"Link bait" is anything that you put on your site that encourages others to link to your site, and then drive massive amounts of free traffic to your site by telling others about it. It's some feature that by it's very nature makes others reference your site and want to tell others about it.



Examples of this could be a service that they need to visit your site to access, or an outstanding article that they have to visit your site to read, or even some type of list that they need to visit your site to access.

Examples of link bait that I can think of (actual and hypothetical)... things that would cause other webmasters, publishers, and just people in general to send you traffic include:

- The site http://formatit.com/ has a software utility that formats emails for free. This is where I format all of my ezines and emails to a max of 65 characters per line ;-)

- The site http://selfpromotion.com/ has a program that allows you to semi-automatically submit your sites to all of the major and minor search engines and directories for free.

- A site that has a listing of all the major blog directories.

- A site that has a listing of all the major places to "ping" when posting to your blog.

- A recipe conversion chart on a cooking site.

- A chart showing calories burned during various exercises.

- A listing (with hot links) and maybe reviews of major internet marketing forums.

- A list of 100 top rated directories to submit your ezine articles to.

- A list of the 100 most popular baby names.

- A list of foods considered aphrodisiacs... and why they work.

... you get the idea!

If you can incorporate something similar to the above on your blog or site, then after the word gets out, it will be natural for people to link to you. They'll feel good linking to and telling others about your site. People enjoy appearing "in the know."

You should do some brainstorming today, and see what ideas you can come up with for link bait to add to you site and then tell the world about.

As I said, it can even be an article. For example, an article on how to really optimize a website, 20 top traffic generation methods, some type of webmaster tricks, etc.

As an example, I recently wrote an article, which I expanded into an ebook called "20 Insider Techniques Of A Super Affiliate." I recently decided to post these techniques as a 20-part series to my blog at http://WillieCrawford.com/blog/

Once people start referring to this series, it will attract traffic to my blog for a very long time. The key then is to have links in my blog's navigation that make it easy to locate this series even months from now!

Go ahead... do some brainstorming, and then put some link bait on your site. Then tell a few others and ask them to help spread the word. After all, link bait only works if the word gets out. Once it does, the flow of traffic will become unstoppable.