Link baiting is a powerful strategy to build one way links from relevant sites and improve a site’s overall popularity.  How do you go about baiting links?  Here are a few steps to follow in order to conduct a powerful linkbait campaign.

• Arrange a brainstorm session that includes various people from your organisation including marketing, IT, creative agency reps and last but not least, your SEO.

• List the various categories within the target audience of your website.  An example of this could be Young parent with kids, Young parents without kids, etc.

• Brainstorm which digital properties they use in their day to day life.  An example of this would be, young parents might use parenting forums and Yahoo Answers for advice, YouTube and Flickr for entertainment, Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family and Google News for keeping up with the latest news.

• Map out digital properties to each of your target audience groups.

• Now spend some time thinking about all the digital assets your website has.  Examples include and email database, content, videos, images, interviews, a microsite, etc..

• Finally, end the brainstorm session by thinking about ways to use your digital assets in ways that will make them work harder and inline with your audience mapping mentioned above.

A great example of a company that has done this perfectly is the Guardian Newspaper.  The guardian created a widget, the Guardian Chalkboard. 

It’s an online application which has data from the past three years for every premiership football match, as well as info about tackles, passes, shots, throw-ins, etc for every single player.  The application allows you to draw virtual chalkboards and compare matches and players. 

A fantastic linkbait to attract links from football websites and to garner more loyal Guardian readers!

They say Content is King, well Linkbait is the Ace in the hole! 

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