The time of websites merely being a part-time hobby has long passed. These days every website owner has become an entrepreneur and is required to think like one if they want their website/blog to be successful. The success of a website/blog is directly proportional to its traffic and thus it is important how to link-bait to boost your traffic.

"Link-Baiting" is a term given to the art of getting traffic from one place, normally a place of high traffic, on the internet to your website or blog. This is also why link baiting can also be seen as the diffusion of traffic from one point on the web to another. The trick is to implement some basic tricks as to catalyze the movement of traffic to your website or blog.

Social Web-Marketing

This includes the promotion of your content on your website on social websites such as Digg, Reddit, Netscape and more.

1. Attractive articles or other content specially created for the specific social book marking websites normally rank well on those websites and result in a good amount of traffic. Creating content especially for certain social book marking websites generally requires knowledge of the type of traffic that specific social site receives and trying to please that audience (e.g. Digg users love Apple). Good headlines and descriptions for any content submitted to these social book marking sites requires concentration as most users better rank your submission purely based on those two factors.

Build a Community

No website is an island, and thus you need to try and continuously build a community of web-owners like yourself so that you can promote one another.

1. Link out to a lot of websites and especially Blogs. People generally tend to read up on who are promoting their site, and the smaller the blog or/website the easier they are to get to link back to you. Make sure to link out appropriately within the context of your content and you will be taken more seriously.

2. Use Technorati and find websites that are in your same niche and try to encourage interlinking. Make it beneficial to link with you because people tend not to associate themselves with below standard websites.

3. Establish a good friend base with other web owners through forums, personal meetings, parties, social gatherings of any other kind, chat rooms, blogging and interlink and more. Try to get these friends to link to you and link back to them in return, although it is advisable to link out first. This is how you can get a lot of free traffic form the people you know.

4. Donate your services free-of-charge to someone in need of website help, this is another way to get people to give you links, this normally is highly effective at Universities, Libraries or Schools, because these place normally have authority and give some good traffic for your site, and the people around these types of sites generally are not to tech-savvy.

Search Engines, Paid for Links and Random Link Building

1. Add your website to all types of search engines (e.g. Google, MSN or Yahoo)

2. Write articles for free and give them away through Ezine and more, this is a great way of building traffic for your website.

3. RSS feeds are a great way to get your articles to the people, you need to promote your RSS feeds (this is the new Newsletter) as it will definitely mean more traffic which actually likes what you have to say.

4. Have Competitions going, Give-Away's and more… all in an attempt to promote your site. Tell people to add you to their Technorati Favorites and the can win something or subscribe to your RSS feed.

5. Try to write articles which promotes itself… every now and again people write article which only need to be read once and it spreads like wild-fire through the internet resulting in thousands of back links to your website.

6. Buying Reviews is also fairly trendy and a good Paid for method to get traffic to your website/blog by getting other bloggers write about yours.

7. Buying advert space through Google/Yahoo/MSN is also a great method of getting traffic to your site.

8. Building Templates for Joomla/Mambo or any other open source PHP application and giving it away free is also a great permanent link you can get through other websites.

Finally, it is important to get your website/blog promoted, but try your best not to be a Spammer and try to force people into coming to your website/blog this generally causes a negative reflection of your site.

The main focus of link baiting should thus be to bring already interested traffic to your website, thus all you need to do as a web-owner is provide interested parties with your links as often and in as many places on the internet as possible. This will provide you with the necessary force to have a successful website or blog.