Note from the Editor

I think it’s definitely time for me to consider getting serious about changing the host for this site. Dreamhost has regularly been having 1-2+ hour outages on me most weeks recently. It’s very annoying and much too constant.

I always dread moving sites about. It’s time I’d rather spend doing other things. However, I certainly can’t afford to keep having my sites down like that.

Researching hosts is always a pain too. I have a few ideas for companies I plan on looking at, just from reading on webmaster forums and seeing who other webmasters trust. It’s a matter of finding that right balance of price, reliability (both in uptime and how likely the company is to stick around), features and support.

I’m not sure how fast I can manage this, though. I would prefer to remain deep in the throes of preparing for Christmas, but since some of my shopping sites are on this same host, downtime is about to become a major issue for them too. I’d like to actually do well this Christmas, after all.

How Do You Make Linkbait?

Anyone who has spent much time learning how to market online has heard how valuable inbound links are. Inbound links are a major part of how the search engines find your site and rank it.

However, the rules for what makes a good link keep changing. Reciprocal links used to be enough but now many marketer suspect that reciprocal links are devalued, especially if they are not relevant. This makes getting links more challenging.

Article marketing is good, of course, but submitting articles to directories can be time consuming or cost a fair bit of money.

Many marketers talk about linkbait. This is an article, useful tool, video or podcast that is so good, interesting, entertaining, etc. that people just naturally link to it. It’s certainly a dream come true, as a good link bait gets highly relevant links to your site and brings in people interested in what you have to offer.

But it isn’t so easy to create. Lots of people are trying to create link bait, but only a few succeed.

There are a few factors at work here. The first, of course, is the quality of what you’re trying to get people to link to. If it isn’t well done you aren’t going to get good links.

Uniqueness also comes into play. There are plenty of backlink checkers out there, so if you offer one it needs to be better than what is already out there or offer a new twist, for example.

You also need to hit a hot topic. If no one cares it won’t matter how brilliant your work is. Controversial can work well too.

Your ability to market your linkbait also matters. It doesn’t matter how great an article you write, tool you create, etc. If you can’t get those first people looking at it and talking about it you may as well have not done the work at all.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and so forth are quite useful. However it’s easy to get buried among the many other marketers trying to get people interested.

Is linkbaiting easy? Not for most people. Making the bait and getting people to link to it is pretty challenging. But it can be done and it is very worthwhile.

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