Dragonfly Media Curacao

The term link baiting sounds wrong. It sounds like you are about to land a vicious hook in somebody’s lower lip and reel him into your boat, flopping about and all. The practice has also gotten some bad press because there are people that forget that just having a great title and a savvy introduction is not enough. The content itself, the article/post, needs to be link-worthy as well.

Tropical SEO, Andy Hagans, is said to be the master baiter (pun by Stuntdubl). He appears to have it figured out how to make content go viral easily and get those links pointing his way. When you read his blog you will understand that link baiting is an art and a lot of work, but if you have the method down you should be able to reap the benefits of those incoming links.

At first we thought, like many other people, that link baiting was in some way an unethical way of building links to a website. After reading through part of Andy Hagans’ blog we were cured of that particular misconception though.

The idea of link baiting is to write content that people will want to read and link to. The title (and introduction) is the bait for the link, but the hook is in the content itself. If the title is good you can probably get a lot of people to view your content, but the percentage of people that then links to it is directly related to the content; bad content = no links, good content = links.

After you have decided on what to write about you will need a good, catchy title. As the title is the bait you really need to think about how you can make it as interesting as possible. What would pique your interest more: “Raising Spot” or “Who Else Wants an Obedient, Loving Dog”? For more attention grabbing headline ideas check out copyblogger. Your title is what people see first in the search result pages and is sometimes enough for people to ‘digg’ your post (especially if the introduction is enticing as well) so it pays off to put thought into it.

The content of your post/article are the hook. There are different kinds of hooks and each of them requires a different approach. Some of these hooks are:

• Resource hook
  The resource hook is where you offer useful information to readers. This hook is especially valuable because if the content is interesting enough people will bookmark it and link to it for a long time. Besides this; compared to the news hook it retains its value for a long time.
• News hook
  This is also called the ’scoop-hook’. It basically means that your post has news value and the theory is that people will link to you as the one who originally found out about this piece of news.
• Contrary hook
  If you refute common knowledge/myths in your neck of the woods this sparks a lot of interest as well. It can ignite discussions and garner many links as other people talk about the concept on their own websites.
• Attack hook
  This one is basically the same as the contrary hook, but a lot harsher. Instead of starting off an intelligent discussion you attack the myth/person in not-very-upbuilding terms. The attack hook can start off a flame war so be careful when using this.
• Humor hook
  It seems like there are more websites using this hook than there are websites about making money online (and that’s saying something). As everybody likes a good laugh this hook can definitely get you some good views and links.

Now you know what you want to talk about, have a good title and have an idea about the hook you want to use. So, you still need to write the post itself (yeah, I know, that’s the part where you need to work). As with all online content your content should take into account the general rules of writing online content. Good resources for this are a post we wrote ourselves about who you need to write for and copyblogger.com.

You have now written a great article, posted it and are just watching those links streaming in. Or not. If nobody knows about what you have written, nobody will read it or link to it and all your work was done for nothing. So, after you have writing your incedible masterpiece you will need to promote it on sites like digg, delicious, reddit, etc. Besides this, it also helps to actively let people know what you have done by commenting on other sites, sending emails and being the social animal that you are.

So, go forth, create and link!

PS: if you didn’t see it yet; we ‘borrowed’ this title from Andy Hagans. Credit where credit is due.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under Internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.