Most people think link baiting is for only blogs, but they are wrong. Blogs might to better link baiting due to their freshly updated content. But I’ll show you some tricks about link baiting for ecommerce sites.
Table of Contents
What is Link Baiting?
Create a free content to offer the web community. It may be an article or a blog post on your blog, a press release, or an authority article sent to an article directory, basically any content you offer freely on the internet. Then the web community will find your content valuable and link to it. Bingo!!! You start receiving free backlinks instead of paying for them or spending hours finding them. Link baiting is a part of Viral Marketing.
Why is it called Link Baiting?
It is exactly like fishing. With the bait, you have the chance to catch some fish.
Free Content => Bait
Free Backlinks => Fish
If you have a community related site, or a blog, or an article/authority type site, it may be easy to do link baiting. But I receive many questions from ecommerce site owners about how to do link baiting.
How to do Link Baiting For Ecommerce Sites
This is where the entrepreneurship mind comes in to our help. Remember a true entrepreneur always think outside the box. A regular guy, after reading about link baiting, can easily figure out some basic methods to link bait for his/her ecommerce site. He’ll even post a link baiting list on his blog;
What will a regular business owner do for link baiting:
- Create a great blog within your ecommerce site
- Write articles about your products, and use them both within your site and send them to article directories.
- Write about your company, your staff, etc.
- Publish a press release quarterly. Talk about your new product line, etc.
- Publish recipes if you sell food or related products.
All of the options above will bring your ecommerce site traffic, if you are a good content writer, and even lucky you may get more traffic than you’ve expected.
But, if you don’t want to be one of the guys in the ground, and if you want to lead the crowd, you will create much better link baiting techniques.
I will give you some real life examples.
What will a successful entrepreneur do for link baiting:
FreshDirect.com Celebrity Shopping Links
They are the #1 online retailer of FOOD in New York State. Unlike many other online food retailers which only publish food recipes to link bait, they have done something different. As the title says they publish the shopping lists of their celebrity customers. We just sent them a direct link, and they have achieved their goal.
PayPerPost.com Startup Step by Step Episodes
PayPerPost.com is an online marketplace for advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers pay bloggers to write about their website, services, products, etc. etc. Founder of PayPerPost Ted Murphy, who I believe is a true entrepreneur mind, has created a site called RockStartUp.com
Behr ColorSmart
Behr created an online tool called ColorSmart that helps consumers find coordinating colors for their project, visualize their colors on an interior or exterior, and register so they can save and retrieve their project details. Could you think of a better tool for somebody to play with colors on a visual tool before deciding to purchase them? And Behr.com sells paints already, the visitors of this tool are only one step from purchasing them. They even offer 8oz samples of all available colors to try at your home. I bet this ColorSmart tool has helped a lot to increase their sales.
Final Words
There are so many examples of smart link baiting for ecommerce sites. I will keep posting more whenever I have time. Link baiting and getting so many valuable links => customers is as is as this. Be creative, think outside the box, and start brainstorming.
Please add your comments if you have creative link baiting ideas for ecommerce businesses which you’ve tried or heard of.
