How Linkbait Attracts Traffic to Your Blog

The word “linkbait” is pretty logical: it’s anything on your site that encourages others to link to you, like bait encourages fish to swallow the fishhook. The best linkbait is worth its weight in gold and followed links. So how do you figure out the perfect linkbait for you? Start with these tips.

Your Audience’s Interests and Needs
You need to know whom you want to attract to your site. If you’re just trying to get people to pay attention, you might end up with a lot of people referred from social networking sites, but if they are only coming to see your one-hit-wonder post, the audience will be gone again before you know it.
To have a little consistency instead of relying on long-tail keywords, you need to make sure that you are building up an audience and a tribe. People don’t want to be loyal to a brand that isn’t well defined; they want to know what to expect from a site or blog they follow.

Give Something Away
Nothing brings people faster than something that is given away for free. Once you have figured out what problem your audience needs to solve, help them get one step further with a free tool or eBook. Even a free PDF checklist can really help people get moving on solving their own problems.
Be sure to be generous. Your free work will be seen as representative of the quality you will also show in your paid work, and most paying customers are looking around for any way to get a preview of something that they’ll buy. High quality free work also creates trust, assuming the product is something that was meaningful and useful for the customer.

Explain Something
Infographics and top ten lists are great tools because people are itching to learn something substantial and be able to understand it quickly. Find a way to teach something related to your niche, especially if you want to attract novice-level readers. Both your established audience and your new readers can appreciate seeing information presented well, and learning or relearning essential information.
Come up with infographics by finding common questions or misconceptions in your niche, especially ones having to do with numbers. Infographics do a wonderful job of putting numbers and connections in perspective, especially when you are dealing with large numbers in the millions or billions.

Make Them Laugh
When nothing else works, humor is a perfect way to develop new linkbait material. Think about what kinds of things would make the people in your niche laugh. Keep an eye on comics and other joking material so that you can link to it when it’s especially relevant.
Always pay attention while using humor, as it is often difficult to express true intentions through the Internet. If your usual crowd is expecting a detailed how-to and gets a humor post instead, they might not be impressed or interested enough to share it further. However, if your site is built on humor, you will be attracting the people who will pass humorous material on.

Use Internal Links
No matter what your linkbait, make sure that your voice is still consistent with the rest of the site. Nothing is worse than attracting someone to the site, only to have him or her think that the one article they enjoyed was the only one of its kind.
Also, make a practice of adding a couple internal links to each of your articles. That way, readers have somewhere else to go on your site, and they can be exposed to more posts that they might find interesting.

Bring it Up
Though linkbait is part of the recipe for links, the other part is letting people know that the information is out there. Get the ball rolling by making sure that your linkbait post is being shared with all of your loyal fans first, so that they can get the word out about it. Social sharing is also how your link will likely be shared; so let people see it in context so that they can think about passing it on to their friends and contacts.

What kinds of linkbait work best for your sites? How would you recommend that people use their linkbait posts?