Drawing visitors to your website isn’t always achieved by simply telling people how wonderful your service/business/website is and hoping for the best. Any promotional strategy requires a degree of dedication and thinking outside of the box. One helpful technique is to predict a trend (before the 2008 US election I was the first one of the first websites to heavily promote a Barack Obama Flash Game on my online games site and I reaped the rewards via the search engine ranking).
Other techniques involve being controversial (that always gets peoples attention), or offering something that’s novel (a top ten list for instance). Occasionally sites offer a service so useful that people feel that they simply must link to it. Depending on the theme of your website and no matter how formal is it, there will always be an opportunity to linkbait in a way that is fun but perfectly on topic. This, in my view, is the very best form of advertising because people feel that they have discovered your service, rather that having it forced upon them. A great example of linkbaiting is premier holidays 5 Insanely Small Inhabited Island article. It takes the theme of the website and adds a fun twist. The result is that thousands of additional visitors interested in the topic at hand visit your site. That can only be good for business. 301 useless facts is another obvious linkbait example. This time it’s off topic, but as the site relates to SEO, it’s a great idea of conveying to clients that you’re able to draw people in through use of such techniques.
Perhaps my biggest linkbaiting success relates to the Deal or No Deal gameshow. I added the online game version to my old website (now sold) and included an incensive to join a bingo site featuring a pay version of the game with real cash prizes. The thinking was that many of those interested in the game had a gambling mentality and hence a “free £10 play” offer would appeal to them. I promoted the game heavily and the combination of a fun game and real money alternative really send its link popularity soaring. The linkbacks came flooding in to the extent that the game is still top 5 in the uk for the term “deal or no deal” and top ten worldwide. The revenue brought in by this one page alone was considerable and it really demonstrated to me what can be achieved by lateral thinking. To this day many thousands of people visit the page each week as a result of those initial promotional efforts. This is how popular it become at the time:
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