After reading a link baiting article written by Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl), I started thinking about how one’s personality plays a roll in how they write their link baiting approach. Let’s be real here. There are more factors than just choice alone that play into how we link bait. Embedded from birth, our personalities influence the way we write and come across through the screen. Words without personality lack hook potential. It’s the guy (or gal) behind the monitor that places the worm on that hook.
So how do you bait your hook?
Controversial Hook
You know who you are: The instigator. Controversy comes naturally to you. Dark sense of humor, strong opinionated and witty SEO professionals often take this approach when it comes to link baiting. It just comes naturally to piss people off with such great personality traits.
With this type of hook comes a major consequence if done wrong: Being shut out. Saying the wrong thing about the right people (or even their views) can shut you out a social networking circle faster than you walked into it. Just be careful about whose toes you step on. Also make sure you know who their backup system consists of.
Shock Factor Hook
Personalities that practice the shock factor hook approach are those that don’t give a flying you know what. Often times these folks are the life of the party. These people must be the center of attention at all times. They are real social butterflies with a knack to be known.
Shock hookers are also great at marketing their ideas by grabbing people’s attention. By being free spirited with no care in the world, shock factor hookers have the advantage of digging deep into the situation to uncover buried facts. They are the “hard core thinkers” with whit and a will to be noticed.
The shock factor hook is similar to the controversial hook as it goes beyond the standards and ruffles comfort levels. What sets the shock factor hook apart from the controversial hook is that with the shock factor hook there’s no attacking a someone else’s viewpoint. Posting “new news” gives the shock factor hook an advantage and opens the doors for controversial hookers to attack you; Hence, you receive press from both ends.
Resource Hook
Those that seek out the resource hook are the ultimate nerds of the internet world: Organizers, truth seekers, thinkers, as well as those just starting out in the SEO world. Most search engine optimization professionals start at this level until they gain enough trust to make their own assumptions.
Un-easy writers also dive into this approach. Afraid of putting out an opinion of their own, they use resources, and follow already well-known professionals to feel reassured of their articles potential.
This could possibly be labeled the safest way to achieve links, while building trust of your own. Another plus of this approach is that resource articles are often printed, bookmarked, and tagged. What’s the down side? Links move at a slower pace.
News Hook
Eager, strong willed, and go getter personalities often jump into writing the news hooks. These people have to know what’s going on at all times. A lot of busy body night owl’s with an abundant amount of time on their hands go niche in this link baiting tactic.
Link baiting with news is easy on the writer; but this type of bating is so saturated with writers that it takes one hell of a writer to make an article worth linking to. Writers with a niche for news hooking often lack a direction with their purpose.
News hookers take an on going new topic and write updates on it as it happens. Often times it is hard to get the “insider scoop” on newly approaching topics.
Just like the resource hook, this one is another slow and steady wins the race. This is another easy way to gain trust, but difficult to survive with.
Conclusion
Since there is no one-kind of personality trait that pertains to making a great SEO professional, different types of hooks can be found throughout social networking sites such as del.icio.us, digg.com, and even the site geared towards mainly SEO, Sphinn.com. We can even plot traits in our local newspaper, on magazine covers, and in the content we read along the web.
No matter what type of fish you are looking to catch, always remember the bigger the bait the bigger the bite.
There’s one more hook: the “reach out and tap the reader on the shoulder and say hey look! Tthis is just like you” hook. Touch them personally.. it helps them pay better attention
I would say you are partially right. Link baiting is a nasty word, kinda like speal or pitch, but i do agree that links will come faster from overt efforts and the p[erson with the best personality will usually have more friends. Any effort to reach out to users or the community will benefit you with links.
We are new but rank for competitive keywords with barely any links. Mostly because few sites really understand Google SEO criteria.
Check out my international pages and see the style compared to link building… Scottsdale SEO Agency
You are spot on.
People who fart alot are much more apt to link to my stuff.
I agree with your points. I’m becoming convinced that’s it tougher to link bait with written content than it used to be.
[...] How Personality Plays a Role in Link Baiting [...]
Yes, personality does count, and strong personalities can produce good content, however only with good content can you really showcase your excellent personality… - Yep, its a vicious cycle.
Great feedback guys. With the way the internet is, we are more free to express our personalities through our writing styles. With a screen in between us and our readers, for a personal connection, we must reach beyond the days of content like newspaper writers, and speak our readers language.
In a way, the free HitTail service was created by Connors Communications specifically to gather attention for its other services (link bait?). The incredibly conservative Google link check reports 1,820 links, which is a pretty smashing success. Perhaps this falls into the “Resource” hook. But I think there may be an entirely different category for folks who can slam out fully functional valuable sites which are themselves resources. So, it’s not a personality-driven resource site in the conservative sense you discuss, but rather, it’s a ballsy “let’s-make-a-resource that no one else has thought of yet” strategy.
HitTail’s not the first example. Another biggie that comes to mind is how SEOChat incorporated the first Google PageRank checker into their site. There’s tons of others.
Mike Levin of HitTail ~ I do agree that personality can be taken away from a resource driven website and still be successful, but that’s not quite what I was talking about in my article.
What I was referring to is link bait that is created by individual users to stir up talk on the internet. The personality of the writer determines the kinds of link bait that is more easily written by him or her. Any article writer can create press on the “resource” hook quite easily, as I feel it is the easiest bait to create.
For the others, such as the controversial hook, it takes a specific type of personality to create the right nack to hook readers.
Good point given though. I appreciate your feedback.