If there is one thing that attracts readers the most consistently and serves as an easy type of link bait, it is that of the info-graphic. If you don’t believe me just check out the front pages of Digg and Reddit and see how many posts are made up of simple easy to digest graphics. For some reason or another, people tend to eat this stuff up in droves and for us bloggers, it’s one way to create compelling link bait.
One of the best blog examples to solely use this method of posting is the OkCupid blog. This blog has only been putting up about a post per month for a year now and is already one of THE top blogs on the web. So what’s their secret? Easy, because the owner also owns the OkCupid dating site, they have a huge amount of useful data at their disposal; the kind of data which they can easily turn into compelling statistical graphs.
So how do we create our own graphs to use as link bait? Well, that’s pretty easy too. You can create graphs out of almost anything, particularly if you are using Google Docs to aid you in the process.
Let me show you how I used a Google Docs Form to create a simple poll, drive traffic to that poll and then create a graph which served as the staple to one of my most successful posts to date.
The first thing I did was setup a simple fun hypothetical poll that would really engage people and get them thinking, like this:
The second thing I did was spend $5 at StumbleUpon to deliver approximately 100 visitors to the survey. This along with my regular readers amounted to about 200 or so survey results, giving me enough solid data to create my link bait graph.
After about five days of collecting the data, I posted my link bait graph, along with my full analysis. The graph in the post ended up looking like this:
Finally, I sent out a few emails to some of my fellow bloggers in the same niche (dating) notifying them of my super cool “research study.” Also, I submitted the article to a handful of niche social media dating sites such as the Seduction Sub-Reddit.
So, what were the results? Within several days, that one post had gotten well over 6,000 unique hits and quickly became one of my best performing posts in years, all to the power of a simple little graph.
The next time you get stuck in a rut, trying to think of a good post idea, don’t strain your brain too hard, as it could be as simple as making a graph.
If the author talking about his/her Alexa Rank than he/she put a statistic from Alexa on the article.
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