6 Yummy Linkbait Creation Tutorials and Tools

Linkbait is the cat’s meow of content marketing. It’s a powerful traffic-building tactic, one that any business involved with Internet marketing should prioritize.

What exactly is linkbait? It’s a content piece that in some way is superlative and magnetic  — the ultimate blog post or infographic or tutorial or video. Go above and beyond to create something distinctive, promote it well and voila, this uniquely crafted content can EXPLODE your website traffic.

It’s content so exciting or insightful or funny or shocking, it becomes the buzz in many circles — it’s rabidly shared. As a result, your website benefits because so many people are linking to it (from their blogs, Facebook, emailing it, etc.). With so many good links now leading to your site, the search engines notice and give it a boost in visibility.

Of course, the ultimate goal is for a pleasing percentage of those people to fall within your target market. You want them to embrace your brand and at some point do business with you.

When Linkbaiting, Tall Titles Hook ‘em the Best

In most cases, the content title is alluring, possesses a must-click quality. For example, each of the following sits at (or near) the top on Google, Bing, Digg, or another exceptionally long list online. Are there any here you simply must take a peek at?

100 Things to Do In Paris (TripAdvisor.com)

People Who Gained Superpowers From Being Brainwashed (io9.com)

101 Tips for Small Business Bloggers (Money.com)

Dog Found On Top of Mount Kilimanjaro (TheSun.co.uk)

5 Unexpected Places You Can Be Tracked With Facial Recognition Technology (AlterNet.com)

40 Excellent Free Fonts for Web Designers (1stWebDesigner.com)

21 of the Worst Marketing Flops, Follies and Faux Pas (Grasshopper.com)

Linkbait Tools and Links You’ll Like and Link To, Too

If you’re considering mounting a linkbait campaign, check out these essential guides, tutorials and related resources. Each reveals some of the masterful secrets to success:

• Distilled.net provides this awesome guide to creating linkbait, titled SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics. It’s a comprehensive blog post that has a companion workbook you can download. This is a super-long blog post — easily qualifying it as killer linkbait about . . . LINKBAIT!

• For theme ideas and thought-starters, check out the Practical Guide for Finding Linkbait Inspiration at SEOsmarty.com. This offers a great list of sites to kick-start the brainstorming about your viral marketing piece.

• Wiep Knol I consider a link building strategy shark. He publishes Wiep.net, where he gets truly creative and provocative with website link building, often through clever linkbait strategies.

• Another good piece: Why Your Linkbait Fails and How to Fix It. This insightful blog post on linkbait was published at SEOmoz.com. It fleshes out everything that could go wrong, so it’s well worth reading before you start executing.

• Click through to Digg, the linkbait capitol of the world. Pretty much every blog post or article that’s ever risen to the top on Digg did so because it was given a magnetic, must-click title. If a linkbait title is uninspired, then too few people will click it, regardless of the great content that may be inside.

• For an idea of how essential it is to craft a mouth-watering title, check out this fun gizmo: Linkbait Generator. After you’ve played with the linkbait title creation tool a while, click through to the blog and just scan the titles they’ve used. Note: I used this cool title tool for what I might name *this* blog post. It suggested:
• 15 Coolest Linkbait Tricks Ever
• The Bloggers Guide to Linkbait
• Linkbait and the Occult

. . . When I get some time, I just might mastermind that last one!

A Content Marketing Service Can Engineer Your Linkbait

To start reeling in lots more Web traffic, have a content marketing service handle the research, writing, and market distribution for you. In most cases you’ll double the amount of visitors to your site; enjoy a bump-up in link popularity; and may see a dramatic increase in your search engine rankings.

If you’ve had a good linkbaiting success, feel free to leave a link to it in the comment space below. We’d like to see it and learn what worked!