For anyone who is unaware of what link bait is defined as:
Editorial content, often sensational in nature, posted on a Web page and submitted to social media sites in hopes of building inbound links
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=sem_glossary
So what does it actual mean and does it have to be content? Well in fact link bait is anything which can attract people to link to it, obvious the terms relates to hunting and how someone puts out a bait to catch their lunch, well this is the technological version where a bait is placed and with a little exposure can often work very well.
So what ideas? It can be content, a movie a tool or anything which will attract other bloggers, a few example of great link bait are:
- Million dollar home page – this worked with out actually thinking as it being link bait, but this was also caught on by the off line press which in turn gave the online success 10 times the magnitude, at its peak it was a Pagerank of 7 with thousands of links.
- How many five year old can i beat up? – Well this site wasn’t bad natured just very comical, again I first heard about it from Radio 1 whilst sat at work, this gave the site a flourish of visitors and again a good number of links
- bunk beds – this is one of the recent ones i heard about basically with canny twist of “how long would you survive if you were chained to a bunk bed with a velecor raptor, this was in the form of questions within a flash movie.
So ideally you need to think of something which people will link to, controversy is always a good thing, then simply send round some social bookmarking sites (Stumble, digg, reditt) and of course some social network sites (make a facebook app) and if people think its good, just watch the link role in…
Also the links are free, generally relevant so your winning part of the battle…