One of my favorite SEO strategies has always been “link baiting.” Essentially this means writing an article to be eye catching and entertaining enough that people will want to share it, so that then when they read it on your website, they’ll be more likely to want to post it on their own websites or on forums. This was a strategy that was around before social media marketing existed in a big way, and one that allowed for articles to go viral before the days of Facebook or Twitter. Fast forward a few years though and I’d argue that many of the social network “influencers” could stand to learn a thing or two from the technique.
Too many people believe that having a big network of contacts on a social media site is enough to ensure that their content will spread. The strategy for many of them it seems is to simply gather a large number of “followers” or “friends” and then to just share everything they create and hope for the best.
The problem is that not everything is well suited to that kind of viral sharing, and like the link bait articles that SEO gurus use, a better strategy would be to devise articles from the outset that will be more likely to get shared. Next, we will take a look at how to accomplish that task.
Write Articles with an Emotional Hook
The first thing you need to do if you hope for your article links to spread quickly is to give them some kind of emotional resonance. If someone reads your article and they come away thinking ‘wow’ or even feeling angry, then they will be more likely to share, comment or interact with that content in some way.
Write Articles with an Eye- Catching Title
For someone to share your article they first need to read it, and the only weapon you have at your disposal as far as that’s concerned is the strength of your title. While you could write an entire article just on that, the tenets you should follow are to make your title descriptive of your article so that people know what it’s going to be about, to make it engaging in some way (again by making it emotional, or by asking a question or making a statement) and to use hyperbole (the ‘ultimate’ list, not ‘a very good’ list).
