Blog Relations

“To bait a link, you need a hook”.

There’s an excellent article on The Art of Linkbaiting by Nick Wilson that has set me thinking. As we all know, traffic to your blog depends heavily on in-coming links from other blogs. Ultimately, this is what boosts your Google rating and permits you to race to the top of the search rankings ahead all those old fashioned, multi-million dollar websites run by great corporations.

Nick has five excllent tips on how to hook in those links: a news hook or scoop.A resource hook or useful service or tool or advice for your readers, a contrary hook, or opinion that runs against those of other bloggers, an attack hook which you use to pick a fight with another blogger and provide amusement for everyone else, and finally, a humour hook.

Looking back at our own short history, we’ve had some hooks which have definately helped our traffic. The biggest was our Blog Relations Survey. It’s an old fashion PR ploy – you do some research and you have a good headline in mind. “Blogs are a threat to corporate reputations” hooked in some interest and gave others something to write about.

Another post which people still link to every now and then was our “Top Ten Tips“. It piggy- backed on ProBlogger which is in itself one giant Tip or Resourse hook. Tips are good. People love them. ProBlogger was promising to link to tipsters, and it was a big boon to our traffic.

Podcasts have been good for us too. They are still a bit unusual, and the interviewees are inclined to link back to your podcast. Our Loic Le Meur interview from the Lewis blog Seminar was particularly fruitful, hooking links from Loic’s top blog and from Micropersuasion. I suppose Steve Rubel heard the podcast via Loic’s blog and took a fancy to an anecdote about himself that was mentioned in it.

Forgive me for going on about our own very modest efforts at hooking. The really big hooks of the year have been “events”. There was a brilliant Blog Day ploy that generated thousands of links, but I can’t recall what it was all about. The PR annual Blog-in Week also generates heaps of interest and traffic, as do conferences in the real world such as Podcastcon.

One big mistake I’ve seen more than once recently, is when people do a lot of work on a white paper and then only offer it as a PDF. If you’ve got a blog, use it. Make lots of posts out of your reasearch. Get lots of key words out there on the net, especially in your titles to your posts. Don’t lock all your pearls of wisdom up in an Adobe file.

But our top tip for baiting links with hooks is Do Something Interesting. Something, preferably, that involves lots of people with blogs, or at least something that will hook their interest. A geek dinner, for instance, will do nicely. Everyone will write about it before, and then review it the next day. A blog is a very good adjunct to an event in the real world. Bring the two together and they will help each other.

We are going to do something a bit different next week. It’s a development rather than a stunt. I can’t say that we had link-baiting in mind when we plotted it, but I hope that people will find it interesting. We’ve both been working very hard at it….