We all know that link baiting can be one of the efficient ways of getting more websites to link to yours (if you don’t, please go read these articles first). However, there’s a huge difference between knowing that it could work, and actually being successful with it.

In my opinion, there are five important success determining factors for a link bait, and you’ll have to score at least 4/5 in order to reach the results you’re after;

• The idea
• The title/ headline
• The content
• The promotion
• Luck

In this article, I’ll try to give you some directions for finding good ideas that match your situation. That leaves you with only having to fill in the other four :)

Everything starts with having a goal

Before you even start thinking about link baiting, you should have some goals prepared. These goals usually come from your marketing or business plan, and should be followed up by an evaluation of your current situation (or the other way around, depending on your business process).  During this evaluation, you’ll take look at where you’re at right now, if your goals are still achievable, and what you’d have to do in order to achieve those goals.

If the goals seem to be within reach, you’ll have to decide what kind of link building strategy would probably be the most effective in your situation. And if it turns out that link baiting is the appropriate weapon of choice, you usually have three options.

Single target link bait

This is where you create a piece of highly targeted content, in order to obtain a link from just one or two -very valuable- websites. In case you’re desperately looking for high authority websites, it might be worth it to devote some extra time to getting your dream site to link to yours. Writing guest content for high authority websites in your niche is single target link bait as well, in my opinion. If your site doesn’t seem to be trusted enough in the eyes of Google, make obtaining a few highly authoritative links your main goal.

Best matching link baiting hook: Education & information.

Limited target link bait

Another option is to create a piece of content which is targeted at a relatively small group of very relevant websites. A great example of this is the recently re-launched ‘Top 100 Online Marketers‘, which is well-targeted at the egos of 100 online marketers and their followers. With a specific audience of high profile internet marketers, the result of this campaign is probably quite some awareness amongst (and links from) a relevant group of people and websites. If your link profile lacks relevance, a limited target link bait is your friend.

Best matching link baiting hook: Resources.

Mass link bait

The most well know version of link baiting is the mass version, where a piece of content is created that is supposed to reach a very large audience. You can see examples, including 20 amazing facts about beer or this amazing shark pic, waiting for at you at Digg or Reddit’s front page every single day. Although the average relevance and/ or the quality of the links that a mass link bait campaign can result in is usually relatively low, the amount of links can be very high. If you’re mainly looking for plain numbers, a mass link bait is probably the way to go.

Best matching link baiting hook: Entertainment, widgets.

Know, and understand your audience

Each of these three link baiting options requires a different approach, because you’re dealing with different audiences. Your audience is not only the people who end up visiting your website, but also the people who link to you and (either directly or indirectly) help you to promote your content. If these people think your content is good enough, they’ll spread the word – it’s as simple as that. But how do you know if your audience will like it?

Define who your audience is

First, you’ll have to know who your audience is, and this depends on the type of link bait you’ll be using. It’s relatively easy with a single target link bait, but it can be more difficult for the other types of link bait. Once you’ve identified your audience, write it down on a piece of paper, so it’ll remain clear for you in the future as well.

Know what moves your audience (into linking to external sources)

Now that you know who your audience is, you can try to find out what you can do to make them link to you. Find out why they have linked to other websites before, find out which of the principles of persuasion they are most likely sensitive to, etcetera. When it comes to mass link baiting, try to find out what moves the larger groups you want to reach (and their influencers), for example by learning more about them.

Analyzing for new ideas

Now it’s time to move on to the part where you can actually try to come up with good ideas. Finally.

I have explained a few brainstorming methods earlier, but here are a few additional tips.

Single target link bait brainstorming

This is the easiest to do. During your situation analysis, you have (hopefully) identified a few ‘link building must-haves’; websites that are highly authoritative in your niche, and which would be really valuable to add to your link profile. These websites should be worth it to put in some extra effort for, otherwise you’d have to target them either via a limited target link bait or a mass link bait.

Try to find out:

• What the most relevant pages on their website are.
• What kind of websites they’re currently linking to, and from what pages they link to them (for example via Bing’s linkfromdomain: command).
• What kind of content they’re missing, or which content is incomplete or incorrect.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, such as Delicious.

Mix these things up, match it with your audience, and try to come up with an idea.

Let’s do this with an example – let’s say you’re in internet marketing :). It shouldn’t be hard to find a few key influencers and websites that get linked to a lot in our industry. Like I mentioned before, guest posting would be an option, but you could also try a Cuttbait.

Limited target link bait brainstorming

Now you have to broaden your view a little bit. In stead of taking a look at just one target, you’ll have to look at multiple different targets at the same time, and look for commonalities. With relatively small groups, ego baiting (such as the earlier mentioned Top 100 list) can be very successful.

Try to find out:

• What the most important influencers in your target group are. When one starts, the rest usually follows.
• What (kind of) pages the majority of the target group links to.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, preferably social niche websites.
• What kind of websites the most important influencers in your target group currently are linking to, and from what pages they link to them.

Let’s use the same example again. Websites like Sphinn can help you to find even more important influencers, and you can keep an eye on link posts to find important websites and inspiring content. Asking people to help with research or creating an industry award could be good options. A quiz might work as well, but you’d be targeting a much bigger group with something like that.

Mass target link bait brainstorming

This is the easiest to do. During your situation analysis, you have (hopefully) identified a few ‘link building must-haves’; websites that are highly authoritative in your niche, and which would be really valuable to add to your link profile. These websites should be worth it to put in some extra effort for, otherwise you’d have to target them either via a limited target link bait or a mass link bait.

Try to find out:

• What the most important influencers in your target group are. When one starts, the rest usually follows.
• What pages/ websites the majority of these influencers links to.
• What kind of content is popular on relevant social media platforms, such as Digg or StumbleUpon.
• What kind of content, which is relevant to yours, has made it to leading news/ entertainment/ etc. websites.

Back to the example; broaden your view, and take a look at the tech section of the Guardian or WSJ, and find out what kind of content gets mentioned. Besides news related stuff, creating a bunch of useful tools, a much more general award, or developing a dozen or so great plugins could work perfectly also. Still not big enough? How about a layoff tracker?

Conclusion

Coming up with good ideas isn’t difficult, but finding the right idea that perfectly matches your situation can be pretty hard sometimes. Knowing what you need (authority, relevance or quantity) is important in this process. Not with getting more creative, but with helping you focusing on the right type of ideas, and therefore finding the right solution.

Please note: Just like with nearly anything related to marketing, there is no ’scientifically proven method’; this is just how I look at things and try to get links. Do you have additions, or do you use an other approach? The comment entry field is down below ;)

Just recently, I was talking with someone about a linkbait campaign. He suggested that, instead of creating one page with outstanding content, it might be better to create two pages with good content for the same price. I didn’t agree with this, and we had a discussion about this topic, which lead to an (in my opinion) interesting comparison.

For those who know a thing or two about cars – in my opinion, choosing between good content and excellent content is like choosing between giving away a BMW, or giving away a Bugatti Veyron. A BMW (I just couldn’t resist :) ) is a car. It’s a great, luxury car, but it’s still a car. You can see them in your street, on the highway, in the city, etc. And although most people can never afford a BMW, it’s nearly a commodity.

A Bugatti Veyron isn’t a car, it’s a space ship. It’s a dream. It’s the most exclusive car in the world. You might know someone who has a friend, who has a neighbor, who’s cousin has once seen a Bugatti Veyron, but that’s about as close as you’ll ever get to a Veyron.

Giving away a BMW is good. You’ll definitely attract some attention with the campaign, and some people will think “Whoah, I’d definitely want to win one of those”. However, a campaign like this has probably been done by others at least a few times, so it basically isn’t something new. Participants will enter, and move on with their life.

Giving away a Bugatti Veyron is amazing. It probably hasn’t been done before by someone else, so it’s unique. People will go “What the….? Are they out of their mind? Hey Mike! Come take a look at this, someone’s giving away a Veyron!”. They will participate, tell their friends about it, and keep a close eye on the contest to see if they’ve won. And even when they didn’t win, they’ll keep telling their friends that they’ve ‘nearly won a Veyron once’.

The first contest, just like good content, will probably result in some solid links and an increase in traffic. With the second campaign, just like with excellent content, you’ll see all kinds of press jump on it. If you promote it the right way, it can lead to dozens of excellent links, hundreds of other mentions, and a shitload of traffic.

My point is that, with linkbait, it’s well worth it to put in a few extra hours, dollars or whatever to shift your content’s quality from good to excellent. The simple equation below, which I use for link marketing, confirms that statement.

To explain the equation, in case it’s not clear to understand (I usually suck at making myself clear :) ) – the result is always fixed, because you’ve (hopefully) set yourself a goal.

Let’s say that the result you’re after has to be 100x. With an offer value (and your content usually is your offer) of 10x, it means that you’ll have to put in the same amount of sales to reach the end result of 100x. However, if you double the quality of your offer, you’ll only have to put in half of the effort that you originally needed.

Keep in mind that the sales quality (the quality of your pitch, how you use your network, etc.) plays a role in this as well. A low sales quality raises the amount of effort you need to put in, but a high sales quality can decrease that amount.

To make a long story short: increase the quality of your content, so you can take it easier on the promotional efforts to reach the same result. Or even better, put in the same effort you had planned, and achieve much better results.

Six and a half years ago (which is ages, in Internet years), Robin Nobles, Eric Ward, and John Alexander compiled a legendary list of 131 legitimate link building strategies. Four years later, Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans published 101 link building tips to market your website, which was inspired by the other article. Considering the furiously changing face of search engine marketing and with 2009 already ahead of us, I thought it was time to evaluate both lists and create an updated collection of link building strategies.

7 Internal link building strategies

1. Make sure that your navigation is spiderable. Either use (anchor text carrying) text based navigation, or an image based navigation with relevant alt attributes attached to each image link.

2. Breadcrumbs are a great internal linking tool. Use them for usability and anchor text differentiation.

3. In-content links not only tend to have a higher click through rate and perceived trust, but are also able to add more relevance to a link because of the surrounding text.

4. Use a sitemap. A good sitemap is useful for visitors, useful for search engines and, therefore, useful for you.

5. Link to topically relevant pages on important pages of your website. Link to important pages on every (or most) topically relevant page of your website.

6. Be consistent in linking behavior. If you link to homepage.com, always link to homepage.com, and not to homepage.com, homepage.com/index.php and homepage.com/index.php&id=123.

7. Identify your most linked-to pages, and make sure that the link juice flows to your most important pages from there, in a well-optimized way.

10 Easy link building starters

8. Optimize your existing links. Contact the webmasters of prominent websites that link to you and ask them to change ‘click here’ to an anchor text that contains relevant keywords, an anchor text that encourages clicking through, or -ideally- a combination of both.

9. Monitor your 404 statistics. Keep track of whoever links to old pages or misspelled URLs, which is data that Google provides as well. Contact those webmasters and provide them a good URL which they can link to.

10. Create a ‘link to us’ page, where you provide information about how people can link to you and which URL(s), logo and/ or anchor text they can use. Update this page regularly in order to diversify the anchor text.

11. Contact family, friends, colleagues and other people you know and let them know about your website. Some will send you useful feedback, others -who happen to have a website of their own- might link to you.

12. Do you block search engine bots from indexing certain parts of your website via robots.txt or meta-noindex? Find out if people link to this section of your site. If so, contact the webmasters of these sites and kindly ask them to link to an other page of your website.

13. Use your spell check. People will more likely link to correctly spelled articles than to content that’s full of grammatical errors.

14. Search for websites that already mention your business name or URL, but haven’t linked to your website. This works excellently in Yahoo!.

15. Look for websites that mention your personal name, but currently don’t link to your site. Use Yahoo! for this as well.

16. Leave comments on the blogs you visit every day. Hey, you’re visiting them anyway, so why don’t leave a (relevant, useful!) comment?

17. Find out which website your company owns. If you work for a small company, there may possibly be several. If you work for a large company, the number will probably knock you off your shoes. Link these websites (carefully!) together, or redirect the most important and/ or relevant ones to your main website.

12 Old school link building techniques

18. Search for related websites by using relevant keywords. Filter out all interesting websites and contact them. When you did this for your main keyword(s), there are still tons of other combinations possible.

19. Check which websites link to your competitors. Try to get them to link to your website as well.

20. Check which types of websites link to websites that offer the same services or products as you, but in a different country/ language. This might result in a “I never thought of that…” feeling.

21. Either interview an expert from your field, or try to get interviewed by someone else. Don’t forget to mention your best content: readers of the interview might be willing to link to it.

22. Write guest posts for relevant websites in your niche. You could also write posts about your industry for websites that are slightly related to your niche.

23. Teach. Whether it’s a public workshop (local press), a class at a local college or University (.edu website) or at a business related event (industry links), teaching can result in authority links.

24. Use any search engine advertising program and advertise on keywords that linkerati might use. Try to convert the targeted traffic into links.

25. Use Google AdWords’ content network to determine which (relevant) websites generate traffic and conversions. Contact those websites directly.

26. Join an affiliate program. See #25.

27. Determine who’s linked to you before. Contact them again when you’re releasing an interesting new piece of content.

28. Trade links. There’s nothing wrong, with swapping links with a few, highly relevant, authority websites that can bring in extra traffic. Exchanging links with lots of irrelevant websites, however, might get you in trouble.

29. Donate to a charity. Although buying links is not allowed by Google, there are still lots of ways you can buy links (kind of) legitimately.

12 Places to submit your URL to

30. Most social media websites are only useful for promoting good content (which will get you links in return), but sites like LinkedIn still provide dofollow links with an anchor text of your choice.

31. Some general directories, such as DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web are still worth submitting your website to. Make sure to submit your site to the most appropriate category.

32. High quality, niche directories can be worth considering as well. Notice the emphasis on high quality.

33. Don’t forget to submit your website to high quality, regional directories. Especially worthwhile for websites that target local markets.

34. Publish stunning, interesting, funny or beautiful images in your Flickr account, that contains a link to your website.

35. Writing an article about a relevant topic, that contains one or more links to your website, and submitting it to article directories such as eZineArticles might work for you.

36. Relevant, non-spammy links in Wikipedia articles, Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups may have nofollow attributes attached, but can lead to (dofollow) links indirectly.

37. Submit your RSS feed to important RSS directories.

38. Blog directories may be willing to link to your blog. Submit your blog to the high quality ones.

39. Use PR websites to distribute your press releases, in addition to your PR agency. Make sure that your press release contains one or more (clickable) links to your website.

40. Got a great design? Submit your site to CSS directories and/ or website design contests. Even well-designed parts of your website can result in links.

41. Twitter. Just published a new post or article? Mention it on Twitter, your followers might visit it and -if they find it interesting- link to it.

12 Ways to make people write about you

42. Send out christmas gifts or birthday gifts to bloggers (or website owners) you know.

43. Offer services or a product in exchange for a review. Don’t ask the bloggers or webmasters to link to you, they most often will do anyway.

44. Create something unique. Top 10s, top 250s, mash-ups, how-tos, best-ofs, surveys, studies, awards. Define the proper hook, create unique content and attract good links. The possibilities are infinite.

45. Try to start a hype, use a new word, get a meme going, or do something else you’re the first at.

46. Link to others. People -especially bloggers- will notice it if you link to them. If you do this several times and offer content that is or might be relevant to these bloggers, they might link to you as well eventually.

47. If you happen to have some breaking news, offer a blogger (or a select group) the scoop. Bloggers love to publish scoops.

48. Say something groundbreaking, shocking, confronting, stupid, weird or flattering. People tend to link to others who are different or act that way.

49. Create something with an amazing design. This does not necessarily have to be your website, just having an awesome business card can result in extra links.

50. Launch an extraordinary offline campaign. People will talk about this online. If you integrate this offline campaign with an online version in a perfect way, you may even receive some extra links from ‘this is how you should integrate offline and online’-articles as well.

51. Create a contest and offer give-aways for winners. This is not only a great way to get attention, but to get valuable input as well, for example when hosting a guest post contest.

52. Build useful tools and/ or plugins that are free to use.

53. Speak at an industry conference. You’ll meet lots of interesting new people, and will probably get mentioned in several conference write-ups.

12 Common business tactics

54. Add a link to your local Chamber of Commerce profile.

55. The Better Business Bureau, and any industry related association you’re a member of are interesting link targets as well.

56. Contact your (preferred) suppliers, manufacturers, other partners. Obtain links from these website if they have a partners page as well.

57. Offer to write testimonials or a quote to your suppliers, if they are willing to link back to your site in or near this testimonial.

58. Ask clients to write testimonials about your product or service that they publish on their website, in exchange for a discount, extra fast delivery or any other benefit you can provide.

59. Hire a publicist. Press agency employees usually know the right people in the right places, which can result in a higher acceptancy rate of your press release.

60. Join relevant forums. You can either link to your website on your profile page, in your signature or in your posts. Notice how this one is listed under ‘Business related tactics’ in stead of ‘Places to submit your URL to’? There’s a reason why: forums are not places to drop links, but to join discussions.

61. Sponsor something. There are tons of possibilities, such as an industry conference, a sports club, a relevant forum, a local happening, or just any offline event that happens to have a website.

62. Hire an intern. You can let him or her work on a piece of research, which you can in your link building process. Also, don’t forget the website of the University you’re intern is attending.

63. Offer awesome product or services. People love talking about great stuff they’ve bought. If your products are ‘just’ good in stead of awesome, make sure that your after sales or customer care is excellent. People love talking about companies with a great service as well. Of course, offering crappy products or a lousy service will also result in links, but I don’t think those are the links you’re after.

64. Look for companies that went out of business. Either acquire their website, or contact the website that they’re currently getting links from and ask these sites to link to you in stead.

65. Turn your colleagues into link developers. Each of them has his or her own specialty and group of contacts. This not only take works off of your hands, but is very efficient as well.

4 Important considerations

66. Hire a link builder or an expert. Either let somebody you trust manage (a part of) your campaign, or visit a link building workshop. Especially when you’ve been building links for your own site for several years, a fresh mind can bring new ideas.

67. Hang in there. Link building isn’t something you can do in just a few hours, or something that you only have to do during one week in a year. Building a brand can’t be done in a single day, the same goes for a solid link profile. It’s a continuing process that takes time. Lots of time.

68. Keep an eye on the news. Follow important and interesting different blogs, in order to keep up with the latest news, trends and tricks. I’m not just talking about link building or SEM blogs, but make sure to follow general marketing blogs, slightly different, creative blogs or industry related news websites as well.

69. If you have to ask yourself ‘is this a legitimate approach’ or ’should I be doing this’, the answer is probably no. Too much, too aggressive or too shady isn’t advisable. Don’t do things you would be ashamed of when explaining them to your mother. Or Matt Cutts.

0 Advanced link building strategies

There is no such thing as advanced link building. While this list already sums up quite a few different strategies, I’m pretty sure that you can easily come up with a dozen more, that are specifically suitable for your company or industry.

Eric Ward once said that link building is “one part marketing, two parts public relations, and three parts common sense”. I’d say that link building is 10% basic SEO knowledge, 20% business thinking, 30% creativity and 40% perseverance. Either way, there’s nothing advanced to it.

A linkbait doesn’t need thousands of links to be successful, a few dozen high quality links can be more than enough. Of course, a mix of quantity and quality would be the ideal situation, but that’s pretty hard to accomplish. Today, an article in a newspaper pointed out a piece of research that -although it sure wasn’t meant as one- could easily take the title ‘mother of all linkbaits’.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities, a ranking of all universities worldwide, not only manages to get links from dozens of newspapers, blogs and other media related websites, but they get dozens of links from several top rated universities from all over the world as well. Each year!

Seriously, if you want to get links from universities (preferably from universities that offer studies related to your product), try to get their attention with things like related award, studies, or a piece of research link the ARWU. Even universities are proud of their awards.

This is the third and last part of the guide to building link targeted content. Part one was titled Researching for Inspiration & Brainstorming for Ideas and part two discussed Creating Content & Preparation. All posts are available as a combined, single post or as pdf (14 pages of black text on white background, I promise…), as per request.

Awesome piece of content? Check! Solid preparation? Check! Well, let’s move on then!

The Launch

If your aim is slightly off, or when not all engines light up at the same time, the launch will still proceed, but the target will be missed. No matter how good your missile is. As soon as you hit the launch button, there is no way back.

Launch controller, by Vernk

Timing is important

The timing is an important factor during every launch. However, there is no ‘ideal’ time during the day for hitting the launch button. Although there are some excellent studies on what time might be best to submit your stories to Digg, this still depends on factors like the language of your website, the countries where most of your link targets live, the subject of your content and the market segment you’re targeting. For example, an official newsworthy press release can be more successful in the morning, while an entertaining blog post might work better in the evening. Testing helps to determine what might work best in your situation.

Submitting ain’t that easy

When you submit (or let someone else submit) your piece of content to social media sites, such as Digg, there are several things that can either make or break your submission. The title of the submission, the description, the category where you submit the story to and the visibility of the submitter all play part in the process of reaching the front page. The only problem here is that you need to pass every possible pitfall without falling, one single miss will result in an overall FAIL. Both Marshall Kirkpatrick and David Wallace have written excellent posts about how to submit your story properly.

Pitching pitfalls

Besides hitting the front pages of several social media websites, you also want to reach as many a-list bloggers in your niche as possible. Some of these bloggers might find your content through your social media efforts, but a good pitch to the right bloggers and journalists will result in additional coverage and links as well. Hopefully, after reading part one, you’ve gathered the contact information of several influencing, relevant webmasters and bloggers. When you’re contacting these people, be personal, interested and honest. There are several things you really have to avoid and several things you really have to consider while contacting bloggers, but in my opinion, it bears down to those three factors.

Use your network wisely

A good network is one of the most important tools of a successful marketer. In stead of doing everything by yourself, you can ask friends, relatives or even friends of friends to do stuff for you or to help you out with something. In stead of being alone, you can have a huge team of specialists working together on your piece of content, if you manage to use your network the right way. Imagine yourself what a master of headlines, a social media power user and an expert in the field of your choice can accomplish together. At first, you might think that spending several hours a week helping out other people, or chatting, Twittering, discussing and emailing with them is a waste of time, but this can really pay off in the long run. A good network is worth quite a few bucks…

Monitoring

Like I said before, as soon as you hit the launch button, there’s no way back. It is, however, still possible to adjust the path slightly or to avoid obstacles that suddenly appear. In order to do this, you have to monitor everything, because you’ll have to react quickly.

An ambulance pulse monitor, by Vitiis

Be on top of your stats

Your website statistics can provide excellent data of where your content gets picked up. Use this data to monitor your new backlinks, the traffic every link sends and the average time spent on your site per referrer. You might want to check out websites that send lots of traffic or sites that provide visitors who click through more often, to see what the post or link looks like. If necessary, contact the owner of the site, for example to provide additional info, to request a slightly different anchor text or just to send him or her a thank you note.

Join discussions

Besides bloggers and journalists, you might see several others discuss your brand, product or content as well, for example in blog comments or forum threads. If you only have the slightest idea that it’s a legit website, don’t hesitate to join these discussions. By leaving additional information (or dropping a link to a relevant web page or site), answering questions or -again- just by simply thanking others for the attention and/ or compliments, you’ll show commitment. And commitment builds brands.

Besides your website statistics, there are several other tools that you can use to track these discussions. Google Alerts and Technorati will lead you to the majority of the pages where your piece of content gets mentioned.

After care

The launch was successful and the traffic seems to be over its peak. Now is the time to turn the campaign into a real success, by directing the link juice, expanding your network and planning the follow-up.

Even more beauty awaits after the storm, by ladyinpurple

Directing the link juice

The main goal of link targeted content is -obviously- attracting links. Once you’ve obtained multiple links, whether it’s 5 or 50,000 links, it’s quite important to use the power of these links optimally. Attracting links is one thing, but leveraging the juice of these links the right way looks like a whole different ball game for some.

For example, the brilliant (Dutch) Hema viral campaign for Hema gathered nearly 30,000 links. The only problem is that there isn’t a single link on that page that can pour link juice over the rest of the website…

There are several things that you can do to avoid situations like this, and to let your entire website enjoy the taste of link juice;

• Use in-content links to other important pages on your website. Adding these links to the content page, after the first traffic- and link peak is over, works perfectly fine.
• Slap a nofollow tag on links to pages that aren’t that important, or remove some navigational links on your link bait page.
• Afterwards alterings. Make small changes to the page you’ve promoted, such as a slightly improved title or by adding a few relevant keywords and/ or links.
• 301-redirect the page to a different URL as soon as the traffic slows down. I personally wouldn’t recommend 301-ing in most situations, though. And I’m certainly not the only one (exact same example, btw).

Maintain your new network

You’ve attracted lots of links, both your RSS subscriber number and the amount of Twitter followers have skyrocketed, you’ve participated in several interesting discussions, left numerous comments on other blogs and collected a few email addresses of influential linkerati. Say hello to your new, expanded network. If you can maintain your entire network with care, you’ll make the process launching another piece of content in the future much, much easier.

Follow up

In stead of preparing a single piece of content, make sure to have several more great posts, articles, videos or other material waiting in the queue to get published. It’s much easier to attract additional links when you’re still enjoying your first flow of attention, than when possible linkers have already moved on. The linkerati you managed to get in touch with will also be more likely to link to another one of your pages, when your website’s name is still fresh in their memory. A good follow up strategy builds you a more solid name, it makes sure that you won’t lose subscribers and it avoids the risk of looking like (or becoming) a one day fly.

Conclusion

While some seem to think that a campaign -whether it’s a viral, a link marketing, or any other campaign- is over as soon as you hit the launch button, that’s just one of the several stops during the journey. Monitoring the campaign thoroughly and optimizing the results with care can make or break the outcome. Preparing a solid follow up can make life a lot more easy in the future.

The most important factors of a successful campaign, however, are planning and dedication. If you can manage to think one step ahead, you’ll manage to stay ahead of your competition as well. And sure, you might have success with something that you made in just five minutes, or with something that accidentally came across your path, but you’ll only reach maximum effect if you’re dedicated enough to walk through all steps.

This is the second part of a three posts counting guide to building link targeted content. Part one was titled Researching for Inspiration & Brainstorming for Ideas.

The first part of this series was a selection of tips on how to use your surroundings to come up with interesting ideas that can lead to great amounts of traffic, attention and links. After you’ve carefully selected the idea of your choice, it’s time to prepare yourself thoroughly and to turn that idea into a content page that’s capable of reaching the audience that you’ve always wanted to target.

Creating Killer Content

There are many characteristics of killer content, most of which are important enough to make or break your launch. Misuse of images, boring pages, bad language or other distracting factors can lead to failure. Remember that a even a flagship is as strong as its weakest link.

Your flagship does not necessarily have to be a boat, by DC3-Detroit

Headline

A superb headline can create a massive amount of attention for just a mediocre article, but a bad headline can result in a killer peace of content that doesn’t get noticed. Make sure to give your content the headline that it deserves, but don’t overdo it.
Also, don’t forget to try to get a related keyword into your headline. Because a part of the webmasters that link to your page will use the original title as anchor text, this will increase the possibility that you’ll end up ranking for those keywords. Don’t force in a keyword, though. A good headline prevails over a keyword rich headline.

First paragraph

Although you may choose to submit your own piece of content to Digg and StumbleUpon (or let someone submit it for you), you’ll probably -and hopefully- won’t submit it to every social media platform out there. If you want to increase the chance of hitting the frontpage of social news sites that you don’t even know exist, you’ll have to make sure that the first paragraph is a great one. People who submit stuff to social media websites regularly -me included-, often use the first (or one of the first) lines of text and use it as the description of the submission. Make it easier for them AND make it more likely to hit the front page by creating your own description that’s disguised as an opening paragraph.

Content

The appearance of a page can either be informational (mostly text), it can be visual (images all over the place), or it can be usable (a tool, or movable objects). Of course, a page can be a mix of the above, but usually, only one will be the upper hand. Make sure

Informational page
If you’ve created an information page, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use images, but use them wisely. The text is the most important of the page, so make sure that the images you use don’t distract your readers. In stead, you could spice it up a notch with graphical text images, a great header, or interesting charts for example. The images must serve the rest of the content. Oh, and don’t forget to use that spell check.

Visual page
If you’re building a page that’s mostly visual, it’s tempting to stuff it with as many images and as many different colors as possible. However, using too many images, a lot of different colors, or even mixing up different styles can make your page look cluttered and unclear. If you focus on a single (or just a few) images in stead, take your time when selecting colors and try to keep the page in a single style, it’ll be much easier to ‘understand’ and to digest. Try to avoid the most common stock images, though, or try to make them look differently in stead.

Usable page
The fact that you’re creating a page that’s meant to be ‘used’, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be interesting to look at. While the focus should be on clarity, ease of use and the end result, attractiveness definitely shouldn’t be neglected.

About page

Nothing is worse than reading a great post on a blog or a great article on a website, and you can’t find the name of the author anywhere. Or his or her email address.
Provide as much information as possible. This will not only look much more professional, but it’ll also help you to build a personal brand and it increases the chance of someone actually contacting you. You might provide a contact button, but if I can’t find out who to contact, I probably won’t give it a try.

Ask for help

I don’t consider myself to be a very good writer and I really suck at programming. Although I’m trying to improve it, I also can’t design very well. Just like me, you probably don’t own all of these skills as well, so that’s why you’ll have to get some help from time to time.

The relationship between the quality of content and the amount of attention is an exponential one. A slight increase in quality (the difference between your design skills and those of your friend/ colleague/ business partner) can cause a massive increase in attention. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, you can’t be the best in everything.

Besides increasing the possibility of success, asking help also saves you time and it can improve your business network as well.

Preparation

Unlike some seem to think, preparation does not start one day before the planned launch. Preparation starts on the day that you decide what you’re going to build, it’s more time consuming than most people think and it’s a key factor in any launch.

Good preparation ensures a save flight, by The Library of Congress

Network like a pro

Networking does not start after your product launch, press release or whatever you’re distributing. It starts weeks before that. Contact journalists and try building up a relationship. This does not only benefit you now, but it will be an advantage when you’re trying to reach that bigger audience next time as well. A PR pitch has more effect if you know the one you’re sending the pitch to, even if you happen to know this person for just a short while yet.

Try to create a powerful social online profile, such as a Digg or StumbleUpon profile. You’ll need all the luck of the world if you try to reach Digg’s front page with a profile that you’ve created just ten minutes ago.

Use the people you know. Friends, family members or other people in your personal network that happen to know someone that owns a related website or that participates online in any way, might be able to help you promoting your piece as well. Don’t spam them for every thing you publish, though, or don’t look surprised if you have difficulties reaching them again if you do…

Preparing your target list

You’ve already done research in your niche and you’ve probably kept track of your competitors as well. Hopefully, you’ve saved all this data, because this data can jump start your target press list.
Check out which news websites, bloggers and portals have linked to related stories that went hot in the past and you’ll end up with a list of targets that are both interested in the subject and capable of making your launch a success.

Preparation Checklist

Although some of these points may seem silly, there are several things you shouldn’t forget to check. You wouldn’t be the first one that almost launched a very successful campaign, but ended up in a ‘Top 10 Stupid Marketing Mistakes of the Year’ list in stead…

bandwidth
- do you have sufficient bandwidth or do you have shared hosting?
email usage & contact info
- is important info, such as your email address, correctly displayed on your website and does it work?
double check the page
- double check for things like layout and multiple browser compatibilities. Let a friend check it out, for example.
statistics
- don’t forget to include your analytics code on the content page.
misspellings
- re-read the entire page word for word to make sure that everything is spelled out correctly.

In short

Even a slight mistake or less attractive feature can turn a great piece of content into an almost great piece of content. And almost great just isn’t good enough. If you can’t make something exceptional yourself, ask help, input or advice from someone who can.

Although some might try to, you can’t create a successful content marketing campaign overnight. Solid preparation is key and this starts days (but more often weeks) in advance. If you want to be successful next week, you’ll have to lay the foundation today and start building tomorrow.

Stay tuned -or subscribe to the RSS- for the last part of this series, which will be titled ‘Launching, Monitoring & After Care’.