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? You may want to make your idea look polarized such that it especially
appeals to one group and/or especially offends another. If other
people are fighting over guessing your intentions, you will get quality
links.
? Make your link bait look comprehensive.
o Perception is more important than reality.
o Most writing is quite wasteful in nature, because you have to
trim off much of what you create.
o By creating ordered lists of factoids, an incomplete story can
look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you
make a list of 101 ways to do x, people may give a few ideas
and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383
ways to do x.
? Cite research, further reading, and link out to related resources from
within your content. It makes your story look well-researched and
associates your work with other trusted names or brands in your field.
You may even want to cite a few people that you want links from.
? Dress up your link bait using quality design and/or relevant images
from sites like Istockphoto.
Monetizing Link Bait
? Make your link bait easy to link at.
? Don?t over-monetize it right out of the gate. Make it look like research
that is easy to cite rather than a piece of commercial information.
? In Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, Clay Shirky stressed
the importance of gaining authority to gain scale and distribution if you
want to make money online.
? Link bait rarely makes much money or directly pays for itself from the
direct traffic. However, it has amazing indirect value.
o People who pay attention to the active portions of the web are
far more likely to be web publishers than those who do not.
o Even if people do not link to your link bait idea right away, you
still gain mindshare and brand recognition amongst a group of
people who have significant authority.
o Many search engines, such as Google, use authority centric
relevancy algorithms. Editorial links are seen as votes or signs
of trust.
o In Google, getting a link to any part of your site will help make
all pages on your site more authoritative.
? Two weeks after launching a linkbait, my Google traffic and site
earnings more than doubled on a site that was getting thousands of
visitors and making over $200 a day from AdSense before the viral
marketing campaign.