While attending an SES session last week I decided to put together some linkbait. The session itself wasn't particularly interesting and inspiration had struck so I figured I'd make better use of my time and write some kind of guide or howto article. The result was the 5 HTML elements you probably never use blog entry. My original plan was to launch it prior to Rand's linkbait session and then he could cite it as proof of concept, not that proof was needed but I thought it'd still be a cool idea if he could pull up Digg's front page mid-presentation and have our stuff on there. Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the entry before his session so I just held off until monday. Timing our popularity so we were on the front page around the same time as his presentation would have been really tricky as well.

The linkbait was a success, making it to the front pages of Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Digg. The results were rather interesting this time around: Reddit, who I had thought to be a bit of an underdog in the sphere, sent far more traffic than del.icio.us.  Digg didn't catch on at first, we only had a handful of diggs for the first few days until last night when it spiked up to several hundred and eventually peaked at almost 3,000 diggs. This late spike at digg also caused our del.icio.us bookmarks to go up dramatically, putting us on del.icio.us popular for the second time in two days.

I was really impressed with the quality of commentary from the users at Reddit. They're not nearly as as trigger happy as the Digg crowd and the feedback was excellent. Watching  Digg Swarm was pretty cool this time around, too. Digg swarm basically renders in flash which articles are popular on digg and shows what content users are flocking around. Jeff showed it to me a few days ago and I didn't really think much of it until yesterday evening when my entry was at the center of the swarm:

If your site ever makes Digg's front page, I highly recommend checking out the swarm - it's addicting stuff.

As some of you may have noticed I stuck a few text-link-ads affiliate banners on the HTML elements blog entry (you only see them if you aren't logged in). I wanted to experiment and see if I could monetize some of the traffic. I knew ahead of time digg/delicious/etc users don't click on ads, but I figured I'd give it a shot. The results weren't surprising. Out of 60,000 page views about 100 people clicked on the ad. This has made me wonder how tech-centric sites like Digg hope to subsist on online advertising alone. Clearly their users (myself included), very rarely click on advertising.

Despite this, linkbaiting is still an amazing marketing strategy. Our efforts managed to put the SEOmoz brand in front of thousands of webmaster with no real overhead cost to us. The entry itself took only a few hours to put together and the result is a higher industry profile and a few thousand natural links. How's that for ROI on my time? :)