Blogging to Fame!

Ever gone fishing? Oh a poor joke indeed!

What is a Linkbait?

Linkbait as the name suggests is doing something on your site to attract incoming links voluntarily. Just the right mix of content, information about what’s popular and getting links from others and creativity on the rocks will give you a perfect cocktail of linkbaiting and fizz for your readers. People have been in love with the subject and you can find articles on it all around the net. When we talk about relevant incoming links to be a vitamin to all our SEO related weakness, linkbaiting is the powerhouse of vitamins.

If you want your links to grow naturally, be patient. Today, you have 10 incoming links, 20 tomorrow, 21 the day after, and then 25, the needle sticks there. You try harder, and you have 50 other links. Can you imagine the time it will take to get a 100,000 links or more? Maybe even more than a seed to grow into the tree. When you want to make a fortune on internet, you better be quick.

It took me full two days going through every possible and relevant article on net about the subject (You don’t expect me to be dreaming about it one night and coming up with a post, do you?). I read about the different hooks(came up with that bad joke from here), and 101 ways to do linkbaiting(which itself was trying to do so). All of it made sense and most would be effective.

Telling you to make your site good would be so vague that I should rather say nothing at all. It would not solve anything. We can talk about content here, but aren’t you aware of it. If not you can read it in Blog Optimization: Content and its Supremacy. It can certainly gain you links, but the only difference here is that your content has to be viral. And you can add the Fame ingredient in it.

Lets talk about the various linkbaiting hooks -

In order to bait a fish, you need a hook. Here we will do it for incoming links.
Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:

• Informational/Resource Hook
• News hook
• Creativity Hook
• Tool Hook
• Evil/Contrary/Attack Hook
• Humour Hook

Spice it or mix it and you can easily get newer flavors. Linkbaiting really means providing something that end-users enjoy, for whatever reason. There are literally thousands of ways to go about creating something that hasn’t been done before and making sure others find out about it.

Informational/Resource Hook

Some rare Tips and tricks or any personal experience through which your readers can benefit. Link exchange with a good list of blogs in your niche would help gain visibility. If you manage to get one good link from a popular blogger, rest soon will follow. Review other blogs, appreciate and advice them. A Free How To report based on your niche, can also help you getting one way incoming links.

News Hook

You will have to do some journalism here. Like every journalist will like to get the News first hand you also need to get a genuine scoop. Get to the news first, if you are not the news. A compilation of news and presenting it with your own analysis will give it a personal touch and bring it fame. Its a resource as well as a news hook. You really have to know your subject to do that, but links flow like water. If you can expose a fraud or popular spam, nobody else had noticed, you are going to make it big.

Tool Hook

Give other website owners a useful, fun or cool tool that they can use on their blog that points back to your own. A prime example of this was the blog worth tool that Dane from Business Opportunities developed that tells how much a blog is worth based on Technorati’s API (used by thousands of bloggers (google shows 27,000+ links pointing to it) - most of whom posted the button that the tool provides (with a link back to his blog).

Evil/Contrary/Attack Hook

Write about something that you did not like about a product or a popular blogger. Be sure to have strong reasons for it. You do not like something is not attention gaining but a WHY can do wonders if people seem to agree with you. Be sure to be unique, though. You can get much ruder, but it may attract strong opinions which are against you. It can pull in traffic but if it goes against you, the annoyance of your audience can be killing. They may abandon your blog forever.

Humor Hook

These kinds of hooks are just too easy. Search flickr, or photoshop a bizzare pic of your subject. Funny thing is, those things always get links, it's like people never seem to tire of them. You can visit Blaugh.com and check out the page rank as well as the cartoons posted there. People love it and even I do. It also provides a widget where you can display its daily cartoon on your own blog. A tool hook is used here.

Use your story as a bait. If the fish doesn’t bite it, it does not mean the fish is lazy or greedy. It means your bait is not tasty enough. You have to hook your readers up and reel them in. Be hypnotic, be creative and be innovative.

One more thing to keep in mind is, there has to be fish in the pool where you are. No traffic means no effect of these techniques. The next article would deal with the ethical and not so ethical ways of link baiting.

Till then Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam

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Labels: 5S' of Blogging Success, Blog Optimization, Blogging Fame, Linkbaiting, Viral Marketing/Referal Marketing