If you’re new to linkbaiting and you don’t know how many links or traffic to expect, I’ve created a little list so you can compare my results with your own. I consider myself and my team as one of the best in terms of results.

Once you master the “technique”, link baiting becomes easy. You’re not going to get a hit every time you launch however, you should see a good percentage of launches become successful. Building links will become easy and you’ll spend your time launching new websites instead of endlessly chasing for small amounts of links.

This is a rundown on the methodology and some average results.

Aaron Wall is a well known SEO personality, while he is still “relatively” new compared to the likes of DaveN or Greg Boser, he has made a huge impression in the SEO and Internet Marketing world. His skills can only be described as outstanding. He’s one of the kindest people I know in this industry and has helped many fledgling SEO’s get on their feet without asking for anything in return. His new venture is a community and a training programme where you can speak to him directly and get virtually unlimited help.

I’ve written this post as many people don’t really understand in great detail as to how each social network works. This post should hopefully give you some insight into how many votes you need to make the “popular” page of a network, how much traffic to expect, and what the result of negative votes are on your story.

Name of Network: Digg
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 60 – 300+ on average
Consequence of Negative Vote: Requires more Diggs to become popular. NOTE: One Bury does not cause your story to be removed! You can have a significant amount of “buries” and the story could still go popular.
Expected Traffic: 10,000 to 100,000 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Stumble
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 – 40 typically, Reviews and Tags are also important
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: 2,000 – 50,000 UVs and the cycle can come again weeks to months later.
Type of Network: Toolbar - random

Name of Network: Propeller
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 35+ on average
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: 1,000 – 20,000 UVs – Can go to 100,000 if the story goes to news.aol.com
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: del.icio.us
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: More than 120 bookmarks (as fast as you can)
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 Vote
Expected Traffic: Up to 20,000
Type of Network: Techy, Internet based info, guides

Name of Network: Mixx
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 - 60
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: Less than 100 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Reddit
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 3 – 300+
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 total points
Expected Traffic: 3,000 – 30,000 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Yahoo! Buzz
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: N/A. Popular is Yahoo.com and that is manually selected.
Consequence of Negative Vote: Unknown
Expected Traffic: 1-3 million UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Fark
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: Admin manually select for Popular
Consequence of Negative Vote: unknown
Expected Traffic: 5,000 to 15,000 UVs
Type of Network: Humor

Name of Network: Ebaumsworld
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30
Expected Traffic: 500-20,000+
Type of Network: Weird, Wacky Stuff, Interesting and Funny Pictures work really well.

Digg is seen as the “Grand Daddy” or the “Big Kahuna” of Social Media Networks. It has the ability to send an enormous amount of traffic in a given direction.

However, since the major algorithmic update in January, it’s been much harder to get your Digg submissions to the front page. Also, it’s not unusual to see stories in the “upcoming” section with 300 - 400 Diggs and they still don’t hit the front page, and I saw a story today with 1010 Diggs and it was still in “upcoming”! Back in the old days, we could get almost every article onto the front page, now the odds of getting a submission to go “popular” are less than 50%.

Getting your story a significant amount of Diggs is hard work and very time consuming. Preparing an article or piece that you think will work takes hours and hours of tweaking and can cost a considerable amount of money. All that work will be wasted if the story gets buried or expires, which is statistically more than likely to happen.

Even many of the top submitters have stopped submitting to Digg to protect their high “popular” percentage and continue to appear to be successful on Digg.

However, there are many other Social Networks that can generate large amounts of traffic and are much easier to find success with. I’ve listed the top few other networks you should try:

1) reddit.com
2) del.icio.us
3) buzz.yahoo.com
4) stumbleupon.com
5) fark.com
6) Propeller.com

Using these networks, you can generate as much traffic - if not more - than an average front page on Digg. Also, it will require considerably less effort and your failure rate will be far lower than on Digg.

Give it a try, submit ten articles to Digg. If you’re lucky, two of them will become popular and send, say, 40,000 visitors. This is basically just an average number that you’ll probably get for a couple of regular stories becoming popular.

Submit the same ten articles to the other sites, and if you know what you are doing, there is a good chance that you’ll have an 80% success rate. I bet you could get at least 100,000 visitors. Getting a hit on Propeller can net hundreds of thousands of visitors too, so that one certianly shouldn’t be avoided.

I’m not saying forget Digg, just focus your efforts on the other networks, as you can have much greater success for less money, less time, and a lot less heartache.

I’ve had a lot of comments asking why I didn’t put Mixx on the list. Here is the reason: I’ve never had a decent amount of traffic from Mixx, the most being around 1000 visitors. It requires much effort to get your story to the popular section of any network, and your effort is best spent elsewhere.

Want success on the social networks? Everyone tells you to write compelling, quality pieces that will appear to like-minded social users. “Digg Bait” is writing so that it appeals exactly to the “Digg mind” and by doing that you will have massive success on the social networks, including Digg. This statement is only about half correct, quality content is nothing without the promotion.

It doesn’t matter how good the piece that you created is, it just won’t become popular without promoting it correctly throughout the social networks. Try it yourself, spend a whole week creating some study that is tech-related which social geeks (like me) will love. Then submit it to the networks and watch what happens…nothing.

The reason behind that is they are called social networks for a reason and you need a bunch of people to take interest in your story before it will go out and spread into the wider community.
You need to build a list of “friends” that will help give your article a push into “view”. Without enough votes, thumbs up, Diggs, stumbles or whatever, people will not see your creation, and it will be an absolute waste.
Building up a good network of “friends”, takes time and a lot of effort, many of the successful social media marketers I know participate in their networks full time. It’s not something that you can start and then have some success a day later.

Successful social media marketers have put the effort in, consistently and now have their own networks of several hundred to several thousand people. When they submit an article to the social networks, it gets a lot of attention because of their following. An article submitted by an established social media marketer will attract dozens of “votes” without ever even having to ask, this will propel the article into view and it will start to the gain traction organically. From then it will more than likely hit the “popular page” of one or more social networks, attracting tens of thousands of visitors.

On the flip side, the power of an integrated social networker can get an under par article onto the “popular” page of a social network. This is because their loyal following will vote for the story almost habitually and not even consider rating the story negatively. It’s a strange phenomenon, where your loyal followers will support you almost blindly no matter what the quality of your work.

That’s not to say any old garbage will do well, the piece needs to have some good qualities otherwise people outside their network will destroy the article’s chance of success.

The moral of the story: If you want success, build your network. Otherwise, try and convince an active social media marketer with some influence to bump-start your story.

Social media marketing is tricky, and a lot of people don’t fully understand the positives and negatives of integrating it into their businesses. I’m going to explain how your website will benefit from embracing social media.

The primary reason we work in social media is to get links. Clean, Google friendly backlinks.  It’s possible to generate thousands of them with a single article, just three hundred words could bring in more than ten thousand links.  Obviously, links bring good rankings on Google and will help your site become an authority site if marketed correctly.

Successfully marketing an article on the social networks also brings traffic, more than you could ever desire. We’ve launched articles that have had almost a million visitors. Unfortunately, the traffic is commercially worthless, you’re going to make almost no sales, get any sign-ups or achieve any direct return.  I’ve only ever heard once of a person making “proper” money from a success on the social networks, and that was just $11,000. 

Social Media success on your blog could also help you gain a few RSS subscribers, but I wouldn’t think it would add them in the hundreds.

Brand exposure is also a factor, however, most social network users don’t like commercial sites and the pages have to be “dressed down” in order for them to work. Hence, negating the “brand exposure” that having millions of visitors might bring.

Social media marketing is a great way to start your viral marketing campaign which again would bring indirect brand awareness. Viral videos have always worked well, and are working particularly well at the moment.

In summary, social media can be of huge benefit, if you realise how to use it to it’s full potential. As a webmaster or business owner, the benefit is indirect, mostly though increased link equity, which will bring the rankings and then the traffic. Using social media to create links is by far the most economical way of increasing your rankings on the search engines, and it is still within Google’s guidelines as an added bonus.

I’ve spoken to several people recently who don’t know whether they should go down the link building or link baiting road.

I’m going to try and outline the strengths and weakness of both techniques in this article.

Link Building:

It can’t be disputed that good quality link building is fantastically effective, anchor text controlled link building really can’t be beaten in terms of creating effective results. However, there are some downsides to link begging, or buying links on old, trusted sites that will push your website right to the top of Google. Some of these negatives are well know and include: Getting busted by Google’s webspam team, which would put you back many months.

Secondly, the cost involved in finding and securing dozens of high quality links per month. Building unfiltered, permanent links on old trusted sites, that are in-content and look natural is damn hard and as I’ve just said, darn expensive too. Average link costs, taking into account time and link costs are between $125 - $350 per link. I’d like to reiterate that the effectiveness of well build links should not be overlooked, however, for long term strategy it should be approached with caution as Google is coming down on paid links like a ton of bricks.

Link Baiting is a fantastic method for building large volumes of links, an added bonus is that more often than not, you can pickup some links which would otherwise be almost unobtainable. Writing a credible piece may get you some links from an authoritative government or university website with tons of trust and thousands of it’s own backlinks.

Success is hard to measure with link baiting, however, it’s not unusual to build thousands of links in a single exercise. In terms of cost, successful projects may have a cost from 10 cents to $2 per link. This is obviously much better value for money that manual link buying, a well executed link bait is five to ten times cheaper than buying the equivalent number of good quality links.

The downsides are that you cannot control the anchor text (which impacts rankings you are desperate to obtain), and many of the links will come from blogs. This means PageRank rains down like manna from Gods and then the majority of it ebbs away as the posts are archived, you will retain some link equity though. Learning to link bait is not exactly easy though, and consistent success takes a long time to learn.

Link baiting done correctly is the most cost and time effective method for building links. Period. It has it’s downsides but those can be overcome with clever ideas”steering” the anchor text in the bait.

Summary:

I think in the short term, its hard to make an impression in the short term without going out and finding at least a few links to get you going, with rules and guidelines changing, people are moving away from link buying and begging but it’s going to take a couple of years to see the effects.

I’d always suggest Social Media marketing for your long-term strategy though.

I’ve prepared a comprehensive table to reference most of the major Social Media sites on the Internet at the moment. Instead of just focusing on the top three or four, try and leverage some of the smaller sites which maybe a little more relevant to what you are trying to publish.

Granted, they may only send a fraction of the traffic compared to the biggest social networks, however, it shouldn’t be overlooked as it could yield traffic and links which would otherwise be wasted.

Note: If you feel that I have missed one, please contact me and I’ll add it to the list.

I’d like to thank Brent Csutoras for his valuable input.

Matt Cutts follows very few people on Twitter compared with most, and I’ve compiled a list of who he follows. Some of the people on this list are some of the most influential people on the Internet, especially in SEO circles. If you’re on this list and reading this post, then consider yourself a success. Congratulations.

I’ve created this table for people to see what Matt Cutts thinks is relevant and what is not. There’s so much noise on the internet, it’s hard to tell what the good stuff is. I’ve found several blogs that I’d never heard of, but they offered really good information.

There were a few people who I thought Matt Cutts would be following who were not on the list. The most surprising absentee was Aaron Wall from SEO Book.

Note: I don’t know many of the people on this list personally, and their descriptions may be slightly inaccurate. Also, many of these people have more than one website, whereas I’ve just listed one.

I was inspired to do a post on how to linkbait without using the social networks. That means not submitting to Digg, Reddit or any other of the big network sites and still having your piece go viral.

Too many people see the social networks as the only key to their success. If you spend several days creating a widget, great article or whatever. You want to make sure that it stands the best chance of gaining traction and getting a ton of traffic and hopefully links.

The key to your success is in two parts:

1) A fantastic piece of bait:

Good promotion on Digg, Stumble or some of the other networks can hide a crappy piece of bait. If you want your linkbait to gain serious momentum outside of the networks your bait needs to be exceptional. It really does need to be good enough so that you can gain some links without asking.

2) Good relationships with other bloggers: *

Getting some linkbait viral needs good exposure at the start, you need to get plenty of eyeballs on your bait. Once a small group of people start blogging about your bait more people should see their blogs and then those will catch on and all of a sudden you’ll have thousands of visitors and these should translate into links.

I think it’s hard to make relationships with influential bloggers, it’s also very time consuming. However, it’s something you should do as you develop your business. The most successul SEO’s and linkbaiters all have good relationships with each other. Aaron Wall from SEO Book is a big advocator of business relationships between bloggers.

There is a quicker way to getting high exposure on influential, busy blogs. The way to do that is to find bloggers who do sponsored posts. Imagine if your linkbait was mentioned on Shoemoney’s blog? It’s almost guaranteed to take off if the piece has been designed properly. I personally use this method for some of my linkbait pieces and it works very, very well. I’ve never used Shoemoney’s blog though as he is pretty expensive - at around $4000 per review.

The best way to find some people to blog about your piece is to use the blog networks, I’d say Review Me was the best. You could get your linkbait viral within a matter of days if you select the correct blogs to go onto. Stay away from the low end Blog networks like Pay-Per-Post as many of the blogs don’t have enough traffic to get your piece viral, and will make your linkbait look like spam should a Google engineer look into it.

Don’t forget to ask the blog owner to “nofollow” the post, so you stay within Googles guidelines. You don’t need to worry about not having those few links that have been “nofollowed” as your piece should go viral and you may get thousands of legitimate links.

Lastly, there is one more way of linkbaiting without the Social Networks, and that is to email relevant bloggers with your linkbait and see if you can get a few dozen links. It’s a little harder than using a blog network as the linkbait really needs to appeal to them. Building relationships with relevant bloggers doesn’t hurt either. I’ll save that for another post though.