Linkbait: What is it and Why Use it?
The ultimate goal when crafting digital content should always be to gain substantial traffic; you want as many people liking, sharing and engaging with your work as possible. When exceptional content is produced, exceptional spikes in client/reader/subscriber interest or interaction can be expected. However, creating great content is not always an easily attainable task; countless online platforms struggle with producing work that attracts the audience size which they strive to achieve. Too many content creators focus almost exclusively on simply getting quick clicks onto their pages, crafting exaggerated (and at times misleading) clickbait-like content that attracts merely initial interest. This initial interest can often be lost if the information within the piece is not interesting or useful enough for visitors, making their content easily forgotten and also making it difficult to sustain a strong consistent following. Rather than only worrying about if your content sounds or looks interesting enough for people to visit, ensure that your content is engaging enough for people to continue reading, and useful enough for people to want to link and share.
Link Bait, or ‘linkbait’, is content that is specifically formulated to attract links– as displayed here in this sentence. (See what I did there?)
Content that is considered ‘linkable’, serves as content that others find worthy enough to publicly share or to even reference in support of their own work. This essentially means your content contains informative and engaging elements that online visitors find particularly useful, which in turn draws more web traffic when linked onto other platforms. However, the question is: what kind of content can exactly be constituted as effective linkbait? Creating content that you might find interesting simply is not enough; there are a number of different components which are designed to capture the attention of online visitors when utilized and implemented strategically, including:
Visuals
It has been proven that content which contains some sort of visual elements is frequented more than content without any visual components. Pictures, videos, charts and countless other similar bits can be included in your content to maintain the interest of your audience. By incorporating visual elements within your content, not only is your work more attractive to the eye, it makes your pieces more reader-friendly and more easily understood. Many people are more visual learners, and benefit from having some sort of image to accompany the information which they are consuming.
Lists
The digital age has created a certain laziness and impatience among online users, making it exceedingly difficult to capture and maintain reader’s attention spans. If content is too text-heavy or complex, people are more likely to opt out of reading and search for other sources of information that are more easily digestible. To remedy these easily expired attention spans, consider incorporating lists and guides into your content. Instead of writing a word heavy blog post on the importance of a healthy diet to avoid serious illness, put together a list of healthy foods to eat to boost the immune system. Utilizing this model allows for concrete, step by step instructions for people to implement the advice or information you’ve published and can be more quickly internalized than a lengthy article.
Interactiveness
Rather than having people simply read your work, allow them to feel like they are a part of it. There is a higher level of interest when people are given the opportunity to interact with the content they are consuming, leading them to want to share this content to others so they can also engage. Interactiveness in online content can include anything from quizzes, surveys, personalized assessments, calculators and other similar tools. The more personalized your content feels for online visitors, the more they will appreciate and enjoy engaging with your work.
