Lonely? In need of some Link Love? Let’s get Creative!

Lets face it, every blogger out there. Regardless of whether you’re creating a blog to sell a product or talk about your favourite past-time, needs a little link love. It’s what makes the world go round. There are quite possibly hundreds of ways to gather links to your sites that will in the overall scheme of things help you rank well. Some people, however, are a lot more creative than others when it comes to this, so lets have a look at some of the ways you can get creative with linkbait!

Digg

Digg by far, if done right can be one of the biggest generators of passive inbound links to your site. Why? Well, when a story gets big people will blog about it, it’ll get syndicated on other sites & other social media avenues. The average front page story generates around 300+ inbound links depending on the associated topic. Check out this post on Seomoz that can give you great outline of what it means to hit the front page on Digg.

Here is another site that has played the Digg game quite well. It’s a basically an affiliate site for College Degree programs cleverly disguised as a College Information site. They’re had 2 or 3 stories hit the front page on digg. For their efforts the site has close to 12,700 links back to it. Ouch, that’s not bad for an affiliate website….

Being Controversial in Blog Posts

Whilst many bloggers refuse to be outspoken it’s actually quite a good linkbait. Take for example the whole Dave Pasternack SEO Contest, he made a controversial post about SEO being easy & probably increased the number of inbound links to his site threefold. What’s difficult about this tactic is being controversial without damaging your reputation or rubbing someone else up the wrong way.

Making a Funny Post about Leading Bloggers in your Niche

One of the posts that stood out for me in this category was SEO Lookalikes, not only did it make me spit my tea all over my keyboard but it’s incredibly good link material. It’s the kind of post that people link to without really thinking about it. If you have the time to think out of the box & come up with an idea like this you really deserve the links that come associated with it

Run a Contest on your Blog

Doing something on your blog like offering Blog Reviews is a great way to generate buzz & inbound links. This includes a number of varying options:

1. Offering a linkback when someone does a review of your blog
2. Run a competition & give away something unique, to enter someone has to link back to your blog with specific anchor text
3. Run an SEO Contest to get people to rank for you brand, to enter they need to link back to your site

Create Linkable Content

Certain types of content are more linkable than others. You need to try & find the sweet spot for your own blog & the niche you’re in. People like to link naturally to blog posts that provide unique valuable information or posts that condense a lot of information into one big post. I for one generally fall into a category where I write blog posts on a whim about topics that spring to mind & sometimes don’t have as much time as I’d like to really post as indepth about a topic. If you can really take the time to structure a post out & make it so good they’d be silly not to link to it you’re onto a winner

Be the First to Post News Items

This is where Google Alerts, Email Subscriptions & Feed Readers really come into a place of their own. If you can be the first to blog or post about a particular topic then it’s easily to instantly become the authority post on that piece of news. You’ll naturally attract a lot of inbound links & trackbacks very quickly. This is one of the main reasons why blogs such as Engadget & Techcrunch do so well. It is actually a fine art to find out this information, although I’ll give you one tip: Subscribe to Press Releases or add them to your RSS Reader.

Comparing Services or Blogs against one another

Like my Mybloglog vs Bumpzee post (which was somewhat biased towards Bumpzee I might add) comparing services or blogs like this can instantly create linkable content. I find that being objectionable about a service (which also falls into being controversial) also helps create more linkable content, because people start questioning the article on their own blogs. Especially if you point out a flaw in the system or point out something that other people have overlooked.

A good example of comparsion that is good linkbait was the Blogger Face Off, basically pitting SEO & Affiliate Marketing Bloggers against each other using raw numbers as ammo! Another great idea that is great linking material.

Interviewing Leading Personalities in your Niche

Being the first to interview a leading personality within your Blogging Space can create a huge number of links. For example Shoemoney was the first & only person to ever interview Quadzilla on his Net Income radio show. This can be a difficult one to achieve as not many high profile bloggers are willing to do interviews for anyone. One point on this, if you are planning on interviewing someone just send them a list of questions you want them to answer. Don’t ask if you can interview them, 9/10 they won’t answer.

Create a List of useful plugins or services for people to refer to

This was one of the things that first caused me to stumble across Stuntdubl’s blog. He’d created a huge list of resources for SEO’s. Ranging from Keyword Research Tools to CSS Tools etc. I checked Yahoo & this page has 197 external links alone, not to mention the individual links to each resource list. Not to mention ranking on page two of google for Internet Marketing Tools.

Offer Step by Step guides on how to achieve something

Like my post about Affiliate Sales on Blogger you can easily attract a lot of attention on a particular subject. You need to be sure to show people how to do something but also leave a certain amount of work up to their imagination. Don’t give away all your secrets, I like to try & give some posts an air of secrecy so that people ask questions & take the techniques to another level. People are then likely to blog about their success or failure on their own blog.

So in summary there are heaps of unique ideas that you can use to give your site that much needed traffic boost. However you need to make sure that you’re converting these once off visitors into regular readers.

I’d also love to hear about other unique & new ways you guys have managed to attract links naturally.