Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.
- Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
- Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
- Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
- Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
- Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
- Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
- Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
- Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
- If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.
Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.