62 replies to this topic

[qwerty]

"Linkbait" won't work if it's just bolt-on content created for its own sake - it has to be content that's on topic and adds real value for visitors.

Isn't that true of any content? If a site that sells lawn sprinklers publishes an authoritative, scholarly article on threatre during the Elizabethan era, I don't think it's going to be very helpful in selling sprinklers.

I still don't see how linkbait is any different from putting something worthwhile on your site, which has been recommended forever. The term itself makes it sound like something sneaky, like a bait and switch, but it's not. It's just offering good stuff.

[Debra]

and I already got poked in the eye for that one

.
Awwww... You need some ice for that eye?

Everything Rand said, and everything I've seen elsewhere, leaves me thinking that linkbait is just the newest synonym for shortcut.

I hope not Ron! I believe this tactic takes work and lots of creativity in order for it to be successful - but it can work!! I just don't think it should be the only thing you use to attract links. If you want to rely on one factor to be the major component of a link marketing plan, you’ve substantially narrowed your ability to touch a broad base of your buying and linking public!

Seriously, this is, I think, one of those times we're likely using the same words but different meanings.

Good point. Here’s the definition of “link bait” Google Engineer Matt Cutts gave recently as a guest on Webmasterradio.fm:

………”all link baiting is, is coming up with either something creative, or something controversial or some sort of interesting useful service that provides information”…….

Sounds like good content to me!!

[lyn]

I still don't see how linkbait is any different from putting something worthwhile on your site... It's just offering good stuff.

Yup!

[Scottie]

The term "bait" is synonymous with manipulation.


v. bait·ed, bait·ing, baits
To entice, especially by trickery or strategy.


It's a sad state of the industry when "compelling content" and "giving people a reaon to link to your site" are ideas that are virtually ignored until someone gives it a sleazy name like "link bait".

Everyone's looking for the next trick...

[randfish]

Sorry I've been so absent from the discussion. Let me try to give an overview of why linkbait is different from past tpes of "worthy content that gets natural links."

Please know that this is my own, unique, internal definition of linkbait, and applies to how I use it for customers and contracts, and not neccessarily how everyone else describes it - which can sometimes be as broad as anything that "baits" a single person or a couple folks into linking.

"My Linkbait" takes specific advantage of the linking market on the web - not the folks in your particular industry, who may take a very long time to find and link to you, but the players who are exceptionally active in linking to tech/webdev based work. That's why I mentioned the blogs like boing boing, lifehacker, etc.

There is a monumental community of linkers on the web who are excited about the "new" concepts of web 2.0, community on the web, mashups, APIs, RSS integration and other piece of technology that are emergent and "cool". These folks will link to this sort of content, virtually regardless of the technical subject matter, as long as it plays to their market, which includes:

- CSS sites (they all click view source and shake their head at tables - which I personally like for many parts of webdev, but with linkbait, you gotta go with what works)

- Sites with that "certain look" (I call it the "web 2.0 look", but if you're curious about what I mean, just check out http://thesis.veracon.net/)

- Applications that apply AJAX-style functionality (the sliding animations using XML and Javascript - a good example of a super AJAXy site is http://www.pageflakes.com/)

- Applications that mix Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps with clever bits of information to create a custom mashup - Frappr is one of them, http://www.runningmap.com/ is another good example and there's a whole blog about them here - http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

- RSS delivered information is hot, though it's losing its pure link appeal - you can still get link love if you issue feeds of the right kinds of data, though - especially if it converts previously non-RSS data to the format (like crimes in a city or home closings in your county or new apartment listings on Craigslist - they've already done that but you get the idea)

It's a sad state of the industry when "compelling content" and "giving people a reaon to link to your site" are ideas that are virtually ignored until someone gives it a sleazy name like "link bait".

Scottie, I'd say that although it sounds sleazy, it's really just a way of re-targeting good content at a population on the web who's likely to link to it. I have clients in the fine art world, and there's not a whole lot of daily bloggers interested in their artists, yet. But, if I create content that includes those artists and their work and target it towards the link-friendly tech community, I've created linkbait - is it manipulative?

I don't really think so - they're only linking if they think it's really something special and cool and enjoy using it. The fact that I'm doing it with the intent of getting links and not just to provide something cool is simply my way of paying for development without having to charge folks to use it. The "abuse" of linkbait will only result in lots of cool content and lots of "failed" semi-cool content (that took a lot of development time). It's not something that's too ripe for abuse because the bloggers and taggers aren't going to be linking if they don't love it.

Is it a new concept? Not really, but the rules are changing and the way to stay on top of it has changed. 5-6 years ago, very cool looking Flash sites were getting these types of links. 2-3 years ago, java applets and online games were getting them in droves. Today, AJAX, CSS, APIs and Maps are hot. Tomorrow it will be something else. The point is to tailor your site's content (and you don't have to do the whole site, just one page is fine) to the current link community's whims. It's a way to jump ahead of the pack and get massive amounts of branding and visibility. I note that some of our linkbait pieces received 50,000+ visitors in a month and 2,000+ links.

Hope that helps to make it a little clearer what I mean.

[qwerty]

OK, I think I see the difference, but I'm afraid that it looks like what you're talking about is something both short-term and unlikely to lead to improved ROI.

If Boing Boing links to one of my client's sites because they've published some ultra-cool, bleeding edge, Ajaxy mashup of Yahoo Maps, iTunes, and eBay, I'm going to get a flood of traffic, probably for a few days. If other blogs pick that up, or it gets onto del.icio.us/popular, that traffic will last maybe a week. Huge traffic. Monstrous.

But it's only going to be people who want to see the ultra-cool mashup, not potential customers.

So what's the point? How does this help the client in the long-term?

[randfish]

Bob - Here's how:
www.seomoz.org/ip2loc/ip2loc.php - 2200+ links

Even when the traffic leaves, the links and the rankings remain.

You've also just branded yourself to tens of thousands of people, who'll come back if they ever need data on that set of information again. These same blogs get read and rank well for those niche searches and when the slow-linkers (the news folks and edu glossary creators) go searching for relevant content - you've built yourself as an authority in the field, deserving of those links.

It doesn't have to be AJAX, either - the Beginner's Guide was a perfect example of linkbait, although I created it more as a reference piece to send clients who couldn't afford SEO services to.

1500+ links - and it ranks page 3 for "seo" which, while it doesn't bring me lots of traffic, has boosted all my other SEO related content in Google so that the long tail (and the medium tail) traffic has gone way up.

[qwerty]

But that example, and your beginner's guide, are both highly relevant to your site's audience, Rand. Are you saying that if you posted a tool like that on the site of your client in the financial services industry it would be as helpful to that site as it's been to SEOmoz?

[randfish]

Right - so we're actually building a financial maps mashup right now and it's a similar idea. It provides some nifty data about [secret stuff] and delivers it in a maps API with Yahoo!'s cool new beta system (which almost no one is using yet).

Our goal is to make something that will be fun and informative for the client's audience, but also appeals to those linkers and taggers. If you get creative, you can do the same thing for any audience.

[qwerty]

So... it does have to be relevant to the site's audience. That brings me back around to the high-quality, useful content, and leaves the only difference between offering good stuff to your audience and linkbait, at least from my perspective, the added benefit of getting the mavens of cool to draw attention to it. And those are still, for the most part, separate groups of people. If you build a useful tool for the financial industry, there are tons of vertical portals where you can get links, and that's absolutely great, but it's just no different from the standard advice of building a great site.

If the Web 2.0 people also link to it, you've got short-term traffic that's enough to crash your server, but I still don't think that it's worthwhile. You want the site's audience to be interested, not Xeni Jardin, cool though she may be. (Yes, it's true. I love BoingBoing.)

So now it seems that what you're talking about is a combination of the advice I've always given with something transient and not particularly important. Talk about your mashups...

[lyn]

The term "bait" is synonymous with manipulation.
v. bait·ed, bait·ing, baits
To entice, especially by trickery or strategy.

I guess it depends on how you want to read it. I don't have a problem with "enticing by strategy," as long as I can pass on the "trickery" part. I love enticement! But then, I work in the advertising biz so I'm probably down with the bottom-feeders anyway.

However, reading Rand's new posts above, he has a different, very specific meaning in mind for linkbait. If it's going to denote that particular tactic, I'll bow out -- it's not something I'm equipped to do even if I wanted to.

L.

[Ron Carnell]

Scottie, I'd say that although it sounds sleazy, it's really just a way of re-targeting good content at a population on the web who's likely to link to it. (emphasis added - Ron)

If it was just good content, Rand, I wouldn't have any problem with it. What you want to call linkbaiting in this particular definition, writers have always called slanting and marketers have often called public relations. It starts with good content. If you dress up that good content in classy clothes to get more attention, it's all good.

However, the problem I have with linkbaiting as indirectly described elsewhere, both by yourself and others, is that dressing up really lousy content in classy clothes seems to be just as prevalent. Even Matt Cutts, in his blog, had to include "something controversial" as part of his definition, and therein I think lies the sleaze. The examples you cite in this thread include good content and creative thinking, but you forgot to mention the stupid contests or attacking people just to get attention. You've mentioned them elsewhere, though, so I'm sure you know they too are considered linkbaiting.

Linkbaiting may, indeed, include good content. That clearly doesn't, however, make them synonymous.

The first post explicitly offered linkbaiting as an alternative to relying "on the very unreliable aspects of solid content and the long term hope that folks start linking." To me, that still sounds like a shortcut because, clearly, the opposite of long-term is short-term. My experience has been that shortcuts always seem to carry a price, and I'm thinking the price to this one is likely to be a loss of credibility. Shortcuts work, I know. They just don't last, and the cost always seems to be at the expense of long-term goals.

Personally, I just don't believe there ARE any alternatives to solid content and long-term hope. And I get real suspicious when I see such alternatives surface (which they always do, year after year after year).

[randfish]

Ron - You're right. There's a wide variance in definition. But when I say I'm adding a linkbait component to a client's contract, I don't mean we're drumming up something that pisses off John Battelle or Danny Sullivan just to get links, I mean it in the way above.

And with Michael's assertion that we only target content that's not going to get sandboxed or brands that already have an advantage, I'd say that's a slight overstatement. We still have clients (and plan to have clients) who will use things like linkbait to overcome those issues.

[Jill]

Nope. Just because it has a differnt name doesn't change the concept. It was viral marketing then, it's viral marketing now.

Exactly. Viral marketing. That's what I've always thought of it as.

So, Rand, Ron, Scottie, Debra, do any of you see a difference between linkbait and viral marketing?

Or is what Ron touched upon a few posts up, the difference? i.e., linkbait has the sleeze factor, or controversial factor, that traditional viral marketing perhaps doesn't?

I personally had never thought of linkbait with a negative connotation until reading this thread, but like Lyn, now I'm questioning what I previously thought.

[Ron Carnell]

Rand, I've seen enough of your work to know it's going to be based on solid content and some pretty darn imaginative thinking. I honestly think you do yourself a disservice, however, to call it linkbaiting. The association with others using the same term to describe their work, others who often aren't as imaginative or creative, shouldn't be something done lightly, in my opinion.

Jill, I'm not sure Viral Marketing is any easier to define than linkbait. Seth Godin's 2001 book, Unleashing the Ideavirus painted some pretty broad brushstrokes, making just about anything that falls within the boundaries of word-of-mouth eligible for the title. I "think" the term Viral Marketing was first applied to Hotmail, but I could be wrong. In 1998, my earliest poetry site was the first (of which I'm aware, at any rate) to allow readers to email a poem with a personal message. Like Hotmail, everyone who used the service automatically distributed the word that my site existed. To me, that kind of built-in spread defines the term. To others, however, I know Viral Marketing has become anything that exponentially grows by word-of-mouth.

Maybe it doesn't matter. The emphasis isn't really so much on Viral as it is on Marketing, after all, and I think that necessarily implies a positive experience. I made it easy for people to email a poem, using someone else's words to deliver a message, but that would have accomplished nothing if I didn't also have some good poetry to send. For years, we all saw those "Send to a Friend" buttons on almost every site, perhaps because people thought that was the key to Viral Marketing. It wasn't, of course, because most sites aren't worth sharing with a friend. Viral Marketing, I think, depends on quality content.

As I said before, I think linkbaiting "can" be based on quality content, but it's also pretty obvious that it doesn't depend on it. It's equally effective with trash, or what a few around HR have called Jerry Springer marketing. A link, after all, doesn't necessarily mean anyone likes what you're offering. Viral Marketing, by definition, is marketing. But I think linkbaiting is only a prelude to marketing and, frankly, I think it can be a roadblock to marketing.

As you're fond of saying, Jill, getting a visitor isn't the real goal. Marketing is driven by conversions, not by traffic. So . . . what would you be willing to buy from Jerry Springer?