I’ve seen all manner of overtly commercial sites trying their luck with linkbait, only for it to flop. You see, linkbaiting your e-commerce store is a difficult thing to do and unless you have built your brand from the ground up to infiltrate integrate on social media sites, successful linkbait and the bounty of oneway goodies it affords may continue to be nothing more than a dream.

I suppose in one way it is our own fault for perpetuating this fallacy of marketing. Reading through the plethora of posts about linkbait makes this particular technique seem like some crazy next-generational solution to marketing any site. The reality is, however, very different. You’ve got to work incredibly hard to make linkbait on a commercial store work and be prepared to sustain your efforts even though many of your baits get no traction and go precisely nowhere.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Digg et al have moderators and systems in place to identify commercially motivated linkbait, and even if they don’t, the community itself definitely doesn’t want to see our ‘spam’. The good old days of pushing ’10 Cooking Tips From Holywood’s Hottest Celebs’ to help promote some recipe book store are long gone.

Don’t get me wrong: linkbait is here to stay, but we must progress. The broader SEO community may have only recently caught on and crowned linkbait as the white-hatted linkbuilding prince, but we’re only getting started down the road of punchy titles, angles and hooks compared to our friends in the traditional mainstream media.

So if you are responsible for marketing an e-commerce store and want to try linkbait, be prepared to work harder than you have before to create unique, interesting, timely and resourceful content that real people actually care about and want to read.

Here at Setfire Media we specialise in building online stores. So as ‘Head of Search’ I’ve been in the trenches for long enough to hone the process of linkbaiting an e-commerce store and can say with surety that there are things you can do to help improve your success rate on social media sites – a checklist if you will.

Here are a few things I’ve learned that you can apply and hopefully find more success.

Preparing Your Online Store For Linkbait

Whether you are linkbaiting a blog or online store, the key is to always keep the target demographic in mind from the start. There’s a world of difference between linkbaiting an informational blog and a commercial site that sells a product: what works on a popular blog will probably fail on your store. Don’t forget that because it will give some context to your linkbait strategy.

1. Setup A Blog Where You Can Place Linkbait

The first step in improving your chances at scoring a front page is to setup somewhere to place your linkbait. One tactic used by many stores is to simply create a plain page with no company styling so that it appears some user found a ‘hidden secret’. This is something I wouldn’t recommend doing for various reasons, but primarily because linkbait shouldn’t be looked at as something you do only once. It sounds seriously simple, and it is. Just do it.

2. Choosing Where Your Blog Is Located

This point is particularly relevant to Digg. You’ll notice under a story headline that the domain is listed, but there’s only enough space for about 30 characters. Let’s say you have an online store called ‘cheapbrandxyz.com’ and you want to linkbait it. Where you choose to locate your blog will have an affect on how successful you are. Why? It’s all in the domain. Diggers don’t like anything commercial in nature, least of all some store trying to get onto the front page.

By locating your blog at ‘cheapbrandxyz.com/blog’ you expose more of your ‘not supposed to be on Digg’ domain, which means there is more chance of being buried. Place your blog in a subdirectory and give it a longer name like ‘dailymusings.cheapbrandxyz.com’ and much of your domain will be cut off, improving your chances of not getting buried.

3. Brand Your Blog

It is essential that you brand your blog to fit the demographic. I would personally recommend you choose a different name for it with a tagline that has a strong personality. Remember who your target audience is and let that dictate your branding.

4. Avoid Integration With Your E-commerce Site

Let me just clarify that statement a bit. I’m assuming that your e-commerce site will have the typical 3-coloumn setup, company logo, links to checkout, a toll-free phone number placed in the header and links to products in the navigation etc. If you want your linkbait to get traction, especially on Digg, then this has got to go. The idea is to make your blog appear distinct from the rest of your store, a repository of useful and interesting content tailored to a specific demographic. Anyone could stumble on this page on e-commerce, which lays out real beautiful patterns on how one’s ecommerce website can be customised.

5. Cloaking To Visitors From Social Media Sites

In some cases it may not be possible to change the default theme for your blog: perhaps the company’s board of directors would rather have the same layout across the site to reinforce branding. If you are in this situation, you do have an option.

Cloak to visitors from a set list of referrers (digg.com, delicious.com, propeller.com, buzz.stumbleupon.com / www.stumbleupon.com, reddit.com etc.) and show them a less commercial layout to appease their anti-establishment worldview. It’s slightly grey hat, but it does get around this particular issue.

6. Consider Who You Link To

There’s very little doubt that one of the most overlooked elements in seo Fort Collins is the outbound link. Simply put, you can use the outbound link to associate your site with others in your niche who have more authority than you such as topical magazines and forums. It is, however, important to analyse who you are linking out to: it could be a big mistake linking to a competitor, a site in your competitor’s network or even a site that regularly links out a competitor.

7. To Nofollow, Or Not?

It may be attractive, at first, to nofollow any outbound link from your linkbaits, but upon closer inspection I don’t think the argument stands up. Nofollowing your outbound links will stop you from placing your site in a neighbourhood of authorities. Linking to a relevant industry-specific wiki or blog will help you.

8. Setup A Separate Analytics Profile

I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to do this from the start. When you run an e-commerce store you will rely heavily on tracking conversion rates, per visit values and bounce rates etc. This data is essential to your business and contaminating it with 100,000 visitors from Digg or some other social media site is going to radically, and negatively, skew your data.

The problem is further compounded should you be running any PPC campaigns or email marketing where you need good data to see how effective your marketing initiatives have been. Do the easy thing and protect your data from the beginning by splitting out tracking between your store and your blog.

9. Avoid Sidebar Links To Your Products

I’m of the opinion that links from a sidebar don’t count anywhere near as much as those from within relevant content. If you are linking to products in your catalog try and do so from within the main body of content in your linkbait where it is surrounded by relevant text. Linking internally in this manner means you can pass on juice to products, brand pages and categories that need it most.

Creating Relevant Topical Linkbait

When linkbaiting a commercial site you’ve got to be relevant and present your content as best as you can. You’ll see small blogs getting to the front page with poor grammar, atrocious design and a terrible headline. Let me dispel any hope you may have that a quickly thrown together linkbait will cut it on your store: it will not.

It is possible to linkbait a store, but there are some basics you need to apply first.

10. Keep It Timely

One of the most effective ways to successfully linkbait a commercial site is to tie in with current events. For example, if you have a site selling car parts, then create a bait with an angle that ties in with climate change and the broader green movement.

Another way to stay current is to keep an eye on the latest internet memes, circular emails and acronyms: I’m thinking of Digg’s recent viral adoption of ‘FTW’ in this instance. Adopting the language of your intended audience, particularly in your headline, really does help. A word of warning though: be selective because many of these fleeting internet phenomena are complete and utter trash aimed at a demographic completely different to that of a predominantly male social media site.

11. Relevancy Is Key

You’ll often see sites like Wired on the front pages of social media sites covering issues as diverse as the latest Apple rumours to the race to dig the deepest hole on Earth during the Cold War. This is fine for news outlets, where offbeat news can intermingle with commentary on current events, but not for a site selling a niche selection of products.

There is an argument that in the past irrelevant linkbait was beneficial, based on the assumption that if it went viral you still got lots of links from authority sites. I personally do not believe this to be true now: if you do push irrelevant linkbait on your e-commerce store you actually risk doing more damage than good by altering the theme of your site through links with completely unrelated anchor text from non-relevant sites outside your niche.

12. Regurgitating News Is Not A Valid Strategy

Don’t even allow yourself to get tempted into regurgitating news in the hope that it will get links: it simply will not happen. When discussing news and current affairs people tend to link to mainstream media and high profile blogs, not mom and pop’s store. Unless you are actually a very well known brand, forget about it.

13. Use Multiple Hooks

Old school linkbait might use just one hook, which may or may not be enough. I tend to apply a combination of hooks to initially grab attention, appeal to the reader and then draw them in. Combining the attack hook with the news hook can form the basis of an extremely viral linkbait, but its lifespan tends to be short because the focus of current affairs coverage always moves on.

Creating a linkbait with a view to the long term may mean that it gets off to a slow burn start, but its evergreen nature means it will attract links for much longer. As you can see below, combining the green hook with fear is particularly effective.

14. Differentiate Your Linkbait

Before you start writing up a bait, have a look to see what has already been tried. In an ideal world every linkbait will break new ground but, in fairness, there’s very little that hasn’t been done before. It’s a good idea to find out what has been attempted previously and didn’t quite make it. Even if your idea didn’t work for someone else, it may be worth doing again, only better! A word of warning: don’t try and repeat too soon.

15. Avoid Aggressive Linking To Your Products

The whole idea of linkbait is to help your store rank higher, but to get the more benefit you need to avoid temptation to drop too many obvious links to products. One easy way round this problem is to strip out any internal links while you are pushing the bait, then add them back in after you’ve finished and hopefull for a few good links.

Be Persistent!

There’s very few people who’ll tell you that linkbaiting an online store is easy, but as you can see below, it is possible!

Would you like to get more quality backlinks to your online store? Get in touch today for a free consultation!

Here are some tips to help you plan to stay online and available.

1. Use static page cacheing

Use a plugin such as WP-Cache for WordPress. For for a custom coded site, use mod_rewrite to replace your dynamically generated page with a statically built one for the period of the spike, then switch back to dynamic when traffic returns to normal.

2. Use Memcache

Memcache gives you a super-fast alternative to pulling everything out of a database. This is particularly useful on sites which have mostly database reads, and few database writes such as CMS, blogs etc.

3. Keep the page light

If the traffic is going to hit a single page, keep it light. Use a tool like Firebug to check the HTML size and image sizes. Ensure the images are compressed properly, and consider temporarily removing weighty layout blocks or switching to a lightweight template for a while. If required, seek help from professionals like OutsourceSEO India ot enhance your website.

4. Split your content over multiple pages

Rather than one large page (which everyone tries to load once, at the same time), split your content over multiple, sequential pages. This will reduce the load into more smaller requests over a longer period.

5. Have a code-tidy

Use this review as an opportunity to reduce the weight of your pages. Look at the code of your pages. Do you still have tables and font tags?  Switch to a div-based layout and CSS. Abstract any in-line CSS and JavaScript into separate files.

6. Host your images/media off-site

If you think you are going to have bandwidth issues, put your images somewhere else – with a different host, on a different network. If you need to choose the host, use tools such as traceroute to ensure they are actually in a different place and network path. Put your video on a sharing service such as Youtube and then embed it in your page.

7. Check your hosting plan for hard limits

You might have been through all the tips above, and the site is performing fine … right up until your host switches your site to a page telling everyone you just exceeded your bandwidth limit! Check what you are paying for and make sure this is enough. Talk to your host to see if the limit can be temporarily removed.

8. Find out about the infrastructure of your host

This is less important if you are with a big, well-known host, but then these people are likely to publish information about their infrastructure and internet pipes anyway. This becomes important is when you are with ‘Bob’s hosting’, and he is hosting you on his rented box with 1,000 other low-bandwidth sites and a throttled internet connection. Is the server capable of supporting a high traffic spike? Does it have a 100M/Gigabit path to the internet? Check out Eatel Business’s offering on internet connections and plans.

9. Go dedicated/clustered/grid

You might think you are already paying a handsome price for your hosting, but what is it actually worth to you to stay up? If you were down for an hour at what should be a busy time, what would you stand to loose? In the case of an e-commerce site this should be pretty easy to calculate and you may actually be surprised at what you stand to loose! Look at your hosting cost from this perspective, and it may be that the upgrade to the next level of hosting suddenly looks cheap.

Linkbait is widely regarded by many SEOs as the premier weapon in their quiver of marketing and promotional tools, and justifiably so. When linkbait is successful it can be incredibly powerful, driving an initial spike in (arguably entirely useless) traffic and links, followed by a long and steady stream of backlinks.

That’s the best case scenario. But what happens when your linkbait just doesn’t cut it? Digg, which is the granddaddy of social media sites, is where most linkbait gets peddled. Digg is also subject to random system maintenance and drastic algorithmic changes. Other popular social media sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon can also be hit and miss: what works one day might have no hope the next.

Of course, it isn’t all dependent on where you distribute your linkbait. It may well be the case that your ‘101 Reasons For Choosing Acme Exhaust Manifolds’ just doesn’t appeal to the crowd and is destined to fail, even if it does get 275 diggs and all manner of thumbs up.

So what if this is where you find yourself? What should you do if your linkbait, on which your client has spent good money and you’ve invested copious amounts of time, goes nowhere? Well, for what it’s worth, here’s what I would do.

Don’t Get Angry
It’s very tempting to lose it when you’ve been pimping every living person in your sphere of influence for the past day only to be greeted by that all-too-familiar ‘Out Of Service’ screen. It is infuriating that after 300 diggs, some of which may even be natural, to get buried. However, this is not the time to start ranting and raving. Instead, take a break from pushing your linkbait and do something else. You’re a link ninja, and ninja’s think laterally around problems.

Diversify
All too often marketers pin all their hopes and aspirations for a linkbait on a single site: Digg. This is not prudent. If your linkbait has failed on Digg, then learn this lesson and learn it well! Believe it or not there are other social media sites like Youtube where you can spam push your quality and relevant content. promoting your youtube video for more likes is nothing shameful, and everyone does it without much thought. Check out this handy list of 10 alternatives. ;)

Hit Up Your Contacts
If you’ve been pushing linkbait then you probably have quite a few people on IM, some of which own blogs that may be relevant. If this is the case then it is well worth taking the time to introduce them to your linkbait and beg for a link, even if it’s in a link roundup.

Contact Relevant Blogs
You should really be doing this anyway as part of a diversified link building campaign. Start searching for blogs relevant to your linkbait and tipping them off about it. For larger blogs it may be worth getting a colleague or friend to also email them to make this seem like a more popular article.

Make Sure You Email Companies & People Cited In Your Linkbait!
This is often completely ignored, but can score you some really good links. If you have a linkbait that, for example, compares 10 companies in your niche, then get in touch with their marketing department and inform them about it. Of course there will be companies who just will not link out, but on the other hand there are many big brands who will.

Consult Your Log Files
There’s gold in them there logs! It’s easy to bury your head in Google Analytics studying charts and miss out on the real good stuff. Take a look at referring sites over the last few months and see who has historically been sending you traffic, then contact them.

Create A List Of Distribution Nodes
Linkbait is a tricky thing to master, and even the best social marketers go through dry spells. I maintain a list of sites that I like to call ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’. These are sites with large followings that send traffic and also generate backlinks. In drawing up your list it is a good idea to classify what each site covers, how much traffic they send and whether they provide a direct link or not. Sometimes you’ll come across sites that will link to you via a redirect, but that won’t matter because simply being featured means others in your niche can see your content and link to it.

Critical to creating and maintaining a good list, in my opinion, is teaming up with other trusted friends. You may have a definitive list of ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’ in the sports niche, but your friends may be able to contribute to the list by providing details on highly popular sites in other niches. You can then use this to create linkbait with a hook specific to a niche, then push it on a wider range of ‘Secondary Distribution Nodes’.

Start Forum Discussions
Blogs aren’t the only place where you can get good oneway links, build authority and increase brand awareness. For some reason we as a community seem to have turned our backs on the forum, which are still a thriving way to discuss events, products and current affairs in many niches. If you have admin access at a relevant forum, or know an admin, then it may be possible to create a sticky thread and reference your linkbait to drive traffic and links.

Promotion Via Guest Posts
They’re a little overlooked but can be immensely powerful. The humble guest post is another way to build authority through oneway links with highly targeted anchor text, which, crucially, you can control.

Inclusion In Newsletters
Email marketing is massively powerful. There have been instances in the past where I’ve had a linkbait mentioned in a newsletter that sent tens of thousands of visitors and generated more links than you could shake a big stick at. Don’t pass it up!

Resubmission
This should be your last resort: resubmission, especially to Digg, is a risky endeavour and you may get your domain flagged for spam. To resubmit, you could change the URL of the linkbait or add a suffix to an existing URL such as ‘&ref=RSS’. With Reddit you can delete a submission and then resubmit at a later date, giving you another throw of the dice.

As you can see, just because a linkbait falls at the first hurdle doesn’t mean it is dead in the water. There are many, many ways that you can build links to a linkbait. All it takes is some time and effort!

Coming from an SEO background and wearing my stylish tinfoil hat, I am forever looking for ways to reduce reliance on any single distribution channel: being hooked on the Digg crack is just as bad as relying solely on free organic traffic from Google.

Are you wasting time?

Getting onto the prime patch of internet real estate that is the Digg front page is, of course, very desirable. But does it scale? Think carefully about the time you have to dedicate for the promotion of your submission, time that you could be using to create another linkbait.

Submitting your linkbait to Digg where highly volatile users bury content with the slightest sniff of being commercial can be a huge time-suck, and one that can do your linkbuilding campaign more harm than good. Preach that truth to yourself before wasting hours IMing, emailing, shouting and begging for Diggs only to get buried in the 23rd hour! I should know, I’ve been there.

Another option you have is making money online, so you don’t feel you’re wasting your time, but before you spend time taking paid online surveys, make sure you do your research.  Read reviews and find out what other user’s experiences were like.  Not all sites are great, but there are some decent ones like life points panel. The method is to get paid for your opinions via online surveys.

What’s best for your linkbuilding campaign?

My point is this: what would you rather base your marketing strategy on? Can you really depend on steady exposure to Digg’s infamously immature user base while dodging curveballs from their moody algorithm? Or should you break the habit and find more reliable methods of distribution? My money’s on the latter.

It could be said that I’ve spent a bit of time looking for alternatives to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit. And yes, they do not send as much traffic but that doesn’t mean you still don’t get links and exposure. So here they are, in all their glory. Fire up your engines and spam submit your content!

Bazooka Buzz [General News]
This Swedish site is a real gem that will send a couple of thousand visits to a popular post and generate linkage. Thankfully stories don’t have to be written in Swedish to make the front page.

Cracked Pipeline [Offbeat]
If you are taking the humour angle with your bait then this is a great place to submit. Not only will Cracked Pipeline send traffic, if your story is made popular you’ll also pick up a few citations from other blogs.

Design Float [Design]
A site to submit anything from graphic design and marketing to architecture and digital art. Design Float doesn’t send a lot of traffic, but you are getting exposure to bloggers in the niche.

DZone [Development]
If you are baiting on sotware and web development then don’t miss out on DZone. A popular story won’t crash your server, but a good bait can pick up some good links.

eBaumsWorld eLinks [Offbeat]
The addition of eLinks means it is now possible to get a link and traffic from this aged domain. Strange or funny images and videos as well as humourous stories tend to do best.

Lipstick [Celebrity]
You’ll be instantly familiar with the Lipstick layout and system because it is based on Reddit, only it’s specifically for the celebrity niche. The site doesn’t send much traffic but you can get some decent links with the right story.

Meneame [General News]
When it comes to the ratio of traffic : linkage, I have never seen any site perform as well as Meneame. A popular story on this Spanish social media site will also send you a few thousand visitors.

Shoutwire [General News]
Should you submit a story here, go easy on your promotion as the editors are known to come down hard on anything that looks suspicious. Shoutwire will send traffic to a popular story and generate some linkage.

Sphinn [Marketing]
Sphinn was destined for success ever since it was spun off from the highly respected Search Engine Land. This is the best place to submit articles on SEO, online marketing, usability and other related topics. Users at Sphinn tend to be conversational; you’ll get comments and backlinks.

SugarLoving [General News]
This one is part of the Sugar Inc. network, so by submitting your content here you may also get coverage on one of their blogs.