Seven Important Qualities for Good Linkbait - Attracting Eyes
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The Internet was more a text medium than a graphical one when it started. Text is still very important, but today images, graphics, charts, and videos combine to make it more visually appealing, which is another quality you should strive to achieve with your linkbait. Most people like to look at pretty things, else why would there be so many image galleries online? This is especially important if you’re building a widget; if you want to have people interacting with the mini-application, you should make it enjoyable for them to do so. A pleasing appearance contributes to that.
Take a look at Yahoo Pipes, which I reviewed in July of last year for Dev Articles. This offering from Yahoo lets you manipulate web page data in useful ways, like returning all the apartment listings from several sources that are near schools and hospitals, for example. Playing with the application is just plain fun, in part because the interface is so beautiful. But this point is not limited to applications; if you’re writing a how-to article, or explaining something, it helps to have pictures, diagrams, charts, or whatever will help you get your point across. Don’t fill your linkbait so full of visual clutter that it confuses your audience; simply think about what your audience would find appealing.
Indeed, the seventh important quality of linkbait is that it should be created while thinking of the reader, not the author. I probably should have listed that one first, but if you aren’t already thinking clearly about your target audience – who they are and what they need – then you may have bigger problems than making sure your linkbait succeeds. You should also be prepared to ask some “why?” questions. Stand back from your linkbait and put yourself in the mindset of one of your readers. Then, at Patrick Altoft notes in a post for Blogstorm, “Before you hit ‘publish’ on your next piece of linkbait think about why somebody might link to it.”
I’ve given you seven important qualities for linkbait: relevance, usefulness, interactivity, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, visual appeal, and reader focus. I’m going to add one more, which you really want if you’re hoping that your linkbait will go viral. Linkbait should be easy to share. Add a button that lets readers email a link to the item to their friends. Add several buttons to let them send a link to social bookmarking sites. Forwarded links could snowball into a lot of visitors for your site. Good luck!
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