Poker link bait strategies are methods and techniques of attracting links to your poker content without having to ask for them directly. A lot of times, link bait relies on social media to get the word out about your content in the hopes of it becoming viral and being spread. Sites like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Delicious are perfect places to get your poker link bait exposure to hundreds ( maybe even thousands) of bloggers who are actively looking for stuff to write about and link to.

One aspect of creating poker link bait is being an active participant in various social media communities. I’ve written about that in some other posts. But this post is aimed specifically at creating the kind of content that is likely to attract unsolicited links.

One effective poker link bait strategy is to look at the social media sites for TYPES of content which seem to get lots of attention. A lot of times, the headline is one of the most important aspects of an article to make it “link bait”. I like numbered lists, and a quick look at some of these social media sites today confirms that these numbered lists are still doing well on those sites.

Here are some link baits I see doing well today:

• On Digg today, I see “5 Video Game Facebook Status Updates”. I’m not sure what that means, but I do know that anything that has to do with Facebook automatically becomes more link-baity just because it’s about Facebook. The same holds true for Twitter. Write a numbered list about Twitter or Facebook and relate it to a poker subject somehow, and you’ve got instant poker link bait. You become even more link worthy if your content is funny.
• Also on Digg today, I see “25 Awesome Dirty Car Window Drawings”. This one consists of images, but this gives me a great idea for some poker link bait. How about an article listing 25 awesome dirty online poker screennames? If you’ll write the link bait, I’ll Digg it, Stumble it, etc., but I’ll also link to it from the blog here.
• On Twitter today, I see “Smarter Transportation: 10 Social Media Tools to Navigate Your City”. Again, adapting this headline to poker would be a cinch: “Smarter Poker – 10 Online Poker Tools to Increase Your Win Rate”.
• On StumbleUpon today, I see “20 Incredible Lego Artworks”. Here’s a linkbait idea. Hire a Lego artist to create Lego versions of 20 famous poker players. You’ll get links from that, I promise.
• On Delicious today, I see “20+ Best Windows 7 Themes”.

I’ve never seen a particularly successful example of these poker link bait strategies in action yet. Is this because these link bait strategies don’t work?

I’d say that it’s not that they don’t work; it’s that most poker webmasters don’t try that hard. Creating good poker link bait is hard and takes time.

At the same time, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s complicated. The poker link bait strategies I recommend include just a few elements:

1. Membership and participation in a couple of social media communities.
2. Interesting and compelling content. (It doesn’t even have to be long content; Seth Godin has a post that’s being featured on Delicious this very minute that can’t be a word longer than 250 words.)
3. A compelling headline, preferably one that includes some kind of numbered list.

Food and StumbleUpon

A final observation about a specific social media site. People at StumbleUpon love to stumble food related articles. How about putting together an article about the 10 best snacks to serve at a poker party?

This post was written on September 29, but I’m not publishing it until September 30. So you’ll see different articles on the social media sites I mentioned. But I bet you’ll see similar patterns.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Poker Link Building, Social Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.