Linkbait Tuesdays will return to normal next week so if you want to get your site reviewed fill in the contact form and let me know.
In the meantime I wanted to discuss a few options for linkbait in relation to Rand’s article about Separating the Linkbait Wheat from the Chaff. Gone are the days when simply getting on Digg would get you some good links, now you need a really strong linkbait hook if you want some quality link juice to pass your way.
The method I always like to employ is to decide whether links are the priority or traffic. If my post idea is more traffic bait then I forget about the hook (unless it is easy to add one) and just make an effort on the social news sites.
Alternatively if the priority is to gain quality links it is important to go that extra mile in terms of adding a real incentive for people to link. Once you have added the hook then you can go all out and get to the front page of Digg. If you fail on Digg then send out polite email pitches to bloggers and hope that they like your article.
When you start thinking about hooks it is important to look at the article and decide who might link to it. The goal should be trusted blogs and news sites that are loosely related to your niche. So, if you write about gadgets you need to analyse the last 100 posts on Engadget and see who they have been linking to and why. If you can get on Engadget regularly your readership will skyrocket. Engadget are not going to link to your post about the Top 10 Funny iPhone Stories no matter how many thousand Diggs it gets. They will probably link to your breaking news story with pictures of a 3G iPhone leaked from somewhere.
Likewise if you are looking to get a link from Search Engine Land or a similar blog you might like to keep your post about the Top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress for later and instead write an in depth summary of how certain types of sites are seeing better rankings this month and finish off with your theory as to why this is happening.
It is very rare that I link to a linkbait style post on Blogstorm, that isn’t to say I don’t like them – I just don’t see much point in pointing people to top 10 lists when they probably already saw them on Digg. The posts I will link to are ones like the SEOmoz post about where I can add some value. The way I blog is pretty similar to everybody else out there – nobody wants to look lazy, everybody wants to provide maximum value.
Before you hit “Publish” on your next piece of linkbait think about why somebody might link to it.
Today we are faced with the challenge of building links to a Czech website about Aerobics, www.aerobicstyl.cz. The reason this is challenging is because the content isn’t really appealing to the gadget/tech demographic of bloggers and the content isn’t in English.
Before we start I would like to invite any health & fitness bloggers such as Everett to add some tips in the comments.
First of all it is very hard to carry out linkbait in a language other than English simply because you are narrowing down your target audience so much. I recommend publishing any article you write in both English and Czech to make sure people can link to whichever version they require. Countless tech blogs link to a Google translated version rather than the original when they reference foreign articles which means the source loses out on link juice.
If you can’t translate the articles yourself then using Google Translate is acceptable.
Sometimes the language barrier can make longer articles less likely to become a success so it might pay to write some pictorial linkbait instead.
On sites with a non tech audience it is important to explain to readers what RSS is and direct them to an email subscription form in the first instance. It is also important to not rely on social networks – this is a key concept of what people are learning in linkbait school.
Linkbait Ideas
Create themes for health and fitness blogs
17 Exercise Tips for Unfit Bloggers
How to Lose Your Christmas Fat Without Paying for a Gym
8 Ways to Get Fit in 2008
Write about how January sees a stampede followed by an exodus
Top 10 Fitness Gadgets to Avoid in 2008
Top 10 Fitness Gadgets to Buy in 2008
How to Save Money & Get Fit By Building A Gym At Home
Killer linkbait articles to inspire you
Write exercise examples like this (over 3400 links)
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
Today we are looking at ideas for promoting Karans Guesthouse in India. To help other people I will try to focus on general methods to promote a guest house or hotel website.
First of all the site needs to be changed, at present there are several factors preventing the site from attracting links:
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
socks4life.com is an online sock retailer. I bet most of you are thinking there is little scope for linkbait in that industry. Well, thanks to my linkbait research tool (due for release here tomorrow) I can tell you socks are extremely linkable.
The stories below I found within 2 minutes and all have huge potential. Some of them have not been particularly well written, presented and promoted so anybody can come along and use the same idea with better execution and win thousands of links.
It is important to notice the non sock related post in the mix from engadget. You might be able to tell it’s not about socks but I bet Google can’t. Writing about post on a sock site about how Google Gears will knock your socks off and hitting the Digg front page is a great way to build links.
Knitting is a huge industry so creating and offering free tools and tutorials will be very useful. Even if knitters don’t use Digg they use forums a lot and forums can drive large amounts of traffic. Try also using Yahoo Groups to reach them.
Other ideas include gift ideas for different niches such as the Top 10 Socks to Buy a Blogger / Digg User / Gadget Lover For Christmas.
How to make your own iPod/iPhone sock would be quite a good one, include patterns and images to make it easy to do.
Any readers have any good sock related linkbait ideas?
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
www.subsidesports.com is a sportswear business selling football shirts and other items in the UK, USA, France, Germany and Japan.
The site already has a lot of links and is trusted by Google so as well as linkbait I will take a look at how we can increase traffic by building up content on the site.
A retailer like this should be looking to leverage its authority status to try and rank for more off topic long tail terms. For example they sell Wayne Rooney football shirts so they need top ranking for the query wayne rooney shirt . If this was my client I would be also creating profile pages for thousands of players & clubs with photos, videos, links to their websites, stats and as much information as possible to try and rank in the image, video and organic listings for queries such as “wayne rooney”.
Make sure the pages add value to the search results before you start releasing them just in case the large increase in pages triggers a manual inspection from the folks at Google.
Player profiles might not sound like linkbait but if you can get good rankings and maybe offer free pictures for Myspace and peoples blogs in exchange for a link back you would be amazed.
Next I would create a news section to the site with enough authority and editors to feature in Google News and start covering football news every week. Get to know all the football and sports bloggers and maybe send them a free shirt if they link to you in a blog post. Bloggers will be eternally grateful if you send them free stuff and you will become their favourite news source to link to.
As well as news you should publish linkbait style content targeted towards bloggers such as:
Top 10 Sports Injuries of All Time [PICS]
Top 10 Soccer Gadgets
5 Useless Sports Gadgets You Should Never Buy
How Technology Changed Tennis (or Cricket or Football) For Good
How Hawk Eye Works
How to Hit Free Kicks Like Beckham
Sports linkbait is probably easiest to do by sticking to news rather than feature articles. Monitor this page for a few weeks to find out whats hot and what works.
If you have any more suggestions please add them in the comments.
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
This week we are looking at linkbait opportunities for optometry.com, a site dedicated to eye care. In the past I’ve included on-site SEO advice in my Linkbait Tuesday column but it was taking the focus away from the main aim so I will be trying to limit this.
Despite certain design issues with Firefox and large screens the site works quite well and ranks on the first page in Google for “optometry”. With an exact match domain name it would probably be the top result in Google if the SEO firm behind the site didn’t host some of the content on their own domain.
The site would probably double it’s link potential simply by doing a modern redesign and getting rid of the Adsense or at least changing the colour and removing it for visitors from social networks.
Linkbait
Linkbait for health type sites has huge potential thanks to the large number of health blogs and the potential crossover into the gadget and tech industries. The key is to identify your target link audience and create some linkbait specially for them. Sometimes just a simple picture can be worth a lot of attention.
How to Prevent Eye Strain from a Computer Screen
How the Eye Works
How far can you see? 10 Furthest Away Objects in the Universe
Top 10 Coolest Optical Illusions
The Human Eye in High Resolution [PIC]
How Strong is the Human Eye (post about incidents such as this where people retain their sight after an accident)
Top 5 Ways to Improve your Eyesight
How to Eat Your Way to Better Eyesight
In terms of long term linkbait I suggest starting a blog and covering every bit of news related to optometry and the human eye that you can find. The opportunity is there to become an authority.
If you have any more suggestions please post in the comments below.
DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.
The issue of Google looking at link profiles is a complicated one. On the one hand they rank old sites at the top of the search results even though the information on those sites is 3 or 4 years out of date and they haven’t got a single natural link for years.
Conversely they look at link growth profiles for newer sites and may devalue huge link spikes if they make your site start to rank when an engineer thinks it doesn’t deserve to.
This presents a tricky situation for marketers – the key issue is to make sure that our links keep growing at as steady a rate as possible to keep growth looking natural. One good method to help with link growth is to make sure that you make the most of every link & traffic spike by building new RSS and email subscribers, these subscribers will hopefully remain loyal and link to you again in the future.
Probably the easiest way to produce long term linkbait such as “How To” articles rather than topical content. This works well if your article ranks highly or you have a large readership to leverage.
Sometimes bloggers struggle to linkbait without using topical content, especially in the tech/gadget industry. If this is the case for your niche then try to make sure you have a long term linkbait strategy so you can keep reproducing link spikes on a regular basis rather than just once or twice.
Linkbait School is almost a week old and I wanted to publicly answer some questions readers have been sending in.
First of all lots of people were asking “Is it right for beginners/advanced/average linkbaiters” and the answer to that question is yes. In fact, if anybody can’t attract more than $199 worth of editorially given 100% natural links from Linkbait School I will keep helping them free of charge until they do.
As you might have noticed from the lack of posts on BlogStorm this week we had a very good response to the school last week from people of all abilities. Its taking some time for me to work through the consulting but already the feedback is great with bloggers and webmasters learning new skills that they can put into practice for years to come.
Give a man a link and you help him for a day. Teach a man to linkbait and you help him for a lifetime.
If you were wondering whether the Linkbait School is right for you or whether your site would get any value from it then please drop me an email and let me take a look.
The first 20 people who email me will get a free killer linkbait idea, no purchase required.
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
Linkbaiting is most fun when you are tackling new industries, maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun with the Linkbait School – most of the people who signed up are in totally new and exciting niches with massive potential for some creative linkbait.
Today we are looking at a niche I wouldn’t have expected to exist – a blog and social network about garden sheds. This is an industry with a hugely passionate following and probably includes older people so targeting the Digg demographic isn’t a very good idea unless we can think outside the box.
First of all I would clean up the social network site. Remove all the paid links and get rid of all the loans and credit card content as this is really affecting the sites trust. I would suggest hiring a good SEO to look at the site as there is a lot of long tail traffic being left on the table not to mention rankings for competitive keywords such as “sheds” which could be improved very easily.
The main www.readersheds.co.uk uses a 302 redirect to www.readersheds.co.uk/readersheds/ which is far from ideal. There are also a bunch of old domains that don’t redirect properly to the new site which will be affecting rankings a lot.
The side has a huge amount of potential for affiliate income from sheds and other garden related products but the conversion rates will be low because of the cluttered design.
In terms of linkbait I would start off merging the blog and the social network and creating a big site with great search engine rankings. The blog is key to attracting links and it doesn’t make sense to split the link equity between 2 sites, especially in a niche where attracting good links is going to be very hard.
The key with linkbait is to decide on your target linkers. For example we could decide to write about gadgets to use in a shed to appeal to gadget bloggers.
Linkbait Ideas
How to Turn Your Shed into an Office
Top 10 Gadgets for Your Shed
How to Store Your Fishing Tackle in a Shed
How to Build a Mountain Bike Rack for Your Shed
Why Bloggers Should Move to a Shed for Inspiration
Today is launch day for the brand new BlogStorm Linkbait School, a training program to help website owners learn how to build links by creating remarkable content.
The program includes 10 linkbait ideas, a 13 page report telling you all the advanced strategies linkbaiting experts use and an hours consulting from me to help you create, optimise and promote your linkbait articles.
I’m only taking a handful of students per month so if you want to take your website to the next level I suggest you join today. Demand is likely to be high if the response to Linkbait Tuesdays is anything to go by.
This program is designed for people who already know that getting quality links is good for rankings and want to learn more about how it’s done. The report and my consulting time contain enough advanced strategies that even linkbait experts will get value out of Linkbait School.
Some people call linkbait an art – my report shows you how to use repeatable techniques to turn the art into a science.
Those of you who spend hundreds of dollars every year on paid links or are struggling to get your linkbait campaigns off the ground will find huge value in joining the school. Even a couple of high quality links will more than cover the entry fee.
If you have any questions or feedback please post in the comments. Offering this sort of product is new territory for me and I want to make it as good as it possibly can be.
Today we are looking at ideas for promoting 
Linkbaiting is most fun when you are tackling new industries, maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun with the Linkbait School – most of the people who signed up are in totally new and exciting niches with massive potential for some creative linkbait.