Linkbaiting Your Adsense Sites
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Happy Monday everyone! Well it finally cooled off here in Chicago. I was really getting tired of that oppressive heat, let me tell you!
Today I want to talk to you about something a little bit different and a little bit out of character for this blog – namely; linkbait.
What is linkbait?
Basically linkbait is simply something you do/create/giveaway/etc that gets people to link to your website or further spreads the word about your site virally.
It usually involves creating some sort of free report, or ebook, or interesting video, or meme, or software or something along those lines. You then give that thing away and it’s so interesting that people pass it along to their friends and post about it on their social networks.
It’s a basic Internet marketing strategy, but one I don’t generally talk about here on this blog because I’ve focused on thin Adsense sites for so long. It really isn’t feasible to create good linkbait for every thin site you build, especially if you’re churning out hundreds of sites a day or week.
So why talk about it now?
I’m talking about it now for two reasons:
- I’ve begun talking about different types of Adsense sites here on the blog lately and linkbait works especially well with thick Adsense sites that are highly themed.
- I accidentally created some linkbait over the weekend for one of my other non-adsense related websites and thought it might be useful to look at as an example.
The first one is pretty self explanatory. If you build thick Adsense sites, it makes sense to put a little effort into building some linkbait. ESPECIALLY now that we live in the post Panda and post Penguin world of Google madness. Getting real people to link to your site and spread the word about you virally on social networks is essential to getting any sort of sustainable search engine traffic.
Google is getting better and better and ferreting out fake links to websites. Linkbait solves that problem completely and Google eats up those kinds of links in a way that you’ll never duplicate by creating incoming links yourself artificially.
My Linkbait Accident
This weekend I accidentally created some linkbait. I wasn’t even trying! I keep a sort of personal blog over at my FlatplanetMedia.com site here.
Saturday it was still really hot outside and I was bored so I decided to teach myself the C programming language. Then I wrote a short blog post about it and posted it on that blog. It’s titled: I’m (re)Learning The C Programming Language
I then submitted it to Hackernews, which is a sort of reddit style social network about computer programming (obviously you would submit your own linkbait to places that are appropriate to the content itself).
Since then over 1,600 unique visitors have come to view it over 2,300 times and many have told their friends, posted it to social networks, shared it on twitter etc. Furthermore, several people posted comments on that page itself, as well as on hackernews.
Sure in the scope of things, a couple thousand page views over the weekend isn’t a huge deal…but even that sort of small buzz is enough to propel your site in the Google rankings for years to come. And if you make a habit of creating a new piece of linkbait ever few weeks, it can have a dramatic effect on your website.
As you can see, even something as small as a stupid blogpost can become linkbait as long as it strikes a nerve with people. Your linkbait should do a few things:
- Be compelling
- Be interesting
- Be FREE
- Be specifically targetted to your audience
- Be easily shareable
I highly suggest that you take some time to create your own linkbait strategy. It might take you a while to figure out exactly what your audience considers interesting, but once you do, once you can strike a cord at will, there’s literally nothing online you can’t accomplish. It takes work, but it’s well worth the effort.
Keep on building!
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
