We’re all being told that we should produce content that’s epic enough to make Jesus, Barack Obama and Matt Cutts himself want to link to us and share our awesomeness with all their friends and social media contacts.

Easier said than done.

If we all got links and social shares just for great ideas or good content intentions then our SEO universes would all be pretty and we’d be skipping through Googly fields of daffodils.

But we all know there’s more to it than that.

Link Bait

When I say ‘link bait,’ it’s only because it’s less of a mouthful than ‘link, traffic and social interaction bait.’ But whenever we set out to link bait at Tecmark, we’re not just looking for links from websites, we’re looking for people sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Google Plus – in fact on any of the major social platforms. And with the growing correlation between your search visibility and how people interact with your website on social media, I think it’s critical that social shares are considered too.

What I’m Going to do Here

I’m going to share some of the ideas we’ve come up with in our Tecmark link bait brainstorming sessions (based on many of the common link bait concepts discussed) and go through some of the outreach methods that are working well for us. These are intended as ideas for an approach. The medium through which you present them is entirely up to you! You could pick from any number of things including:

• Infographics
• Text blog posts
• Downloadable PDFs/Resources
• Video Content
• Audio Content
• Interactive content (be nice to your HTML5 geniuses!)
• E Books

Ideas!

As I said, presentation could be executed any number of ways! But here are 15 ways we’ve been finding success with link bait.

1. Produce your own research by surveying your customers/clients.
    
2. Can’t get your client involved in research? Then get their consent to use their Google Analytics as the basis for some research. This is valuable data unique to them. Use it to discuss something topical (e.g mobile) or useful to your wider industry (times of day that people search/shop in your industry).
    
3. Update someone else’s research. Found a great piece of research by someone else that already has people linking to it? If it’s over a year old why not update it? The people who shared the original are the new basis of your outreach.
    
4. Compile key points from multiple pieces of research into one concise, well presented bit of content. Credit your sources and, again, the original researchers and the people who engaged with their research are the basis for your outreach.
    
5. Make someone else’s research pretty! At Tecmark, we carried out some research in March 2011 on what proportion of traffic is mobile. We subsequently updated it some months later. While we found that content was really great for links (both to the posts and the homepage) and social shares, we’re the first to admit we didn’t present it all that ‘prettily.’ So if someone came along and used our research as the basis of an infographic or interactive infographic and credited us, we’d be the first ones linking and sharing! We’re not alone, I’m sure. If you take someone else’s research and present it in a more visually accessible way, you again have a great foundation for your outreach.
    
6. Write an opinionated open letter! This could be to an authority in your industry, to a Government official, a business or a group of people. And whether what you have to say is favourable to them or not, if you convey your points intelligently it’s not only a great way to express your opinion on something relevant in your industry, but could potentially warrant some links and shares. I refer you to this amazing open letter to British footballer, Joey Barton (that link comes with a foul language warning) that I found recently as just one example.
    
7. Parody something topical! An example is 8ball.co.uk (full disclosure: I work with them) who actually design products parodying topical matters or news items. Just in time for the Euro 2012 tournament, 8ball produced a range of tees poking fun at England team hate figure, John Terry and the England Manager's difficultly with pronouncing the letter R! The main issue with this is to make it timely, you have to be active the same day, making it harder to put together a plan beforehand for outreach!
    
8. “Instructographics!” How-to posts are great – but what about taking a step further and making it a bit more visual. This came up in a presentation at SMX London this month by Vince Blackham, when he talked about how he’s been using these on Pinterest. This is an idea we loved and was a step further than the how-to material we’d been previously looking at. So thank you, Vince!
    
9. Instructional cartoon strips. This is something we’re trying out as something of a development inspired by the instructographics. We’re putting more a humorous spin on the instructographics and making them cartoon strips. And as every single industry will undoubtedly have certain processes, services or products that will require some explanation, you can probably make this work in multiple niche areas.
    
10. Ego baiting. As humans, we love a bit of endorsement from our fellow humans. And we also love getting recommendations about products, services, blogs or people we should know about and that are relevant to us. Compiling list posts or visual representations of the most influential blogs in your sphere is nothing new. But develop it a bit further and consider any way in which you can create content about someone else (whether it’s a visual thing or a text post). Maybe you could interview someone in your industry or ask 50 influencers in your sphere for quick answers to a simple question. You can then represent this visually. If your content is amazing the people you’ve included will be the first port of call for outreach.

Link Bait Outreach

Build it and they will come! (Disclaimer: that's a lie).

No. They won’t. That really does not apply on the Internet for most businesses or websites.

Build it, tell your social sphere about it, optimise it, persuade some friends to share it, social bookmark it, make it even more awesome, update it as appropriate and get it under as many eyes as possible and maybe they’ll come.

In short, you need an outreach plan!

Here are five ways we’re getting the word out about link bait content.

1. Find relevant social influencers on Twitter and make friends!! I love Follower Wonk for finding the relevant Twitter users. But don’t just get right in there on content launch day and beg them to share it. Start engaging with them beforehand, get a real understanding of what content entices them to share and what their followers like. Don’t target them for outreach if your content is irrelevant!
    
2. Journalists working on industry specific publications and, where relevant, even broader consumer publications. In the UK we have a resource called Journalisted, where we can identify relevant journalists. The same applies with journalists – don’t get in touch if what you’re sharing isn’t relevant to them. Even better – if you have a PR agency working with you or your client, find out how they can help in reaching out to industry press.
    
3. Optimise your content! Right back to the basics here. Carry out keyword research around what people might search if they’re looking for something like the content you just produced and optimise from an on page perspective for that. As you start accruing links to the page, this will of course help its visibility for the relevant search terms further and this in turn means more traffic, shares and links.
    
4. Paid advertising (Facebook and Adwords)! I love Facebook advertising because you can target your demographics so, so tightly. Be prepared to invest in getting your content under the eyes. Similarly, invest in a launch PPC campaign to get eyes on your awesomeness and if the content is great, this will result in links and social shares.
    
5. Find influential bloggers using Technorati or other blog directories. When I say ‘influential’ I’m not referring to Pagerank! You should be considering how much of a community is actually in existence around their blog. Do they get comments? Do they have a social following?

Make it easy for people to share and link! Give people a snippet of code they just put on their site to embed images and make social sharing buttons available. Nobody will share if it’s hard work to do so!

Link bait isn't easy! It requires creativity, resources, a great plan and hard work! But when it works, it ticks all of the 'awesomeness' boxes for sustainable link building.

Also Recommended…

There’s already some incredible stuff right here on SEOmoz about link bait and I strongly recommending casting your eyes over it!

• 10 examples of awesome link bait
• Why Your Link Bait Fails and How to Fix It
• How to turn your content into link bait