I respectfully disagree. Linkbaiting the widest possible audience is certainly a viable strategy, but so is linkbaiting a narrow audience. The whole link ninja thing is clever, but as a person doing targeted link baiting since those ninjas were toddlers, for me it’s far more challenging–and fun– when you have a very specific audience you want to appeal to. Once upon a time I was working with a site devoted to long distance running. This is a site that today is known by anyone who runs marathons. When they launched they had a fairly narrow audience of targets for publicity and links. I asked them if they had a way to create an online marathon training calendar, or some other types of running training calculators. After some discussion they built them, and they still exist today. The calculators were the bait that took them from a handful of links to hundreds of thousands of links. All from running specific sites. Natural links over time, never requested, never ninja’d.

That said, note that I proudly call myself the original ninja. I was seeking topical links for sites in 1993. I remember one project for a southern coffee manufacturer. There were less than 20 places to seek links for such a site back then (like usenet newsgroups)and believe me, it took every bit of ninja I could muster to find them :) That site is long gone now, but the seeds from the linking work still exist, thanks to Google. Have a look.

http://snipurl.com/19o1g

OK. now I feel REAL old…

Eric

The point with linkbait isn’t to appeal to a narrow niche audience, that’s where your traditional link building, or precision link building ninja’s come in.

The key point of link baiting is to target a wide segment of the population. Appeal to the masses, or more specifically the masses who are out-link friendly.

“what about the links that can’t be baited?”

From your comment:

“I agree that ANY link is baitable.”

Which is it?

For example, there are tons of San Diego local bloggers, and likely even directories that make them easy to find (I know that’s true in DFW). So how hard is it to come up with an angle that catches the attention of those bloggers? Sure you have to mix in a little email promotion to kick it off, but once it gets going it can easily turn viral in a closed loop community like that, where everyone reads one another.

So what if I did something “shocking” to get people’s attention, if they enjoyed “the story” you were telling, the only people who lose are the people who won’t “advertise” to get your attention.