Good linkbait is hard to come by. Good linkbait that achieves its desired goal is even harder to come by. This past year we partnered up with our web developer buddies down the road to accidentally perform an ongoing experiment in linkbait.

We collaborate pretty regularly with Nicholas Creative, a local web design firm and one day over lunch we were just tossing around content ideas for a website we were working on. At some point we started talking about quizzes and IQ tests and I pointed out how difficult it is to build an IQ test. Then it dawned on me that I had taken the Wonderlic test a few years ago – the test was only 50 questions long, lasted a maximum of 12 minutes and was entirely multiple choice. That would definitely be easier to replicate.

A quick search on my phone showed that there were already plenty of sample quizzes. So we tossed around ideas on how to spin it into something else and that's when we came up with the idea – the NFL. If you're a sports nut (I'm afflicted with this condition) you're probably aware that prior to the NFL draft each year a select number of college players are selected to attend a pre-draft workout called the NFL combine. During these workouts players take the Wonderlic test to assess their intelligence. Each year a new crop of players surprise and disappoint with their scores, and inevitably the press makes a far bigger deal out of the results than they should (there doesn't seem to be any correlation between Wonderlic scores and on field performance – Dan Marino only had a 14).

So we decided to build a tool that lets people compare their smarts against NFL players. The only problem? This had absolutely nothing to do with any of our clients' sites. We still loved the idea so much that we figured we'd build it anyway because apparently none of us have a life.

We did the research to find scores for players across the entire spectrum of possibilities, found some images we could use of the players, and some sample questions and we were pretty much ready to go. We ended up scaling the quiz down to 15 questions for the short attention span crowd and we sent it live on the Nicholas Creative domain – (the quiz can be found here).

Again, we more launched this because we loved the idea, it's not relevant to either of our sites (thus why I let them put it on their domain). We launched it in the summer, so there was no real rush of football news. I had an intern sprinkle some posts on NFL Facebook pages and on some ESPN and Yahoo Sports articles just to get it out in front of some people and then we pretty much forgot about it.

Interestingly enough, months later I took a peak at the analytics and it was generating consistent traffic. More interestingly, the badges that the quiz produces were getting used a little bit as well. Too bad we didn't have a sports related site to put this thing on!

When I started digging through the analytics it I figured the Nicholas guys would take some more links if we could get them anyway, so I had one of our PR people send out a press release when college bowl season heated up and the NFL playoffs came around, and not surprisingly, more links came in and more traffic came in as well. Then, out of nowhere, some prominent bloggers picked it up at the beginning of March and thousands of visitors came flooding to the page.

The exciting thing about this, which I think is the real takeaway for linkbaiters is the evergreen nature of this idea. When I last met up with our pals at Nicholas we started talking about this tool again and we started talking about updating the players we use as comparisons (which is a minimal amount of work) to include whoever the most talked about rookie is or any other trending NFL Players. In reality, you could update this whenever a player ended up in a major news story and do some publicity to it and continue driving easy traffic to your site and over time exponentially growing your links.

So the more I look at this concept, I think there are some points to take into account when developing linkbait to see if you can squeeze every last ounce of its "evergreen-ness" as possible.

1. Can the content be updated easily?
   1. In the quiz's case, it's relatively easy – finding scores and images are easy, and the tool itself can be coded relatively easily.
2. Are there different occasions throughout the year when this can be re-marketed to the same audience?
   1. For this tool the Super Bowl, the NFL Draft, the NFL Combine and any other time a prominent player becomes a news story (think anything related to Brett Favre this past year)
3. Can this be marketed to different audiences?
   1. Other sporting audiences might also be interested in this tool, as well as other sites related to the Wonderlic test or other forms of intelligence testing

Any other items you think about to re-market your linkbait? Please share!

P.S. Special thanks to the folks at Nicholas Creative for letting us share their analytics.