Late last year we started serious linkbait campaigns for our clients. Here is a little insight into how a campaign is constructed and what results can be generated. Our client, Beau-Coup Wedding Favors, wanted to attract attention to their site and build dozens of relevant links in the process. Creating hundreds of new links is the whole point of a linkbait campaign. These campaigns are similar to PR campaigns where the quality of the content and the distribution list are the critical success elements.

Step 1: Research your market and develop content that is relevant to this audience. In our case we wanted to launch on Digg.com, which is visited primarily by young tech-savvy males. We chose a title that would immediately appeal to that target market: Nintendo Influenced Weddings.

Step 2: Create a page on the main site that looks like an ordinary article page. Use images where appropriate. Here is the page we created for this campaign.

Step 3: Invite all your friends, individually – not in a spammy email, to Digg the article. In many cases we start with our own personal and business networks and then expand to other acquaintances and friends-of-friends as much as possible. This is the hardest and most laborious part of the linkbait campaign. It can take hours to send out all the individual emails and chat notifications with the link embedded.

Step 4: Be patient and watch the Diggs grow and the traffic swell.

Here are the actual stats of that campaign. Linkbait release date: December 19, 2007

Page views: 192,721

Unique views: 133,948

Backlinks Yahoo!: 1,166

Backlinks Google: 64