The Fine Art of Linkbait
As a blogger, one of the most effective ways to build inbound links, as well as obtain new readers, is to create posts that are "linkbait". Our Weblogs Guide, Susan Gunelius, defines linkbait as:
A blog post that is written about a buzzworthy topic for the primary purpose of driving search traffic to it and attracting incoming links. The ultimate goals are to boost traffic and links thereby boosting rankings, including Google Page Rank.
A new post from Roy Huiskes at Onetomarket takes an extraordinarily detailed look at the fine art of linkbait, including where to find it, advantages and disadvantages, plus how-to's on content, presentation and release. It also provides some examples, both hypothetical and real-world. I found of particular interest his list of all the different kind of "hooks" you can use:
- News Hook
- Contentious Hook
- Attacking Hook
- Shocking Hook
- Reference Hook
- Tools Hook
- Humour Hook
- Quiz Hook
- Contest Hook
- Award Hook
- List Hook
- Awareness Hook
- Design Hook
- Huff and bluster Hook
- Research & Statistics Hook
- Give something away Hook
- Usability
- Cool factor
See Roy's post for the details.
I've created quite a few linkbait posts of my own -- too many to list here, frankly. How about you? Have you made linkbait lately? If so, feel free to share it in the comments below.
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Comments
Nice post. Thanks for the links - some very informative articles.