The Perils Of Link Baiting
Posted by: Luke in blogging, tags: analogy, bedding, blogger, density, extra room, good chance, i don t care, info business, making compost, optimal quality, red worms, reproduction rate, scraps, sleep, worm binLast night I was inspired to write some link bait. It didn’t turn out so well, in my opinion. I only realized this after I published, as happens when you are sleep deprived. I’m going to leave it up, of course. I submitted it to Digg — but the fact is it was crap, so I undug. Oddly enough, I got a comment. IIRC, It was like “OMG you actually watch that show???”
The fact is, all articles are potential link bait. Someone somewhere might very well link to you. But some articles are more likely to float to the top of a social bookmarking site than others.
In other news I’ve decided to up my post count to 2 per day. I can handle this. I’ve been doing a minimum of 1 per day for three weeks. For the next week, I’m going to challenge myself and try to publish 2 per day.
If my quality suffers, I apologize. However let’s face it — I’m a newbie blogger and my quality was never that high to start with. If I write more and have a lower than optimal quality, I will probably still have a good chance to improve that quality over time.
An analogy with my red worms comes to mind. If they are crowded into too small of a container, their reproduction rate goes down. Having extra room to grow makes them grow faster.
Blog quantity is analogous to the amount of space in my worm bin. When I make more space, the number of worms per unit of space goes down, it’s diluted in other words. Quality is more like the number of worms packed in a given area of the bin. It’s reduced in a bigger bin, but temporarily — the density expands to fit the area.
Ultimately the combined factor — the mass, so to speak — is more important than either density or volume. If I have a ton of worms, I don’t care if they’re spread through five tons of bedding. What matters is that they’re in there, eating scraps, making compost, and breeding.
So that’s a little something from the human side of Luke. Some more news: Theme and permalink structure will be changing shortly. Categories may change as well. Existing CommentLuv posts and direct links will be 404-ing up until they are adapted to the new permalink structure. Found a good little theme but it’s Non-Commercial Share-Alike CC’d. Which is weird since parts of it are supposedly GPL.
That’s all folks!
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March 31st, 2008 at 11:52 am - Edit
I’m trying to build up a link bait article on a local recipes site. The link bait should be thrown 3 days before Easter, and I’m spreading the news to my fellow bloggers (Romanian only), to talk about this. This will happen 5 days before Easter. Again, I will send emails 5 days before to some of my friends with general/miscellaneous blogs. Some of them will write about it, some of them will just place links on their blogs.
The result? I hope for a big spike, as the recipes site (built on WordPress, by the way) is two weeks old, in the moment of writing this comment.
So, my advice is plan before throwing a link bait, talk to friends, spread the news, write the article and timestamp it for your chosen date. At the moment of actual posting, Digg it, stumble it, anything you know. Post about it on forums, blogs, etc. You will, more than sure, get a big spike
Good luck!
March 31st, 2008 at 11:58 am - Edit
Wow, great idea Chip! I could basically write an article (as good as possible) a couple weeks in advance, then brag about it a bit for a while before posting it. Then finally hit it with as much force as possible…
Great ideas, and thanks for the feedback!
September 28th, 2008 at 1:41 pm - Edit
Its very hard imo to write articles, for link bait. Its a lot easier to create web templates and distribute them with a link in the footer. Oh i forgot to tell you, im a web designer!