Do you ever wonder what it really takes to get thousands of links to your website with a small investment? Web developers use link building all the time, whether it’s in the form of countless directory submissions or guest posting. But link baiting is so much more powerful, as long as you know how to do it. People tend to associate link baiting with a “viral or fail” attitude — either a single piece of content gets thousands of links or it was a failure. But that’s not really true. Link baiting is doing what Google wants you to do, creating valuable content that people want to link to, even when you don’t ask them to.

But creating link bait is not as easy as filming your cat walking on the top of the couch, or writing yet another Top 10 Nobody Cares list. Fortunately, however, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

What is Link Bait?

Link bait is content, whether it’s an article, video, picture, widget, or infographic, that’s interesting to a large audience. It stands out as being humorous, valuable, or referential to your niche community. It’s also well designed (or sometimes, as you might find, very poorly designed) to attract attention. Best of all, link bait attracts organic links. While the power of link bait can be limited for keyword SEO (as people are not always going to link to you using the anchor text you want), it is the absolute best way to build authority to a “brandable” domain name. Look no further for an example than a site like Mashable.com.

It shouldn’t take long for business owners to realize the potential behind link bait. After all, almost every television commercial is designed to be memorable – whether it’s sleek, funny, controversial, or provides truly valuable information. Why should the concept be any different with online content?

It’s important to remember that almost any topic can become link bait, depending on how you treat the subject matter. For example, an article entitled “wireless providers in my area” is obviously meant to satisfy an SEO keyword need – but it’s not going to get many links on its own. On the other hand, what if you were to create a widget that matches a user with all of the wireless providers in the area based on their price range, location, technical needs, and housing situation? That could very easily become something people would want to share with others in the niche – link bait at its finest.

How to Create Link Bait

Now that you hopefully understand the power behind link bait, and how it can be applied to any business, it’s time to learn how to create it. Depending on your budget and technical/creative prowess, you might be limited at first – but that’s alright. There are plenty of ways to create link bait without needing to be an all-star content writer or a brilliant graphic designer.

Free to Cheap Options

Link Directories – These tend to be overdone, but I’m including them because they’re easy for anyone to create. Simply find a niche, like “hedgehogs as pets,” and compile a list of links to any sites that you feel have solid information on the topic, or a portion of the topic. Not only to people like to bookmark these pages and link to them, but the people you linked to in the directory may notice your “shout-out” and return the favor.

News-Worthy Articles – Follow Google Trends and news websites closely and create content based on that. Don’t just dryly rewrite the news stories – give them an intelligent, or humorous spin. For example, you might create an article called “The Downward Spiral of [Insert Celebrity]” which tells a story, and links to some major news sources for credibility.

Write Something Scary – Fear really does sell. While you won’t be making anything up if you don’t want to land in hot water, you can take a topic and apply a sense of urgency in an article, perhaps even warning consumers of a danger. Consider the topic “dog food.” You can easily get some clicks or links to an article called “10 Poisonous Chemicals Found in Dog Food” – at least more links than “How to Choose Dog Food.” Remember, don’t fabricate anything to get some links. But do look for information that others might avoid.

Getting on the Expensive Side

Create a Widget – Widgets are absolutely fantastic link bait if you know a programmer willing to work on the cheap, or if you have a decent budget. Widgets don’t fall under the typical umbrella of duplicate content like articles do. So, you have to get your widget out there as much as possible for it to become link bait. The idea behind the widget is to create a useful tool, like a calculator, that people will literally imbed on their blogs or websites. This, in turn, gives you countless links back to your own. We don’t need any more mortgage calculators by the way, but we could use a calculator to help determine how our daily meat consumption matches up to lions, tigers, and bears (oh my…).

Create an Infographic – If done well, and it should be, an infographic is also an expensive investment. Don’t use an infographic to add some pictures to your content – that’s a waste of time. Instead, use the graphics to literally become the content. You could create an inforgraphic listing the tallest mountains in the world with some pictures of mountains to the side. Or, you could have the pictures of the mountains be the data, like a graph. The key to making good infographics is to create them so every image belongs in the graphic. But keep the word count as low as possible – people don’t like to read paragraphs in their graphics.

As you can see, it’s not really all that difficult to create link bait. While you might distribute the content to some friends, the idea is that the majority of people will come to you – not the other way around. Make sure people know your content exists, but don’t force it. You’ll want to have some accurate data to see which efforts work and which don’t anyway. And remember, one solid piece of link bait is worth 100 forced links, every time.

“Back Link Strategies”

Most methods people use to build back links quit being effective in 2008.

Things like mass directory submissions, article syndication, indiscreet reciprocal linking, press releases, paid links and even link baiting. Yet many SEO continue to sell these methods as link building services.

Just think about it, you pay somebody to do a blog post about your website, they write a post and place a link to your website. A month later, most of these bloggers have given up and decided that is not how they want to make money…so now your link is sitting on a blog that is either gone off-line or has a link to you that is buried inside a blog no one uses any longer.

And directory links, press releases and articles sites all work the same way, eventually your article gets buried inside an article site with 1 million other articles and the link becomes worthless.

Let us not forget that Google is very good at discounting strategies people use when building back links. I mean come on…you have to know that when everybody is talking about building back links by submitting their websites to directories, Google is going to quit counting links from directories.

How stupid do you think Google is?

If you are serious about making money online then you need to become serious about becoming someone online.

There are a million social networking sites that can be used to build your name and reputation.

If you want to rank in Google then you need real links that are credible links and come from credible people. Not a credible site but from a credible person.

The real back link strategy is not to build back links but to build a credible business.