Viral marketing is now a cornerstone of most brand campaigns and is a line item in every marketing budget. In the blogsphere, viral marketing in the form of linkbaiting is often sighted as the primary method to driving traffic to a blog. If done well, linkbaiting is second only to great content in growing readers.
Today, there are a few excellent posts that provide the details of what linkbaiting is and deliver actionable steps to leverage this viral method.
Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.Net provided a laundry list of his posts on linkbaiting best practices. He also links to several other prominent SEO blogs on their approaches. Here is the link to the post:
Darren started his post by referencing Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz) and his post on Yahoo Publisher Network. Here is the link to that post:
Lastly, I checked out a post from Dosh Dosh on a twist to linkbaiting called freebaiting. The concept of freebaiting makes me a little squeamish. Much like advertisers questioning lead quality from incentive-based affiliates, I was initially skeptical that freebaiting would just drive traffic, but not readers. However, it is too easy to throw the baby out with the bath water here – as it is with incentive affiliates too. Freebaiting can provide a powerful viral vortex to your content or services. If you do it in such a way that you provide real value with your free offer, then you can grow regular readers of your blog. Here is the link to the post:
