Publishing linkbait on your blog is a great way of driving editorial links to your blog but why not leverage this asset in other ways? When done correctly, linkbait can have many alternative uses that maximises your creative investment.

 Check out these 5 alternative uses for leveraging linkbait on your website!

1. Guest Posting

So you want to guest post at wisebread or some other high profile blog. Do you think anyone will take notice of your red widget versus blue widget article? Nope! Bloggers want to see content that has value to them, so prove to them that you can write it by publishing high quality linkbait on your site.

Once this linkbait is published.. then feel free to use it in all communication with guest post opportunities until you get a high profile guest post published (then you can use that!)

2. Relationship Building

Link requests is dead you say? Nah.. your just doing it wrong. What better way to build up rapport with fellow webmasters/bloggers than to create a super niche piece of linkbait that would only be interesting to them. Whilst this linkbait won’t get on the front page of digg, it will really help to get the persons attention your emailing and could turn into a relationship that makes a front page digg seem like a sad one night stand.

Great examples of linkbait to use would be an historical articles or just a simple infographic that only people in the niche would care about.

3. Something for your list

You got a list right?! A great way of improving your subscriber rate is give away your linkbait to potential sign-ups in return for their email address. You could even use current bait and just turn it into a simple infographic that subscribers will love as it’s even more digestible.

Giving your linkbait to subscribers early is another way of gaining favor and makes the people on your list feel warm and fuzzy inside.

4. Article Marketing

If you are still just putting “YOUR KEYWORD” articles into ezine then you have been doing it wrong and probably just wasting your time. Article marketing only works well when your content is syndicated so what you should be aspiring to achieve is linkbait on a budget.

Try and make your article linkbait more general than the articles on your site so that it can be syndicated in as many places as possible.

Once published, use the ezinearticles dashboard to track views and use google (copy and paste you first line from your article) to see how many places have syndicated your bait. If the sites are high quality then open up the lines of communication and offer them unique articles on a regular basis!

5. Web 2.0 Sites

Posting content in places such as Squidoo and Hubpages does not mean you should go down the spam route of just posting “YOUR KEYWORD” articles.

Web 2.0 sites provide you a great place to get your linkbait seen by thousands and can attract editorial links that can provide real long term benefit. Many of these sites have a large user base of visitors and can lead to lots of internal links very quickly. Matched with the power of an aged domain and editorial links,  these web 2.0 sites can be a great source of traffic for years to come.