Often marketers will put in significant hours developing linkbait. With such an investment in time, you’d think they’d take action to lengthen the impact of their hard work. Unfortunately this is not the case.
As Wiep discussed in his excellent post about different types of linkbait, it is imperative that you define goals for your campaign before developing anything. Depending on the audience you’re targeting and the goal of the link bait there are certain actions you can take to ensure you’re desired outcome is achieved.
One Way Links
If you’re looking for links back to your site, then you should go out of your way to put in messages around your link bait instructing visitors how to link back to your site, even going as far as providing them the html needed in order to link back to you. An advantage of this is you can select the anchor text people use to link back to you, assuming they copy and paste the html directly from your site.
Feed Subscriptions, Repeat Traffic
Prominently display your RSS button on your page, even more so than on other pages. Make it huge! Make sure you have links to many other relevant pages on your site from the link bait page. Have an ‘If you liked this, you will also like…’ or ‘If you found this funny, sign up to get similar material sent to you.’ Put an ’email this story/photo/video to a friend’ button around the linkbait to increase it’s virability (my spell check is giving me guff cause it’s not a word, but I’m riding with it). These are just examples and I’d advise you to change up the text to make it more appealing and industry specific, but hopefully you get the point. The lower your link bait’s bounce rate, the more likely you are to get repeat traffic and/or RSS subscriptions. Do everything you can (within reason) to keep them clicking through to relevant pages on your site.
Sales
Why not create a landing page that has a one time discount or a buy one get one free limited time offer for people that enter the site via your linkbait piece? Having complimentary products along with the featured product is a basic e-commerce technique, but you’d be surprised at the number of stores I see that don’t do it. Something I’ve seen work well is an email sign up saying something along the lines of ‘Don’t feel like buying now? We’ll let you know when this product is on sale again.’ In addition to the contact info, the next screen allows them to enter other products/services they would be interesting in receiving notifications about. Congratulations, you just got one more person who has expressed interest in your product and given you permission to market to them, over and over again.
These are just a small fraction of the actions people can take to ensure they receive the maximum benefit from their link bait. You put in too much time to put out linkbait, have a profitless traffic surge for a few days, then be back at square one a few weeks later. With these tips and others you develop on your own, you can *elongate* the impact of your hard earned traffic.
*Before all you Webster’s point it out, I know ‘elongate’ is not the proper word here, but I can honestly say I don’t think the word has EVER been used in an SEO blog, and I think it’s a funny word, so leave it alone.