viral-marketing-and-linkbait-on-the-web

Viral Marketing and Linkbait on the Web ©2007 SEOmoz, LLC This article serves as a guide to creating, launching and promoting linkbait and viral content on the Internet. Covering all aspects of the linkbait genre, the guide explains what constitutes linkbait, who appreciates and spreads it and how it is used for maximum exposure and return. The guide also covers twelve potential linkbait formats, and offers guidelines on how traditional businesses, operating online, can use linkbait in an appropriate manner. Introduction The Power of Linkbait and Viral Marketing The true power of a viral message derives from its ability to spread rapidly, naturally and without encouragement. To a marketer, this is bliss – rather than forcing or re-enforcing a concept, their work is done for them by the very people they hope to reach. The web is a natural conduit for viral content, buoyed by popular sites that help to spread and promote ideas, tools, mashups, blog posts, articles, studies... anything that catches the eye or interest of a link-savvy audience. This article will introduce the principles of leveraging the web to help content spread, discuss specific content strategies and provide tips and suggestions on how to use social media, blogs and news sites to promote your work. For most forms of linkbait, the best type of promotion comes from social media. Save for the rather unexceptional and the exceedingly popular, there exists a near bell curve of viral distribution. At the beginning of a piece of content’s viral spread, the increase in links, views and comments speeds up. The content becomes popular on one or more social media website. Depending on how popular the content becomes, the content either moves through the “now popular” section of the site(s) and drops back into obscurity, or it is promoted to a list of “most popular” entries, in which case it stays in the public eye for longer. Aside from StumbleUpon, most websites that collect, rank and display viral content operate in a similar manner. Generally, there is a limited amount of time one has to work with from creation to submission to popularity. What is Linkbait? Any piece of web-based content created with the purpose of attracting links and attention can be called “linkbait.” There are three primary goals to creating linkbait:    Attract Inbound Links Generate Press / Build Buzz Drive traffic Occasionally, there is a fourth important component – increasing sales – but with linkbait, this is more often a secondary purpose. While the normal content of a website is meant to appeal to potential customers, linkbait is created for an altogether different audience, one that must be understood in great detail in order to be successfully targeted. We affectionately call this group of tech-savvy, social media participants the “Linkerati.” We receive linkbait in emails from friends, see it mentioned in online publications, find it by accident when using search engines and come across it when following links on other websites. There is a difference between content that “goes viral” by accident (the Numa Numa video, for example) and content that is specifically created to attract a lot of attention, like the GoDaddy videos. Every day, the most popular content on the web is a mix of both types of viral content. An experienced web user can usually tell the difference between accidentally popular content and linkbait, although a marketer’s ultimate goal is to create content that is difficult to pick as being deliberate. A common misconception is that linkbait is all scandalous, ridiculous, shock-jock style content that respectable businesses cannot possibly publish. The reason for this misconception is that it is generally only the shocking, controversial linkbait that gets called out for being "bait." Most linkbait examples are considered simply interesting material. Consider this: ninety percent of StumbleUpon content is some form of linkbait. The remaining ten percent has taken on the status of viral content by accident: it was not created with the intent of being funny or interesting, but has appealed to people due to a typo, an irony or another “accidental” factor that the author didn’t take into account. This "Death by Caffeine" example is a great example of linkbait: the people who created the page wanted others to see it, spread it and find it entertaining. It is clever, simple and easy and is not scandalous or offensive in the slightest. This article is titled “Viral Marketing and Linkbait”; however, there is a difference between the two. Viral marketing relies on the spread of content; linkbait denotes content that people do not reproduce, but which they link to. In any campaign, there is usually some cross-over. People will link to viral videos and they will reproduce content for their own blogs or emails. Despite their slight differences, the process of creating the content is usually quite similar. Who are the Linkerati? The people we refer to as the Linkerati are those web users who not only own websites and blogs, and are not only prone to linking to compelling content, but whose sites carry strength and authority. They are the people whose accounts at social media sites are highly active, lending additional weight to that which they submit and vote on. They are web-savvy individuals who have seen a lot of linkbait and who often don’t want to link to direct marketing ploys. Upon visiting a social media site or reading a blog, the only reason why a member of the linkerati would take your bait and either vote for it or link to it is because it’s simply too good to ignore. The public at large may send links, chain letters and pictures in mass emails, but the Linkerati are a harder sell. There are six types of people who regularly constitute the Linkerati. Sometimes, people fall into more than one category. Social Media Participants These are people who are actively involved in communities such as StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg. They visit these sites every day, vote on content, submit content and add comments. They are powerful because their votes determine which content will become popular and thus be exposed to the largest number of people. Most social media sites, including the three large sites listed above rank their users according to how much success their votes and submissions generally garner. The unfortunate thing about this crowd is that they can sniff out linkbait and they often detest marketing. Bloggers People who run blogs are prone to writing about interesting content they find elsewhere on the web. While millions of people have Blogspot, Wordpress and Typepad blogs, some of them have never been indexed by search engines, carry no PageRank, have no links pointing to their sites and have little power. However, a percentage of blogs carry a lot of weight and their authors’ opinions are highly respected. This group includes the likes of Pete Cashmore from Mashable and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: having these people, or their staff, write about your products, tools or content results in massive exposure. Links from these sites are very valuable. Of course, the more prominent the blog, the more difficult it is to convince the blogger to write about you. Paid blogging campaigns (where one has thousands of inconsequential blogs write about and link to one’s domain) can elicit huge numbers of links, and yet cannot compare in strength or significance to one link and one write-up from TechCrunch. Many people do not think of the writers at these prominent websites as being bloggers: the word conjures up images of political activists, amateur literary critics, stay-at-home moms and their ilk. Often, people think of “bloggers” as a lowly form of the next category – journalists. However, blogging (call it “writing for the Internet” if the term bothers you too much) is becoming more important to the activity and culture of the Internet, and the best in the field are becoming more respected for their craft. There are inherent differences between blogs, bloggers and traditional writing, most of which revolve around style, user interaction and subject matter. Bloggers are prone to editing their posts as new information comes to hand, adding strike-throughs to text that is no longer applicable and taking a less formal tone with their audience. Their bad reputation for knowing little about grammar, style or literary tradition is true for some of them and is completely undeserved for others. With so many people currently maintaining blogs, no one stereotype that applies to them all. Journalists The difference between journalists and bloggers is usually their employer, although other notable differences exist. Most newspapers, magazines and television stations have websites where they post their stories, and some even allow readers to comment on stories in what was once typical only of blogs. Journalists, however, rarely change their stories once they’ve been published, preferring instead to print retractions or omissions if they’ve made an error of if new information comes to light. Journalists are almost universally paid for their writing, whereas bloggers are often operating for themselves or making their money from the advertising on their site, if they make any money at all. Bloggers also often have other jobs – that is, they run an online or offline business and they blog for the company’s website. Even though there are many times more bloggers in this world than there are journalists, you can guarantee that far more people declare themselves to be professional journalists or reporters than “professional bloggers.” Another reason journalists are often respected more of their writing given more credit than that of most bloggers is because they are, theoretically, impartial and objective writers. Bloggers have never claimed to be anything but subjective, opinion-based commentators. Journalists are also powerful because their reach is not confined to the Internet; their profession is more established and recognized by society and they are often published on and offline. Even the least web-savvy people seem to realize how easy it can be to have one’s opinions posted online, and thus appear to respect offline writers more. Links and reviews received from journalists vary in strength and significance, just as they do when received from bloggers. A link from the New York Times, for example, is going to be worth much more than from the Puget Sound News. When dealing with online ventures, certain publications are more authoritative than they are offline: being reviewed offline in Wired magazine is great, but being featured in their online publication is extremely valuable. Because Wired is well known as a respected, authoritative technology publication, the sites to which they link (unless the links are nofollowed) are credited with some of Wired’s authority. Researchers and Web Authors People who publish their research online are quickly becoming part of the Linkerati due to the strength of the websites they generally use to publish their findings. Sites whose generic top level domain is .edu are credited with authority that they may or may not actually have. A gTLD of .edu indicates that the site belongs to an educational institution, usually a university. It is somewhat of a flaw in the algorithms of search engines to assign universal authority to .edu domains, as most universities allow all students and faculty to create pages on their domains, which can contain any amount of inaccurate, untrustworthy information. Search engines also assign weight to .gov (government) and .mil (military) domains, as well as the non-US versions of these sites, such as .gov.au in Australia. The people who write for these sites are usually neither bloggers nor journalists. Also note than many researchers and authors do not have .edu or .gov sites. Some even contribute to sites like Wikipedia, where the links do not help for SEO purposes (due to nofollow tags), but can drive a lot of traffic and value. Often respected authors, academics, scientists and business-people who publish online don’t realize their status as members of the Linkerati; their influence offline is credited to what they publish online, but they do not necessarily understand the way their status affects those to whom they link. Forum Posters Although somewhat less visible to the public than blogs, the web is teeming with forums. Virtually every industry, hobby, religion, political affiliation and cause has dozens of forums where people discuss, argue and debate the intricacies of their chosen subject. Many online cultural phenomena have been spread by forum participants. Having your content discussed on a forum that relates to your subject is a great form of exposure, as you can guarantee that the people involved are interested in the content. A recent piece of linkbait we released at Drivl was picked up and talked about in various college sports forums. While the piece did not receive a tremendous number of Diggs or Reddit upmods, the traffic to the page was huge and a lot of it was driven by these forums. We recently leveraged forums about the United States’ immigration procedure in order to market a post relating to the subject. Forum members are usually passionate about the forum’s subject matter. Like social media websites, forums usually reward constructive participation by assigning rank to members. In the example below, one poster is a Junior Member while the other is a Senior Member. While rank makes little difference to a users’ actions within a forum (unless a high rank gives them moderation privileges), such a system is a great way to have people participate on a regular basis in order to improve their ranking. Forums are also specifically designed to let users know when new comments have been posted, thus encouraging discussion. Unfortunately, the tone of many forums tends toward argumentative and many threads turn negative. People are sometimes less than polite when concealed by a pseudonym, so viral content can be lambasted by forum participants in the same manner that it can be torn apart by commenters at social news sites. Offline Connectors The final group of people who can spread viral content are those who do so offline. This category is made up of influential people who are not active in any particular online community, but who reach the public through other mediums. Highly visible examples include people like Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and, to a lesser extent, Joel McHale of The Soup. Both host comedic commentary television programs in the U.S. and both talk about current events, viral content and social memes. Neither is personally involved in maintaining websites or blogs, but the things they talk about, the jokes they make and the content they promote is well-known. Many less-visible people also belong to this group. In actuality, anyone who discusses online content in an offline environment is an offline connector: conference speakers, public officials, technology evangelists and politicians have all helped facilitate and spread viral content at one point or another. The Goals of Linkbait The primary goal of linkbait is contained within its name: to attract links! However, there are multiple facets to a linkbaiting campaign, especially since the links pointing to your bait will most likely be internal pages that aren’t particularly important to your core business. It is very rare to have linkbait of any kind appear on a site’s homepage or important product pages. Either appearing as a blog entry or on a specifically created page, linkbait adds links and strength to a domain as a whole rather than to individual important pages. Achieve Recognition with a Wider Audience One of the goals of linkbait is to have a brand appear in front of people who would not normally see the brand or the site. Linkbait on an insurance company’s website will not make people immediately jump to a registration, application or information page. They won’t necessarily click on advertisements. What linkbait can achieve, however, is an improvement in domain strength and brand recognition. People buy from, register with, return to and respect brands with which they’re familiar. Geico used an offline version of viral marketing to raise awareness of their brand. Two of their advertising campaigns, one involving a British-accented gecko and the other featuring sophisticated yet bitter cavemen propelled the insurance company into pop culture. While other car insurance companies showed car accidents, Geico focused on improving their brand recognition in order to attract customers. You would never equate an insurance company’s website with an enjoyable, entertaining experience; however, before Geico, you’d never have thought that car insurance advertisements could be enjoyable YouTube-worthy phenomena either. Create/Improve Reputation There are two risks companies run when they use linkbait in this way. Firstly, you do not want to your business or website to become so engulfed by linkbait that its true purpose is obscured. In the Geico example, the company did well to include a slogan that relates to both the advertisements and the product: “So easy a caveman could do it” relates to how easy it is to sign up with their company and, by implication, how easy one’s life becomes once one is a Geico customer. They also inspired a slew of jokes surrounding the phrase “I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico” by making it the punch-line in some of their earlier commercials. In every advertisement, the company makes at least a small mention of what they actually do, which hopefully ensures that most people relate funny cavemen and geckos with car insurance, and car insurance with Geico. The second danger to linkbait is managing its appropriateness. Companies can damage their brand’s reputation with ill-conceived ideas. You must always remember that your humor does not necessarily resonate with the rest of the population: the content may go down well with some audiences and not others. Another “real world” example of bait that was extremely appealing to some people and rather off-putting to others comes from a tee-shirt campaign run by Canadian company Acquisio who specialize in creating payper-click management software. Their shirts, which read (in all caps), “I hate doing this shit” were a recent hit at SEO and technology conferences. People who wore the shirts around some of the United States’ and Canada’s major cities reported smiles, laughs and questions about the “shit” that they hated. Offline viral marketing at its finest The same people, however, reported that it was not such a good idea to wear the shirts when one ventured away from the city. While people in large urban environments found the shirts amusing, their rural counterparts were a little more socially conservative and did not appreciate the humor. One anecdote recounts a wearer beginning a road trip at a supermarket in central Seattle, where people giggled and inquired about the shirt, and coincidentally, ending at a supermarket in rural Idaho where the person received looks of absolute disgust. Luckily for Acquisio, their primary (sole?) market comes from larger cities and people who find their shirts amusing. The campaign did not damage their brand, primarily because the people who did not like the shirts were almost certainly never going to need Acquisio’s services. The company’s web address is printed in very small letters underneath the main print. This ensures that a truly curious individual can figure out where the shirts originate, but that the brand name does not obscure the primary content. Given the nature of Acquisio’s business, their tactic is almost identical to Geico’s: create something desirable and market it to people who would otherwise find your business particularly boring. The message on the shirt also makes fun of the perception many people have of pay-per-click and its nuances; many people do hate managing pay-perclick campaigns. But people usually love companies that can make fun of themselves. Creating such linkbait is fine if you’re certain you’ll not alienate potential clients. However, many businesses and websites cannot take risks with their viral marketing campaigns. In less conservative markets, you can often get away with more risqué content than if you are attempting to sell products to a more generic audience. While some people will be offended by virtually everything, it is better to err on the side of caution if you depend on diverse markets for sales. When you are constructing a campaign for such a business, think of the supermarket in rural Idaho. Would you shock and disgust the patrons? Do you count on those patrons to buy your product? Then tone it down a bit! Enhance Credibility The above examples of linkbait and viral marketing all somewhat fit into the stereotype of linkbait as humorous, scandalous or otherwise eyebrow-raising content. Content that is specifically crafted to improve a person, brand or company’s credibility is, fundamentally, “bait.” People often misstep when creating linkbait to enhance credibility. This practice is not the same as creating flame-bait, where one discredits other people or services to appear more knowledgeable. Credibility and reputation-based linkbait should establish you or your company as experts, showing that your writers and staff are worthy of industry respect for your insights, research and knowledge. Examples of such linkbait include “user-friendly” research papers and articles (long-winded, academic writing does not make good linkbait). While such content rarely appeals to the population as a whole, it can spread rapidly through the industries for which it was written. Always remember that just because you are writing for the Internet, you still need to back up articles and papers with sources and solid facts. The Web’s terrible reputation for lies, mistruths and bad research is well founded: there are far fewer safeguards and far less red tape to get through before you can have your writing published online than there are when content is printed in a journal or a book. Thus, there are plenty of opinions masquerading as facts circulating online. The ease with which one can publish online without citing sources and checking facts is the primary reason why it is important to factually back up what you write. Attract Evangelists It takes only a small number of passionate users / visitors to spread your content. The people who will become your evangelists are those who do not just enjoy your site, but who actively encourage others to check it out. Public Relations Linkbait can be used to tailor and control the message put out by your company. Three or four popular items that are of a highly professional, analytical nature establish a similar image for the website or company. Many forms of linkbait also invite user participation via comments, interaction with a widget or a download: people’s experiences with these will shape the public’s perception of a company. While you can’t control users’ experiences at social media sites, on forums or on any other site that may be discussing your content, you have the opportunity to shape users’ experiences at your own site. You have a certain amount of control over your public relations via linkbait in the following ways. 1. Tone, voice and subject matter of content. This is totally within your control before you even start producing your linkbait, and long before anyone sees a finished product. 2. Presentation of the content. features as simple as font, color scheme, layout and choice of media (article, video, Flash presentation etc) can impact the producer’s image. 3. Location of content. Linkbait presented as a blog post usually receives a lot of attention quickly, but less in the long term. Articles, “features” and similar static pieces of content often receive more traffic over a longer period of time. 4. Your participation allowances. a. Will you allow users to comment on your content? Will you moderate their comments? You are by no means obliged to let people comment and you are perfectly entitled to remove comments that don’t serve your public relations campaign in a positive manner. If you are intent on allowing comments, you are best advised to enable comment moderation and thereby control the reactions that are posted on your site. There are definite SEO advantages to allowing comments: search engines notice and appreciate regularly updated content of all kinds, including that which is contained in comments. If you have no means by which to moderate comments before they appear, make sure you are receiving emails when new comments are added and that you’re at least able to delete bad publicity. You need not feel bad about this: it is your website, your content and your prerogative to control your public relations. b. Do you give users the ability to contact you via email and how open are you about your identity? Completely anonymous writers are often harder to connect with and they often elicit less emotional reaction from their audience. The opposite is only true if an audience becomes intent on finding out who is responsible for a piece of content. Link Attraction Obviously, this is the goal from which linkbait derives its name. Links are the “currency” of the Internet, and linkbait can greatly improve a site’s number and quality of back links. The difficulty with attracting links is that sometimes, highly publicized content doesn’t actually receive terribly many links. Its page views, commentary and duplication may very particularly high, but people are often disappointed by the number of actual links they gain after a linkbait campaign has run its course. Whether people link to bait usually depends on the type of content. Simple, effective content usually receives more attention at social media sites – pictures, jokes and news stories sometimes receive up to 10,000 diggs (although 2,000 diggs is considered a lot). However, such content often provides little more than a couple of second’s entertainment. When encouraged to click through to an amusing picture or joke, 99% of people will view the content and quickly click out of the site. If the source of the traffic is a social news service, the content will receive a great deal of votes. However, people often don’t link to things that only interested them for less than ten seconds. Such content is the empty carbohydrate of linkbait. Consumed very quickly, it is just as easily forgotten. Solid links are usually built to content that engages readers. This is not to say that it must be particularly intellectual, but the longer your content stays in someone’s mind and the more it resonates with its audience, the more likely you are to find your linkbait referenced or reviewed. The simplest linkbait, while often very popular, is also more likely to be copied as opposed to linked. This mathematical conundrum, which has appeared across the social news platform, is a great comment-provoker, but it is likely to be simply typed out by those who want to reference it. In fact, the post itself was most likely copied from elsewhere. The same is true for intriguing pictures: reproducing the image, either by sourcing the image from its original location or by re-uploading it is more common than linking out. The best you can hope for in these circumstances is that the copied image or content will contain a courtesy link to its source. Oftentimes, people are not deliberately plagiarizing others’ work: they are simply unaware of online etiquette. They believe that they are being complimentary in showing your work to others. In circumstances like these, feel free to contact the webmaster or blogger and politely request that they add a link. Even if they have copied your content and created a potential duplicate content issue, your discretion may advise you that asking for them to remove your content is unnecessary. If they add a link back to your site, search engines will almost definitely recognize your version as canonical. Linkbait that is not easily reproduced is less likely to be copied by uninformed publishers and is more likely to be referenced via a link. Ensuring that your content receives links as opposed to clones involves covering a range of factors: 1. Present your content in a way that makes it hard to efficiently copy or scrape. For example, make you entire page part of the content, including HTML / CSS / Javascript features that can’t be copied or sourced as easily as images or text. This will put off those people who would unwittingly reproduce the linkbait as well as making life more difficult for those who’d willingly steal the content. 2. Include links to one of your important pages (homepage, sales page, etc) within the content. If someone is going to reproduce it elsewhere, you may as well get your link somehow. While people who maliciously reproduce content may remove the links, many will not, and even scrapers often leave links in place. 3. Produce content that is supposed to be reproduced! Banners, badges, widgets and tools can all be linkbait and they can all link back to your site. Traffic Having traffic move through your website is one of the best ways to become a recognized brand. While people may not be aware of this, they pick up the branding you include on your website and recognize it in the future. Secondly, not all visitors to a website participate, purchase products, register for services or plan to return. However, a percentage of all visitors usually do. Thus, the more traffic you can generate, the greater number of people will take actions on the site. Different types of linkbait create different traffic flows: the more lucrative type of traffic is that which flows consistently, rather than that which comes in a rush (e.g. from the front page of Digg). Consistent traffic increases the chances of steady, ongoing linkbuilding, which in turn increases your site’s search engine rankings. Quick-hit traffic is really only profitable if it morphs into consistent traffic or if you are able to produce multiple instances of such traffic spikes. As a general rule, social news sites provide the one-time-only traffic hits, whereas social tagging services, niche blogs and forums, search engines and traditional media sources provide ongoing traffic. Ad Views & Clicks The more targeted your linkbait to your industry, service or niche, the more likely it is that your visitors will click on advertisements. However, you should be aware that linkbait is not an exercise in attracting customers as much as it is about increasing brand recognition, improving rankings and increasing the possibility of people buying from you in the future. Broad Linkbait and Viral Content Options Blogs Ever a popular medium for linkbait, blogs provide an easy way to publish online. Your audience doesn’t appear to be very picky about where your site is hosted; free, templated Blogspot blogs have had their content become popular within social media. The benefit of blogs is that they are specifically tailored to allow participation. People often take more interest in something with which they can interact. Given the option of adding and reading comments on a piece of content, people will often return to a site multiple times in order to read responses and reactions. People also appear to have a very liberal view of what should constitute a blog post. As opposed to content presented as articles, blog posts can be very short, centered around an image or alternative form of media, and no one questions the author’s choices. Thus, you are free to be flexible when working with a blog. Essentially, blog posts are a completely different medium to traditional online and offline publishing. Blogs can be a lucrative and low-maintenance medium on which to display linkbait; however, blogs are generally expected to be open about who authors their content. In most circumstances, there is much transparency in terms of the author’s name, background and qualifications. Anonymous bloggers often run into an astonishing Internet hypocrisy where anonymous commenters will demand to know who has written the blog’s content! If you or your company is unwilling to reveal terribly much about yourselves, you can either remain anonymous and deal with potential criticism, or you can present your linkbait in another format. Surprisingly, content that appears to be independent from a blog often receives less demand that its authors reveal themselves. Another benefit to hosting linkbait on a blog is that blogs are particularly SEO-friendly. Blog features such as tags, categories, posts’ publication dates, RSS feeds and navigational links mean that a popular blog post can greatly boost the indexing and ranking of the site's other pages. Content that stands alone often contains fewer beneficial links to the rest of the site and has fewer links from within the site pointing back to it. If 10,000 links point at your linkbait’s page and that page links out well to the rest of your site, incoming search engine spiders will follow those links. Articles Articles are often a good way to establish authority. Usually, they are composed and consumed quite differently to blogs posts. Rather than taking an informal, personal tone with readers, articles tend to be more traditional in style and structure. Authors refer to themselves in the third, as opposed to first, person. They are also more likely to adhere to formal writing norms such as including citations and references. A great example of an article that served as linkbait is SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. The article has been linked to across the web and has helped establish SEOmoz as a leader in the search engine optimization world. It does not have a feature where readers can comment on its contents and it does not show the date it was published, nor its author. The document is credited to the company as a whole. Even though many people know, or can guess, who authored the piece, the lack of a named author served to improve the company’s authority and reputation. The SEOmoz website received over 8,000 links to this article alone, many of which came from authoritative sites within the SEO industry. Generally, links included primary keywords. Even when an author is named, such as in the magazine and newspaper industries, editorial responsibility usually falls onto the company. Blogs often include disclaimers about their contents being solely based upon opinions, whereas more care usually has to be taken when presenting content as an article. Articles are usually informative and research-based and often don’t hit the front pages of social news sites due to their length, and due to the intellectual involvement required to read them. Social news sites usually feature only the sensational, easy-to-digest types of linkbait. However, articles such as the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization do well at bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. They also tend to rank well in search engines for their primary keywords, as they appear to be authoritative. Tools, Widgets & Badges Done well, these types of viral content are highly profitable. All three come with the functionality and design that only exists online; people can read opinion columns and articles in offline publications. They can write in to magazines and newspapers with their comments (even though the immediate satisfaction of commenting online is lacking). Online tools, widgets and badges are solely the realm of the Internet. Below are examples of all three types of content that have been successfully marketed. Tools SEOmoz’s PageStrength tool analyzes a site’s prominence in order to give it a score out of ten. Once the tool has assigned the site a score, it gives the user the option of embedding a little badge on their own site, showing the score. The badge links back to SEOmoz. Useful, accurate, good-looking tools are often difficult to create and harder to maintain, so producing high quality tools will accelerate a site or a company’s growth and reputation. The marketability of tools is often based both on their functionality and their deliberate marketability, so incorporating badges that display results is always a good idea. Unfortunately, tools are prone to breaking, malfunctioning and (if they are complex) requiring a fair amount of upkeep in order to retain their popularity. Widgets Widgets differ from tools in that they don’t necessarily have to have a useful function. The term includes everything from slideshows of a person’s photographs to displays of international time zones, feeds of news stories, various countdowns and even online music players. Widgets, which are basically chunks of HTML that can be embedded on multiple websites and don’t require those websites to power them, are easier to create than tools and they generally require far less upkeep. The above facial recognition widget became very popular for a few reasons. The first was that it indulges people’s narcissism by showing them celebrities whom they “look like.” This took the Myspace-era idea of posting flattering pictures of oneself online a step further. Secondly, creators MyHeritage.com gave users a wide variety of choices regarding how they’d like to display their widget, which of their celebrity look-alikes they’d like to feature and which they’d like to leave out. MyHeritage also took steps ensure that their widgets were installed: users can tell the service the password to their social media profiles across sixteen sites and MyHeritage will install the widget for them. The uploaded widget appears in different locations depending on the site in question. For example, the widget appears as a Note on Facebook, in the “About Me” section of Myspace and in the Widgets section of Bebo. Alternatively, MyHeritage provides the code so that users can install the widget wherever they so choose. Badges Badges differ from widgets in that widgets generally do something, whereas badges are simply images. They are usually embedded in a webpage in the same manner as widgets: via a chunk of HTML. They pull images from another site and link back to the site that produced the badge. It is perfectly advisable to create a badge for a number of things. Whenever you create a tool or a quiz, make a badge that people can display on their websites, such as the badge for the PageStrength tool. The entire HTML of the PageStrength badge shows just how easy these badges are to create.  A tidy link to SEOmoz’s report page about Example.com comes with some optimized keywords and appears as a small badge, perfectly suited for being embedded in a footer or sidebar. An example of a site who should have included a badge but didn’t is AlphaDictionary.com whose “Are You a Yankee or a Rebel” accent quiz attracted thousands of links. The quiz asks a visitor twenty questions about how they pronounce certain words, giving a final score that indicates where the person’s accent probably comes from. What the site should have done is present users with a badge upon their completion of the quiz that shows their score. However, all they include is a “send to a friend” link. The inclusion of Reddit and Del.icio.us buttons was a good idea, but the site still provides nothing substantial for the linkerati to pass on. An example of a quiz that includes a badge for users’ results is JustSayHi.com’s Zombie Apocalypse quiz, which asks a variety of questions to determine whether someone is likely to survive a 28 Days Later / Dawn of the Dead-style zombie invasion. The badge proved to be a big success for JustSayHi. A number of factors contributed to JustSayHi’s success with badges. Most importantly, the badges were well designed, which greatly increased the likelihood that people would actually want the image displayed on their sites and blogs. You do not necessarily have to create a quiz or a tool in order to create and spread badges. Although their rate of adoption will be lower, it’s perfectly advisable to create badges for your business, website or blog. Bloggers are especially prone to including badges in their sidebars. Obviously, smaller badges are best for sidebar and footer distribution, whereas badges such as the Zombie Apocalypse usually appear in the body of posts. Gmail, Feedburner and SEOmoz offer up badges Videos Like badges and widgets, videos often serve as viral content rather than as linkbait. A majority of popular videos are hosted on sites such as YouTube which allow users to embed the videos into their own websites and blogs. Hosting a video with a video sharing site is the best option if you want the video to “go viral” and be reproduced multiple times. If you want people to come specifically to your site to view a video, don’t host the video on YouTube or one of its peers, and don’t include an embed code. Which method you choose depends on your goals with the video. To gain links alone, host the video yourself. However, be conscious of the way video has developed on the web: while reproducing other people’s text and picture content is generally frowned upon and results in duplicate content, it is often in the best interest of the producer to have videos spread virally. Viral videos can act in the same way as television commercials, with the added advantage that people don’t realize they are watching (and passing on) an advertisement. Specific Content Strategies Top 10 Lists The time-honored genre of Top 10 Lists is a staple of linkbait. However, the problem with these lists is that the market is somewhat saturated with them. This is not to say that they can’t be useful, but they do have to be creative and unique in order to garner any attention. We have also reached a stage in linkbait marketing where many savvy social media participants are immediately turned off when they see a title using the term “Top 10.” For this reason, you should consider modifying these list-style pieces to “disguise” their genre. This post from Drivl received 2413 diggs and was highly successful at StumbleUpon. However, if reduced to ten names and given a title such as “The Top 10 Worst Place Names in the World”, there is a chance that the post would not have done as well as it did. Naming posts “Top 10” has become too common a linkbait strategy and goes against the idea that linkbait should look as little like marketing as possible. When presented properly, list-style bait can work for a range of industries and subjects. Companies struggling to come up with linkbait ideas often turn to lists as the list format allows people to share their expertise or opinions in an easily-digestible format. A more useful "Top 10" style post ... that received 4644 Diggs The most common form of list-style linkbait will include a title for each numbered bullet point, followed by a short description or piece of commentary. Sometimes, authors include pictures or other forms of media. However, there is no limit to the length of each item. Reporting / News Opinion Given that most genuinely objective reporting online still comes from the Old Media, popular “news” stories online are fairly opinion-oriented. News-centered linkbait is often styled in an op-ed fashion that invites discussion of current events and politics. Pieces such as this have a good chance of being picked up by Reddit, where both Old Media content and blog commentary make it to the homepage daily. “Best Of” Guides Although this type of content has not been “abused” to the extent of Top 10 lists, “Best Of” guides are a common form of "content-centric" linkbait. At their most visible, “Best Of” guides include U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges guide. The magazine has made a name for itself with both its print and web version of the list. This guide is very well-executed linkbait for a number of reasons, the first of which is controversy. People put a lot of effort, money and time into choosing and attending a university, so to pit colleges against one another and rank them in order of “quality” is bound to please some people and enrage others. Secondly, the list is long, showcasing 130 universities. The chances that a collegeeducated U.S. reader attended - or considered attending - one of the featured schools is quite high. The fact that the list is far from comprehensive or accurate is rather inconsequential. Numerous small, high-quality universities are not mentioned, even though a proper assessment of their worth would rank them highly on the list. However, the average reader won’t be looking for such colleges, and if they were listed, many readers wouldn’t recognize the colleges’ names. They recognize big state colleges, Ivy League schools and other “famous” universities such as NYU and Georgetown. While you should always strive for accuracy in your linkbait and never lie in order to create compelling content, there is no harm in presenting content in a manner that is most likely to capture people’s attention. When creating “Best Of” lists, be prepared for people to disagree with your assertions. Do plenty of research to ensure that your “Best Of” can be considered an authority. Appealing to a knowledgeable audience is in your best interests in terms of receiving quality links;you will only impress knowledgeable audiences with quality content. U.S. News & World Report employed an extensive methodology in order to rank its colleges, raising the authority of its findings. Its omission of unheard of schools, however, has little to do with its ranking metrics. “How-To” Guides “How-To” Guides can be either serious or completely irreverent. Sometimes, it can be tough to tell whether the author is serious or not! PartSelect.com sells parts for appliances: its website is useful but boring. Their linkbait – How To Cook a Delicious Spinach and Ricotta Cheese Lasagna In Your Dishwasher – attracts diverse links that the site’s regular content could never acquire naturally. As with “Top 10” and “Best Of” lists, research and opinion both play their part in the guides’ composition. Often, the Internet does not require people to cite their examples and justify their reasoning, so “How To” guides such as Blifaloo.com’s “How to Detect Lies” post appears to have no particular scientific backing. The post’s StumbleUpon success is phenomenal, gathering 577 reviews and many more positive ratings. The “How-To” genre is great to work with if your website is otherwise “boring”, but your industry knowledge and expertise can be turned into a useful or fun guide. The links your site receives from this type of content are also likely to include your desired keywords in its anchor text, since you will be more than likely writing text or creating content about a main component of your business. Comprehensive Articles Well-researched articles are generally not social media bait; however, they are a fantastic way of earning industry respect. Such content also receives targeted links, most of which will include great anchor text that utilizes your primary keywords. The idea that linkbait always has to appeal to the users of Digg and Reddit is a misnomer. Revisiting our definition of linkbait (Any piece of web-based content created with the purpose of attracting links and attention can be called “linkbait”) there is no doubt that comprehensive articles serve this purpose. For content like this, you often have to turn away from many of the well-known linkbaitspreading services. StumbleUpon can still be helpful due to its diverse audience and extremely vast range of categories and tags. However, the majority of people who find the article won’t get to it via social media. The following are methods you can use to spread linkbait that is not generally appealing to traditional linkbait outlets. Most industries, interest groups and communities have their place on the Internet. Some groups’ “place” is as elementary as a Facebook group. Others have forums dedicated to their topics. Industry-specific forums Forums and message boards are prolific. Finding one that suits your needs should not be hard. Simple Google searches are often all that is needed to come across such forums: searching for virtually anything followed by “forum” will produce results. The Paper Forum exists for the paper industry. The Purse Forum exists for the handbag industry. Other examples can be found when searching for “furniture forum”, “insurance forum”, etc. Do not dive directly into a forum and begin promoting linkbait. Most forums have a seniority structure where participation is rewarded with status. People who see a new member pushing content, especially if all the content is from the same website or company, will immediately recognize a marketing campaign. Forum moderators may ban accounts that are seen participating in this way. You must bide your time, build a history within the forum and increase your seniority a little before dropping any links. As with Digg, it is recommended that you also link to resources and content that is not your own. Building a name for yourself in a forum is not a full-time job and should only take a week or two of participation. Make sure to choose a name that does not reflect the service or site you’re going to link to, and choose an avatar that also doesn’t reflect your business but that people will begin to recognize. The people who you are dealing with inside forums are potentially going to improve your business, so it is important to treat them with respect. Facebook Groups As an industry, SEO has flocked to Facebook and created (at our best estimate) 700 SEO-related groups. While not every industry has this presence within Facebook, the service’s fifty-million members mean that groups exist for a wide variety of interests. Do you have SEO news? Here are some good outlets... Groups can act as mini-communities where discussions, content sharing and posting occur, often on a regular basis. You want to find groups that are active: some are never updated and the groups’ members never check back to see what has been added to the page. After you have joined a group, it is relatively easy to keep track of how often it is updated: clicking on the “Groups” link in Facebook’s sidebar will show your recently updated groups on the right hand side of the page. Regularly updated, active groups have an array of options for sharing content: Industry-Specific Social News Sites As opposed to industry-specific forums, niche social news sites are not particularly common. Internet Marketing recently received its first successful social news site in the form of Sphinn. Previously, PlugIM served as a social news service for the marketing industry; however, Sphinn has surpassed its predecessor in terms of traffic, PageRank and number of votes needed to reach the homepage. If your industry has a social news site to its name, promote your linkbait there. Two good examples of other niche social news sites is Menéame (a Spanish language social news service) and RealEstateVoices for the real estate industry. In addition, there are numerous social news sites that are somewhat similar to Digg, including Shoutwire, Mixx and Newsvine. The guidelines to being noticed at these small, niche social news sites are quite similar to those that apply when dealing with Digg and Reddit. Less attention-grabbing is required because your audience is generally less fickle than is Digg’s. Along with the advantage of having content appear before a targeted audience, one big benefit of niche news sites is that it usually takes very few votes to appear amongst the list of newly popular stories. Whereas stories often need between fifty and one-hundred votes to reach become “popular” at Digg, many smaller sites promote stories to their front pages with only ten or fifteen votes. In other words, the work you put into gathering the first twenty or thirty votes at Digg would catapult a story to the top of many smaller services. Of course, finding thirty people who have accounts at these smaller sites could be difficult. It’s also not advisable to acquire too many votes too quickly: a story with thirty votes that is surrounded by stories with ten or fifteen votes is immediately given away as manipulative. Humor Humor is always a winner in the realm of linkbait. No matter what you include as your interests on StumbleUpon, you will routinely be shown humorous content. The problem with humor and comedy is that professionalism and relevance often suffer when content is created for the specific purpose of getting laughs. This said, humor usually goes further in terms of links and social media votes. The most conservative clients probably won’t tolerate the humor enjoyed by social media participants, but given a little freedom, comedic content can attract thousands of links. Online, certain forms of comedy tend to do better than others. Sarcasm (or, in a more evolved form, wit) appeals to most of the “linkerati”, as do odd photographs, inside-jokes (especially jokes that only the web-savvy understand) and political satire. Regarded as either sickening or hilarious, the online phenomenon of LOLcats appeals to many Internet users because they understand where the phenomenon came from and have followed the inside-joke through its debatable evolution. Surveys People love to give their opinion, and online surveys make this process very easy. A surveys’ questions and results can serve as linkbait. Display these two things on separate pages and take advantage of the multiple links. Because you are unlikely to want either the questions or the results to rank for your brand name or keywords, it is not a bad move to split this type of link-juice. Not only does conducting surveys benefit you in terms of gathering information and data, an invitation-only survey will gain flattery-driven links from people who are asked to participate. After all, it's an honor to be asked to share an opinion, and people are inclined to draw attention to situations in which their opinions and expertise are respected. Creating surveys that attract links and attention is as much about the presentation of the survey as it is about the survey’s content. It is worthwhile investing in a good designer and programmer to put together a neat interface for participants to use, and it is equally important to display results in an attractive manner. Try to limit the length of surveys to a manageable number of questions. While fifty or sixty questions may seem reasonable to a survey’s creator, online attention spans are notoriously short and shortened versions are often more successful. Surveys can provide linkbait in multiple ways. While you can create a survey about almost anything, the following sub-categories are usually quite successful. Each sub-category links to an example. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Salary Surveys Political Surveys (which sometimes double as quizzes) Industry-Specific Surveys Professional / Business Surveys Survey results Applications that utilize survey results (this site gained 9,000 backlinks) Quizzes In a similar vein to surveys, quizzes retain their popularity due to vanity. People love being told about themselves and quiz-bait is a great way to have people devote some of their online-time to themselves. Even a quiz that has no particular personal questions or qualities can be popular: people love to test their knowledge. There are a number of different types of quizzes that do well as linkbait. The categories below link to examples of such quizzes. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The Brain-Teaser The Personality-Analyzer The General-Knowledge Tester The Interest-Specific Quiz The Intelligence Test Political Analyzers 7. Ridiculous / Pointless Quizzes While poorly designed or ugly quizzes can take off and become popular, high quality, design and layout go a long way toward winning social media attention. Some sites use Flash to put together their quizzes, as is the case with the Fekids.com example above. While Flash can have aesthetic advantages, it often turns users away due to slow load times. It is also impossible for search engines to read the content of the quiz. While this is far less of a problem than if the entire site is Flash-based, it’s never a bad idea to create indexable content! Be aware that the quiz is one of the oldest forms of web content. You’re unlikely to create an intelligence / IQ test that is significantly different to one that has been created in the past. The “What kind of (blank) are you?” quizzes are also prolific and are difficult to replicate. However, a relatively fail-safe way to create unique quizzes is to base your quiz around a new phenomenon or technology. “What type of iPod are you?” is probably a safer bet than “Which animal do you most resemble?” As is the case with surveys, a quiz’s length should be short enough to ensure a low abandonment rate, since people who quit a quiz or a survey before its completion are highly unlikely to link to it. Do you feel as though you’re sacrificing content for brevity’s sake? Consider offering an extended quiz for people who’d like to see a more in-depth version. Pages within the extended quiz that may result in duplicate content can be given a Noindex tag. Once your quiz is complete, you should include sharing and display options. The most profitable option, mentioned above, is the badge. The more attractive the badge, the more likely it is to be embedded on visitors’ blogs and profiles. You rely partly on the badges adoption for links and foot-traffic, so put some time into their design. Charts & Graphs Crafting content in a visual format can take the edge off long articles or academic studies. If something can be adequately displayed as a one-thousand word article or an attractive graph, the graph option will probably gain more links. By all means, include both the article and the chart, but be aware that many people will only look at the visual feature. Often, graphs and charts aren’t totally self-explanatory and require elaboration. Just because you include that elaboration in the surrounding text does not mean that people will read it! The above graph required a lot of explanation. The post suggested that over fifty-million American citizens might not be granted a Green Card, or U.S. Permanent Residency, if they had to apply for it. An American citizen would never have to apply for residency and the graph was purely hypothetical. The U.S. also does not exclude residency applicants based on sexual orientation. However, the “easiest” way to becoming a U.S. resident is to marry an American, and the U.S. does not recognize gay marriage. The other bars on the graph highlight some of the other areas of applicants’ lives that immigration services analyze. All of this was explained in the posts’ text. About eighty percent of commenters clearly indicated that they’d not read the explanations. The post received 764 diggs. Popular variations and examples of charts and graphs are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. Humorous / meaningless diagrams (2,200 backlinks) Online Chart and graph creation software Maps / Georgraphy Statistics as Graphics In-depth information presented as a chart (mouse over the images for descriptions and explanations) SmashingMagazine.com also chronicles seven innovative methods and examples of content presented as graphs and charts. Calculators Popular amongst websites and companies that are limited in their linkbait options, calculator-bait fits into the same niche as tools. Fitness calculators, mortgage calculators, conversion tools and financial calculators are all popular incarnations of this genre. The great thing about calculators is their ability to provide interesting content across a variety of “boring” topics. Calculators do well with web audiences because of their ability to take simple tasks and provide multiple answers and possible outcomes. Fitness calculators, especially those that show potential weight-loss, allow people to play with numbers and figure out how many miles they would have to run and at what speed to reach an ideal weight. While most of us could, with some effort, work a lot of these calculations out by ourselves, we love having a widget do it for us instantaneously. Developing multiple calculators and presenting them all on one page is a good idea; however, give each calculator its own URL as well, as people may want to link to one in particular. Put some time and effort into the calculators’ presentation: these things can be made very easily but significant appeal is derived from the perception of usability and aesthetics. When brainstorming what your business could create in the form of calculators, consider the things you or your customers regularly have to compute. You have probably already developed systems for calculating common problems and equations: turn these systems into a web-based tool. Sub-genres and examples include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Compilations of online calculators Mathematical calculators (with extra features for added appeal) Interest-specific calculators Conversion calculators (general and industry-specific) Heath and Fitness calculators Mortgage and Financial calculators Presentations While PowerPoint has spawned literally millions of boring slides and presentations, welldesigned slides can serve as a solid piece of linkbait. However, there is no shortcut when it comes to using presentations as web content: how useful is a collection of slides without the presenter’s comments? Given that the most effective slides contain far fewer words than are spoken by the presenter, many of the best presentations make little sense when viewed by themselves. If you want to post something you presented at a seminar or conference as real content (and hopefully, as linkbait), you’ll have to type out what you said to your live audience as well. Sites such as SlideShare allow you to upload PowerPoint presentations and provide you with a link so that others can view the presentation online. One drawback with SlideShare is that PowerPoint files appear to be converted into an OpenOffice format and sometimes slides’ contents can move. The shifting is not major, but you should check that none of the text or images have been overlapped by borders, frames, or each other. Videos of presentations make great web content, and providing notes along with the video will make the content even more useful, as this removes most of the work for the viewer. Publishing industry leaders' presentations is great as well: just make sure you have permission to reproduce and annotate the presentation. Video Content: Skits, Instructional Videos, Interviews Good videos can be a little harder to produce than text or images, but they’re also phenomenally good at attracting attention. The effort it takes to properly light, film and edit a video pays off in brand awareness, links and viral distribution. Skits that have turned out to be successful include this video that explores "What if Chat Rooms were Real?" The video was not heavy on production values, but it was quite wellproduced, relatively amusing and poignantly accurate. This said, creating a skit that fails to be accurate, amusing or well produced will likely hurt a brand far more than a questionable blog post or article. One reason for this is that people copy and redistribute videos far more often than they copy and paste large chunks of text. A bad blog post can be taken down and all the links that point to it can be redirected elsewhere. A video that has been uploaded to YouTube, DailyMotion or Metacafe is likely to have been reproduced in arenas that the author does not control. For this reason, always test video content before putting it on video sharing sites. Show videos to members of your target audience and ask them for honest reactions and critiques. The following comments are in reaction to the “If chatrooms were real” video. Out of 448 comments, about 90% are positive: This is fantastic press for the people who made the video. While the concept (something from the Internet shown in “real life”) isn’t overwhelmingly inventive, a decent dose of humor made this video very successful. It is quite an admirable feat to garner hundreds of positive comments from YouTube participants, many of whom are rather hard to please. Instructional videos, such as this screen cast about how to convert MP3 files to video, establish authority in the same way as do comprehensive guides and articles. With 820 views, this is far from a YouTube heavy-weight; however, 820 is a good total for such a video. As with any content where you profess to be somewhat of an expert, make sure to check all your facts and information, and show the video to other knowledgeable folks before releasing it to your website or YouTube. Finally, interviewing a well-known person can result in your video appearing either in a search engine or video hosting site’s result page for that person’s name. When the interview is featured on your blog, you will receive most of the links, losing some to any hosting service you use. Linkbait Ideas and Creation Restrictive Subject-Matter Issues The skills required to create linkbait are quite simple: creativity, practice and a knowledge of what appeals to social media participants is really all it takes. Where linkbait becomes more difficult is when you (or your clients) can’t post the style of content that routinely becomes popular. Traditional or conservative companies and industries needn’t miss out on the benefits of linkbait; the trick is to create relevant bait that meets the Public Relations department’s content guidelines. Creating Appropriate Content The following are tactics for coming up with linkbait ideas that are not going to horrify clients or customers: 1. In any industry or business, there are oddities that can be written about, graphed or debated. Find a strange, aggravating, interesting or otherwise unusual aspect of the industry and pick a presentation format that will complement your analysis or dissection of the issue. 2. Pick your target audience and put yourself in their position. What are they interested in? What do they worry about? What amuses them? The “what do they worry about” question is especially important: You have the opportunity to address people’s concerns and questions, which can heighten your business’s credibility and authority as well as serve as linkbait. 3. Beat your competitors with presentation rather than content. Some sites, such as large online retailers, have little to distinguish themselves from one another apart from the quality of their sites. This Dutch site went completely overboard in the best way possible with their products page. Although few social media participants understand Dutch, Hema.nl found itself atop Reddit due to its fantastically entertaining Flash animation. 4. Once you have some linkbait ideas, head to the search engines. Search for the phrases you would use with these ideas and see if they have been done before. Even if the content already exists, there is no reason why you can’t take a similar idea and execute better. Imagine that you had decided to chronicle the best blue widgets of all time, and you find that six other sites have written about highquality blue widgets before. Can you be more in-depth in your analysis? Can you present the content in a more inventive way? Do you know about blue widgets that haven’t been mentioned in these previous posts? Protocol for Launching Linkbait Domain Usage Rarely is it a good idea to launch linkbait on a new domain, or a domain other than the one you’re actively trying to promote. Every so often, buying new domains or launching linkbait elsewhere has worked well for businesses, but these instances were carefully crafted marketing campaigns where the launch on a new domain was part of a larger strategy. Generally, linkbait should be launched and hosted at a business’s primary website. Registering new domains is not the only mistake people make: linking to images on Flickr or Photobucket, keeping a blog at Wordpress, Blogspot or on a social network, submitting content to article sites, and neglecting to embed their own YouTube videos on their websites all dampen linkbait campaigns. However, most of the above sites and services can be used to your advantage. You can use Flickr and Photobucket to host your pictures (and reduce the load on your servers): just make sure to launch them on your own site by using an tag. There is no harm in using blogging platforms and services to manage your blog posts, but the content should be published on your own domain, not a .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com subdomain. Make a post out of your YouTube videos to avoid losing all the acquired links to the video’s YouTube page. Hopefully your domain will be one of the more authoritative sites to link to / embed the video, and your link will appear below the video, albeit with a nofollow tag. Launching linkbait elsewhere makes sense under only a few circumstances. One is that you want to disguise the fact that your site or company is really behind the campaign. It is not recommended that you hide a company’s involvement for any reason other than theatrical advantage. You should not get into a linkbait / marketing circumstance where the “discovery” of your company’s involvement would damage its reputation. Hiding involvement should be for entertainment purposes only. For example, if a company that made a certain brand of cleaning products wanted to launch a linkbait campaign and the idea behind the campaign was the fun, innovative or strange things a random customer had achieved with said products, launching elsewhere would be a viable option. The campaign would simply not work as well on the company’s site. However, if the new site was “outed” as belonging to the company and being part of a marketing strategy, the company would not lose customers or respect as a result. Internal Linking Many businesses worry about the placement and visibility of their linkbait to regular customers. Even content that has been given the “okay” by a company’s public relations department is sometimes not completely appropriate for a site’s front page or for new visitors who have reached the site through an unrelated link or search engine. Businesses needn’t worry about this: there is absolutely no need whatsoever to link to linkbait from a site’s important pages. What is far more important is how the linkbait’s page links out to the rest of the site. The above example, which plays a ridiculous song when viewed live, was not appropriate for SEOmoz’s blog and was never linked to from a blog post. However, it includes all of SEOmoz’s navigation, so that any link strength acquired from this content is directed to the site’s more important pages. Often, you will see links to pictures appear on the front pages of Digg and Reddit, and you’ll find images coming up while you use StumbleUpon. The images have been submitted to these social news and tagging services by themselves (their URL’s usually end in .jpg) and they don’t link back to anything within their site. While the strength gained by these pictures – or by any other type of content that doesn’t link to the rest of its site – is still useful, this is not the optimal way to promote linkbait due to the lack of links pointing back to important pages on the host site. Sidebar navigation and links to other important pages versus... No links whatsoever to the rest of the website It may be tough to prevent social media participants from submitting your photograph to Reddit, StumbleUpon or another service without your knowledge; however, this is not necessarily detrimental. When you submit content yourself, try to always host the content on a page that contains internal links. External Linking To help combat spam, most links on social media sites are nofollowed. For those that are not nofollowed, you can count on the fact that the links are not given terribly much strength from the search engines. The links that are valuable are those you receive from people who come across linkbait and write about it on their blogs and websites. Unfortunately, you cannot control how they link to your content: their anchor text and link placement are entirely up to them. SciFiSource.com links to their Featured Sites with a moving .gif image of a skyrocket. A search for “click here” gives you an idea of how many times that highly optimized phrase is used as anchor text. Acknowledging that much of this is beyond your control, there are several things you can do to improve the chances that you’ll receive optimized links: 1. Optimize your own title If your content’s title is misleading, badly worded or (worse) absent, don’t be surprised when others fail to use your optimal keywords in their links. Including your keywords in a title or description places the words in people’s subconscious, at the very least. Are you launching a student loans refinancing calculator? Name it accordingly. While “The most awesome tool you’ll never need to figure out your debt” may sound neat, these are not the words for which you want to rank. 2. Include your keywords in the page’s URL People will eyeball your URL when they go to copy and paste it. Again, mentioning your keywords here may make the words stick. 3. Include visual reminders Include your primary keywords prominently, not only in a piece's title but in descriptions, tags, text and captions. Submitting to Social Media Sites In the Comprehensive Articles section above, we discuss some of the ways linkbait can be promoted outside of traditional social media sites such as Reddit and Digg. Linkbait that has a chance of appealing to social media participants should always be submitted to the appropriate social media services. Our Social Media Optimization Strategies article has in-depth guides to promoting content across nine services, but these are some bestpractices: 1. When dealing with popular social media sites, a “strong account” usually has to submit content in order for it to become popular. Building a strong account usually entails submitting a lot of links to the site and having a relatively good percentage of them become popular. You can build your account’s authority this way, but with Digg in particular, this strengthening process can turn into a very time consuming task. If you know someone whose content regularly becomes popular at social media sites, you can ask them to submit linkbait for you. However, successful Diggers, StumbleUpon-users and Redditors get a lot of submission requests and won’t necessarily fulfill your request. Another option open to you is to have friends vote on something you submit. This only works if your friends’ computers all have different IP addresses and they are willing to vote for you: “vote spam” has resulted in a lot of people ignoring vote requests. Digg deals in humor, technology, video games and political scandal. Reddit enjoys left, far-left and libertarian politics, incredible pictures and social scandals. Del.icio.us deals almost exclusively with technology with some music, politics and news thrown in every now and again. Their “Hotlist” is usually entirely made up of technology-related posts. StumbleUpon is the social media service of “the people” in that it contains content across virtually every subject. Of all the social media services, it’s possible that StumbleUpon is the most flexible. 2. 3. 4. 5. Server Load Issues All too often, a successful linkbait campaign results in a crippled server and a dead website. The massive amounts of interested visitors pouring in from Digg and (more recently) Reddit are completely wasted when a site’s server can’t handle the traffic. Sites like Duggmirror attempt to capture and post the content of sites whose content makes the homepage of Digg. The idea is that when the site crashes, Duggmirror will have a copy of the content available for people to read. Digg users will link to the “mirror” in a post’s comments section. This example shows 2Spare.com’s “Top 15 Strangest Coincidences” in its mirrored format. Obviously, it is preferable to avoid needing Duggmirror for people to see your linkbait. Firstly, if a site is down, many people will not bother looking through the comments for a mirror link. People who see linkbait with a mirror may still link to it in its original source; however, Digg participants are often quite scornful of sites that can’t stand up to Digg traffic. The premier offenders when it comes to crashing servers are images. Linkbait that is image-heavy is more likely to buckle under traffic, but thankfully, there is an easy solution to this problem. Host the pictures on a photo sharing site (Flickr is a good choice) and display them on your website with the abovementioned tag. This way, Flickr spares your server the task of handling the bandwidth. A solution to overwhelming database requests is to make a static version of the linkbait's page. If you are promoting a viral video, chances are you’ve hosted it with YouTube, Metacafe, or Daily Motion. Thus, YouTube is acting in a similar manner to Flickr if the video becomes popular on your blog or website. However, if you are using a video as linkbait and haven’t published it at YouTube or an equivalent site, a large influx of traffic may pack a punch. Our advice from the Social Media Optimization Strategies article is also particularly useful: “If the page that you have submitted to Digg is dynamic, try to cache as much data as you can. Limit the number of database queries / connections to as few as possible. As a backup, have a static HTML page ready and 301 the dynamic page to the static page if the load is extremely high.” Server load issues can be a problem if linkbait is featured on Digg, Slashdot, Yahoo! Site of the Day, Fark and Techcrunch. As Reddit becomes more popular, it is bringing down websites on a more regular basis. We have never heard of StumbleUpon sending an overwhelming rush of traffic at once; its visitors tend to come in a steady, ongoing fashion. Forums, smaller social news sites and social networks never accumulate the sheer numbers needed to bring down a server. Measuring Success Tracking Visitors You won’t know the success of linkbait without some form of analytics. At the least, it’s important to know which traffic sources send the most traffic and which are not performing well. Tracking visitors helps refine your linkbait tactics and choose which sources you focus your efforts on in the future. While basic server logs can tell you where visitors come from, it’s useful to know what visitors from each site did once they entered. Of the thousands of Digg visitors, very few stay on a site for longer than is needed to briefly glance over the linkbait. Rarely do they click through to other parts of the site. While this is common knowledge about Digg visitors, your competitive advantage will come from observing and learning the behavior of visitors from lesser known sites. You may find that people who visit from a particular forum also click back to the forum very quickly, while visitors from a Facebook group stay longer, read more, sign up for services or purchase products. Even if the visits from the forum were twice as many as from the Facebook group, the Facebook group was more profitable than the forum. However, you may notice that a lot of the links you acquire are coming from blogs and websites run by forum members. Thus, your forum traffic was useful for a linkbuilding purpose. It takes a more advanced analytics program to track actions like these. A lot of webmasters tend to think of analytics as only important for monitoring search traffic and “serious” customers; keeping ahead of visitor tendencies in terms of linkbait will allow you to streamline and tweak future campaigns to reflect what you learn. Be sure to monitor the following metrics: 1. Sign ups. If the site offers both free and paid subscriptions or memberships, be sure to differentiate between the two. 2. Returning visits. Identify the sources that send the "stickiest" traffic and what type of linkbait has people return in the future. 3. Feed subscribers. 4. Time of page / Bounce rate. 5. Page views per visit. 6. Conversion rate. Track the people who first arrived through a piece of linkbait and eventually purchased products or services, whether on their first visit or in a subsequent visit. Link Analysis It is important to keep track of the links you acquire via linkbait. Two-thousand targeted, relevant, keyword-optimized links are very different to two-thousand badly-worked “junk” links from unrelated websites. Search engines are becoming more proficient at telling the difference between relevant and irrelevant links; monitor the relevancy and quality of links you acquire from different pieces of linkbait. Resources for monitoring links include Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Blog Search, and Technorati. Reputation Monitoring Even carefully-constructed linkbait can create reputation management problems if the content is taken the wrong way, heavily negated, inadvertently offensive or alienates audiences in another way. Monitoring the discussion around your linkbait, while sometimes a painful process, is quite important. You can skip over the majority of inane Digg comments, most of which offer no constructive advice or criticism, but you should keep an eye on what people have to say about your brand. Set up email alerts with Google’s Blog Search to receive immediate updates whenever your brand or your linkbait is mentioned. Frequent the forums, groups, social media sites and blogs where your linkbait was talked about. Google’s Blog Search does not pick up everything on the Internet and although some discussions may stay hidden, they’re still important. The conversation and reputation issues surrounding your linkbait become even more important if the linkbait ends up being an indented result for your brand or important keywords in Google's regular results. This alone is one reason why you should never try and hide a piece of linkbait. If the content received enough links and attention, it could well end up ranking in second position for your business’s name. If you find a significant negative backlash against something you’ve released, your options range from ignoring the problem to diving into the conversation and explaining your position. Removing linkbait that becomes an image problem or redirecting the page to a different place are both options, although be aware that the second option is often referred to as the Bait and Switch. People who have linked to the linkbait are “tricked” into linking to something that they did not intend. Additional Resources Social Media Optimization Strategies Jane Copland’s Linkbait Presentation from SMX London, 2007 The Keys to Online Success in Simple Equations and Links How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message It's The (Other) Algorithm, Stupid! Understanding DiggRank How to Create a Blog That People Really Digg Writing for StumbleUpon: High Impact Content "Above the Scroll" in Four Easy Steps A Visual Tour Through the Basics of Social Media Marketing Social Media Traffic Isn't Useless Leveraging Linkbait The Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting Resources Arguing with Link Moses: A Defense of Linkbait Identifying the Linkerati Motivations for Linkbaiting - Why Links are Good for Your Blog What Makes a Web Site Link-Worthy?