Dating Site Link Bait
A tricky subject and one which deserves a lot of attention is link bait. What sort of link bait would work on a dating site (or any site for that matter)? Ideally we would want something which would appeal both to the users of the site and webmasters looking for something hot to link to. As you may already know, link bait can take many different forms, but the best must surely be pure, unique content that people naturally just want to devour. Is it possible for a dating site to create such content? I think so, but a careful recipe is required. Be prepared for some programming and data capture, add a dash or two of appealing SEO-friendly CSS design, sprinkle a little statistical analysis on top, leave to simmer for a couple of months and then serve to your target audience. Following me?
Let us look at it in more detail. You want unique content that plays to your site’s strengths. Throw yourself together a forum and get the site’s members to contribute. Be careful here as many users may use a forum to bypass any flow control of information between members which you may have put in place. In the forum put up a number of polls with enticing questions. Make the poll interesting and plan it with a view to gathering some useful stats. Effectively you are running a statistical experiment from a cross-sectional sample of the dating community in your particular dating niche. Leave the poll running for a few months to collate a statistically viable sample set. Once your data has been harvested, throw it together into a package such as Excel and make use of some of the advanced statistical techniques they have made available to you. Most people would struggle with analysing raw data, but there are online resources which can help you perform a feasible data capture and analysis project. Ok, most people would not know where to start, so drop me a line if you get stuck.
Use excel to present the findings of your study in a nice professional manner, with tables charts etc. On your web page Include a disclaimer and highlight the sample size, which techniques you employed to analyse the data and other such useful facts about your study. Wrap it all up in a nice easy to read ‘Web 2′ format and allow people to link to it.
What you now have is a unique statistical report (though potentially of dubious scientific validity, depending on how you ran the experiment) , which will provide useful stats to both webmasters and site visitors alike. People like reading lists and facts, so offer this up to them. It will be interesting to read and offers an additional benefit in that the results are unique and freshly created from your own site. Give it a try, include it as part of a site feed and distribute it tothe feed aggreagators. You may also wish to do a press release and gain extra exposure that way. Don’t just leave your link bait to grow old on your site… get in indexed and manually linked to until it reaches critical mass and the links start generating all by themselves.
Good luck and let me know how you get on; I will allow some of you who follow this advice the chance to write a small article about your project and publish it here (another link to add to your site’s tally).