post titled: Organic Food Is Not Healthy. Of course, I referring to a report by someone who said that. I then opposed the report and dissected it, but the headline what got people to click.
- Resource Hooks - How To's are best here. People are always looking to learn something new or you can even use a Top 10 list. Works for late night, so why not here?
- News Hooks - People want to break the latest news story. This is why sites like Digg were so popular for a while. You wanted to be the first one to digg a story. And better yet, you wanted to have your story dugg. This was a huge amount of traffic if you could get to Digg's front page. So, if you have a good news story, then break it.
Those are the types of hooks. Do not mislead people. Ensure the hook is exactly what they will be seeing when they get to your website. If not, you will be in trouble of the social networking site as they will blast you.
While linkbaiting can have some SEO purposes, I do not use it as much for that.
You want traffic to the site for something, whatever it may be. Save the SEO part for a separate link building campaign you might have underway. If you are going to make this practice a part of your internet marketing business, then you need to have a call to action for the user when they get to the site. This could be anything. But just don't let the traffic go to waste. So, let's go do some fishing.
Michael Baker is an
Internet Marketing Consultant and owner of WSBM LLC, a web development company located in Sylacauga, AL. He has helped his clients gain an increase in website traffic by using linkbait properly, as well as showing you how to
Build Your Pagerank.
