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.

Push my Buttons!

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.

Push my Buttons!

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.

Push my Buttons!

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’.

Push my Buttons!

There’s no doubt that creating a valuable piece of content is a great way -and maybe even the best way- to attract links. However, when I mention link baiting (or link targeted content), I often get reactions like ‘it sounds nice, but link baiting probably isn’t the way to go for me’, or that ‘building content to attract links doesn’t work in my industry’. Bullocks. In a three step guide (of which this is part one) I’ll try to show you how everyone can come up with great ideas, can turn the idea into a piece of killer content and can make that piece attract great links.

Start Close

While it usually is best to enter a brainstorming session with a blank mindset, it’s even better to check what you’ve got first. Good ideas are often closer than you think.

Things can be closer than you think, by Pictophelia

- Your own website
If your website isn’t a brand new one, you probably have at least a few pages that managed to attract a few or more good links. You can either investigate why these pages got mentioned elsewhere (and use that info for a new article), or find your best one, improve it and launch V2.

- Your own head
What kind of resources are you missing in your niche? What kind of tool have you always wanted to use but couldn’t find? What kind of content would make you go ‘WOW’? Build it!

Brainstorming for Ideas

The great thing about brainstorming is that you can’t brainstorm the wrong way. Of course, there are guidelines you can follow and techniques you can use, but in theory, every method you use to come up with new ideas would be considered brainstorming. Effective brainstorming, however…

Brainstorming, by faroekat

Like I said earlier, it can be quite effective to start a brainstorming session with an empty mind. Because your link targeted mind probably even rattles on in your sleep, it might be useful to invite someone that isn’t that much into links as you are. Some people always invite the client they’re working for, but I don’t think that’s best in every situation. No matter how hard you try, for some types of personality, tunnel vision is an almost certainty. On the other hand, bringing in the knowledge of your client does add extra value.

More tips for your brainstorming session:

• Appoint one person to lead the discussion and to write down all ideas.
• Record everything to make sure that you don’t miss anything. And to be able to provide evidence to the client that you haven’t been drinking all afternoon, of course
• Encouraging your fellow brainstormers to participate, encouraging great ideas and encouraging to shout out everything that comes up is key to a harmonized brainstorm session.
• More suggested reads; JPB’s creative pages, MindTools brainstorming and Brainstorming.co.uk.

Furthermore, one of the most important things to keep in mind during a brainstorming session is that you shouldn’t settle for the first reasonably good idea you come up with. Good ideas arise pretty quickly, great ideas need time to grow. The best tip I can probably give you is to just start a session. Brainstorm with a few colleagues about a simple item, such as what you’ll be having for lunch or how you can improve your working conditions. You could even be brainstorming about how to brainstorm. Evaluate that session afterwards and learn from it. Experience will lead to inspiration.

Researching for Inspiration

After your brainstorming session, where you’ve probably generated over a few dozen ideas, you might be tempted to drill the list down to the most useful ideas straight away. In stead, letting these ideas soak for a short while and researching ideas that have worked in the past, researching ideas that have failed in the past and researching your niche might be a better solution. Don’t take a short cut by copying the ideas you come across, but use them as inspiring input.

Doing research, by revlimit

Think Social

The voice of the community will show you what might work.

- Use Digg’s search function
Look for relevant articles, posts or pages that have made it to Digg’s front page in the past by entering a relevant keyword in the search box. This might give you some inspiration and it should give you an idea of what might work in your niche.

- Stumble upon related pages
Use StumbleUpon to find pages that are related to the content you want to promote. Check what kind of pages receive lots of thumbs up and positive research. You’ll not only come across at least a few great pages you’ve never seen before, but you’ll also get an impression of popular stuff in your area.

- Del.icio.us popular
One way to use Del.icio.us, is to use the ‘popular’ section to see what’s hot in your niche, for example popular in link building. If you can’t find popular posts in your niche, you can always broaden your search query or use the regular tag function.

- Your favorite news site
That news website you visit every day (whether it’s a big news site or just a local one) has historical data of what kind of related articles or posts have made it to the front page. Do a site query to find relevant news articles that got mentioned on the news site earlier.

- Social Niche sites
Is it difficult to find related stuff on one of the big social media websites, or are you looking for more targeted traffic? There’s a social media website for nearly every niche, so don’t just refrain yourself to the mainstream sites.

Think Niche

Only here will history, relevance and authority show up.

- Your competitor
Some people can’t stand it when a competitor gets mentioned on a popular news or niche website. In stead of enviously watching how they get all the attention, you could also see this as an opportunity and investigate why they got mentioned. If you don’t follow your competitors on a regular basis (which I can’t imagine), use a nifty tool like LinkDiagnosis to research which page on your competitor’s website has the most incoming links. Investigate why this page managed to do this and use that info in your advantage.

- Research your ultimate link target
You probably have at least one website in mind that you’re dying to get a link from. You know, that popular blogger or that portal that everybody in your niche visits daily. If you can find out which pages on this website have attracted a lot of links or managed to create a lot of buzz,

- Research your ultimate link target’s competitor
If there are multiple large targets in your niche, you can use the best features of both sites to get links to your own. Find out what the most popular/ interesting/ valuable page of link target 1 is and offer to make a better version of that page to target 2. Now find an interesting tool or feature on target 2 and offer to make something similar to target 1. Don’t forget to mention your own website as the source or author, of course.

- Respond to your ultimate link target
Did the website you’re after just release a great post or did it fire up a heated conversation? Respond to it. Whether you agree or not, responding to a news item or adding something to a discussion can be a great way to attract links from the initiator, participants and/ or other related sites.

- Contact your ultimate link target
It doesn’t get more simple than this. Contact the website you want to get a link from and ask them what kind of content they’ve always been looking for. Build it, let them know where it is (or you could even offer your link target to let them host the entire piece of content) and you’ll get the link you were after. Keep in mind that this kind of target bait is only worth it in a few occasions, but you’ll probably know when

Selecting the Right Idea

After you’ve gathered dozens of great ideas, it’s not important to choose the idea that you’ll be working on, but it’s important to choose the idea you’ll be working on first. It would be a sin to leave the rest of the ideas untouched, wouldn’t it?

Picking the right one, by Maria Dipshit

Selecting the right idea is nothing more than determining which one of the options will probably help you to reach your end goal -whether that’s just lots of links, links with specific relevance, traffic or anything else.

You’ve checked your own site, you came up with dozens of creative ideas and did research on what works (and what probably won’t), so you’ve got enough data. Your client has enough knowledge of the niche and you have enough knowledge of SEO to be able to come up with the best option together. In the end, you’ll find out that the final choice will be one that’s made by feeling.

Oh, and a little tip here; make sure that -if you work for one- your client makes the final choice. If you think he might choose for the wrong option, give him better directions. This ensures a better relationship in the future, no matter what the outcome is.

Use the Results

Now that you’ve done a great deal of research -and hopefully have a ship load of ideas-, it’s important not to forget your research data as well. You just found out that both industry blogger X and related website Y have both linked to that press release that your competitor sent out earlier. Since they’re both linking to this page, it might be useful to include blogger X and website Y in the list of websites you’ll be contacting when you announce your great piece of content. More about this in part two, but don’t forget to save the data you’ve collected. Having to do things twice can be a real pain…

Conclusion

This list is just an indication that there are tons of places where you can find inspiration for creating content that attracts links like a magnet. Some, however, ask themselves if link baiting isn’t a bit overrated, I do believe that creating link targeted content really is worth it – and it sure as hell can be so for everyone (be careful with widgetbait, though). Besides link and ranking related reasons, you shouldn’t forget that the piece of content and the traffic it attracts aren’t exactly worthless.

Next in line is part two of three: Creating content & Preparation

Push my Buttons!

Yesterday, when I was doing some research on Digg, I spotted a page that I had seen before and wanted to check it out once more. This page in question managed to get to the front page about three months ago, but when I tried to visit it today through Digg, it wouldn’t load anymore. It was 301′ed.
After digging in a bit deeper, I noticed that this website made it to the front page five times. Four of these submitted pages disappeared and were replaced by a 301 to heavily optimized pages on the same domain. Three out of five pages were submitted by the same top Digg user, who had submitted the same pages to Reddit as well.

I used to have the opinion that you can either try to redirect as much link bait strength to your most important pages by designing your page optimally (or changing it later), or you can try to catch all strength by 301ing the link bait page to one of your important pages. This example completely changed my mind.

Using a 301 on a page that has been generating links in the past is -in my opinion- not the way to go (and can even be dangerous) because:

• It’s not user friendly. Visitors that are looking for specific content and find something that doesn’t correlate with the link that directed them to your website, will be disappointed.
• You’re deleting great pieces of content. Why would you remove stuff that made it to the front page of Digg, Reddit or any other social media website?
• You prevent the page from attracting even more links in the future. Good content will remain to attract links in the future as well. Content that is 301′ed to a heavily optimized page probably won’t.
• You get a wrong incoming anchor text/ page content relationship. Especially when your link bait page isn’t 100% related to the products you sell, your anchor text/ page content relationship will be completely off.
• This can even backfire in terms of bad publicity (gaming the system). What if a few Diggers found out that your website is 301ing several posts that made it to “their” front page. Can you imagine what that might cause?
• You might lose that top Digger. I don’t know how this website managed to let the same top Digger submit several of their posts, but if his Digg reputation is in danger, he probably will refrain himself from submitting more stories.

And the reasons mentioned above aren’t even all reasons. For example, imagine what Google would do if more and more people would use this strategy. Do you think they will remain to handle 301s exactly the same way they do today?

So what can you do to let as much link strength and link relevance flow to the most important pages on your website?

• Make sure to get a relevant link bait title.
• Use in-content links to other important pages on your website (or add these links after the first link bump is over)
• Nofollow pages that aren’t that important, or remove some navigational links on your link bait page
• Provide an RSS feed in your “link bait section”. People who liked your link bait might like (and link to) your future campaigns as well.

Of course, there are some exceptions (off-domain 301s, for example). In some cases it might be better to 301 a link bait page, but I don’t think this is the way to go in most cases. Especially in this case, where it were blog posts and an html page that got redirected, I believe that other solutions might have been better. I can imagine that you don’t share the same opinion (or perhaps you do), so my question is:

do you use 301 redirects on your link bait pages? Why, or why not?

Push my Buttons!