Link Baiting - Writing Good Blog Reviews
Posted on October 31, 2007 - Filed Under Marketing Strategies
One of the buzz words around the hot topic of getting traffic to your blog is “link baiting”. As the description suggests, link baiting is the art of getting bloggers with high, consistent traffic to provide links to your blog for free.
There are a number of methods you can use to link baits from other bloggers:
Be a Top Commentator. Be the first or at least the first ten, to comment on their posts, and comment often. Most blog sites will allow you to add your web address to your comment, and if you are able to create a good impression that you know what you’re talking about, people will follow your link to visit your blogs. Many times, commentators will get people to visit their blog by just a witty comment, or even if only their name appears on the top commentator list or often enough in the comment threads.
Participate in forums. Be active in the discussion threads and refer members to articles / posts in your own blog and put in the link to your own website as often as possible. Be careful not to overdo it or you will earn the reputation of a spammer, and nobody likes spammers.
Blog Reviews. Write about the top bloggers, review their sites, and link back to their posts or articles as often as possible. Most bloggers have Tracking URLs activated and will receive pingbacks of people who have linked to an article with their blog. If they like what you have written about them in your blog, they might just add you to their blogroll or include a link to your article on them for free. And even if they don’t, tons of people search for these top bloggers on the Internet all the time, and chances are if you’ve written a review about a budding new blogger that who is rapidly building in traffic, your site will get listed in Google. Not convinced? Do a search for “Skelliewag“, a new blogger who has taken the blogosphere by storm, and notice how many of the links in the search page are of sites who have reviewed her blog. Reviewing blogs is a great way for your blog to get noticed, and if you don’t mind investing some money to get a top blogger to review your site, pay a visit to ReviewMe or contact John Chow who will review you for $500 if you want a cult following. Similarly, if you would like to make money reviewing sites (and this only works if you’ve already got some serious traffic), you can sign up at RevewMe to write advertorials for budding bloggers.
Interview Bloggers. Another way to get traffic is to interview successful bloggers. Do your research and choose a blog that is viewed as an authority in the field that your blog is targetting. Of course, not all of those you approach will agree to be interviewed, but if they do, take the opportunity to provide a unique insight / angle to these bloggers and point to key factors that led to their success. Again, for this to happen, you need to be spend time and effort to create quality and value added content rather than just a mediocre attempt to get your link backs. If you do this well, the search engines will love you, and the owner of the reviewed site will link you to his site to promote his own brand as you are providing a “customer testimonial” for him.
Social Networks. I’ve already written a post about social networks, and while this can work well for you if you’ve already got an existing fan club in digg or del.icio.us, it can be pretty frustrating and daunting to someone who is just starting out in social networking. My suggestion is your best bet while you’re still trying to build your presence in these social networks that you focus your energies on other niche social networks like StumbleUpon, and MyBlogLog.
But before you start link baiting and invite people to your blog, do remember that it is like opening up your house for a party. You need to make sure that all is in order before your guests come. Make sure that you have a decent looking site without bugs in your template (test it on browsers like Firefox, IE, and Safari), your posts are easy to find and comments-enabled, your metatags are in place, your subscription feeds are enabled and visible in your blog, and you have a personable and professional “About Me” blurb written. If so, its time to start the party!
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