6 Sure-Fire Tactics to Re-Ignite your Linkbait

Glen Allsopp / 19 Comments / July 21st, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

Do you ever think you’ve wrote the perfect viral piece, only to see it flop on Digg and other social sites? Or that because your content didn’t ‘make it’ there’s nothing else you can do?

I’m not one of these social media marketers that simply write about the topic (sadly, there are a lot of them), I work with some of the biggest companies in the world: consistently driving huge amounts of traffic. Today I’m going to share the exact methods I use to help promote linkbait even after it might not have done well initially.

So, what’s the problem?

We’ve all been there; our ‘Simple Guide to Losing Weight whilst Eating More’ getting a few votes on Digg and maybe a few hundred visitors from StumbleUpon. The only links to the article coming from the social sites themselves. Yet, we often hear about sites getting thousands of links in a short space of time, so why isn’t it happening for us.

Well…I had the issue about a year ago until I realised there’s actually more you can do to get eyeballs (the linkerati) on your content and receive a wave of backlinks even after you think it may have failed. Before I get into that I do want to outline some of the issues marketers face when offering a service like linkbait for clients:

• Relying on Others - the fact is that you can’t really control how far your linkbait goes. You are always relying on others to vote for your stories, write about them and in-turn drive links
• New Niche - it’s often that I’ll be asked to come up with content ideas for a new niche, one where I don’t know the popular communities or the type of content the audience enjoys
• Hard to Measure - besides the obvious traffic figures and backlink count, linkbait can do wonders for branding and direct traffic which you can’t accurately measure

6 Tactics to Re-Ignite your Linkbait

1. Add Content on a New Domain then 301

Sometimes you may even have the issue of a domain being auto-buried or just want to be careful and constantly trying to promote a certain sites content without being spammy. One of the best ways to counter-act this is to create your linkbait on a new domain and promote that instead.

Obviously this doesn’t give you the traffic benefits but you can pass some of the link-juice that your lovely content managed to build up by 301 re-directing the page after a few weeks.

2. Drive Traffic via PPC

I’ve used this twice now and it has been surprisingly effective. It works on the basis that if your content is indeed viral and people are going to want to talk about it, the more relevant visitors you can get to see it the better.

I remember when Aaron Wall launched his ‘SEO for Bloggers‘ article. Although the article would have received a lot of links anyway, Aaron setup Google Adwords to show the article around relevant keywords. This works especially well if you have on-page social bookmarking buttons and want to encourage extra votes.

3. Make things Easier on Yourself

I don’t really recommend re-publishing information and then submitting it again but a common reason linkbait doesn’t do so well isn’t because of the content but because of the page / site it is on. Make things easier on yourself by:

• Including social bookmarking buttons
• Removing any annoying or excessive ads
• Keeping all the content on one page
• Not trying to push something such as services on the user

After that is done you may want to rewrite the title and some of the content and give it another go or completely start again.

4. Make use of Niche Communities

Although your article about Scrapbooking might be funny, it still might not appeal to audiences on the likes of Digg, Reddit or Mixx. However there may be a digg-like site or active forums in the niche that would really enjoy the content.

Due to the fact that there are a few hundred million blogs, it’s likely that a lot of these community users blog and therefore are able to link to your linkbait. Of course, give something back to the communities whether it be submitting stories from other sites or writing helpful forum posts before trying to leverage them.

Brendan Picha over at Squareoak put together a great list of 83 social voting sites that might help your research.

5. Just get Traffic to the page

I’m stating the obvious here but the only way people can link to you is if they actually know about the article. Whenever I’m on the Digg homepage (about 5 times per month) an article gets about 500 links, that is because there are tens of thousands of people that viewed the article who have the ability to link to you from blogs, forums, personal websites etc.

You can get traffic to the page via the likes of Mixx, Digg and StumbleUpon but if that fails you can:

• Buy banner ads on relevant sites
• Use Text-Link-Ads ‘Intext’ feature for a month on high traffic websites
• Pay bloggers to write about something relevant and include a link to the article

6. Become a Top User

If all else is failing on you after multiple attempts, it may be that you are just not writing quality content that people want to talk about. Another option is to really build up a power profile on top sites in order to give your own stories a boost whenever you submit them.

This is going to be very time consuming but if you want to ‘leverage’ a site then you have to give something back. I think StumbleUpon would be the best place to get started as there’s an audience for all types of content, and luckily I’ve already written a guide on becoming a power user.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

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