Link Baiting Case Study

Hot on the tail of Matt Cutts’ post on link baiting, Loren Baker has posted a very cool case study on link baiting. You’ll remember that SEJ hosted some SEM Blog Awards late last year, and it got him a heck of a lot of links (and even kudos from Matt Cutts):

1,960 links to the contest announcement page is pretty good, even if
10% are judged to be quality back links, thatâs still 196 more than I
had beforehand. If $100 per link is the going rate for an organic &
valuable link to a web site, then the four hours I put into this
contest resulted in $196,000 worth of links. Thatâs one valuable idea.

That’s a sick ROI for maybe 10 hours of work total. Loren ends his post with a question: How can you produce a successful linkbaiting campaign for your niche market?

In my opinion it’s pretty hard to give a canned answer, since the key is to be creative, and to whip up something that will work well in your neighborhood of the blogosphere.. But there are definitely types of posts/features that consistently work well as link bait, which you can customize to your particular niche: awards, "top 10" posts, inflammatory posts, etc.

Or you can just hold a link baiting contest, like I did. I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on you