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.

I always thought I would be the first SEO to suck a sweet card out of Hugh, but Todd beat me to the punch with this sweet post. Good stuff Todd.

Why are companies that do not currently carry the Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation 3 bidding on those terms to send customers to pages that do not have the product? Why is it that their landing pages do not offer the option to sign up for priority notification when they become available? How many 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars are these people wasting?

People are getting shot waiting for Playstation 3 systems, and then you have these huge retailers bidding on the associated keywords to throw the traffic away and remind potential customers that they are sold out of the product. Sorta bizzare at both ends, eh?

I hate when technology or forms of communication break or are unreliable...yet as I try to do more faster it keeps happening more and more. Maybe it is just operator error. Recently...

I accidentally labeled a ton of emails as spam in Gmail and now real emails are mixed in about 30,000 + spam emails. In spite of clicking undo afterwords Google didn't undo it.

Google's Gmail spam filters must be using me as the test user who filters out all spam for everyone else. Thanks Google.

I haven't responded to a lot of email recently. I hope to catch up before the week is out. Not sure if I will ever dig through all the mislabeled spam though.

Some jerks have comment spammed some of my blogs so bad that I had to block letters of the alphabet on some of them.

Last weekend I threw my back out playing tennis with my new girlfriend. I have only ever played about a dozen times ever and was serving some serves at about 85 miles an hour with a cutting spin on them. I won, but I wasn't able to walk until today, and it still hurts. Who knew I was such a typical alpha male idiot when it comes to sports? :)

I am bad at talking to San Fransisco area realtors...sorta regret even wanting to rent a place instead of just waiting a year to buy one.. I don't understand how some of them have issues with your credit if your credit scores are nearly perfect, you have no debt, and can pay a whole year lease upfront on a one year lease (even if that is like $40,000). I hate moving when I know that I am just going to move again soon.

A friend of mine had a host that didn't support custom .htaccess. I moved her site and her email worked intermittently off the start. The next day it worked all the time.

I added a ReviewMe ad to Threadwatch yesterday, and it only showed up intermittently until randomly it started showing up all the time today (editing Drupal is not my skill).

I am almost done updating SEO Book. Hope to have a new version out today.

What have you broken recently? What has been broken for you? What do you wish was better or easier?

Google representatives often make statements like make sites that are good for users, but they don't tell you what specifically they are looking for to determine the quality of a site because if they did people would exploit it. When Google is using code speak to prevent people from reverse engineering organic search results then perhaps the ends justify the means, but recently it appears that Google has been looking at usage data and signs of trust which may relate to organic search and applying some of those to Google AdWords.

As Google obfuscates the field of SEO with bland double speak, and uses organic search signals as a sign of quality in PPC they are increasing the value of those who take the time to understand what Google is ACTUALLY looking at. They want an informational bias in organic results and a commercial bias in AdWords, but invariably Google is looking to separate signal from noise in organic results and AdWords.

Given how crafty us optimizers are, Google believes a healthy dose of misinformation is key to making that happen. Given how arrogant Google is and how much they believe in the raw power of data you wouldn't think they would need to do that with AdWords.

As Google owns a growing segment of the attention stream, uses vague guidelines that are selectively applied, and make backdoor deals with large publishers they are killing off many business models in aims of improving quality (also known as profit). How much leverage has Google accumulated? The NYT said that ~ 22% of their website visitors come from search engines. Think of how old some of the old media companies are and how long they have built their brands, and they are already that dependant on search. Think of how new web video is, and that there are already reports of it eroding television viewership.

As the web grows the increasing competition and increasing scope of the link graph means that content creators have to keep getting more innovative and give more away to be remarkable, gain mindshare, and build a brand.

Creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities -- even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.

That is why I feel so strongly that most standards are arbitrary. As long as you reach to your market with passion eventually your market will find you. I am living proof that armatures don't need publishers. As everything moves toward free, attention, trust, and brand will be the only things that makes you a non-commodity. And as long as Google keeps separating signal from noise, and technology keeps making it easier to participate on the web, publishers are going to need to start adding value if they are going to stay relevant.

So sure, Google is right when they say you need to add value, but many businesses operate under the false pretense that they are not going to get marginalized.