Blasphemy, I hear some of you saying. Linkbait, if promoted properly on social media sites, brings lots of traffic and, if you’re lucky, lots of links from other bloggers.
But it’s a hit and miss situation that sometimes ends up with overloaded web servers, cancelled hosting accounts, and even lots of nasty comments on Digg, if the article sucks, is poorly categorized, or both. This can be emotionally and/or financially draining, if you’re doing this long-term. A site consisting only of linkbait might eventually turn readers away.
Now, I’m not saying don’t linkbait. As a hired linkbaiter myself, I’ve seen the value of quality linkbait. (And really good ones are not easy to write, despite the sudden explosion of linkbaiters out there.)
But Pandia presents a comprehensive alternate link building plan [via Sphinn] based on a few simple principles. There’s also a really clever set of terms to describe certain types of content and services, and their temporal behaviors.
Consider this premise that Pandia puts forth: Quality content, such as a tutorial, that pulls X visitors per day over a year might actually pull more traffic than an average linkbait promoted on Digg. That is, a page pulling even 10-20 visitors per day, every day, might be far more effective on a holistic level than a linkbait.
Why? Because those 3,000+ visitors over a year might actually be more targeted than a sudden influx of social media visitors. Do you think you can write lots of good content that steadily pulls in 10-20 visitors per day? I’ve had a few CSS tutorials pull in regular traffic, comments, and links for a good year now. A gallery of simple fractal images on one website pulls steady traffic, thanks to Google Image Search and a few links from high PR websites.
On the other hand, good linkbait promoted well can and does pull in massive amounts of primary and secondary backlinks that supplement traffic for a long-time. And the links come early on, which has an effect of pulling future traffic and backlinks in a manner very similar to compound interest. My own feeling is that you want to build a website that has a balance of textual and visual content types.
0 Comments For This Post
1 Trackbacks For This Post
August 16th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
[...] have a plan for building your website’s authority and have decided that you need linkbait. You’re either going to write it yourself or hire someone. But one piece of linkbait is not [...]
Leave a Reply