Building Linkbait? Do Your Homework - Kinds of Linkbait
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Once you know your target audience well enough to know their likes, dislikes, interests and needs, it’s time to start thinking about what kind of linkbait you’re going to build. A blog with regular entries is one of the easiest forms of linkbait. It’s something of a low risk, low reward strategy, at least at first; that can vary significantly with the blogger and the topic. A good blogger can build quite an audience of visitors who return regularly.
Blogs themselves aren’t usually thought of as linkbait. Special entries that require a good bit of work and research can be, though. In one article I wrote recently about linkbait, I mentioned that Danny Sullivan did a comparison study of how well three different services performed at blocking spam. He collected the data and wrote about the results. Now that’s linkbait!
A couple of years ago, Nick Wilson wrote about several different kinds of “hooks” you can use when linkbaiting, and the choices are every bit as valid today. He listed a news hook, contrary hook, attack hook, resource hook, humor hook, etc. Basically, according to him, it boils down to two kinds of hooks: nice and nasty. You need to be very careful with the nasty hooks, because they can backfire and get you into trouble.
But that leaves you with plenty of nice hooks that will help you build your reputation as an expert in your field. Here are just a few ideas:
- Compile a list of the five best resources on your topic or field. You can even do a series of these: five best books, five best web sites, five best articles, five best videos, five best blogs, etc. Explain why each of these is such a good resource; you can even make it personal by saying what you got out of it.
- Regularly collect the important news related to your field and do a summary. Or expose a news story as flawed, and explain how it is flawed.
- Create a tool that will be indispensable to your target audience. Taking our gardening example, one tool might let the user put in certain values – say the state they live in, the amount of space they have, time for gardening, etc. – and then tell them what kind of plants they might consider for their garden. (Such tools probably exist already; I mention it as just one example. If you really want to create a tool or a widget, you should research what is already available).
- Go with something humorous. The classic examples are lists, such as “Ten things I hate about…” or “You know you’re a [fill in the blank] when…” You’d think people would get tired of such things, but just the other day I received a “You know you’re a Floridian” list in my email; I’ve seen those lists before, but this one still cracked me up.
I’m sure you can think of more ideas, and quite probably much better ones than I did. This is just to help you get started with your own brainstorming.
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