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Linkbaiting is still one of the most important techniques used in the world of SEO (search engine optimization) and is an extremely effective method of generating blog traffic.  It can literally mean the difference between blog success and failure.  That’s why you need to understand the process and how to use it. 

Link baiting is just like fishing. You throw out your bait (which is your content) and hope people bite.  And once they bite, the magic of linkbaiting begins.  As people link to your website, talk about it and share your post on their favorite social networking sites, your content can spread like a viral.  Before you know it the short term and long term traffic visiting your website explodes. 

Once you’ve completed your website builder program, you need to become highly effective at linkbaiting.  Once you know how to do it, expect your search engine rankings to dramatically improve and your traffic to sky rocket.  To get you started, we’ve put together 10 insider secrets to linkbaiting that will help you ensure your website achieves its full traffic potential:

1. Run a Contest With a Great Prize:  people love free things, and this is one of the easiest ways to link bait and get people talking about your site.  Maybe one of your suppliers would give you a free item in exchange for some free publicity, or you could invest in a prize that you know will be worth the spend, considering the free publicity you’ll generate.  Set up a contest that’s relevant to your niche, your readers should take the bait and spread the word about your site globally.
2. The Linkubaitor:  this plug in makes it easy for people to link to your site.  It gives HTML code for website visitors to simply copy and paste on to their own site.  This generates more keyword rich links back to your site, which the search engines love. 
3. Create a valuable resource:  this is one of the most successful link baiting techniques.  Create articles that give people valuable information they want to share with their friends and their own website visitors.  Top 10 lists, how to articles, the history of… all of these are useful things that take time to compile, but will make your website extremely popular and sure to get you noticed.  For example, if you are in the building trade, you could write an article about “Ten Mistakes to Avoid when Hiring a Builder.”  Or if you’re a chartered accountant, you could write an article entitled, “How to get 50% off your tax bill.”  These are the kind of articles that get you noticed and make people want to link to your content. 
4. Be an expert in your niche:  you need to create a website about a topic you have knowledge of and can claim to be an expert.  Then you’re giving your visitors information of real value, that only an expert would know.  They’re more likely to share your information with their friends and readers, giving you more links and increased traffic to your site. 
5. Interview leading experts:  if you conduct an interview with a leading expert in your field, you’re bound to end up with hundreds of links to your website.  Try to get an exclusive interview and ask them about current topics that are relevant to your field and what people are talking about now.
6. Be Controversial!  Now obviously if you’ve just set up your website builder and created your blog, you don’t want to offend people.  However by saying something controversial and creating an article on that subject, you’ll stand out from the crowd and are more likely to pull in links to your content.  Know your niche, understand what people are saying and give a controversial opinion that no one else has thought of.  You’ll find that people will want to come back to find out what you’re going to say next!
7. Create Great Headlines!  Very often people make up their mind about your content by simply reading the title of your post.  Of course it’s important to keep SEO and keywords in mind when creating titles.  But you also want to give something that’s eye grabbing and will make people want to open up the link, read your content and then share it with their friends.  For example, a headline such as, How To Make Extra Money Working from Home, could be so much stronger.  Give specifics and eye grabbing information.  A better title would be, How To Make An Extra $120,000 A Year Working From Home!
8. Offer free tools:  if you’re giving something away for free, this is one of the most successful link baiting techniques.  People will link to your content and talk about it on their blogs and forums.  If you’re a computer expert, you may want to write a simple WordPress plug in or theme that you can give away for free.  Or you may have a free eBook that provides value to people in your niche.  A good example of this is our website builder program, which is available completely for free. 
9. Create a Resource List:  if you make your website a source of useful information, people will link to it and share with their friends.  A good example of this is the Resources and Plug ins page on this site.  It saves people so much time once they’ve created their website, with all the plug ins in one place, available for free.  Create a resource for your visitors and watch the links come in. 
10. Protect Your Website from Crashing: just a final piece of advice, when linkbaiting goes well you could receive tens of thousands of extra visitors in one day!  So you need to make sure your site and your host can handle them.  Many WordPress users will tell you horror stories of running a successful link baiting campaign completely in vain, because the sudden surge in extra traffic saw them booted off the server.  Use a plug in such as WP Super Cache, which freezes the state of your page that’s attracting all the extra traffic, preventing it from crashing.  The page is then manually refreshed at the interval you choose, instead of after every comment.  This plug in, and the others mentioned in this post, are available completely free on our resources page.