Oh boy, here I go with a new term again. When is someone just going to come out and tell me to shut the fuck up already? I swear people I’m not just pulling these out of my ass. I actually use them regularly to properly describe something that I haven’t seen anyone coin yet. I just hope the people in my office understand me and just give me that all too familiar weird nod and eye shrug for other reasons. Uhhhhg as much as I hate to admit it the concept of market bait is useful and should be a considered practice for the already well developed site so here it goes.

As you probably guessed market bait is, in sorts, the red headed step child of link bait.

Link Bait - Creating a portion of content that draws readers interest. Its intended purpose is to suede other webmasters/bloggers to talk about your content, thus linking to you. Hence its kind of like fishing for links.

Market Bait - Expanding the scope of a websites niche (subniches) in order to allow you to expand your site’s marketing scope to other link sectors.

We’ve all been in the situation where we’re developing a link plan on a site and it suddenly hits the brick wall. At first it’s easy, you peruse around the other sites in your niche and you easily gather tons of links, and put up your link everywhere they’ll allow you. You get a few good relevant ones and put it up in some directories. Everything is going well and and you start making rash predictions. If I managed to get 6k quality links this month then in six months I should have about 36k…right? Haha I’ll stop that thought right there, since there is the possibility that I’m the only dork that tends to do that.

If I may jump into left field real fast…oh man I hate it when I’m doing some spam site project and I look at the stats from 10 test sites, as like oh wow these 10 sites are making $25/day so if I create 5,000 I’ll make $12.5k/day. Yet it never turns out that way does it? Still it never crosses your mind that your wrong until AFTER you’ve done all the work. All well, it’s just the way of the world I guess. If you know what I’m talking about please say so in a comment so I can feel better about myself. :)

Back to the subject of the brick wall of link building. Once you reach that point you have several options. Most start looking into generic low quality links. Hey at least its a step forward. Others look to link bombing. The rest decide to keep the easy road rollin’ with Market Bait. In other words they create a new “type” of content for their site. That type of content allows them to easily reach a new market filled with a whole new set of easy to grab links.

Lets list a few examples
Webcams - Just putting a webcam on your site allows for a whole world of easy link building. There are tons of webcam directories and webcam link sites you can post to. This is easy and if you don’t actually feel like entertaining a webcam audience you could always just be lazy and point the webcam out the window and ad it as a “city cam.”

User Contributed Videos/Pictures - Just allowing your users to submit videos or pictures opens up a ton of link market opportunities. You can submit to video directories, youtube…brain fart…too many to list.

Jokes - The joke market is HUGE. Lets say you have a medical info site. Just putting up a small medical jokes section allows you to post up your link to thousands of joke sites and directories.

A Blog - I had to mention this one just because it’s so obvious. Most SEO sites recommend putting up a blog on your site for just this reason. Just having a blog opens up a ton of linking opportunities.

My point is simply, why stop at a blog? There are thousands of ideas that are just as effective in the same marketing concept why not just keep producing them? Create one market bait and get a few thousand easy links, then just create another. Frankly it’s much easier than attempting to beat down the brick wall or avoiding it with link bombing(ehhh. I’ll take that back).

My Approach
I’m going to create an official Blue Hat SEO comic strip.
Here’s my buddy Stacey and I as super heroes. My super powers are very painful to villians. I have a cat for a hand. I punch the enemy and claw the hell out of their face. Then I squirt lemon juice on them. Ouch dude, ouch.

And no super hero comic book is complete without an evil villian.

Matthew has a grapefruit juicer for a hand which he uses to squirt innocent civilians in the eyes with grapefruit juice. My buddy shawn has an airhorn for a hand which he uses to give headaches to people then he scratches the chalkboard on his chest with his nails.