Is your website lonely?  Not seen a friendly backlink  in months? Is it as wanton as a sailor on shore leave for a few visitors?  Well, I think I can help you tart your site up for a good night out full of just enough debauchery to get it laid (I mean new traffic and backlinks…).  The trick is masterbation. Whoa, whoa, sow down there cowboy and put your hand away.  I am taking about the fine art of baiting people to link to your site through the creation of sticky content.

Remedial Course: What are backlinks and why are they important?

Backlinks, links from other sites to your real estate blog, help to improve your credibility with search engines, online visibility, content reach and traffic. Therefore, building quality backlinks is just as important to the health and well being of your real estate blog as the content that you write. So, let’s take a good hard look at not only why and how search engines value backlinks but now you go about building quality backlinks through an easy to follow link campaign.

If you don’t know what backlinks are and why you need them - start remedial school here: Ultimate guide to building backlinks

Why do search engines measure backlinks?

In simple terms, search engines consider each backlink a “vote’ for your site. It is a way for Google to determine the overall authority and popularity of your site.
Tool: See how many backlinks your site has
Read also: Explanation of Google’s link algorithm and why you only want to actively build high PageRank backlinks

There are basically four ways to build links from other sites to you. 

1. Buy links from directories, ad networks, affiliate programs, etc.  Effective but not recommended as many sites that buy links eventually get penalized by Google.
2. Join a mob of link farmers where everyone links to each other incestuously. Again, Google ain’t fond of this method either and has been known to punish sites that engage in link exchanging.

Read also: Reciprocal Linking Penalties: Does Google hate your Link Love?

1. Build links manually. This is extremely effective and free. You just social network yourself all day long, ask friends, family, associates, clients, etc to link from their site to yours. You add yourself to every directory you can find then submit your RSS feed to every feed site you stumble across. Then you’ll get up tomorrow and do it all over again because you need t keep growing these links. Clearly the downside of this method is that you end up wasting a lot of valuable time.
2. Create linkbait content that makes other people WANT to link to your site!  This is easy to do if you are creative and the best possible use of your time. This is the topic of this article so I am going to show you specifically how to become a masterbaiter using lists.

What is link bait?

According to Wikipedia, linkbait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.  Part of successful linkbaiting is devising a mini-PR campaign around the release of a link bait article so that bloggers and social media users are made aware and can help promote the piece in tandem. Social media traffic can generate a substantial amount of links to a single web page. Sustainable link bait is rooted in quality content.

The reason I like linkbaiting is that instead of having to go out and buy or manually build links every day to keep up my link velocity, I can write a single post and if I market the post effectively, it does the link building for me.  The right kind of post can build links for you naturally both now and into the future.

How do I write link bait content?

Don’t chain yourself to your own site or your own industry

The likelihood of your industry, business or product being so freakin’ earth shatteringly interesting is almost none, so you probably cannot write a post, article, thesis, manifesto etc… on something related to your businesss and expect other people to want to link to it.  Therefore, think outside the box. What topics do people like the most? People like lists.  People like gossip. People like offbeat and funny. People like new technologies and tutorials on how to use technologies.  People like contests.  People like tips and other useful shit. See what people over at Digg are interested in and write about something similar.

Here are some great examples of posts that get read:

The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit In Your Shoe)

Lindsay Lohan just got best Christmas present ever: A bastard half-sister! Thanks, Santa!

The 25 Biggest Rock Wusses of All Time

Here are sme examples of titles I just came up with that can apply to any industry.

Top 10 Most Disgusting Redneck Foods

Top 10 Hottest Chics with Wings

Top 10 Places You Can Get Herpes from Paris Hilton At

Write in a way that people will want to read your post

OK, guys and dolls, lets get into the meat of how to connect on a personal and human level with your audience in each post.  Blogging is a very personal media channel.  People want to learn more about you, your expertise and your life.  The rub is, they dont want you to just come out and tell them about yourself. 

You need to create a soap opera in your blog posts where you disclose personal things about yourself in small doses.  That way it makes people feel as though they have come to know you slowly.  Think of a blog as one big date with your dream mate. You dont go telling your dream date your life story- the good the bad and the ugly on the first date.  You slowly let them into your life one date at a time. 

A blog is not the place to use the industry lingo or jargon. A blog is the place for you to let your hair down and talk to your customers in the same conversational tone you do with your closest friends. Use some slang, get creative with your grammar, spell with an accent if the story permits. Get gregarious on your blog! Be funny. Help people relate to you by being YOU only on the Internet and a lot more virtual.

See how some of the greats write

How to be interesting by Brian Clark

10,000 Hours by Seth Godin

Figure out where you are going to post your masterpiece

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking link bait needs to be on YOUR site. There are ways to build links to your site through posting on other sites.  The trick to this is always making sure you include a link back to your website or blog and submit the article to multiple article directories and RSS submission sites. Find a few trusted ones you like - for example - you might like goarticles.com, buzzle.com or ezinearticles.com

Openly tell people they can take this content and repurpose it.  Because what you want is for them to use the post, the rss feed, etc on their sites and get a bunch of inks back to your site.

Pimp your posts

Pimp your story all over the internet like the ho she is. A link bait post shoud ALWAYS be pimped out. Make sure you post it to Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, your Facebook page, LinkedIn and even stumbe the post.  Don’t be shy either- et everyone you know know about the post and beg them hep you pimp it.  Also- always pay it forward.  Be sure to reguary comment and Digg/Stumble/Favorite other people’s posts so you can grow your pimping network!

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