My Online Journeys

There is an old saying on the internet: 'Content is King'. There is a nugget of truth in it, for sure, but without the authority, your content, even if you write the best posts in the world, will never get any traffic.

With a certain simplification, we can say the authority is built by backlinks.

You can check an article about using the already existing authority.

There are two problems with such an approach:

This approach has a few faults as well:

Today, we'll learn about another option for getting backlinks. It's called link-baiting.

In essence, you create a page with interesting and useful content that everybody would like to share. Sharing on the web translates into backlinks.

Yes, a lot of sharing goes through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and similar services, which may or may not be indexed. But a lot is done through blogs as well. The best of all is that you don't have to promote your link-baiting content because others do that for you. At least in theory.

Let's check a few use cases:

While it's next to impossible to rank for words like 'blue' you can pretty easily rank for strings of words like 'what is the difference between royal blue and midnight blue'. Such strings are hard to find in keyword research tools and are mostly considered commercially uninteresting. But with so large lists, you'll find them in countless combinations, and with thousands of such strings that are typed just a few times per year, you'll still get a decent amount of traffic.

With a decent amount of targeted traffic (in this case by designers, artists, and similar professionals), your chances for backlinks are rising. After the first few backlinks, your position in search engines will improve, which leads to even more traffic and even better opportunities.

According to the AHREFS tool for checking backlinks, this address earned more than 600 backlinks from more than 250 domains. A few came from my promotion, but more than 200 domains linked to my content without my knowledge. I never wrote hundreds of emails to ask for links, like many SEO experts suggest. These links definitely came as 'natural' as possible.

A few of my other projects pan out as link-baiting without my plans.

This is a lovely example:

This blog is made for the presentation of illustrations made by vintage artists. It supports one of my main goals in life - to promote fairy tales and their power.

With thousands of attractive illustrations of all styles, it also acts as a link bait. Sure, 35 linking websites doesn't sound like a lot, but this blog often gets a peak of several hundred visitors in one hour due to sharing on social media, it gets constant traffic from Pinterest, and it has 50 subscribers. The traffic is growing even without additional content, but, of course, occasionally I post something new to expand the reach and promote something fresh, connected to the main theme of the post.

This blog made me so happy I decided to create two similar ones:

This one is specialized for color pictures from the most popular fairy tales. Think about 100 illustrations of Red Riding Hood or Cinderella. A lot of different people are looking for such goodies, and if I offer something unique (about 30 percent of presented illustrations are very hard to find elsewhere), a chance for a link or two is here.

and

This one is dedicated to the most popular themes in fairy tales like absent father, wicked stepmother, etc. It will never get as huge traffic as the blogs above, but it's aiming for a more demanding, professional audience. If they put a link or two from respective authoritative websites like universities or institutes, my hard work will be paid.

If you intend to create a link bait, follow next simple rules:

Have as much control of your content as possible (I presented one where everything is mine and three where it's not).

Create content relevant to your goal (If you are selling cars, maybe offer tips on maintaining cars or something similar).

Offer a lot of useful info (if an average post on the web is about one thousand words, link-baiting posts often surpass ten thousand words) and add content that is easier to share than simply steal (like tables or graphics or links to other resources).

This is an example of catchy graphics.
Source: https://www. artstation.com/artwork/39D0lJ

Somewhere in the link bait post (maybe even at several places), include a call-to-action (like 'please share this post with your friends' or 'don't forget to bookmark this resource').

Then just wait. Or, maybe, create another link bait. The more the merrier!