Google has made it public that it does not like Paid Links. They want you to earn your links, not buy them. More specifically, they like you to earn your links amongst two complementary sources: the blogosphere and social media sites.
Linkbait consists on engaging social media users (many of whom are also bloggers) to interact with you and your website. From your point of view, the objective of this interaction is to get them to vote for your site on social media sites, and to link to your site in their blogs. From their point of view the objective is to find out about worthy content that appeals to them so they have something to blog about.
See the potential of this relationship? This is a win-win situation.
So how do you actually develop a linkbait campaign? These are the basic steps you need to follow:
- Visit the social media sites that are popular in your vertical niche and research for that have become popular in the past.
- Analyze and use them as the basis of your brainstorming. Why were they popular?
- Write your article. You can start with Top Ten Lists and How To Articles. They are usually good performers on these types of sites. Funny and/or polemic articles also work.
- Write a killer headline. For example: “The Secret Of [your topic]”, or “How To Build [something related to your niche] In 10 Easy Steps”. If you are not sure about this I recommend you do some research about Headline Copywriting.
- Network. Submissions need an initial push in these social media sites to become visible enough to the rest of the users.
When your submission becomes popular in one of these websites many users will bookmark it and some of those users (who are also bloggers) will end up linking to your website in the future.