Link Baiting, or linkbaiting, is one of the waves of the future for SEO and SMO. Below are some things I really liked from www.seobook.com.

Link Baiting
The idea of link baiting is to create a piece of content which is centered on a set demand from a specific audience. Questions to ask yourself are:

• Who is the target audience?
• Why would they care?
• Why would they want to share your ideas?

Some common link baiting techniques

• Talk about a specific target audience.
• Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important.
• Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community.
• Be controversial.
• Be complete thorough.

Mine, Mine, Mine!

• People like to view themselves as being important.
  • Many bloggers search for links to their blogs on Technorati or Google Blog Search multiple times each day.
  • Calling out specific people, especially with humor.
  • People are more likely to believe and spread messages which reinforce their opinion.
• Community involvement is important to help others identify with and feel ownership in your link bait.

Just Ask!

• Ask for feedback from people who may be interested in helping you improve your idea or helping you market it.
• Asking people for feedback can help others feel ownership in your idea, and is a way to pitch them on your idea without looking sleazy pitching it.

• Some social news sites allow you to place voting buttons on your site. Do so on your most important ideas.
• Have a friend or yourself submit your best ideas to the most authoritative and relevant social news sites.
  • Ensures your story has a title that is easy to vote for.
  • Ensures your story is submitted at an appropriate time.
  • If you do not do it soon after mentioning a story on your own site someone else may submit for you, using a dumb title or dumb post content.

Leverage, Leverage, Leverage
Use the connections you have.

• Call in favors from people you helped in the past.
• Incorporate community ideas into your idea.
• Leverage friends and contacts via instant message and email.
• Build accounts on social news sites: www.delicious.com, www.digg.com, etc.