Linkbait has been a term thrown around by many SEOs, webmasters, and internet marketers. Even Matt Cutts from Google has talked about it. What does this shady-sounding compound word mean?

My definition of linkbait is this:

Linkbait is interesting and/or useful content (includes tools) created mainly for the purpose of attracting many natural backlinks. Linkbait is heavily marketed through social networking sites. Also, linkbait is promoted to relevant people in the niche like bloggers, other webmasters, and journalists.

That’s it. Linkbait doesn’t have to be a complicated thing. You simply create remarkable content and market it well.

Here are the steps to producing and marketing linkbait:

1. Know Your Industry Well

In my opinion, this is the most important step. If you know your industry well, you’ll know your target audience well. With this knowledge, you’ll have a good idea of what your audience finds useful and interesting.

You’ll know what content your competitors are producing. You can use this knowledge to write something that will stand out and be different. That’s one of the keys to good linkbait: producing something different from the rest of your competition.

With industry knowledge, you’ll know who the influential market leaders and bloggers are. These are great people to target with your linkbait. Also, you’ll know where your audience hangs out – forums, niche social networking sites, blogs, etc. This is crucial information because you’ll use the sites as marketing channels for your linkbait.

If you’re outsourcing the linkbait process, make sure the the linkbait creator is either knowledgable in the industry or will spend enough time learning the industry.

2. Create The Linkbait

You can write it yourself or hire a content producer. If you’re creating a tool, you’ll need some developing skills or a developer.

What kind of content has been effective linkbait in the past? Lists, tutorials, case studies, interesting pictures, useful tools, well-researched pieces, humorous writing, controversial content, attacks on well-known industry people, and breaking news first are some things that have worked in the past.

However, don’t just rely on this list. Linkbait is all about being creative, so if think of a creative new format for your linkbait, by all means, try it out. You may start a trend and receive links from being the first to do it.

If you don’t consider yourself a creative person, my advice would be to read A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It’s an easy and enjoyable read. The book talks about the importance of creativity in today’s business world and how to be more creative. After reading this book, I realized that creativity can be learned. There is hope for us non-creative people. :)

So that’s the preparation and creation of linkbait. In a future blog post, I’ll write about the promotion of linkbait.

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