Writing a quality piece of content (aka linkbait) that employs a hook, fulfills a need, communicates much-needed resources, or provides a hilarious distraction is the easy part. The hard part is that everyone is putting up GREAT content these days. Unfortunately, most of that great content can die on the vine quickly without a solid "push" from the publisher. You have to know how and where to promote them effectively.

To that end, here are nine tried and true strategies that we use on our own client pieces, which you can readily replicate:

1. Add Social Sharing: Making your content easy to share is essential to generating initial traction on even the best content pieces. We recommend the use of AddThis.com for non-Wordpress platforms and Social Warfare specifically for Wordpress blogs. These should be placed directly at the top of each blog post or as a floating toolbar that scrolls with the reader. Visitors to pages that have these buttons can visually see accumulated stats and are more inclined to share the piece in turn. At a minimum, posts should have Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, and Reddit buttons for maximum viral reach optimization.

2. Promote with Paid Tweets: Services like Sponsored Tweets and BuySellAds (sponsored tweet category) allow users to promote specific tweets (i.e. links to link bait pieces)