Spreading Link Bait

I recently wrote what I believe is an interesting and funny article in my niche and want to post it to my website and spread it as link bait. (Its about making Jerky out of Squirrels)

The problem is that I have never done that before.

I dont have friends for either of my unused accounts at Digg or Stumbleupon so I fear that bookmarking my own site wont do much good.

Any ideas for spreading link bait would be appreciated, or maybe people willing to Digg my article if they find it interesting, would be awesome.

I'm planning on Fark, Faves and Twitter, maybe Mixx and Facebook.

 

Create a twitter account. Increase your followers to a few thousand. Then post a tweet asking for help in bookmarking with any accounts they have. Works for me!

 

I would suggest that you start working on your Digg account, StumbleUpon and Reddit account so that when you do need to launch content you have an account that is strong enough that it might be possible to attract enough votes to make it popular. It does take some time, but at least you have some control over the process then.

However, as that doesn't help you in the immediate future you could try to find users on the site who might be willing to submit the content for you.

Use the search function on the sites and try to find users who have submitted similar topics before. On Digg in particular, users will often have their IM details listed on their profile pages. You can get chatting to these people and offer to do something for them in exchange for submitting your article.

As you mention, you can also submit the article to one of the smaller social news sites and hope that the content is strong enough that someone sees it there and then submits to one of the larger sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon.

Many users will be signed up to more than one site. If they see that content has become popular on one place then they might submit it somewhere else. Not quite sure how well it will travel on Twitter as you would need a decent sized following or for the article to be retweeted to see any results.

Mixx might be a good option as I know there are lots of Digg users on Mixx.

Your article might work as some studies carried out into viral marketing seem to indicate that surprise and disgust play an important role in helping to spread messages.

If your article is explaintory and not just a funny article (obviously, it could contain elements of both, but I mean if it actually goes through the process of showing how you can make jerky from a squirrel) then you could also consider sending the link to animal rights groups.

If it's links that you're after then you can bet there will be lots of angry animal rights protesters willing to link to you to highlight to the rest of their community the fact that a loveable squirrel is being used to make meat from. If you decide to go down this route, then you could submit to care2.org/news. I'm sure there will be lots of people who will hate the article (but also be emotionally charged enough to link back because of it).

I would ask why you want the traffic though? Generally, users from social news sites won't stick around on your site for very long. Are you trying to promote a product or service or do you have ads on the site? Unless you have CPM ads you're unlikely to make any money from the spike in traffic. You can end up with some extra feed subscribers though, so you might want to make the RSS button more prominent. If you're using wordpress or joomla then you could use the "what would seth godin do" plugin to highlight the feed to new visitors.

 

Thanks Tweez23 for your insights.

I actually considered the animal rights route for traffic but decided against it. I definately need to work on my Digg account so that has moved up on my to do list.

Mostly its my first link bait experiment and I was looking for a few more inbound links and some traffic to maybe increase my Adsense earnings a little. I only considered Twitter because I have been having so much luck getting traffic from there lately that it couldn't hurt.

I do like the idea of finding people that have submitted similar stories and contacting them. I'll probably do that this week when I post the article to my site.

 

I suggest twitter and stumble upon. Just increase followers on twitter and friends on stumble upon.