by David Callan

Even as many webmasters go into all sorts of trouble to accumulate valuable links to their sites, some creative bloggers are using only carefully crafted posts and articles to attract more than enough high traffic and valuable links pointing at their blogs.

Actually they have clearly demonstrated that writing link-baiting articles and posts is a special skill of great value. The good news is that it is nevertheless a skill that can easily be learnt.

You Must First Find A Hook For Your Link Baiting Article
This sort of content or article is really a bait designed so that “the fish” that you are after do not think twice about “biting”. So the first thing that you must do is find a good “hook”.
Current news, especially if it is proving to be controversial, can help create a good hook for a link-baiting article. This is probably one of the easiest link baiting articles anybody can do. Just to give you a recent example. There was an interesting piece of news that was exclusively written by website that requires readers to sign in to read any articles. I badly needed to refer to it in one of my posts and I knew that if I linked to it my readers who were not members of this site would not be able to view the contents of the link. So I used the information to re-write my own version of the same story, linked to it from my article and forgot all about it.

Some weeks later when there was a new development on the story another high traffic blog linked to it and it resulted in a massive injection of extra traffic to my blog. It also ultimately dramatically boosted my rankings with all the search engines.

News, and controversial current news at that, can be quite an effective bait in creating link baiting content at your site

News From The Blogosphere And The Leading Blogger Can Even Be More Effective In Creating Your Link Baiting Content
Every particular industry tends to have its’ own particular “conversation” going on at any given time in the blogosphere and related discussion groups and forums. It could be a planned new law or a controversial development in the industry. It will basically be something that is being talked about a lot. So talked about that the leading and most influential bloggers on the subject will have already said a lot about the subject.
All you do is familiarize yourself as much as possible and then write content that disagrees with what the leading blogger has said. This is very similar to the offline situation where some minor expert comes out of the blue and disagrees with another leading expert on a controversial issue that has been in the news recently. There is a high chance that such a stunt will really stir up things. And that is exactly what a link baiting blogger is looking for.

The attack should not be personal but should be carried out in good taste, and do be sure that you really do have something to say.

When executed well some blog comments of this nature have been known to attract several hundred links within a few short hours.

Do Not Expect To Hit A Home Run With All Your Link-Baiting Articles
It is advisable that you set a timetable for attempting your link baiting articles or content. Once a week is ideal. It is important to remember that nobody really has a 100 per cent record in these things. Meaning that you will not always succeed in attracting links. And even when you are successful, home runs where you attract dozens of links at a time will be rare. What will be more common is content that attracts a handful of links. Still these regular handfuls of links will gradually accumulate and will tend to add up quickly so much so that within a relatively short period of time, there will be a dramatic effect on the ranking of your site. This is naturally the whole objective of the exercise.

In Conclusion
Link baiting content can be a very powerful SEO strategy and technique that can work relatively quickly in getting any blogger a good number of one way links pointed at their site and thus lifting a blog dramatically and quickly upwards in the rankings at search engines.