I was lately seeing everywhere these words. Link bait. Now, I understand how exactly it works after seeing live examples and will provide you one of the most effective ones. Bait means to throw little worms to the sea to grab the fishes. In MMO world, it is the process of writing a spectacular controversial article to grab attention of other bloggers and dynamically spread your link through discussions and trackbacks. Cool yeah? Here is what I believe a link bait. Since I am writing on it as well, it is successful.

Seth Godin suggested to click ads to show your appreciation for the blog owner if the content that you read was good. It has fallen to the SEO and MMO community like a bomb and most people including A bloggers blamed him supporting click fraud and have given links to his blog and have driven traffic. Jackpot. Seo and Traffic ! Since, you have understood basically how the linkbait works, I will do my part and eat the worm by writing my opinions about the topic naturally.

First let’s look how the market in general works. We have three players. Publisher, Advertiser and Customer. The ideal is Win - Win - Win and it can be only provided in natural sequence. Customer sees a relevant ad, buys the product on the target and becomes happy. Advertiser sells, happy and finally we publishers get our commission, happy.

Suppose a situation that a small budget advertiser spends $5,000 for marketing a specific product with the expectation of 20% profits. So, he expects to earn $1000 but assume that these fraud and suggested tip clicks get from the budget $1500 with no sales. The result is a loss and most probably this advertiser will not turn to the system with this product, so publisher will not get his future opportunity cost commissions. Loss - Loss - Neutral what we have in the model in the long ru .

Seth has also a right part stating that “I never click on ads people” are wrong. I do agree with him. If you believe that you will benefit from the advertisement do click but not for the only solely purpose tipping the blog owner.

I will give a real example. Since I use statcounter.com’s free service for all my websites, should I click on their ads time to time to support because I think as much as they earn money, their service will continue nicely and I will benefit? Do you feel what’s wrong here in those ideas?

You can also benefit linkbaiting and get your part by linking to these posts including mine for sure Then someone else does it for you until it reaches to a point in the ground of the pyramid scheme. Faster you join better you get the benefit.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!