Let me start this one off by saying that while I am a big proponent of linkbait, I can’t admit to ever having successfully produced any linkbait - so what I am sharing today comes from my research (read: reading blog posts) on the topic, not from hands-on experience. With that in mind, let’s do this…

The more I think about yesterday’s post on affiliates and linkbait, the more I think I am on to something. The way I look at it, linkbait is more about talent than about money…and since search marketing is being starting to be dominated by big marketing dollars (BusinessWeek just reported as such), affiliates need to rely on their talent to defeat the giant bank accounts of big advertisers. Real David and Goliath stuff, eh?

So you might ask, if linkbait is the key to a successful affiliate SEO strategy, how do we start cranking it out? Great question…and hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction to find some answers.

Linkbait Tactics

First off, let’s talk about the common tactics to draw in links. For this advice I turn to Todd Malicoat, a.k.a Stuntdubl, a staple player in the search community. In January 12th he posted an article called The Linkbaiting Playbook: Hooks Revised. Todd identified the seven common linkbait “hooks” that have been known to work quite well. These hooks are:

The News Hook - break important and interesting news and provide expert commentary

The Contrary Hook - start lively debate with bloggers, industry experts, etc.

The Attack Hook - go for the jugular and attack someone’s character (effective but bad!)

The Resource Hook - create a unique, helpful resource for your community

The Humor Hook - people like to laugh…make them laugh

The Ego Hook - write about other people and they might link to you

The Incentive Hook - have a contest, give away awards, give people a reason to talk about and link to you

(Todd does a great job breaking all of these down in his original post…make sure you read the whole thing.)

Tips for Effective Linkbait

Another well know search marketer, Aaron Wall, a.k.a. SEOBook, also gave some great advice about link baiting in his article Linkbaiting or Link Baiting? Aaron gives the following tips for creating effective linkbait:

Talk about a specific community
Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important
Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community
Be provocative or controversial
Be thorough

Aaron, like others who have succeeded with linkbaiting, says that the headline of a linkbait blog post is KEY to getting your linkbait to catch on. His suggestion is to make sure you write headlines that are going to spread. This might mean writing headlines for the “WOW” factor and not for SEO keywords.

Aaron also suggests taking the time to “seed” your linkbait by placing your bait on social news sites like Digg.

(Aaron also gives a ton of helpful advice in the post - read it all here.)

But Where Do I Get The IDEAS?!

But at this point you might be thinking, “Great! That helps me understand what types of things work and some of the tactics of linkbaiting - but that still doesn’t help me think of any great linkbait ideas.”

Well, that is true. And I can’t really help you with coming up with ideas, but luckily Scott over at SEOMoz recently posted his suggestions for brainstorming linkbait. SEOMoz is one of the premier linkbait builders out there, so I can attest that whatever process they are using over there is working. The SEOMoz approach for linkbait brainstorms includes four steps:

Write Down Everything - basically, barf out every idea you could ever possibly have

Breakdown You Ideas - separate and classify the ideas based on concept and content
Evaluate Content - prioritize the ideas you had
Mix and Match - connect content with concept

(Again, I highly suggest reading the full post.)

Conclusion

Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. Hopefully this post and the links herein were helpful. I know that linkbait seems hard to do…and that is because it is. But I would imagine that the most successful SEO affiliates in the future will be the highly competent linkbaiters.

Oh yeah! If you start cranking out the linkbait and you want a little link love from our humble little blog, let us know where to look!

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