I am a freelance blogger. That means that on most times, I depend on my blog for affiliate sales, gigs from direct clients who come across my blog and like my writing style and hire me to do the same on their blogs.  Of late, I have been wondering what makes a blog post a link bait. I have for example noticed that the writings of Neil Patel, an online marketing guru, attract lots of link juice.

Well, you must have noticed how hard it is to write content that gets likes, comments or linked to. Interestingly, you have some friends who do it effortlessly. They quickly write simple content and before you can say the word ‘link bait’, their works have already gone viral and attracted a lot of back links. You wonder what they do and since you are so desperate to get numerous page views, you ask them to tell you how they do it.

Well, here are six ways to make your blog post a link bait:

1. A Magnetic Headline

You have one second to either persuade or dissuade readers with your headline. While a headline like ‘Twelve ways to write a Winning Headline” might attract many readers, another one ‘Good Article Headlines’ will not be as good. Craft great headlines that will persuade your reader to not only read but also share and link your articles.

Some of the magnetic words that have been found to attract readers include: Great, tricks, tips, how-to and of course lists (e.g. Ten reasons why you need to write a magnetic headline).

2. Go visual with pictures and infographics

A picture is worth more than a thousand words. How many more times do you want that repeated to you? Pictures and well-illustrated info graphics have been found to attract lots of views and backlinks. So rather than spending lots of time crafting high-quality articles, how about creating visual graphics for the same.

3. Write from the heart and in long form

Don’t write like another choked, hungry desperate blogger trying tooth and nail to get visitors, page views and meet a certain word count. The Internet is awash with them and it would be a disservice to have one more.

No. Write from the heart in a conversational, humorous tone that shows that the content was written by an interesting person and not a robot. Long form content also makes one appear an expert in the field they are writing in.

4. Interview an industry expert

Everyone likes getting snippets of wisdom from an expert. You might be churning awesome how-to articles every day with nobody giving a caring about it. However, when you interview a renowned industry expert and they give the very same advice, heads turn. People start taking action. Your interview post becomes an actionable link bait. Sometimes back, for example, I interviewed Walter Akolo, a renowned Kenyan freelance writer, on this platform and his post did so well and is still attracting many page views.

5. Take a different stand

People want to see your arguments and school of thought. They want to know why you have to think so differently from the rest of the world.

Sometimes back, content marketers had to literally lick Google’s toe so that they could rank highly in its pages. Those were the days when we literally had to use SEO books before typing a sentence. However, some guys one day ignored the search engine and wrote some contents without observing any SEO rules. The result? They are today’s content market leaders.

However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your posts for SEO.

6. Giveaways

Now, who doesn’t love giveaways? Offer a gift, job or discount to those who solve a certain question in your content. You will get millions and millions of page-views. And that is not all–your readers will link and share your work so that more people can get your giveaways.

You now know how to create link bait content. As you have read, you need to think outside the box and do things a little bit differently. It is not that you have to write in impeccable, queen language. No, who does that anyway? Just craft a captivating headline, add high engaging pictures, write like a human being (yes), interview an expert, be a little bit controversial and give away freebies.