Monetising Linkbait - What's the story?

After spending many hours researching conversion techniques and funnels with a bit of help from Egol's links, I have learned that the key to conversion success is, as the book is titled, Don't Make Me Think.

The best pages I have for converting have content visible upon further delving but get direct to the point, with that being an enquiry form in the right area of the page, trust signals everywhere & a strong call-to-action that stands out. It tells the visitor that they are on the webpage to find out more info and that info is best accessed by enquiring.

I use clicktale to record visitors and I am flabbergasted at how many clients open up my website and then immediately enter full contact details, real telephone number etc without looking or navving the site at all.

What's this got to do with linkbait?

Well, the very notion of linkbait is that it is excellent content that captures the eye and keeps the visitor enticed. I, as a traffic converter, want the user to focus on my calls-to-action, not my amazing content.


So, do you create the content on its own page, attract the links and rely on internal linking structure to rank the money pages, assuming that the links you get will give you domain strength and help your all-round rankings?

Or do you rank the good content, monetising at the expense of a few conversions from people caught up with the content?

My suggestion would be to rank the content but design your page in a way that the user sees what you want them to see first. Then if they are intent on reading all you have to offer, let them find the great content and enjoy. Of course, it makes the link-bait less valuable to gain links if it takes a back-seat to the calls to action.

What do you guys do?

Egol's thread to save you searching:

http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?p=758911#post758911

That's part of my bookmarks LOL

Great advice.

A lot can be learnt also from PPC landing pages, as these guys pay for each click and really need visitors not to be distracted by anything but the BUY NOW button.

Strategies may vary according on the nature of what you are selling, whether it is a service or goods. There's no "one size fits all" solution, but testing and testing again, changing one element at a time, giving it some time before applying another change and see what leads to more conversions and what does not work.

Great question... Our approach is to create content that attracts links (and ranks the content page) and then advertise the product on the content page. These advertisements link to the sales page for the product.

This is how we get traffic in difficult SERPs and you are right that it is not a direct promotion of the product in the search engines. If you have a really powerful site you can get product sales pages to the top of the search engine in difficult SERPs.... but if you have a weaker site that will only occur where competition is very very low.

The key is to have presentations and strong calls to action that pull content page visitors into sales pages.

For an e-commerce site, this is what i think and this is what i expect:

Visit my website, check out the product reviews/ratings, select and add the product to the cart and check out.

No other thing should interfere during the purchase process, not even the navigational links at the top, side and bottom. I would really not like if someone blocks my cart on my way to check out in any way whether it is an article, ad or link to some other page. Link baits are good to attract links but should be kept in a separate section on the website and should not dilute the products' visibility in any way.

The major advantage with PPC is you can get to the top of google with such basic, conversion-optimised websites. Unfortunately, with search it is a lot more difficult to rank a site that is purely there for conversions.

In an ideal world, we could rank the sales pages but as Egol just mentioned, this is difficult without all but the most powerful sites.

What I am trying to do is to have the content and sales on the same page, but design the site in such a way that the calls-to-action are above the fold. The content is there - but you need to at least look for it before I'm giving up the easy sale

So aside from increasing your domain strength, link-baits for you are to:

Create a well-linked page from which to link to your sales site for the purpose of

A) Traffic
B) Ranking of sale pages
C) Both

IMO putting content and sales on the same page is a horrible idea. Your contents will only distract and may even change the buying behavior. Why take any chances with possible conversions? Moroever no webmaster would like to link to a sales page even if it contains great contents somewhere.

Actually, I'm not telling to design your pages as PPC landing pages but to use the same tricks to focus user attention on what you want them to do. That quite what you are saying with a "clear call to action" above the fold and avoiding to distract them with links that lead them outside.

Trying to combine the best of both worlds. Well, easier to say than to put in action, but that's the idea.

I know what you mean but the sites I'm talking about are lead-gen so an enquiry form is the extent of the sale.

It is why I started this thread because its such a compromise -

Does one rank the content and then lose conversions - every link that a user has to click to get to the completion cuts conversions

Or does one mix them up and lose focus on your funnels - not forgetting the point you made that you have to work extra hard to get a webmaster to link to a page that even slightly resembles a sales page.

I know what you mean, PPC guys are the best because they have to be and there is an awful lot to learn from them

You can make a nice content page with a right vertical column that contains related products. Then when the content page attracts links some juice flows into the sales pages. Also visitors to the content page will see a great display of relevant products when they arrive.