Copywriters may use different link baiting strategies at their copies to attract others to link to them. I’m going to share one that I’ve used successfully and I’ve received such valuable links to them. Over the course of years other authority sites have also found them and linked to them. You do it once when you learn it and it brings you links after links during the years to come.
What’s This Fantastic Copy That Attracts Valuable Links?
Well, I tell you what it is. The answer is writing a copy that is less or insufficiently written about.
- Does it mean original copy? Yes.
- Does it mean fresh content? Yes.
- Does it mean informative copy? Yes.
Well, you may say this is the link baiting strategy others have also talked about. I will answer,”Yes, you’re right, but I tell you how to write it!”
Everyone is specialized in one particular field and reads, watches, listens to lots of content about it. You don’t need to be necessarily a highly accredited expert in a field to be able to write such a copy – call it a blog post, an article, a series of them or whatever you want. Just follow the steps below to practice the link baiting strategy I’m explaining to you at this post:
- Discover the wonderful stories, topics, phenomena, events, traditions, etc that are amazingly unique and you’re moved by them.
- Search for them online to see how much is written about them.
- Look for more information about them at printed books and read a couple of them.
- Learn about your selected topic by experiencing it, visiting it, touching it, etc.
- Take notes during all the above steps.
- Spend some time putting the notes together and write about your topic.
- Structure it in a way that you say a lot in short (no extra sentence).
- Optimize your copy for search engines.
Well, what I’ve just explained above doesn’t seem like a link baiting strategy. You know why? Because it follows a natural content creation process. If you want some organic placement in search engines, you should follow such natural method. The result will be beyond your imagination, because human editors at authority sites will look for such content to link to.
Do you want some proof? OK, here’s one:
A Real Example of This Link Baiting Strategy Before I’d Heard about SEO!
I’ve started a travel website a few years after I started working as a national tourist guide in my country, Iran. The purpose for building this site was the need to stand from the crowd as every year more and more guides were added to our list, but the demand was not on the rise! So, I started a travel website for Iran. Not knowing it would be a link baiting strategy one day, I was going through the above steps I’ve explained to you to learn about an ancient underground Iranian water supplement system called Kariz (Qanat).
I went to different parts of my country to see them, I went to the local unknown museums. I read articles about them. I listened to the illiterate laborers working on this system to learn from them. I did all this and took notes to put together something to explain to my tourists how amazing it was. Finally I squeezed all the information into an article about Qanats.
The Last Step I Added to This Natural Content Marketing Campaign
A few years later, when I learned about SEO, with very basic information, I started optimizing the webpages of my site including this one. Soon, I was found by the authority websites and got links from them. This process goes on and on. My latest link for this article was a couple of weeks ago by BBC. Take a look at the screenshot taken from Google Webmasters Tool showing the incoming link sources to this page:
This is the real proof for this link baiting strategy that has worked for me.
These days when I look back at this process and the amount of time it’s taken me to write this article, two points cross my mind:
- I took time to create this article, but I spend that time during my everyday career. So, it wasn’t like a huge allocated time spent on a project whereas the link popularity of my site increases gradually and naturally.
- It’s brought me a lot of credibility, trust, and business. I’ve done it once, but I will take benefits from doing it as long as this website is out there for me.
So, I think this is an amazing link baiting strategy that all of you can put into practice and see the results. It won’t need to take a lot of time to be noticed by those authority sites anymore as you’re not a green SEO learner. Besides, these days search engines are a lot smarter and quicker with Google as the front-runner of indexing social media updates on a real-time basis. Create such content and announce it to your audience through social media and other website promotion channels. You will see how great the results will be.
Excellent post, Rahman!
That’s probably the most complete post I’ve ever read on linkbaiting naturally. I’d like to add one more recommendation.
When you’re out doing research on the subject, take along a video camera. Right now, Bing and Google are battling it out for supremacy by providing results based on video links.
If the person can put a video in their blog post to enhance the post, the search engines will eat it up and since 60% of the worlds population are visual, your visitors will too!
Thanks Bob for the nice words. Also, I thank you for the emphasis on the importance of video as it’s really getting a lot of attention these days. Content can be in various forms and I think as more and more people get access to high speed internet, video will be THE big thing sooner or later.