This is a topic that I have really considered to be an area of concern for me as an online marketing professional.
So, what are link bait and viral marketing?
Link Baiting:
The art of targeting, creating, and formatting information that provokes the target audience to point high quality links at your site. Many link baiting techniques are targeted at social media and bloggers. SEOBook
Viral Marketing:
Self propagating marketing techniques. Common modes of transmission are email, blogging, and word of mouth marketing channels.
Many social news sites and social bookmarking sites also lead to secondary citations. SEOBook
OK, so we all agree (many of us anyway), that SEM and SEO are components of marketing, right? Let’s look at what marketing really is:
Marketing is the ongoing process of moving people closer to making a decision to purchase, use, follow, refer, upload, download, obey, reject, conform, become complacent to someone else’s products, services or values. Brian Norris
So both of these are concerted efforts to do one of two important things:
1. Generate Link Traffic (Link Baiting)
2. Generate User Traffic (Viral Marketing)
Attracting users and publishers using these techniques is a tricky endeavor. The best practices are hard to achieve. Let’s apply some thought to each.
Link Baiting
This is a great way to generate links by publishing something that will entice other publishers to link to it. There are three difficult aspects of this process:
1. Creating something that is worth linking to
2. Making it attractive to other related sources
3. Having the visibility for it to be seen
Here are a few quick thoughts on the matter:
Link baiting is that it shouldn’t be the only means of getting links to your website.
Search engines are concerned with the pace of your inbound link acquisition, go too fast and you can be penalized.
The engines also consider the source of your links, get too many links from irrelevant sources and you can be penalized.
Viral Marketing
This is a great way to have your previous customers help in your marketing message, spreading your marketing message to others.
Viral marketing has some positives and negatives:
Positive
References from a trusted source is always preferred
Negative
You may not receive the targeted traffic that you want or need
Something to note, if you are providing a high quality product or service with your customer’s satisfaction as a primary goal, then viral marketing will happen. If you engage in an effort to artificially do so, your message might be viewed as an attempt to deceive potential customers. This is a very fine line.
Conclusion
Neither of these practices are bad habits, but if you are working on either, great consideration must be placed on the benefits and the consequences that either can deliver.
My take on these practices: They can be very invaluable, however, they should only be a part of your marketing mix. They should not replace your existing efforts of link building and customer satisfaction. Just like other forms of SEO and SEM, they should not attempt to deceive users or search engines, ultimately, this is not a safe practice for long-term results.
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