Tuesday, May 06, 2014

What is the Difference Between Click Bait and Linkbait?

I trust that you are in the wiser category.
I was asked this question privately after my last post, see here, and decided that a quick response was appropriate.

This is my definition, you may not agree with me leave a comment if that's the case, linkbait is only to get other people to link to your site.  Click bait on the other hand does that but also encourages people to click through to find out more.

In my mind the difference is one is just for SEO purposes but the other also carries a benefit to the viewer.

I watched an interesting video recently about linkbaiting.  The author of the video said that he found that linkbaiting didn't work consistently for his blog posts and he felt that ultimately he was doing damage to his brand.

He was using deliberately provocative headlines such as "Find out which three things you must do to get traffic."

I agree that this type of linkbaiting starts to smell of hype fairly quickly and your credibility goes out the window nearly as fast.  It may be a mistake on my part but I generally don't even try to write blog posts with SEO in mind so the titles are meant to let you know what the post is about.

Hypy headlines and titles are out.  Good content and information is in.  The next trick is to use good images in the posts that are the click bait.

Google also indexes the images on your posts and they link back to you so don't neglect the image.

I hope this helps calrify this for you.  Comment?

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