In my last blog post, I gave two steps dealing with linkbait - preparing and creating the linkbait. Today I’ll go over the third step, promoting the linkbait.

3. Promote The Linkbait

I’ll talk about social media sites and blogs because they usually send the most amount of traffic. Press releases can also help if you have newsworthy linkbait.

Social Media Sites

Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Netscape are the “Big 4″ in the social media arena. Stumbleupon and Netscape accept many kinds of submissions from different niches. However, Digg and Reddit are primarily about gaming, tech, politics, and humor, so don’t submit your gardening related linkbait there.

Also, make sure to check out social niche sites. Here is a good resource post filled with 25 social niche sites. Check the comments on the post for more sites. Social niche sites are great even though they don’t send as much traffic as the Big 4. Here’s a blog comment that illustrates their usefulness:

I think it’s fun to observe hundreds of people from Stubmleupon or Digg hitting your site…

But recently I had 160 hits from Stumbleupon and NONE of them signed up for our live help service.

So, personally, I think that 10 visitors from a niche social bookmarking site (above) that sign up are still better than 1,000 from Digg or Stumbleupon that just come by and go.

It’s great to have a massive amount of traffic from the Big 4. Just remember that the bigger the social niche site, the more likely it will refer less-targeted visitors.

Blogs

Blogs in your industry are great sites to promote to. Many bloggers used to linking out. Also, they drive targeted traffic.

Email your linkbait to the relevant bloggers. You don’t necessarily have to ask for a link. Hopefully, you linkbait will interest them enough that they’ll post about it.

Community Participation

Your linkbait will have a better chance of spreading if you participate the social media site and blogging community.

For example, if you’ve built relationships with key bloggers in your niche, you have a much better chance of them linking your linkbait. You can build these important relationships by blog commenting, linking out with your blog, and occasionally emailing them interesting industry information (not just your own content).

With social media sites, you can participate in their community to get more votes (or diggs and stumbles) to drive traffic to your linkbait. Participate by leaving comments, voting on other people’s submissions, and submitting stories not your own. Also, try going to webmaster forums like DigitalPoint. Interact with the forum members and then see if any of them would be okay with trading votes with you.

As you can see, much of the promoting step takes time. In fact, it’s a good idea to spend a couple weeks participating in the blog community of your niche and the social media site community before creating linkbait.

Please share your thoughts