Rand mentioned that there are multiple types of linkbait, those that are known as controversial and those which are informational or comprehensive. I view them both as being in the same category though...evoking emotions and thus links. :)

I just updated my ebook again. I added quite a bit of information about designing / creating / formatting / packaging / launching / and marketing link bait. While it will surely change in future versions, here is some tips from the current version, similar to my recent WMW Pubcon talk on viral marketing.

Link Baiting
The idea of link baiting is to create a piece of content which is centered on a set demand from a specific audience. Who do you want to relate to? Why would they care? What would make them likely to spread your idea?

For example, Salary.com sponsored research stating that work at home moms did $134,121 worth of work each year. Because it was packaged as research and a story people would want to spread it spread far and wide.

Some common link baiting techniques

• Talk about a specific community.
• Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important.
• Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community.
• Be provocative or controversial.
• Be a contrarian.
• Be thorough.

Controlling Your Message

• Launch your story on a main channel such that you can change your messaging or update your offering based on feedback. If they wrong group runs with your story you may not want to stop them. ï
• If you do not have a main channel which you can launch your idea on try to launch your idea by giving a popular channel such as TechCrunch the exclusive on your story.
• If possible, build trust and attention in the marketplace well ahead of when you need to leverage it.
• Consider potential blowback ahead of time. Depending on the importance of your message and brand strategy you may want to make your message easy to misinterpret OR you may want to make your message clear.
• Create common link points. Do not throw away your link equity. For example, here are a couple ways people throw away link equity they earned:
  • Some book authors do not create an official page about their book on their site, and thus just give away the link equity and top ranking to an online bookstore.
  • Many people use Surveymonkey or some other 3rd party voting service when they create contests and polls. If you can include the voting script on your site you keep that link authority associated with your site even after the poll closes and people no longer talk about it.

Magnetic Headlines

• Be specific with your headlines. Salary.com stating that work at home moms are worth $134,121 a year is probably going to spread further than if they said $200,000.
• Write your headlines with the intent of spreading them. Focus more on writing something that evokes emotional responses and spread rather than writing for keywords and SEO.
• Given that many social news sites have a voting mechanism that does not even require people to read the article to vote, the title may be far more important than the actual content of your link bait.
• Copy Blogger offers great free headline writing tips.

Me Me Me: the Selfish Web

• People like to view themselves as being important.
  • Many bloggers search for links to their blogs on Technorati or Google Blog Search multiple times each day (I typically do).
  • Calling out specific people, especially with humor, is an easy way to build linkage data.
  • Digg frequently has homepage stories about Digg or Digg users.
  • People are more likely to believe and spread messages which reinforce their world view.
• Community involvement is important to help others identify with and feel ownership in your link bait.
• When Rand Fishken launched his Search Engine Ranking Factors he collected feedback from about a dozen prominent members in the SEO community. Many of those people are active community members who helped spread the news at launch time.
  • Asking people for feedback can help others feel ownership in your idea, and is a way to pitch them on your idea without looking sleazy pitching it.

Seeding Your Idea

• Ask for feedback from people who may be interested in helping you improve your idea or helping you market it.
• Leverage friends and contacts via instant message and email.
• Pitch relevant bloggers and media sources. It is preferable to build rapport prior to pitching.
• Build accounts on social news sites.
• Some social news sites allow you to place voting buttons on your site. Do so on your most important ideas.
• Consider the best times and locations to launch your idea.
• Have a friend or yourself submit your best ideas to the most authoritative and relevant social news sites.
  • Ensures your story has a title that is easy to vote for.
  • Ensures your story is submitted at an appropriate time.
  • If you do not do it soon after mentioning a story on your own site someone else may submit for you, using a dumb title or dumb post content.

Launching a Static Site
Even if your site is fairly static in nature you can still create a buzz when you launch it.

• Call in favors from people you helped in the past.
• ncorporate community ideas into your idea.
• Spread out your ideas. For example, if you are forming a new partnership you can triple dip on publicity:
  • Interview partners on another channel.
  • Announce the launch.
  • Add linkbait to the site at a later point in time.

Formatting Link Bait

• Make it easy to identify and connect with. Think about human emotions and tap the sense of empathy.
• You may want to make your idea look polarized such that it especially appeals to one group and/or especially offends another. If other people are fighting over guessing your intentions you will get quality links.
• Make your link bait look comprehensive.
  • Perception is more important than reality.
  • Most writing is quite wasteful in nature, because you have to trim off much of what you create.
  • By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you make a list of 101 ways to do x people may give a few ideas and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383 ways to do x.
• Cite research, further reading, and link out to related resources from within your content. It makes your story look well researched and associates your work with other trusted names or brands in your field. You may even want to cite a few people that you want links from.
• Dress up your link bait using quality design and / or relevant images from sites like Istockphoto.

Monetizing Link Bait

• Make your link bait EASY to link at.
• Don't over-monetize it right out of the gate. Make it look like research which is easy to cite rather than a piece of commercial information.
• In Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content Clay Shirky stressed the importance of gaining authority to gain scale and distribution if you want to make money online.
• Link bait rarely makes much money or directly pays for itself from the direct traffic. However, it has amazing indirect value.
  • People who pay attention to the active portions of the web are far more likely to be web publishers than those who do not.
  • Even if people do not link to your link bait idea right away you still gain mindshare and brand recognition amongst a group of people who have significant authority.
  • Many search engines, such as Google, use authority centric relevancy algorithms. Editorial links are seen as votes or signs of trust.
  • In Google, getting a link to any part of your site will help make all pages on your site more authoritative.
• Two weeks after launching a linkbait my Google traffic and site earnings more than doubled on a site that was getting thousands of visitors and making over $100 a day from AdSense before the viral marketing campaign.

Bubbling Up

• Social news sites and social bookmarking sites have recently popular lists that many people read.
• Meme trackers track what stories are quickly spreading through the blogosphere.
• Exposure on either of these can cause additional exposure and more linkage data. Many bloggers and some mainstream media outlets (like the MSNBC Clicked Blog) use these social news sites to find stories or sources.

Don't Compete With Yourself
Be careful what you name your link bait ideas. If your link bait is well executed and targets keywords important to other pages on your site the link bait will likely outrank your other pages in the search results.

Our SEO for Firefox page nearly outranks our homepage in Google for SEO.

Niche websites:

You can't create a site about what's going on in the plastic industry unless you learn how they think. You gotta pick up some trade papers. Talk to some people inside. So that when you do create you will be authentic and loved. So that you get it. You can't be fucking pedestrian and set up a site and hope they will come. They may visit but they won't come back. And if they don't come back you have lost.

Danny Sullivan is launching Search Engine Land in 2 weeks. NickW is podcasting web dev stuff. Both will surely be great niche websites, although it remains to be seen what sort of brand strength and share of voice SearchEngineWatch.com will have without Danny Sullivan at the helm.

Videos (Google has a clear lead in packaging and aggregating that niche content): You are What You Say and All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google are both interesting, via Rough Type.

Via Blogoscoped, Google has a clear lead in scanning books

Google, for instance, is digitizing some great libraries. But their contracts (which were actually secret contracts with libraries - which is bizarre, but anyway, they were secret until they got sued out of them by some governments) are under such restrictions that they're pretty useless... the copies that go back to the libraries. Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare. I mean this is 1984 - a book about how bad the world would be if this really came about, if a few governments' control and corporations' control on information goes too far.

Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment [PDF] - a good piece of research showing why and how Google is gaining leverage daily. Key quote:

Value of aggregation and brands increases with exponential increase in content choice.

Which is another way of saying that it is going to be better off for small players to own a niche than to be a choice within a larger marketplace.

If you own a niche the aggregators NEED you. If you are just another player in a crowded market then it is going to be tough to build much of anything as quality algorithms suck the life out of your market.

A while ago I made a bunch of posts about search (and the web as a whole) being about communication, but I think the posts were so verbose that nobody cared. :)

Since then I have been playing with social web stuff a good bit more and it is hard to grasp the full potential of it until after you see some of your marketing ideas spread like a weed. I have done well spreading ideas related to SEO, but I really was blown away by the potential when I had ideas not related to SEO that spread fast and far. In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History Manuel De Landa highlighted that smaller businesses tend to act as research labs for larger ones. Nick Carr highlighted the erosion of blogs from the Technorati top 35 media sites over the past couple years, based on David Sifry's most recent state of the blogosphere post. The problem is not that blogs are less important than they were, it is just that big media is integrating blogging into what they are doing, and are leveraging their other assets to boost the blogs.

As more and more people write online the value of any singular algorithmic exploit is reduced, and the value of creating what people want or being able to influence decision makers and authorities directly goes up. If you are featured in TechCrunch the odds are good that thousands of people will see your product and hundreds of people will link at your site.

How much is a static link in a lower quality directory worth? It is hard to quantify, but as the static portions of the web represent a smaller and smaller portion of the whole, the value of being mentioned there goes down. If you create something that people are actively talking about which quickly spreads the marketing value of that exposure can be far greater than any marketing you could buy, especially if you value your time.

There are many ways to participate in the active web. If you build a finite amount of attention in the marketplace before you need to leverage it then you can use that asset over and over again.

Blogs & Forums: You can leave comments on blogs and forums, or if you are motivated you can create your own blog or community. If you have limited funds to invest you can invest by spending significant time learning your industry and freely linking out to other sites.

Feedback: Before launching an idea ask important members in your community what they think about your idea. Sometimes their feedback can make it far easier for your idea to spread. If they owe you a favor or feel emotionally attached to your idea they may even help you market it for free.

Social News & Social Bookmarking: You can learn a lot by seeing what stories are spreading on various social bookmarking and news sites. Pay attention to article titles, community bias, bias of the marketed content, format of the marketed content, how frequently certain topics appear, and how you can relate your site to topics these communities enjoy.

The Past: It used to be cheaper and easier to directly manipulate the engines by doing things like

• focus on a highly profitable commercial niche

• focus your anchor text
• buy high PageRank links and build many low quality links
• focus your link equity, pointing links at the page you want to market

But Google filters many obvious bought links, has added cost to low quality links (by making it harder to get in their index and not crawling some sites that have too many low quality links), has a -30 ranking penalty for sites with artificial profiles, and even MSN is getting more aggressive at filtering link spam.

The Present: In many markets it is getting cheaper and easier to manipulate the engines indirectly by participating in the active web, by dong things like

• creating ideas and content people like and want (even if those ideas do not have a direct monetization model)

• being willing to go exceptionally niche or exceptionally broad with some content to create an idea which people would be likely to vote for
• not caring about anchor text
• not caring about what page they link at (realizing that authoritative links to any page on your site will boost your site's authority and the rankings for all pages on your site, and thus will allow you to monetize your commercial pages from the authority of the linkworthy pages)

The Future: Imagine a day when

• hardware, software, and bandwidth are free

• Google and other engines have access to most web usage data
• most people who use the web run websites
• the web is a reflection of what most people think

If that happened would you still be able to compete in your vertical? No matter how good any of us are at manipulating engines, invariable for longterm brands and websites it is going to be cheaper to influence people.

Why does Google sponsor spam and tell people to blend their AdSense ads, but try to control other link sales? It is the frame of thinking which allows them to make the most money (don't spam unless you do it with us and give us insider information on your business). If you are afraid of the consequences then you become risk adverse. But you are rarely going to do anything great if you let fear control your actions. It is an epiphany the day you realize that you created enough value that the search engines need you more than you need them. Why does the media like to paint a wall between editorial and content when there is none? Many movies are profitable only because product placement revenues. And many toll booths have ads on them. Think about the toll booths...there only to collect money and slow you down AND they still have ads on them.

Why is Matt Mullenweg so afraid of spam after he stepped his game up a level above anything I would consider doing? Because he feels he has to be for his credibility, especially after botching it up badly in the past.

As a recruiting technique the US government holds pizza parties with 13 year old children, getting them to play video games where the content is about killing people.

"We want kids to come into the Army and feel like they've already been there," said Col. Casey Wardynski, who as director of the Army's office of economic and manpower analysis came up with the idea. "A game is like a team effort, and the Army is very much a team effort. By playing an online, multiplayer game, you can get the feel of being in the Army." - The Washington Post

Yet politicians talk about protecting the children online. Do you notice a moral disconnect here?

If you look at a tag cloud of presidential speeches you won't just find issues that the population find important. You will find some of them scattered in to make the rest of the sales pitch sound legitimate, but you will also find ample amounts of bogus Orwellian language like death tax.

There is no need to repeat what is actually true and believed. Power sources only repeat things because

• they are untrue or misrepresented

• they set a frame of thinking to the benefit of the speaker
• they pull focus from other issues

Why do authority sources hate the idea of openly selling authority? Because if they openly endorsed it then they might not be able to do it themselves, and people openly and honestly selling influence create more value in richer conversations.

Value systems only exist in our minds. The value of asking for feedback is not just in the chance that people give you a better idea, but also their experience and bonding with the idea which turns the feedback giver into a person who is emotionally connected to your brand... which is especially true if you listen to their feedback. The very ability to influence Digg and Wikipedia directly are what make their brands so powerful.

When language is a commodity that is targeted, bought, sold, and repositioned against ever-shifting arbitrary quality guidelines what could be more valuable than asking influential people what words / tags / ideas they relate you to and how you could do a better job of it?

Well the ReviewMe launch has went far better than anticipated. Information Week covered the launch and we added FAQs to the site.

Rumor has it that Andy has been inspired by a recent Bank of America video and will be singing in Vegas next week. More to come soon :)