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 pay-per-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.

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-per-click 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.
   1. 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.
      
      
   2. 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.