Linkbait Vs. Branding: Which Is A Better Strategy?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 17 of November , 2007 at 12:12 pm

Aaron Wall recently wrote a great post on linkbait and suggests that it’s not as valuable as it once was. He recommends, instead, that modern marketers build a brand. It’s slower, but more reliable, he says.

I’m all for website branding. You know that. But I’d like to take a minute to really analyze what Aaron is saying here. First, an excerpt:

Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.

The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I think the larger issue is whether you get any of the right kind of traffic from your links. Roderick Ioerger said it better on Marketing Pilgrim:

I don’t believe that just because Google or another search engine might devalue a set of links is any reason to be afraid of generating linkbait. Links that generate traffic, whether or not a search engine values them, in my mind are still good links…

I don’t think the important thing is whether you do linkbaiting or not. I think it’s whether the linkbaiting that you do is effective in driving targeted traffic to your website. With that in mind, there are three different kinds of linkbait campaigns:

1. The One-Shot Charlie - This is where you build a list or a poll or build some web page that is designed to get people excited over the short term and that is effective in building quick inbound links, but after the initial enthusiasm the inbound links begin to decline. The inbound links built at the beginning are still there, but as time progresses fewer and fewer websites and blogs link to your bait, eventually being forgotten. Remember, the links are still there so you still may get traffic to that web page months or years after the bait has been set. Is that targeted traffic? If you do it right, it can be.
2. The Long-Term Necessity - This type of linkbait involves offering a resource that people will need and use any time in the future. For instance, link popularity checkers and other webmaster tools. These type of link bait are popular and could build as many inbound links two years from now, or fifteen years from now, as they do the first day they are implemented. Since the bait being linked to is beneficial at any time to a good cross-section of people then it is a very powerful form of linkbait. The drawback is that not all of your traffic is necessarily targeted and you could feasibly get a lot of traffic from people who will never do business with you.
3. Targeted Linkbait - Another kind of linkbait campaign is the targeted linkbait. You purposely put up linkbait that is going to be attractive to specific audience within your niche. You are effectively cutting some people out, but you are doing it because you know those people won’t be interested in what you have to say. There links won’t matter to you anyway. You really want the links from the sites that fit into your niche, or a subset of your niche. Therefore, you target your linkbait to fit that segment.

Which type of linkbait you use depends on what you want to accomplish. Before the last PageRank update, many people sought to increase their PR ratings by implementing generic linkbait that any website owner anywhere might link to hoping to get a lot of high PR sites to link to them. That strategy won’t work any more. A better strategy is to use the Targeted Linkbait strategy so that you attract relevant links from relevant sites in the same niche that you are in. If you see an increase in PR from that effort, fine, but the real benefit is the traffic you get from those websites. By the way, this type of linkbaiting is also good for helping you build your brand. So it’s not really a matter of either/or, you can have both/and.

Category: Branding, Link Building

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