One of the most popular ways of gathering a lot of attention to a blog or website is linkbaiting. Although its main purpose is to get links to a website, this can also be a powerful marketing method that is being used more and more lately.

There are two types of linkbaiting: negative and positive. Although both are fantastic ways to attract links, use the first one with extreme caution as it can generate a negative reputation in the blink of an eye. One of the most recent stories related to negative exposure is related to the business that was treating its customers badly, in order to get links to the site, they manipulated search engines for higher ranks and received lot of exposure; you’ve guessed it, it’s the company that appeared in the New York Times and on thousands of other authority blogs and websites. However, we all know the end of this story with guys at Google punishing the website and the owner now being under accusation by harassed customers.

Here are some “positive” linkbaiting ideas anyone could take advantage of:

1.      Interviews

Interviews with authority folks from your industry could definitely generate a lot of online buzz and most important, most of your links will come from related websites while they are directly interested in the interview.

2.     Tools, plugins, add-ons

Whether you create an add-on for Firefox that help web designers in their work or a plugin for WordPress, these tools usually attract lots of links if they get popular. Have no expertise in doing this? Outsource the task to someone that can do it. Tip: for your “creations” to spread faster, make them free of charge.

3.     Contests

The recipe is easy: giveaway a consistent prize, announce the contest through different social media channels and from there forward wheels will be in motion. People like contests so they will Tweet, stumble, digg etc your story, thus giving you a great exposure, waves of traffic, subscribers and future prospects.

4.      Lists are popular

Whether we are talking about “top 10 ways of…”, “best 5 tips to….” or “50 most….”, lists get distributed in short time; however, the subject must be well researched and created in a manner that will get people’s attention.

5.     Statistics

Statistics are, again, very popular not only among webmasters. Everybody likes seeing statistics related to his industry so why not taking advantage of this weapon?

Tags: Link Baiting, link building

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under Business, SEO / Marketing, Site Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Posted by WebCreationUK You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.