The One Year Millionaire

In attempt to build backlinks to your website you may have spent countless hours doing repetitive tasks such as submitting your site to directories and commenting on relevant blogs that you may have completely overlooked one of the most productive forms of link building. It is called “Link Baiting” and while it is semi-controversial because of certain risks to the webmaster; it is becoming quite popular and could be an easy way to build 100% natural backlinks and possibly even subject you to highly targeted traffic!

The idea of ‘Link Baiting‘ is basically to create a unique page that seems to naturally attract backlinks from other webmasters who will either support it, trash it or question it. One thing will be common and that is the fact that people will be talking about it and linking to it. With Link Baiting, think of your ‘page’ as the ‘bait’ and ‘backlinks’ as your ‘catch’. This is the simplest way to put it as quoted from searchenginejournal.com.

So instead of spending hours at the edge of your seat in front of your computer building link after link to your web page, it is a way where others will likely just link to your pages willingly depending how good your bait is! In order to create an effective link bait you essentially need a hook. It has been reported by various online gurus that there are 5 main hooks that are commonly used in Link Baiting, here they are:

• News Hook
  Give your readers the first scoop on a story surrounding your niche. For this to work, you generally have to be the first person and that is how others will link to your site… if you come in with a scoop after others have already posted it then it isn’t much of a scoop after all. Challenge specific news in your niche to be fraudulent or look for the flaws and write about them.
• Contrary Hook
  Contradict another blogger in your niche. Be sure to have some sort of proof or justified explanation. You don’t want to look like you are claiming to have seen UFOs, but you want to grab people’s attention and possibly work off of someone else’s fame.
• Attack Hook
  This is probably not the best way to Link Bait because it can do a lot of harm to you and your reputation if you go too far, but in a sense you can almost instantly boost your traffic if you happen to get lucky and do this at the right time towards the right person for the right reason. This is very similar to the Contrary Hook except that you are taking it a couple steps further to a point of verbal attack! I personally don’t suggest this method for obvious reasons, but if you are looking for internet fame overnight then how can I stop you?
• Resource Hook
  This is probably one of the best and easiest Link Baiting hooks. What you do in this situation is that you can either compile various quality information surrounding your niche and offer it to your readers or you can also give readers a heads up about relevant tools or even something for entertainment. Remember that on the internet there is about as much fun and games as there is work being done so be sure to capitalize on that area as well.
• Humor Hook
  People will never get tired of linking to Humorous pages. Never. That is why it can’t hurt your page to post them. The most common humor hooks are either funny lists, top ten lists or weird pictures. Sharing these things will likely get backlinks because humans have a tendency to share things that they find funny. Have you ever noticed that when you find a funny video on YouTube that almost instantly after watching it you have the sudden urge to send it to some of your friends? This is one of the reasons that it has a great potential when building backlinks.

There other ways that you can Link Bait, but these are the most common and proven to work. One of the latest trends in Link Baiting is to do a contest on your blog or web page, this seems to receive a tremendous amount of backlinks especially if the contest prize is something of high-value. So in conclusion Link Baiting is a must for anyone who is serious about building great quality natural backlinks to their website! If you haven’t already, you should start to consider applying this technique on future posts and pages and monitor the results closely. For a little more information on Link Baiting you should definitely check out the Art of Link Baiting.

In the next issue of the ‘ONE YEAR MILLIONAIRE‘ I am going to be talking about the importance of RSS subscriptions and how you can start increasing your count!