Being able to create link bait can take care of all of your problems. Link bait is content which is especially attractive to other webmasters, thus encouraging them to link to your from their sites (hence the term “bait”).

While link bait is primarily associated with links which obviously build your site’s presence in the SERPs, it’s effective for bringing in traffic and sometimes huge flows of traffic at that because if another webmaster feels that your content is good enough to link to then you can expect a good bit of their traffic will follow that link to your site.

Link Bait Ideas

Now I’ll give you some link bait ideas which you can use to create your own content bait to encourage other webmasters to link to you.

Great Content – You knew this one was coming. It may sound like a cop out on my part, but creating great content is the classic form of link bait because other webmasters plain and simple want great content to share with their readers; so anything which is inherently unique, informative, entertaining, or some combination of all of these is the ideal bait.

Trending Topics – Trending topics/current events or anything topical make for great link bait examples because people are interested in things which other people are already talking about. If something is trending online, that means a lot of people are talking about it and already sharing information about it, so you’re striking while the iron is hot in this case.

Contests – Contests and competitions are great ways to get people to buzz about your site. Create a contest related to your niche, name a sweet prize, then writing about it on other forums and blogs in your niche and anywhere else you can think of to get people talking and linking to you.

Controversial Content – Creating controversy always gets people talking, and online it gets people visiting your site and linking to you.

Case Studies – Case studies usually have interesting results which people want to learn about. At the very least it will peak some people’s interests. I did a case study a few months ago on the best way to make money online in which I pitted 3 different forms of traffic (website traffic, social network traffic, email marketing traffic) against one another to see which earned me the most money on a new affiliate product which launched. I documented the results via video then wrote about it on a variety of marketing and money making blogs to get some great traffic.

Which traffic source won out? You’ll have to click the link and watch the video yourself to find out – see how it works?

Infographics – After you’ve done your case study, create an infographic from your findings. Infographics are just images which contain information, typically stats or analytics to represent some sort of findings.

Sure you could simply write about your findings, but by (also) compiling it into an infographic, you’ve created a very nice piece of quality content which is MUCH easier to share and or link to.

It’s a lot easier to cold email other webmasters in your niche when you’re armed with a strong piece of link bait that you know they’ll want to share with their audience.

You’ve already done the heavy lifting through the analytical work and piecing together your attractive infographic; all they have to do is link back to your site if they want to share the graphic with their audience.

Remember to embed your website URL somewhere on the graphic so that even in a worst case scenario if someone steals your infographic, it’s still visible to anyone who sees it.

Don’t forget to title and alt-tag the infographic with your keyword in mind so that you better optimize your article for your keyword as well as give the image itself a chance to rank in the image SERPs, giving it a greater chance that someone will find it.