Linkbait Tuesday: Easy ways to linkbait

Last week I was intending to move back to old site reviews format but most of the sites asking for reviews are either tech/gadget blogs or blogs about SEO and internet marketing. Linkbaiting for these sorts of sites is quite easy because so many links are passed every day so there is little value in regurgitating the same old tips.

Today I will start with a few tips and then follow up with tips for a specific site.

This week I’ve had a number of emails via the contact form and, thanks to the enhanced contact form I use to track referrers, I can tell that the people sending emails came via a big list of the blogs such as this one or this one. What people are doing is writing an interesting article and then sending personal emails to the top blogs in their niche and informing them about the article.

Most of the time I will read the article and sometimes I might even link to it. The one thing all these emails had in common was that I wouldn’t have known about the article if the person hadn’t taken the time to contact me. These linkbaiters are not relying on Digg or another social news site to get the word out about their great article, they are being proactive and taking the time to make sure the right people read their article.

It isn’t about reaching 50,000 readers in the first 24 hours, it’s about reaching maybe 10 key influencers with maybe 5,000 RSS readers each who will see the article over the course of a week.

Stumble Bait

When you find your linkbaiting gets tricky it can make a refreshing change to start creating content purely for StumbleUpon. For example this article was designed with images, headlines and was targeted 100% towards the community of webmasters that use StumbleUpon.

Over time I expect that the article will attract more than a handful of links purely from residual traffic from StumbleUpon.

Linkbait for styletips101.com

styletips101.com asked for linkbait tips so here are a few:
“How to tie a tie” is something that did well on Digg and attracted a lot of links. Articles that tell people in easy steps how to do something always get links. Try “how to dress for an interview” or “how to dress for a conference” or even “10 Style tips for a first date”.

Also maybe “10 skirts to make you look thinner” would appeal on women’s blogs and social sites. The key is to make sure you read all the blogs in your niche and see what they are linking to. Once you figure that out just start creating the same content.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 12:59am ON Wednesday, 16 January 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+