Attract a Flood of New Readers with Linkbait

Boy, do I love linkbait. A good linkbait post could drive more traffic to your blog in one day than you’ve had in the previous month. The best part about linkbait is its viral nature. For months after, you’ll find backlinks popping up here and there, gaining you more traffic and improving your search rankings in the process.

LINKBAIT IS TRAFFIC GOLD!

Linkbait: A Rough Definition

It sounds evil, doesn’t it? It sounds as if you’re setting a trap for your unsuspecting readers to fall into, ensnaring them within your blog. In reality, the practice of linkbaiting has morphed so much that today’s linkbait bears little resemblance to the linkbait of two years ago.

Linkbait is a unique, useful, and often provocative blog post that people respond to by linking to it and sharing with others. Linkbait targets link-friendly audiences, as its goals include traffic, visibility, branding, and backlinks.

Simple, right? Linkbait is nothing more than a good blog post that people want to link to, but it’s so very effective because it combines the practices of viral marketing with a popular topic or meme.

Linkbait: What it Isn’t

Linkbait is not the traffic silver bullet. It has limitations. Linkbait is terrible for converting browsers into long-term subscribers, it doesn’t work well for ad click-throughs, and is inappropriate for an emotionally sensitive topic (controversial is okay, however). Linkbait rarely makes much money or even pays for the direct traffic bandwidth, but you write linkbait for its indirect value. And therein lies the gold.

• Linkbait helps you gain mindshare and brand recognition.
• Linkbait generates powerful backlinks from web properties of authority.
• Linkbait can have a dramatic effect on your search rankings.
• Linkbait is great for capturing the attention of influencers.

Building a network of influencers is a major theme in the social media section of “Blogging in Action” because it is such a valuable concept. When you build a network of influencers, you can write your own ticket. It’s like being able to turn on a firehose whenever you want to drive traffic to your blog, and its value can’t be underestimated. The step-by-step plan I outline in the book will help you build this network.

How Linkbait Builds Traffic

Once a unique or trendy post is written about somewhere, it gets picked up and dragged across the web by citizens of numerous online communities. Social tagging and popularity ranking sites help give the post visibility to hundreds of content creators, who then happily link to you.

Everyone wants to be part of the “in” crowd, especially in the online world where people are trying to carve names for themselves. This attitude encourages linking — no one wants to be left behind, and everyone wants to appear like a leader, so your linkbait spreads widely and quickly like a virus.

Above I mentioned that the power of linkbait is in the indirect traffic. Here’s more of what I mean by that, described purely from the traffic perspective:

1) When your linkbait is launched, you get the immediate direct traffic spike.

2) Linkbait attracts a long tail of links. The long tail is the concept that our search traffic is shifting from a small number of keywords with huge traffic, to a massive number of niches with less traffic. It represents the sophistication of searchers and the specialization of the web.

3) Long tail links generate residual traffic, directly from those links.

4) Search engine rankings improve, driving more search traffic.

5) Steps 3 and 4 repeat indefinitely.

I refer to this phenomenon as the traffic boomerang.

5 Characteristics of Good Linkbait

1) Linkbait is remarkable. Your content needs to be amazing. Choose topics that other people wouldn’t like to touch — maybe it’s too touchy, little formal research exists, or it would require too much time to address — and do it wisely. If you are making a claim or a counter-claim, be sure you can back it up to avoid any bait backfires.

2) Linkbait is original. You must tackle something new, or tackle something old from a new perspective or it will not attract eyeballs and will never spread.

3) Linkbait is trendy. The “in” crowd likes to spread “in” ideas. Browse Digg, del.icio.us, and Twitter to see what’s getting a lot of press.

4) Linkbait is useful. The more useful your linkbait, the better your chances for keeping a percentage of the direct traffic, so be curious and information-possessed. Get as much information as you can.

5) Linkbait is long tail. Be laser focused. The more specialized your topic, the better you’ll do.

Add Linkbait to Your Arsenal

Whatever your blog’s focus, whatever your audience, whatever your purpose — write linkbait. It works. It requires an investment of time in writing the post and building your network of influencers, but pound-for-pound, you won’t find a better way to open the traffic floodgates than to write linkbait that connects with readers and spreads like a virus.

But don’t get carried away. All of your posts can’t and shouldn’t be linkbait. Stick with the posting schedule recommended in Blogging in Action and add a good piece of linkbait every month — AFTER you build your network of influencers. Your ideas won’t spread without them!

We’ll discuss linkbait in more detail at a later date, especially to give you some ideas on how to create the “hook” in a linkbait post. There are several tested formulas that I’ve found to work, and I’ll share those with you.

Chicken or Egg: A Solution to a Common Problem (Autopilot Blogging)

I’m really excited today to share with you a piece of software that I use in my blogging efforts. I’m excited because it has gotten an overwhelmingly positive response from people just like you. And I’m
excited because I want to give it you!

Which Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?

I frequently hear questions like this: “Shaun, I’d love to blog more, but I can’t find the time. If I had more income from my blog, I could definitely find the time to improve it . . .” The classic chicken or egg situation.

To create a truly profitable blog, you need to follow a detailed blueprint like Blogging in Action and prepare your blog for the long term. But this requires time. And to get that time, you need compensation for your blogging efforts. So you need time to make money, but you also need money to make time.

I have a solution, and it’s one I use relatively extensively. It’s a gap filler. It helps you bring in extra income while you wait for your long-term blog to bear fruit. How much income is entirely up to you.

The best part is that it’s really fast and easy to create these passive income streams. Okay, that’s not the best part. The best part is that you can create these passive income streams with a piece of software I am going to give you for free. Really — it’s free, no catches. Just one consideration: I want a few links.

What the Software Does For You

Remember how I said that you can’t create a good long-term blog with duplicate content? And that the most profitable blogs are long-term blogs that attract a dedicated reader base? Both are very true and very accurate, but I have a secret to share with you.

My secret is that I create numerous niche blogs that I quickly put on auto-pilot, and I use a content rotator to keep the pages and posts continually fresh. Because the pages are tightly focused, the pages are frequently refreshed, and the content is a value-added mashup, Google comes back again and again to index and rank my auto-pilot blogs.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. It takes me several hours to create a completely unique blog that I can immediately monetize with AdSense, Chitika, Kontera, and more. I have more than 70 such
blogs, and while each one doesn’t generate much in revenues ($2-$3 each per day on average), in aggregate they pay all of my living expenses.

That means I’m free to devote my time to the things that are the most profitable, including my long-term blogs.

Case Study: $15,691 in One Month

If you find yourself in the chicken or egg situation, and you need to generate some income while you build your main blog, auto-pilot income blogs are a good option. And I want to give you the software
that you can use. In exchange, you’ll provide a link to me on the bottom of the pages you generate with this software. Fair enough?

Download a free case study about a man who earned $15,691 last month with this software — and he had very little online experience when he started. What are you waiting for??

Essential Blogger Task: Research your Keywords

One of the first things that I tell anyone who is blogging — regardless of whether they are brand new or an experienced veteran — is that they MUST pay attention to the keywords they are focusing their content around. And if they aren’t focusing their content around a carefully selected group of keywords, they had better start doing it NOW.

For the same reasons that choosing an effective niche is so profitable, so is keyword selection. In fact, using keyword research to help select your niche is the best strategy for starting a new blog. Please do it. You will thank me later!

Ignore keywords at your peril. Weeks and months of hard work can be quietly undermined by poor keyword selection. Get it done right!

I use keyword research for these reasons:

• It enables me to focus my blog’s content tightly on a niche
• It enables me to gaze into a crystal ball and predict what story titles will attract the most new readers
• It enables me to find out how much competition I have in a niche
• It helps me bring in highly qualified traffic
• It allows me to see how much search traffic there is for a niche
• It saves me tons of time I would otherwise waste on research or deadbeat keywords

All of which lead to more relevant content, which is the cornerstone of highly profitable contextual advertising. Profitability isn’t everything, but we all have to eat!

Keywords are so important that I address keyword topics exclusively in another member group. To learn more about keyword research or to join this group, visit the keyword research group page. I am giving away two free e-books, “AdSense Arbitrage” and “AdWords Made Easy,” for new members of this group. I hope you’ll join us because we have plenty of great tips to share!

How to Get Your Blog Indexed in One Day

If you’re up for it, I thought we could discuss something fun today. This is one of my favorite white hat tips for new blogs, and why more people haven’t thought to use it is beyond me. Be that as it may, this is a great way for you to get your blog listed in Google’s search index in under a day.

Really, I’m not kidding! One day is all it takes to get listed in Google’s index if you use their bots to your advantage. This works consistently in most niches where there is already some high-quality competition. So let’s get out hands dirty.

The Traditional Method

To show up in the search results pages, your blog must be listed in the search index. Makes sense, yes? To get listed in the search index, you would traditionally go to a search engine’s ‘Add URL’ page, enter some brief information about your blog, and then wait for the spiders to visit your site.

Spiders are just bots that scour the web, moving from link to link trying to build up a listing of all of the content out there. The problem is, these spiders are busy, and your new blog isn’t on the top of their priority list, so it could be several weeks before they come knocking on your door.

With my technique, we’re going to convince these spiders that your new blog is their priority, because your blog serves their readers.

Theory Behind the Technique

Search spiders are so proficient these days that it seems silly to wait until THEY have a free moment to visit your blog, when you can just insert your blog into their high-priority work queue.

So we need to make sure that they have a clear path to your blog from another site in their index that is already popular and is being updated. If they have that clear path to you, they will want to index your blog as quickly as possible because the perceived value of your blog is related to the blog where they found your link.

So all you need is a backlink from a blog that is frequently updated. That’s it! And the easiest way to get a link on a blog is through the comments. Now, I’m not talking about spam or a ridiculous “blast your ad” approach. I’m talking about placing a highly relevant, helpful link on a popular blog that the spiders will want to follow.

The Technique Explained

So here’s how we’re going to proceed:

1) Your blog should already be seeded with content, and preferably you have a few days’ worth of additional posts at the ready for the next few days.

2) Find one of your compelling anchor posts, and search Google for a complementary blog post that would fit well with your post. For example, if your post is on rehabilitating a torn meniscus, you might search for a running blog that has a blog post discussing common injuries. Just make sure that your comment and post will add value to the readers of that blog. You are not spamming them, but participating in the conversation and offering them something of value. In short, you are being a good blog citizen.

3) Once you find a blog post, you’ll need to view the source of the page to see if the blog uses the “nofollow” attribute in comment links. Quite a few popular platforms, including Blogger and WordPress, use nofollow by default. If you remember from the “Blogging Revealed” e-book, nofollow tells Google not to follow a link to its source, and is commonly used to prevent a blog from “leaking” Page Rank.

4) If you find nofollow, move on. Otherwise, post your comment on this blog, pointing back to your top-level domain name in the name field and pointing to your individual blog post in the comments field.

When Google comes to this blog to index its new content, your link will be picked up by the spider as a related reference, earning you quick access into the search rankings!

5) On the morning after you perform this, query Google for your domain name. If you show up in their results anywhere, your blog has been indexed. Congratulations!

But We Can Make it Easier

You’ve already seen the downside to this approach: it can take some time to find a relevant blog where you can place a good comment. The hardest part is finding a blog that permits its links to be
followed, and this is absolutely critical to this technique’s success.

What would make this easier is if we could just search Google and let them tell us which blogs in its results pages allow us to post comments that will be followed by the search index spiders. And that is exactly the task that the Blog Love Finder performs for you. You can use this tool to:

• Keyword search the top 100 to 500 Google results, and return a list of blogs that do not use the nofollow attribute
• Find the Alexa rankings (to see how popular a blog is) for each blog returned
• Keep track of your comment campaign by indicating which blogs you’ve already commented on

It’s a very simple tool and it’s free for you as a member of this group. Every good blogger should have a healthy toolkit and I try to keep all owners of the Blogging in Action book very well-stocked with tools of this nature. They really can make your life simpler and your blog better — a winning combination. Download the Blog Love Finder here.

Download the file, extract its contents to your PC, and then run the installer, following the prompts. Once it’s installed, enter your Google search keywords in the first field and wait for the results. It’s guaranteed virus-free, spyware-free, and easy to use. For more information on how to use it and to see it in action, see this video tutorial I’ve created for your use.

If you could, I’d really like to hear from you. When it’s time to submit your blog to the engines, shoot me a quick note to let me know how quickly you got your blog included in Google’s index. So far we seem to be hovering around one day.

For more great tools and techniques, be sure to download the full Blogging in Action program.

Seven Reasons to Start a Blog

Blogging in Action is a comprehensive guide that helps anyone run a six-figure blog. As such, people with a wide range of experience levels use the program, and that range is reflected in the e-mails
that I send to you.

A previous e-mail contained information about duplicate content and one of Google’s search filters, a subject I would classify as being on the difficult end of the blog topic continuum. To balance that
out, I wanted to step back and address why you would want to start a blog if you don’t already have one.

So here they are:

1) It’s an Easy Way to Establish a Web Presence

Blogs provide the most powerful available path to easily building an online presence. They require no previous technical experience and can be deployed with very little cost, even when establishing a
professional-level blog. In addition, blogging software has gotten increasingly powerful and easy-to-use, making customization a snap.

2) It’s Easy to Build Google Page Rank

A good blog is a great way to achieve Google Page Rank. If you’re not familiar with Page Rank, the short description is that it’s Google’s way of determining the relative worth of a web presence. The higher the worth, the higher in the search results you appear. High page rank is often easier to achieve with simple blogs than with complex most web sites, and blogs attract the search engine spiders on a more frequent basis due to their ever-updating content.

3) Blogs Create Community

Blogs are a great way to establish a dialog with your readers and encourage feedback from them. This leads to an active readership base, in contrast to a typical web site where people enter, consume
content, and leave.

Building active readership allows you to refine your niche and serve your readers better, while taking some of the pressure off of you during the content creation process. Because you already know the importance of your niche, you can guess why building a community is advantageous: it’s profitable.

4) Blogs Offer Simplified Maintenance

Blogs are easy to maintain, and allow you to remain productive in your business instead of wasting time on technical issues. Plenty of tools exist to make blog administration, promotion, and research even easier (I give away quite a few of these tools to members of the Blogging in Action owners group).

5) You Can Earn Money with a Blog

Blogs can make you money, directly and indirectly. Directly, they can earn you short-term profits for those looking to go that route, and they can earn you a living if you follow a systematic blueprint over the long-term. Indirectly, they can be used very effectively to help build a non-blog business.

6) They Help Establish Credibility

Blogs are a great way to establish authority in a niche. To blog effectively, you must keep current with trends in your niche, and you must perform a fair amount of research to write intelligible posts. If you aren’t an expert when you begin blogging in a niche, you will become one soon!

7) It’s Fun

Blogging is just plain fun! Due to its community aspect, you begin to build ties with your readers, perhaps even forming mutually beneficial partnerships. Your blog becomes a virtual meeting room for like-minded individuals to exchange ideas.

With low barriers to entry, limited downside, and a large number of benefits, there really is no reason not to have a blog, even for personal use. If you don’t have a blog already, let’s get started! And if you do, let’s get you set up to build readers and clicks and all of the good things that come with them!

Google’s Penalty: Beware the Duplicate Content Filter

If you’ve been reading these past few tips, you’ve come to realize that Blogging in Action is a long-term blogging success blueprint. I truly believe that the days of the quick buck are over, so not only is long-term viability a better option for your new blog, it has ALWAYS been the more profitable option.

Blog marketing warning #11 (page 11 of the “Blogging Revealed” book I sent you) is “Don’t include automated or duplicate content.” This deserves more explanation as it’s the exact kind of content that
get-rich-quick blogging programs recommend that you use to build your blogs.

Google defines duplicate content as “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

Examples of non-deceptive duplicate content include your blog posts. WordPress will make your posts available in multiple ways: organized by date, organized by category, organized by tag, and so on. Google works hard to filter out this allowable duplicate content.

Deceptive duplicate content, however, is content that is included on a blog with the intent to manipulate the search rankings. For example, say you grab an article from a free article source and put your name on it — if you are doing it, so are hundreds of others.

To a user searching for specific terms, the end result would be to see essentially the same content repeated on a large number of domains, all ranked similarly on Google. To protect the user’s experience, Google has to determine which domain is the authority, meaning that it’s likely that only one out of hundreds of sites will rank for a particular piece of content.

But it doesn’t end there. Because Google now treats this content as a deceptive act to manipulate the search rankings, they will also make appropriate adjustments to the indexing and ranking of the
sites involved. These adjustments can be a decrease in ranking (the infamous -60 penalty) or a complete removal from the search index. Ouch!

This is not so bad, really. Think about it from an author’s perspective. If you spend hours crafting a powerful blog post, it’s only fair that your blog rank highest for it. How would you feel if someone plagiarized your article AND ranked higher for it?

One common way to get penalized unintentionally is by changing your URL structure. For example, say you start a blog with Blogger and later decide to move your blog to a professional platform like WordPress. These platforms use different URL structures, so your new blog could very likely be penalized in the search rankings for duplicate content (different URL’s in the index now point to two sets of content). Just another reason to start out with a self-hosted WordPress blog — it’s future-proof.

On a legitimate blog with the intent of developing long-term readers, I don’t see any reason to use duplicate content. Your content should be from you, in your voice, and directed at your readers. That’s how you build a profitable following.

IMPORTANT: This does not mean that you can’t earn high rankings and money from auto-pilot blogs, which are a slightly different animal, provided you go about it the right way. I’ll be discussing auto-pilot blogs more in the near future.

Duplicate content and the inner workings of Google are complex topics, and I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you might have. To stay on the safe side, you can always follow the step-by-step Blogging in Action blueprint. It will never get you into trouble.

How to Choose a Blogging Platform

Chapter 2 in the Blogging Revealed book you received briefly discussed blogging and hosting platforms. I reviewed the advantages of each, but I thought I’d cover the “whats” in slightly more detail in this tip.

Hosted Platform

A hosted blog refers to services whereby a service provider grants you access to their hardware, network connection, and software, and you create a blogging account to use on that platform.

This would be very similar to signing up for an account at a site like Facebook or MySpace. As far as you’re concerned, there’s nothing more than a web page where you enter and view your information. Everything that goes on behind the scenes is controlled by someone else, and you have no stake other than being a user of the service.

Within the hosted blog space, you have a few subcategories of service, as well, but the pure play examples include LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, Blogspot, and Wordpress.com (not to be used with the software available from Wordpress.org).

Self-hosted Platform

Self-hosted platforms consist of a web hosting account you establish with a data center, and the blogging software you install on the data center’s server. This gives you complete control over both the back-end and front-end of your blog.

Some self-hosted solutions include WordPress, MovableType (the self-hosted version of TypePad), SubText, typo, and Apache Roller.

Which Should You Choose?

Blogging in Action is a long-term blogging guide. It outlines a system of establishing a professional blog the right way, writing valuable content that connects with readers, and utilizing innovative traffic techniques combined with a fresh monetization system to make money from it. If you are thinking long-term, you should choose a self-hosted blog. Not only are they more professional, they are future proof.

However, if you’re in it for the short-term, or just want to try your hand at blogging to see how you like it, then a hosted blog might be all that you need. Beware though, if you stick with it, you will move to a self-hosted blog eventually, and migration can be very difficult. Not to mention that you will likely lose the majority of your traffic, readers, and search rankings in the process.

In February 2007, I conducted a usability study with several readers, placing the same content on two different blogs, one hosted, and one self-hosted. Both were setup to take full advantage of the underlying platform, meaning I made the blogs look and behave as best as I could with the tools I had available. Universally, the self-hosted blog was perceived to be higher value, and the content was considered to be more credible.

Note that this was a small study, and usability tests are not what I would consider scientific by nature, but the anecdotal evidence is worth considering. For my money, I will always go with a self-hosted solution.

Ignore this at Your Peril!

If there’s one thing that I could impress upon you in this tip–one thing that is so much more important than any other at this stage of the game–this is it: you must get your own URL.

If your blogging service doesn’t permit your own URL, move services. Just do it. The longer you wait, the more painful it will be. Just get it done now, because if you wait until the future, it will result in a large amount of effort, lost readers, lost subscribers, and lost PageRank. I’ve worked with too many people who attempt to migrate their blogs after a year or so without their own URL, and it’s painful to watch them watch their hard work get torn down, even if it’s just temporary.

Get your own URL. A little extra work today will save you some serious headaches in the future.

The Importance of Choosing Your Blog’s Niche

Although this topic generates a lot of questions, I debated for some time over whether to base your first tip on it. You see, it’s not sexy, but it’s so important that I think it would be a disservice to you not to discuss it in more depth. So fight through it, you’ll be glad that you did!

Choosing a Niche

Many bloggers will tell you that there are two schools of thought for choosing a niche: 1) Choose a niche you are passionate about or 2) Choose a niche that you can monetize. I disagree entirely with this line of thought. What it really comes down to is long-term gain vs. short-term gain.

Short Term Gain

If you choose a niche that you can monetize, you will probably focus on some hot keywords, regardless of your experience in that field. But lacking passion or knowledge, you’ll end up slapping some free articles on the blog in the hopes that you’ll earn a fat AdSense paycheck. At least, that’s what the get-rich-quick set will tell you.

In reality, after you exit the Google sandbox, you emerge with poor search rankings thanks to your duplicate content, but you still manage to muster some AdSense scraps. Get some automated blogging software, and repeat this process for a few hundred niches, and you can earn a living. These types of blogs are referred to as “splogs” (spam blogs).

While this was a viable, albeit shady, way to leverage blogs a few years ago, changes in the Google search algorithm have made it all but impossible to earn more than a few dollars a day using this method. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from selling blogging programs based on this strategy, and many people still eat them up.

Long Term Gain

If you choose a niche you are passionate about, you concern yourself with content and writing for your readers first, and monetization second. Rather than capturing idle searchers, you are attracting loyal readers. Once your readers find you, they subscribe to your feed and come back time and time again to help you build your community.

Generating traffic is hard work, but it comes much more naturally when readers connect with you as an author. If you are properly niched down, you will dramatically improve your contextual advertising payments, and you gain referred sales from any programs you put in front of your reader base. You attract people who are like you after all, so when you recommend something to them, it’s because you like it, so chances are that they will also like it.

It takes longer to build this type of blog and gain the trust of your readers, but the potential gain is much higher. True six-figure bloggers write about something they are passionate about; or they at least hire writers who are passionate about the subject. Maximizing the long-term profitability of your blog is what we’re primarily concerned with in Blogging in Action.

How to Choose a Niche

My advice will always be to start a blog about a passion or topic of interest. You will never maintain interest posting about a topic just because it’s a profitable one; even if you can do it, your readers will know the difference. Plus it’s a bit disingenuous, don’t you think? If your passions happen to be in profitable niches, then great. You’ll have more competition, but the potential reward can be even higher.

Sample Niches

Another question that pops up frequently is the exclusivity of your niche. To help you define your niche, here are some samples:

• ART is not a niche. DIGITAL FRACTAL PATTERNS is a niche.
• GADGETS is not a niche. QUIRKY CUBICLE TOYS is a niche.
• ANIMATION is not a niche. CLASSIC DISNEY CELLS is a niche.
• CONSUMER ELECTRONICS is not a niche. HOME-BUILT WAR ROBOTS is a niche.

It’s very unlikely that you can choose too narrow a niche. There were over 1.5 billion users online as of late 2007; regardless of how narrow you think your niche is, chances are there are tens of thousands of people out there who are completely aligned with your niche. That’s tens of thousands of readers who can generate clicks and purchase products on your behalf. Now that’s opportunity!

If you’re really worried about it, though, enter a niche into Google’s keyword tool and see what kind of search traffic and competition there is. Remember, this tool is used for Pay Per Click advertising, so the competition represents Pay-per-click competition, not total search competition.

The importance of choosing your niche can’t be overestimated. All of your future efforts will flow from this decision, and it is the single largest factor in determining the relevancy of your blog, which is directly related to your search engine rankings, your blog traffic, and your profitability from monetization efforts.

Take some time to make a good decision. If you can’t decide on just one, begin writing content for several niches. It won’t take long to determine which subject you can write about more effectively and which subject your readers identify with the most.

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