How to Promote your Link Bait: 10 Strategies that Work!

• I love your articles on how to research and write effective link bait pieces for my site or blog. However, I'm still lost regarding how to best promote this link bait content when I bring it live. What strategies can you recommend to drive initial traffic and links to the piece that I can then replicate on future pieces?

Answer: That's a great question and certainly one we get asked a lot. Writing a quality link bait piece 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 ten tried and true strategies that we use on our own client pieces, which you can readily replicate:

1. Add SMO Buttons: 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 the Digg Digg plug-in 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