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Link baiting may have gotten a bum wrap lately due to the false picture and title advertising on social media. We’ve all seen the links with a picture of our favorite celebrity and a headline that peaks our curiosity. We click on the link only to find that we are forced to click through a never-ending and often ad-filled slideshow and never find that celebrity even mentioned throughout the article. It’s frustrating and unfortunately, the first thing that many think about when they hear the words link bait.
However, link baiting is just creating content that other people want to link to. You have a blog or website and you, like most content creators, want more links to your content and link bait is the lure that brings them in so that they will provide them. The more links that your website gets the higher it is ranked in search engines . This is because it is then seen as more popular or interesting than other searches that may be relatable. There’s a lot of different and creative ways to use link baiting but not all are viewed the same. Let me explain the pros and cons of link baiting
Pros Of Link Baiting
Some really great examples of positive link baiting are often unintentional. It’s when the writer is writing about something that they are passionate about, something that is popular, or something that just gets a lot of attention. The writer either has a great topic, a great spin on the topic, or both for an amazing combination. It isn’t done to trick or fool anyone, but simply with the desire to produce outstanding content. The writer may not even intend for it to be prime link bait.
Just like a post going viral on Facebook and the poster being dumbfounded on how it ever happened, sometimes things become tasty link bait that the author never even intended to. It all depends on the linking and the linking depends on the people that decide to link it. As long as your titles or page excerpts are factual and don’t exaggerate the real topic you probably have a great example of positive link bait.
That leads to another great example, good advertising. Maybe, you’ve got good content, sometimes great content, but what you do well is market it. That’s great link bait. You are true to your content and don’t hook people in with false information or promises. You simply put a great spin on what you have and you do it consistently.
Cons Of Link Baiting
Negative link bait is the stuff that Mondays are made of. We’ve all seen those frustrating links on Facebook that I mentioned previously or found them unintentionally through a Google search. You know, the ones we wish we had never wasted a second of our lives clicking on them in the first place. It’s a picture of a popular star that isn’t even included in the article. Then an outlandish at-home claim to fix an ailment that only leads to a sales pitch and a product shopping page. Next it’s a fake news article that makes you feel like your safety depends on you reading the article immediately.
They use a picture of someone that everyone is interested in or use a word or heading of a hot topic item that everyone is buzzing about and when you click on the article, blog, or site you find that the content really has little, or worse, nothing to do with it at all. Basically, people are looking for traffic to their site and they don’t care how they get it. They don’t care if people stay once they get there, they just want the clicks. That is the where the negative feelings about link baiting were born.
How do you feel about link baiting? What other pros and cons can you think of? Leave your comments below!
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