Summary: Linkbait is the creation of compelling content for the purpose of getting people to link to it and share it with others.
Linkbait is content that you create on the web with the aim of getting links and drawing attention (to your site, brand, etc). So the goals of creating linkbait can be summarised as:
1) To attract links from other websites
2) To generate press and get people talking about you/your product/your services
3) To drive traffic to your website
4) To increase sales.
Number 4 is really a product of 1, 2 and 3 – it’s not a direct goal but if you attract the right kind of people (by using the right bait in the right place) it’s the natural result. So if your customer group are retired pensioners, most of whom don’t use the internet and none of whom have heard of the likes of facebook, you might not want to bother with linkbait. If sales is your ultimate goal from your linkbait campaign then the bulk of your customer group need to be online.
For success, the content you create needs to attract what some people call ‘linkerati’ – this term was coined by top SEO man Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz and it’s stuck. It simply means people who are tech-savvy, social media participants. These are people who will make or break your viral campaign. As a result of them doing this (or not doing this), your campaign will spread – or flop.
You get sent linkbait all the time – links in emails from friends, links in online publications that you read, youtube links. It’s usually quite easy to tell the difference though, between content that ends up viral by accident (passed around by your mates and ultimately all over the world) and content that is specifically made to attract attention (GoDaddy’s videos for example). People who market websites, services and products try and minimise that difference as, let’s face it, you’re less likely to pass around commercial linkbait with an advert in it than non commercial.
Is there some confusion between linkbait and viral marketing? Linkbait is content that people don’t reproduce – they just spread it round (link to it). Viral marketing is about the spread of content. It’s just a subtle difference and often a crossover – for example people link to viral vids and people reproduce content on their websites. The creation of viral marketing material and link bait is fairly much the same and the effect is pretty much the same too – so no need to worry too much about the difference.
A viral message has the ability – the power – to spread quickly and naturally without further effort. The message is that good – that funny or interesting – that people do the marketing for you. The internet is a great place for viral marketing as it’s so easy to spread the word – a few links to your friends, who each link to a few of their friends, and all of a sudden, hundreds on thousands of people have seen the content. The web further aids this process with plenty of tools and sites that encourage exactly that behaviour, like social media sites, social news sites and bookmarking sites. Social media is without doubt your number one conduit for linkbait.
Linkbait has a lifespan. Viral content on social media channels follows almost exactly the same pattern every time – a curve where the interest slowly picks up, suddenly links, views and comments increase, the content gains popularity, suddenly it’s featured on home pages (‘now popular’) and then its popularity gradually declines. For this reason, be wary about buying the rights to viral content (example: buying a facebook group such as ‘I like wearing traffic cones on my head’). The initial surge of interest is brought on by novelty factor but it’s rare that this lasts – almost every piece of viral content follows the same life pattern and the same decline.
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