Links, links, links. We all want them, but we’re not completely sure how to get them. There’s no easy way to do it, but there are a multitude of tips you can implement to improve the likelihood your post, or website, gets linked to.

Linkbait, specifically, describes an action that is specifically taken to attract links. Some posts can generate traffic and conversation, but link bait specifically pulls in the eyes of the bloggers, and more important, the linkerati, to link to your website.

1. Create remarkable, unique, original content. If this isn’t the case, your post won’t get linked to. Few linkbait pieces were created in three minutes or are of two paragraphs in length. Your posts have to be thoughtful, creative, and a good reflection of time-intensive work.
2. Create content that is accessible and useful to a large number of people. If you’re too niche specific, the potential reach of your content will immediately be reduced. However, don’t spread too far, as you want your content to create repeat, loyal visitors to your website. If you stay true to tech, food, or something of that sort, there’s a higher percentage chance you’ll get some repeat readers.
3. Be simple. The more complex and difficult to comprehend your idea is, the less likely your audience is to spread it. Supply something that’s easy to digest, but maintains the remarkability linkbait requires.
4. Provide value. If you solve a problem of the reader, you’ll spur them to action. Desire to solve the problems of others will come from that initial problem being solved, they’ll spread the idea, and your work will take off.
5. Be aware of temporal factors. Jumping on recent news is the best way to create content that’ll be spread throughout the internet. Your linkbait doesn’t have to address breaking news, but offering a unique spin on recent developments can be a great way to kick start link developments. Blogs like Mashable, Gizmodo, and Hacker News offer good insights into what’s new and worth writing about.
6. Understand your audience. Check the social media platforms you hope your content will go viral on, and see what’s “working” there. It’s beyond vital to assess what people like and enjoy promoting.
7. Create controversy. Links are very likely to occur if you pick a fight and call someone out. However, an intelligent audience can tell the difference between good, authentic points and ones that were created to draw in links. Realize an opportunity where calling someone out is worthwhile, then mold the post and content push to make it go viral.
8. Have a reputation. If you work on creating and developing a reputation, linkable content will come a lot easier. This can be both on your website and/or on social profiles, where “pushing” your content will come a lot easier if you have a reputable profile.
9. Reveal as much as possible. Digging into extremely personable details and then referring it back to a public subject can be a superb way to draw in attention. As readers, we love to be let in, and we’ll reward you with links.
10. Post regularly. Your regular viewing audience will be a large part of your “push”. Maintain them by posting with consistency. Five posts one week and one post the next doesn’t fly.
11. Use an attractive title. An extremely important part of the post is the title. To get the content to spread, you have to get the reader to click on the post first. Copyblogger has some Headline Formulas to work from, and also, How to Write Magnetic Headlines.
12. Push at appropriate times. Post in the morning, because there are more readers to retweet and read your content. In other sectors, it may be appropriate to post on the weekend, as there are fewer new posts.  Source: How to Get Traffic to Your Blog.
13. Network. Find and create friends offline or online, and you’ll have additional resources to help you promote and link to your product. This can be extremely powerful, as a real number of friends online can exponentially increase the success of your posts.
14. Reward your network. Your network isn’t there only for you to gain benefit from – be extremely gracious with your links, time and own promotion and your network will return the favor in kind.
15. Analyze other successful linkbait. This, that, this, that, the money, the list, and this one. These are all good examples of linkbait that worked. They all worked for different reasons, but if you look between the lines, it’s not hard to figure out. Twist the lessons from each to apply to your own site and you’ll be well on your way to a Pagerank 10 site.
16. Make content easy to spread. Place retweet buttons and social links in the appropriate places on your post. The more “calls to distribute” you have, the more likely your audience is to do the work for you.
17. Understand linkbait “hooks”. Todd Malicoat has a good post on Hooks on his website Stuntdubl, which is built upon at Smashing Magazine. The five hooks are: the News Hook, the Contrary Hook (having an opposite opinion), the Attack Hook, the Resource Hook, the Humour Hook, the Giveaway Hook, the Research/Statistic Hook, and the Incentive Hook.
18. Create a tool. Creating a tool your audience can use is a superb way to create continuous, long-term linkbait. Every time someone things your tool can add value to their readers, they’ll link to it. As long as it’s current, the links will keep flowing in.

Have any more great linkbait tips? Add them in the comments.

Sujan Patel loves links. He also loves when you become a fan of Singlegrain on Facebook and also follow Singlegrain on Twitter.

Getting traffic for a new website can be difficult if you go about it the wrong way. Link building for a newly launched website differs strongly from websites in the mid to late stages of growth, as there are certain quality signals and processes to undergo that tell the search engines that your site should be trusted. Using poor link building techniques can lead to a lot of wasted efforts in the initial stages of site development.

Building authority and trust is vital to getting recognized by the search engines. Start with the below tips and you’ll be well on your way to blasting up the SERPs.

1. Get listed in the High Quality Link Directories. Don’t spread too far – we recommend you only stick to Best of the Web, Yahoo! Directory, JoeAnt, and Business.com. These are well regarded and send high trust signals to the search engines.

2. Submit Press Releases to PR sites. A good way to pick up press is to submit press releases to PR sites. PRweb, PRleap, and PRnewswire are all great places to spread news about your launch. If your product isn’t news worthy, it won’t get picked up. Produce something great that’s worth talking about and you should have strong success with press releases.

Make sure you optimize your press release for dissemination. Top Rank Blog has a good guide to use using your press release as a marketing tool. Optify also has a SEO-specific post on optimizing your press releases.

3. Send out closed beta invites. If you have a web application, send blasts out to power bloggers about your closed beta. As long as your application is good, you’ll get positive press and some really strong links pointing to your website. Plus, these thought leaders will probably have some good, usable advice for your web app.

4. Giveaways. Similarly, if you have a product, find the top bloggers in your space and offer a few product giveaways in exchange for a blurb about your post. Make sure you’re contacting the biggest bloggers with the largest audiences to maximize returns, both in traffic and SERP success, with these efforts.

5. Start blogging. With constant, fresh content, you tell the spiders to frequently index your website. You also build an audience for your product and give users additional reasons to link back to your website. The quicker you do this, the quicker you tell the SERPs, and your users, that you’re a website worth ranking

5. Go Social. A great way to get immediate traffic and also get a good link influx to your website is create linkbait from step #5. Spending a day or so to create something worth sharing is beyond worthwhile for a starting website. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, offers some great tips on his blog for creating good linkbait. SEOMoz.org also has a comprehensive article on Social Media Marketing tactics, where you can find specific tips for submitting to each social media website.

6. Get Local. Submitting your website to all the relevant local directories, and the search engines, is vital for every small business. This is the “go social” alternative for the smaller company, even though it is still (mildly) possible to create linkbait as a small business. Outspoken Media has a great, in-depth guide to launching your Small Business Website, and they offer a lot of great places to get your local website listed.

7. Stick to High Quality links. It can be tempting to hit up all of your personal friends, submit five thousand articles, and spam post the comments at large blogs, but there is strong evidence suggesting that these links are disregarded until Google sees your website as trusted.  There are some strong inferences that low quality links are not a trust signal for new websites until Google (and the other engines) already know that your website isn’t spam.

8. Create a Crunchbase, Squidoo, and Aboutus.org page. Aboutus.org attempts to have website profiles of the internet, while Crunchbase has profiles of tech companies with follow links. Squidoo offers a custom lense for any business or person willing to create one.  Getting on these sites is a good way to start reputation management on your own SERP, and also get a few more links to your site. If you create a good enough website bio on Aboutus.org, you can submit for consideration to get your link do-followed.

9. Guest blog. Find the relevant bloggers in your vertical and reach out. Display appreciation for their blog and also expertise in your field, and most bloggers will be extremely generous with their network. You can generally get targeted anchor text for your blog as well.

10. Be patient. Social media doesn’t always work. Sometimes, you won’t show up in the SERPs immediately. Taking drastic measures, like buying a large quantity of links, can get your website banned before it ever gets off the ground. We’d all like to be #1 in a month, but the reality (and competitive nature) of the SERPs is that this just isn’t a possibility.

Ross Hudgens is a Link Building guru. Check out his personal blog, Authentic Marketing.

Here we go again – another link building tip list. Single Grain is going to do you the favor of creating a list that’s not based on a single link bait tactic or thrown together with about 30 solid techniques, and 70 that will result in a negative ROI. These are the tips we use in our day-to-day to get websites convertible traffic and great search engine rankings, in a way that creates the great ROI businesses love.

We’ll spare you the 100 tips – we’ll stick to the nitty gritty, the stuff that creates solid, strong ranking increases that you, or your clients, will love.

1. Squidoo – Squidoo offers a nice resource to build an industry or company page. You can get a do-follow link back to your website, and if you spend enough time to build up your page, draw some other external links to that page that will help distribute juice back to your site. Plus, it’s a way to get another relevant company page ranking so you have less reputation management problems to worry about.

2. Crunchbase – a tech-company profile site that you can build out for your company with lots of cool, relevant data. Many mid-to-large sized level companies will already be listed.

3. Giveaways – hold a contest and offer a giveaway to some high authority, popular industry blogs. You’ll get links back to your site, and also form a relationship with the movers and shakers in the industry to get you some continuous positive PR and traffic streams.

4. Betas – Allow beta access to a new product or service in exchange for feedback/posts about your product. This is a great way to get immediate authority driven to your website and get the ball rolling in the SERPs.

5. Guest blog – Guest blogging on other industry blogs is an extremely easy way to get a good link with targeted anchor text from a blog of your choice. A good way to start in your quest is to use Google Blog Search, or simply search for “(Industry/Keyword) Blog”.

6. HQ Paid Link Directories – Yup, they’re still out there, and they’re still useful. We like Yahoo! Directory ($299 Yearly), BOTW.org ($150 yearly, $300 one-time), Buisness.com ($299 one-time, $249 with a coupon) and JoeAnt ($40 one-time), specifically.

7. Create a blog - If your website doesn’t have a blog yet, what are you waiting for? If you want constant, continuous links back to your site, blogs are the way to go. But don’t expect links to just come in if you start a blog – create solid, great content, and you will be rewarded with links in exchange.

8. Donate - Most philanthropic organizations will return a good deed with a link back to your organization, especially if you ask. You can donate your time in more ways than just monetarily, too. Have a company whose CEO is worth speaking with? Have him speak to Andrew Warner at Mixergy. Or volunteer to speak at a University, and get a link back.

9. Business.gov – Sign up for their forums and contribute naturally, you’ll get multiple .gov links back, with targeted anchor text, to your website.

10. Create great content – Content does not = links, but it’s at least somewhere in that equation and it takes up a great part of it. Before worrying about a lot of other tips on this list, think about creating great content that your users will enjoy. Do this, and you’ll find that getting links is a lot, lot easier.

11. Go to conferences – Conferences are a great way to develop links. If you speak, you can get immediate links. If you speak well, you can get even more, as attendees will link to you and reference your talk on their blogs. There’s also the networking with great people part that can create link alliances for you in the future.

12. Create More Social Media Links – How many calls to action are there on your blog, website, Facebook, Twitter,  and Linkedin accounts? Are you maximizing every link opportunity you have? At the end of every post, are you asking someone to follow you, or subscribe to your RSS feed? Is your website link on your Twitter page(s), and noted in the background? Is every website of yours with a relevant business presence listed on Linkedin? The more you do this, the more traffic you will create, which in turn will create more links (with #10 – Create Great Content).

13. Check your friend list – You might just be thinking of your immediate circle of friends (the ones you call), for potential link targets. However, there are many more that are probably many more acquaintances you have that are more than willing to link to your site. Scour your Linkedin for friends with relevant website connections to your industry, and also on Facebook. E-mail your close friends and ask them nicely if they know anybody that connects to your business. Be willing and kind to these people and positive benefits will continue to flow both ways!

14. Interviews – I already mentioned Mixergy, but it works in multiple ways. The great thing about interviews is that they offer a hybrid of content and personal connection – making a repetition of former information interesting, because there is a human element involved. Get interviewed! Contact power players and ask them to be interviewed! You’ll probably reciprocal link with them, but the power of a good interview means that it will get disseminated throughout the internet and you’ll get link influxes from other people.

15. Business Alliances – Are there any business partners who see it in their best interests to have you succeed? Ask them for a link! Manufacturers or retailers might be very willing to link to your site.

16. Comment on Industry Blogs – No, not for the link. Comment, read, and participate, and throw the link in there, even if no-followed. Open the lines of the communication, and let the blogger know that you enjoy their blog, and you have a relevant industry website (do this by simply including it in the comment, not by plugging it). For the most popular blogs, this is also a good way to get noticed and start the lines of communication to eventually ask to guest blog.

17. Article Content Syndication – Create good content, relevant to your niche, and submit it to article directories such as GoArticles & EzineArticles. Make sure the article directory you submit to is a follow directory or you won’t get any link juice for your submissions. VREToolbar has a good Article Directory list to locate good, followed article directories.

18. Testimonials – Like a product or service within your industry? Have a CEO? That’s probably enough to get a link back to your site in a testimonial. Product/service providers love having positive reviews about their product, so reach out and offer positive feedback, you’ll probably get a link in return!

19. Link out – In your blog or on your site, find natural ways to link to other strong websites and services. Webmasters will frequently get pings about links to their site, and this will create a positive notion of yours in their mind. This will start the ball rolling to them linking to you, creating more traffic, and getting more links.

Like this list? Get more great tips by following us on Twitter, or subscribing to our RSS feed.

So you see a website on the internet, and immediately, you think to yourself “I want a link here”. I mean it’s a website – as long as it isn’t selling paid links, it has to pass some kind of juice or be of some value to you, right? Not really. Besides the standard evaluation practices, here are a few other tips to determining  whether or not a link is worth acquiring.

Is there duplicate content on the page? Sometimes a page can appear natural but actual be full of torrid, useless duplicate content. Google tends to dislike websites with too much of this. It’s a good idea to grab a piece of text and search for it in Google to see if the site comes up first for the result. If it doesn’t, there’s good reason to not pursue acquiring a link – it may pass no value anyways, even if the website still ranks for its own domain name or title tag.

What’s the cache date? So you found a link page on a personal page on some random EDU site in the middle of nowhere. Try searching for it in Google. Is it even indexed? If it is, when’s the last time it’s been cached? If it’s a top or 2^nd level page on the domain and it hasn’t been crawled in a long time, it’s a strong sign of the following things :

1. The website owner no longer maintains the site.
2. Google hates the site.

Based on all of these factors, it’s probably a waste of time to even send out a link begging e-mail now that you’ve gotten here. Your response rate is probably super low, and even if it gets posted, it’s probably of no value to you. Even if it is, you likely won’t get the benefit until months later, and it will only be incremental at best.

How does the MOZrank and PageRank match up? SEOMoz’s relatively new website valuation tool MOZRank is a good way to compare SEOMoz’s opinion to Google’s. If the MozRank SEOMoz gives is two or so points more than Google’s, there’s a good chance that the page has been devalued by Big Brother. It should never be the other way around, as SEOMoz does not penalize sites for their transgressions – it just views websites as poor based on standard link valuation policies.

A lot of link evaluation is gut feel and experience. While these tips won’t solve all of your link evaluation issues, they should help push you on the way to getting great, supportive juice to your website today.

If you’re like many business owners, you don’t have the time to do research on how to link build, or manually do it yourself. You don’t have a SEO in-house, and even if you do, he’s too busy to spend the sufficient time needed to get your URL air-dropped all over the internet.

You need to hire a link builder, whether in the form of a SEO freelancer or a specific company you’ve targeted. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as throwing a dart at a dartboard, calling your mom, or tying your shoes. There are plenty of mediocre link builders out there who are professing the wrong things or not saying enough of the right ones.

Filtering through the muck and picking the right person, or company, for you, can be the difference between a hugely successful, million-dollar website and a blip on the internet radar. There are a few things to look for and do in your auditing process that will help you identify and differentiate between those who read articles on link building, and those who are link building professionals.

1)    Learn the SEO basics. The first step for SEO evaluator, before hiring an SEO professional, is to learn the basics of the craft itself. SEOMoz’s Beginners Guide to SEO and Aaron Wall’s SEOBook are industry standards for learning the basics of SEO. If you don’t have the basic knowledge to properly evaluate SEO hires, you will inevitably hire sub-par staff that are better at persuasion than the actual SEO fundamentals.

2)    Build a list. Come up with criteria you want in a link builder, do some research and find 3-10 potentials that you can compare and contrast, depending on your website, the industry you’re in, and the amount you’re willing to spend.

3)    Ask for a preliminary SEO audit. Requesting a basic audit of your website is a standard procedure that will immediately help you filter through a good percentage of your potential employees. Look for “red flags”, like outdated recommendations (i.e., recommending a large amount of “nofollow” links, a tactic that is now outdated), and bad keyword research.

If you know your business, you should have a good idea of which words convert and which don’t. When potential hires recommended building for keywords that will either be 1- impossible to rank for or 2- never make you a dime, you know he lacks the wherewithal to be a quality link builder.

An example of this would be trying to rank a local apartment company for “how to choose an apartment”. This keyword has no local relevancy, and little commercial intent. As stupid as this might sound, I’ve seen something equivalent, to worse, be recommended as a potential term to link build for.

4)    Get their past link building credentials. Some link builders are reluctant to fully out their past profile, and they often shouldn’t, for the sake of client protection. However, most will be able to cite one or two profiles, sometimes their own, that they did quality work for. Ask about what type of links they got, how they decided on them, their link evaluation process, and the time it takes them to build a certain quantity of quality links. Most importantly, see how the keywords they link built for rank, but be careful when evaluating their performance.

Ranking first for “Downtown San Jose luxury apartments” isn’t necessarily too impressive. Similarly, ranking fifteenth for “sports” isn’t too bad either. Knowing the fundamentals of SEO detailed in step one is vital for properly evaluating this part of the process.

5)    See through the fluff. Many link builders will cite some brilliant link building tactic that garnered them 50 links once, or the time they submitted a story to Digg that got their website 20,000 hits. However, a one-time success really doesn’t matter.  Many of these social media tactics are increasingly difficult to employ effectively, and will never work for your website. Don’t fall for the grandiose stories of one or two-time successes many link builders will tell you. Instead, listen for the fundamentals and metrics like rankings and their link building process that will truly get you rank. Believe it or not, many link builders are capable of getting you top three rankings without ever making you a cool widget for your website or getting you on the front page of Digg.

6)    Make a choice. Hopefully you have enough hard-data to do a comparative analysis of your potential hires. Depending on the size of the link building operation, putting in a large amount of time in to make the right choice can never be a bad decision. If you don’t feel comfortable with any of the potential hires you’ve evaluated, don’t be afraid to re-assess and go out and find more people that are willing and able to do the job right.

Additional Resources for Hiring a Link Builder:

Link Building Evaluation Guide

Choosing the Right SEO Vendor

Portrait of a Quality Link Builder

1. Testimonials. When you purchase a service, product, or whatever else from a company online, especially from bigger sites, 99% of them will allow you to send in a testimonial. If you write one compelling and believable enough, there is a good chance that they will publish it. Make sure you add your link into the testimonial, and it may be the cheapest (free) high PR backlink you’ll ever get. This method isn’t guaranteed, but it’s definitely worth a try.

2. Utilize hired help. If you have an advertising budget, and are willing to spend money to ensure the long term survivability of your site, consider hiring a consultant to do the link building for you. Pay a virtual assistant $9/hr (or whatever) and have their main goal be to get you backlinks (directory submission, blogroll exchanges, etc..). This can help you manage your time better and take a break from the dubious link building process. The money spent will be very much worth it in the long run. (Hint elance.com)

3. Piss off someone that matters. This may sound harsh and unethical, but it’s really not, as long as you don’t cross the legal line. Sink your teeth into a popular blogger or webmaster, post about it, and watch the links pour in. Be careful not to cross the lines of slander or defamation of character. This can, and has been done many, many times throughout history. Always make sure you can justify your reason for slamming them – have sources, witnesses or friends that will back you up. This can be wildly successful.

4. Give away money. Holding a contest is one of the easiest and most effective ways to gain backlinks. Make sure that in order to enter, the webmaster/blogger is required to link to your site, whether it’s a blogroll link or even a short review. Hint – the more money you give away, the more links you’ll get. Giving away $100 will probably get you several hundred, if not a couple thousand dollars worth of backlinks.

5. Be the first on the scene. With the multitude of new web startups, you can usually find out about them right away, and make sure you fire off a pre-made email interview template to them ASAP. Posting the first interview, or best interview, can garner hundreds of incoming links, even from big sites. This is surprisingly easy to accomplish, as most startups are willing to share information to create buzz.

6. Design a plugin for Wordpress. There are a lot of people out there that start blogs or sites that have the technical know how to design useful Wordpress plugins. If this relates to you, then what the heck are you waiting for? Take the chance, and whip up a brand new plugin and order a few paid reviews on it. Even the slightest success can multiply your incoming links by a lot. The funny thing is, even if your plugin just plain sucks, you’ll still have a ton of links from people that like to tell you how bad it is. Strange world, isn’t it?

7. Sponsor a Wordpress theme. With the amount of bloggers that use Wordpress these days, there are always new themes popping up. Visit one of the popular webmaster or design forums, and take a chance at sponsoring a new theme. When you sponsor a theme (it costs anywhere from $5-100), you usually get a link built in to the footer of the theme, so whenever someone uses it, it’s an instant backlink to your site. There are people that have done this and been almost unbelievably successful with it. $5 could land you several thousand links, if not more. If the theme gets super popular, your credibility rating skyrockets.

8. Write an ebook, and give it away for free. Writing an ebook may seem like a dreaded task for some people, but chances are, you are skilled in at least one area. Take this expertise and knowledge, pump it all out in paper, package it up as a .pdf, and distribute it for free. If the ebook is even slightly helpful, you’ll get your moneys worth of backlinks in no time flat. Offer free copies at one of the popular webmaster forums. This method works great, and if written well enough, can lead to even greater opportunities. (Hint – if at all possible, slip at least one relevant affiliate link into your ebook for a nice residual income!)

9. Order up a Press Release. For as little as $20-$50, you can hire someone to write and distribute a professional press release for your site. Press releases have the potential of being picked up by major media outlets (especially if your site is groundbreaking or super creative). At the very least, Google and other search engines love press releases, so natural incoming links are almost guaranteed. A professional press release also gives you an air of credibility that just may convince someone to link to you.

10. Build How -To lists. This may not seem creative in itself, but think outside of the box. We all know that  101 ways to cheat at World of Warcraft types of articles are wildly popular, and usually result in massive amounts of backlinks from relevant sites/blogs and social bookmarking sites. So take it a step further and make an unforgettable, maybe even controversial how-to list. Example: “10 Ways To Kill Your In-Laws”. You get the point.

If you are lazy or unmotivated – stop reading. If you are seriously committed to the long term success of your site – here are some tips to get you rolling with building quality links.

Step One – Directories
Not all quality links are free. Google has come out and said that they will weight an inbound link from a paid directory (like Yahoo’s) so as to have more impact than a free link on a random directory. Why? Because you are serious about your site and it’s content. Shelling out $300 bucks a year is not fun – but if you can write some clever titles and descriptions, your listings will really benefit your SEO forever.

Don’t think that Yahoo is the only player in the game either. There are free directories like DMOZ that are also critical – and many niche directories that are in high standing like Best of the Web.

Step Two – Anchor Text is Critical
Here’s a simple question… If you were a search engine, which of the following links would provide you with more information?

http://www.domain.com/

or

Blue Widgets

Of course it’s the second one – and it’s because it’s using descriptive anchor text. This is an isolated example, but what if you were to build 100 new links to your site using anchor text that matches some of the search phrases you wish to rank for? Well, you’d be well on your way to ranking prominently – that’s for sure!

Step Three – Stay Ahead of the Game
When blogging became big, everyone started a blog and tried spamming for backlinks. It worked, but only for a short window. The lesson learned here is that if you’re going to be successful with building quality links, you need to be constantly thinking of a new way to go about doing things. Of course, the more legitimate and sincere your efforts are, the more likely they will be to succeed.

If you’re unsure of what link bait is, I’ll try my best to sum it up on a high level. Link bait is the creation of content and clever titles that encourage others to link to you and your goods once they come across it.

Clever Titles
Writing clever titles to your posts are one good way to get people interested in what you have to say. Things like lists, open ended questions, or references to popular topics are all great ways to grab the attention of readers everywhere – regardless of how they come across your site.

Good Bait = Good Content
People love lists. From the top ten ways to lose weight while sitting at your desk to the top five things you should be doing with your site optimization plans… quality content is the driving force behind long term link bait.

Be Original
Your link bait will do nothing if it’s just a regurgitated version of what someone else had released in the past. For starters, you’re probably guilty of plagiarism. Beyond that, your content is newer and probably hits up a smaller audience. What good is that? You need to come up with original ideas that really hammer home something that compels readers to check into the full length article.

Use Media!
Videos, pod casts, images and diagrams… are all wonderful ways to set the hook on your link bait efforts. Readers love to come across things that our out of the norm. If you’re scanning through a dozen new topics on your RSS reader, what will make one stand out more than the next? – Quality media! A YouTube video for example is begging to be clicked upon when it’s surrounded by boring text!

Remember, link bait is all about enticing readers to do something. Whether it is to comment or track back to your article, setting the bait out to your targeted audience is key. After a while, it’s not uncommon to see variations from market to market with regards to how to set bait. In other words, what may work for affluent business owners may not at all work with stay at home moms. So, use that to your information and test what works best!