Anand’s Journey Towards The Unknown

Hi everyone,

The past week has been a real experience for me. In a way, you can say, it was the most satisfying week for me at GrmTech. Reasons?

• Our team started to reap the dividends of a move that I had put forth before my Boss for approval around 15 days back.

• I was given an opportunity to be a part of a training session for the new batch of Internet Marketing Associates, which I enjoyed to the fullest when I got the chance to speak in front of the group. Thanks to our HR (Daisy Ma’am) and Leader (Aji Sir) for the opportunity.

• Also, earlier in the week, Aji Sir had involved me to make a presentation to clear some of the doubts of our content writers on how to write effective articles that would fetch links.
• While doing the presentation (my first one ever! Thanks to Manojit da for the help) I got to learn a few things on writing effective link baiting articles.

Yes, that’s what I am going to share with you all in this post. – Link Baiting is the modern name for viral marketing or viral link building.

The single biggest priority for a content writer is to provide quality content to its reader base. But that’s not all. Until and unless, your piece is not attracting links you are a dead duck in terms of SEO (sorry if I am being too harsh!) But once you write something that is really “good” then you just need to sit back with a beer-can and count the inbound links.

Wondering what qualities would fetch you automatic links? In the words of Andy Hagans (the master baiter), “packaging is queen, promotion is the crown prince and a baity title is the Sword of Excalibur.”

Here are a few sure shot tips,

Proper market research – Its important to analyze the trend before writing an article. Give your readers what they want.

Write about what is being talked about – It’s seen that latest talked about news pieces attract huge audience. Hence, a content writer needs to be on his/her toes to have a solid grasp of the recent pieces.

Give your article a good thought – Before sitting down to write an article it would always help if one visualizes in his/her mind the structure of the article (length, beginning, conclusion, etc.)

Write a catchy title – Remember your title would in most cases determine how many people would actually read your article. Make sure to think of 3-4 titles before choosing the best one suitable for you. Still confused as to what makes a good title? Here are a few tips.

Use important keywords and description – If you are looking to optimize your article, make sure to use some of the important keywords in your title and opening lines of your article. Also write a quality description.

Proper use of formatting, grammar – People like to read properly formatted articles rather than encouraging an odd color here and there. A single spelling mistake in the first few sentences is enough to kill your article before it begins to grow.

Write an enticing introduction – The reader gets an idea by reading the introduction, hence if the intro is properly knit out half your job is done!

Write a long article – Believe it or not, long articles are talked about more. Here are examples,

• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/labor-day.html - look at the no. of technorati links, saves to del.icou.us, digs, etc.

• http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization - Yahoo Backlink 4763

• http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm - Yahoo Backlinks 4052

List the main points – People are attracted more towards reading content that is presented in a listed format rather than an essay style way. Something like “101 ways to…” sells morethan plain text.

Use images where possible – As they say, pictures speak a thousand words; readers are always attracted towards articles that have some catchy images within its body. Thus, the use of images won’t do your article any harm.

Write a summary – A properly written short summary of your article would make the reader to stay on to read the entire piece.

Use story hooks – Use different types of story hooks to catch people to link to you.

Think before you Spill – Be 100% sure before you show your article to the world. You can get feedbacks by submitting your articles to forums. See what people are saying. Make the suggested changes before you throw the dice because if you are doing it after people see it that would leave a bad impression and would certainly impact your audience.

Make it easy for fellow bloggers/webmasters – Try to have something like “link to this article” that would enable webmasters and bloggers to link back to your article easily and directly from your article.

Have a good rapport with fellow writers – A good writer would always respect a good piece of information. If you can make friends with some top rated writers on the web, it would act as a booster to drive more traffic to your article as they would start talking about you and referring to you.

Promote your article – There are various methods to promote an article on the web,

• promote in your website
• write press releases
• put your link in relevant forums
• use newsletters by taking out ads in the industry
• submit to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious.etc)
• comment in blogs with links to your article.

Here’s how link baiting scores over link building,

• Get rid of writing link requests.
• Takes away worries of having to respond to link requests.
• Get rid of unlimited stress resulting out of fear of setting a link pattern or having links from bad neighborhood sites.
• Stop worrying about having to spend long hours searching for future link partners.

• Spending all your energy in monotonous jobs like submitting to web directories, etc.

So what are you thinking? Rush off and write a link bait article now!! And do not forget to tell me how many links you managed with your article at the end of it all.

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