If you have a business website, you probably understand the importance of generating organic traffic. Search engine optimization will help you rank highly on search engines, and you will therefore be able to get more traffic to your website. One of the tried and tested SEO techniques is using link bait content. Link bait is simply content that is specially formulated to generate links because of its quality and relevance. Regardless of the type of website you have, it is possible to create link bait content and therefore increase the reach of your content, and have more people visiting your website. Your website will also gain credibility if the content you share is considered link-worthy by many other websites in your niche.
Creating link bait: Basic steps
When creating link bait content, it is mostly about trying your luck with your audience as there are no surefire ways of ensuring that people link to your content. Think about this: you might spend so much time writing a blog about cancer or some other important topic, and still get no links. Someone else might simply share a Game of Thrones meme and end up with hundreds of links. This shows that creating link bait is all about what the audience considers interesting. If you can have content that is both entertaining and helpful, even better for you. You should also aim to engage your audience, and the only way you can effectively do this is by studying your audience in order to know what is likely to appeal to them.
- Research on your target niche
The first thing you need to do when thinking of content to share is to do extensive research on your target niche. You want to find out what your competitors are doing right so that you try and emulate that. You should also check what sites they link to and see what it is about their content that makes it link-worthy. The idea here is not to copy exactly what other websites are doing, but to get a general idea of what type of content people like linking to.
- How can you add value?
People are not looking for generic content; they want something interesting that approaches issues from a unique perspective. This is how you can create your own niche within an already established niche. Find out how you can make your content different from what everyone else is doing. You can do this by asking your audience to give you ideas of content that they would like to read or watch. The best thing about this approach is that you will know exactly what your target audience needs, as opposed to blindly experimenting with something even though you do not know how your audience will react to it.
- Come up with the content
Once you have identified what kind of content you would like to share, go ahead and create it. You can spice things up by alternating between different types of content. Even if you know for sure that your audience responds well to a certain type of content, you should switch things up from time to time so as not to bore them with the same thing over and over again. Photo essays, list posts and infographics are some of the popular types of link bait. You can hire content writing services to help you come up with authoritative content that is relevant and therefore link-worthy.
- Promote your content
Before people get to know you, you will have to do quite a bit of promotion work. Collaborate with other content creators so that they can help you promote your content. You need to know the best platforms on which to promote your content, and how to go about it if you are to have any success with getting links to your site. Encourage your audience to share your content so that more people get to know about it. This will help your website gain popularity and once you have a big enough following, your followers will do most of the promotion work for you.
There are various types of link bait that you can use on your website.
- Whitepapers and e-books
Everyone likes a freebie every once in a while. This is why downloadable resources such as whitepapers and e-books make for such great link bait. The resources should be of high quality for people to want to share them in their networks. Therefore, you should take your time to create something that your audience will truly enjoy.
- Video content
If you are not yet taking advantage of the gold mine of links that is video content, then you are missing out big time. Video content is the most sharable type of content and you should definitely incorporate it into your content strategy in order to reach more people and get those links. There are people who do not like reading lengthy posts and would rather watch someone talk about something. Video content is also great for tutorials on how to use your products.
- Quizzes and games
Quizzes and games are a very popular type of link bait. They are especially common on social media and are gaining popularity by the day. You can develop games and quizzes based on your products and services, and reward the winners with freebies. The only problem with this is that it excludes people who have never used your products or services. Therefore, it may be a better idea to develop games or quizzes that many people can relate to. The results of the games and quizzes can be made sharable on social media, and this should link back to your website. You have to be creative with these in order for people to want to play and share the results, and even compare their results with those of other players.
- Contests
Contests also make good link bait. You can reward people for sharing and linking to your content. The rewards have to be worthwhile for people to feel the need to participate. Have regular contests to keep people coming back to your site and linking to your content.
The following types of link bait have also been shown to be effective:
List posts – These are popular because they are very resourceful. This is why they get a lot of traffic and get shared a lot on social media. The longer the list, the better. List posts can work for almost any niche, so you can use them regardless of your niche. However, the posts have to be done well for people to consider them link-worthy. They have to contain a lot of useful and accurate information, so you have to do your research before making one. It is also a good idea to include images and other types of content such as GIFs within the posts to make them more interesting.
Infographics and images – Making good use of infographics (information graphics) and images can transform the most boring content into interesting content that everyone will want to share. These include things like graphs and tables, which make complex information involving a lot of numbers easier to comprehend. It is difficult to explain complex statistics in words, and that is why it may be a good idea to use infographics instead. When people can visualize what it is you are trying to explain, they are more likely to relate to it, and understand what you are saying.
Widgets – A widget is a program that your website visitors can use to perform various tasks. It can be a currency converter, a mortgage calculator, or any other useful program. You need to be an expert in your niche and in programming to be able to create a good widget. Thus, unless you consider yourself an expert, you are better off hiring a professional to do this for you. There are already so many of them and they are therefore not very popular in link baiting. However, if you have to use one, make sure it offers your site visitors something unique for them to be motivated to share, and for other websites to consider it link-worthy.
Guest posting – Just as you can feature an influencer or authority in your niche in your videos, you can invite them to post on your website. The guest blogger will probably link to your content, and this will help in promoting your content. You should try and have authorities write on your niche and post on your website from time to time so that you can have quality backlinks. Remember, it is not all about the number of backlinks you get; instead, having many quality backlinks is great for your SEO efforts. In order to get more people to guest post on your website, you should also be willing to guest post on their websites. Guest posting also benefits you as you are able to build your name and get recognition as an authority.
Conclusion
It is clear that creating link bait is not as difficult as some website owners think it is. However, note that what works for one website may not necessarily work for yours. Therefore, you need to try out different types of link bait to determine what works best for your website.
