How to Create User Generated Linkbait and Build Relationships at the Same Time

As I've realized the value of time, I try to look for ways to save time in my blogging.

One of the ways to increase blogging productivity is to do something that covers more than one necessary blogging activity.

Here is a way to create linkbait, or linkworthy content, with other people in your niche while at the same time buiding relationships with them.

A couple months ago, Distilled published a great article about creating user generated linkbait through forums.

Here's their method step-by-step:

1. Find a forum with a decent traffic level in your niche
2. Spend some time contributing to the community, get your name respected and ensure the mods don’t see you as a spammer (having a trusted profile in your niche community/forum is worth it’s weight in gold - treat this as a serious investment and don’t ruin it for a one-shot chance at linkbait)
3. Start a post on the forum with the seed of an idea, and a couple of examples from you
4. Let the forum community chip in their own ideas and funny comments and let them grow the idea for you
5. Wait for the thread to die down and compile all the best bits from it
6. Write this up into a piece of linkbait for your site
7. Social media success!

This idea is excellent because you make yourself known to other members in your niche while leveraging their input to create quality content.

One thing I would add to the post is to give credit to the forum where you got the information. You can link to the forum thread at the end of your linkbait and even mention the contributors by name.

Two Performancing Examples

I know this method works because we've done a similar thing and it has worked for us.

A couple months ago, our paid forum, Hive, was an invite-only forum. Ahmed asked the members of the forum for our best blogging tips. He compiled them and created 27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog.

We marketed it on Digg and it got on the front page with over 900 diggs. This led to a ton of links.

I did the same thing on my post: Onpage SEO: 7 Tips That Are Easy to Implement.

It did not get as many links or hit the front page of Digg (SEO is a bad word for Digg users). However, it did get links from two top SEO blogs, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch.