Here are 5 reasons creating link bait might just be the biggest waste of your time.

1. You think keywords aren’t necessary – Content is searchable. Even link bait. You must think about how your website visitors are going to find your content before you decide to publish it. What will make them think your article is worth a link? If it isn’t the keywords and it isn’t the way your content is written, then what is it?
2. Link bait isn’t a magic carpet ride – No link bait is ever just created and published without a plan. If you’re too lazy to plan your content, how it will be written, what it will look like, what graphics will accompany it, etc., then there’s no use in creating it.
3. You think it will promote itself – Even link bait needs to be promoted. Will you push it out with social media? Video marketing? Your blog? Will you share it with high profile bloggers in your niche? Include your promotional efforts in your plan for your link bait.
4. You expect too much too fast – You can’t predict how many people will link to your content and when. You can write it, you can publish it, and you can promote it. The rest is up to everyone else. Focus on what you can control.
5. You think quality doesn’t count – All link bait is based on quality. If you don’t think that’s true, then you shouldn’t be trying to create link bait. No one is going to link to content that doesn’t provide value.

Link bait is more than just some fancy SEO trick. It’s a content strategy. Build your strategy on sound marketing principles, not crazy viral hype.

SiteProNews has a great article about viral marketing. It tells you the 7 techniques that work to make content go viral (however, I’d say there are more than 7). Here are those 7 techniques, just in case your wondering:

• Videos
• Social media
• Articles
• Tweet/Retweet button
• Share widget
• E-books
• Newsletters

The beautiful thing is, all of these techniques work. And while the article is a good article, what it fails to do is teach you how to go viral using these techniques.

The purpose of this blog post is not to give you a step-by-step plan for your viral marketing efforts. Rather, what I’d like to do is to give you the very basis of viral marketing itself. Each of these techniques will work for the right kind of content. But what do you have to do before you start your viral marketing campaign? That’s what I’m about to tell you.

In a word, the one thing you have to do before any content can go viral is to make your content incredibly awesome. Bad content won’t go viral. Mediocre content won’t go viral. Good content might, but it isn’t likely. Great content, well, maybe it will go viral – on a good day. But there is a ton of great content online that hasn’t gone viral. What you really need is out-of-this-world awesome content. If you hit a home run on the creation part, then your content can’t help but go viral. That is, once you put it out there.

One user decided to play a hoax and tweeted “RIP Jackie Chan.” The viral response was spectacular.

Tzvi Balbin, using Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point philosophy, explains how this happened. I think he’s stretching it by saying that all the Twitterers who retweeted the message are salesmen, but I agree with his analysis overall. He even manages to pull in Rudy Giuliani to make his point.

When it comes to viral marketing, Twitter is an impressive tool. One simple message sent to the right person at the right time can lead to a domino effect. Get your message in front of the connectors within your niche and if they like it you can bet a large percentage of their audience will like it too. Viral marketing almost always involves reaching the most influential people to help you spread your message.

@forumn00b piggybacked on the authority of @tweetmeme, a Twitter account with more than 60,000 followers. Of course, popularity itself is not an indicator of viral success. Your message has to be the right message for the audience. If you do it right, viral marketing can set off a social media frenzy. That’s what you’re looking for.

Jonah Peretti describes viral marketing in real simple terms:

Simply, stuff that has the best opportunity to spread is stuff that people want to share with others.

So the essence of viral marketing is really finding something that appeals to a lot of different people. If one person likes it, you’ve got one fan. If a thousand people like it, it’s viral material. Take that to the hundred thousand person level and you’ve got viral content on the go.

How do you create content that goes viral? Is it planned or does it just happen? There are examples of both kinds of content, but I think the best kind of viral marketing is planned.

Your content must possess three qualities if you want it to go viral. It must:

1. Appeal to a large number of people
2. Be published and in a format that is easy to share
3. Be a positive representation of your company or brand

With those three qualities, your content has the potential to go viral. Think about what your audience likes. Give it to them. Then the promote the Dickens out of it.

It seems that everyone is interested in having their iPhone app now. There’s a good reason for this. iPhones are popular, almost everyone has one, and everyone who has one is tuned in through apps. In the future, iPhone apps are going to be the way many people log onto the Internet for routine business.

Think about this.

• If you own a book store, you could have an iPhone app that lets people put a book on hold – right through their iPhone.
• If you are the owner of an auto parts store, you could let people order their car parts through their iPhone, and even schedule delivery.
• Own a restaurant? Put your menu into an iPhone and take carry-out orders.
• Own a bowling alley? You could have an iPhone app that allows your customers to bowl on their phones, and when they’re not iPhone bowling they can reserve their lanes.
• A gardener can have an iPhone app that reports soil conditions based on weather, time of year, etc.

There’s really no limit to what you can do with an iPhone app. If you have an imagination you can come up with all sorts of things. The time for small businesses to take advantage of marketing and customer service through iPhone apps has come. Are you ready?

Consider what it is that makes a marketing strategy go viral. In simple terms, it is a snowballing process where each recipient passes it on to two or more of their friends. This could be an image, a video, or a page of written text. The concept is the same no matter the material. What is important is that it is real people who are the recipients, and where do you find ‘real’ people? In the real world!

Offline marketing can be cost effective, especially when compared to click through rates of banner and search advertising.  The cost of a thousand pamphlets can be similar to the cost of a thousand ad impressions, yet conversion rates can be far higher.  The key to creating a viral marketing campaign using real world marketing remains the same – the material must be worthy. There has to be value to everyone along the chain.

By encouraging others to first go online to experience your campaign and, secondly, to have them send the details to others can be hard. It can also be as simple as offering a free sample or trial. Online marketing is not restricted to the online world. Viral marketing is certainly not restricted to the online world. Have a look around and see whether or not there are real world opportunities to market your business. You never know, you may actually be introducing people to a new experience, not just dealing with you online, but doing business online for the first time – make it memorable for them.

Rather than trying to market to the world at large, you can target those who have influence in your niche. By winning their support (and that is not always an easy task), they will start to promote on your behalf. Because they have some influence in your niche, others will listen and often follow.

Influencer marketing is not new. Look at some of the major fast food outlets. They target youngsters for two reasons. One – they influence moms and dads when it comes to buying fast foods, and two, if you can win them over when they are young, you have them for life. We are interested in the first reason, they influence their parents.

There are many professionals who have significant influence. Teachers and education; food writers and restaurants; and entertainment critics and the entertainment industry are just a few that stand out. They are not the only ones, of course. You can find on niche sites small groups that others often defer to – or look to for advice. In non-professional circles, the women in a man’s life may well influence him in his purchases so the women become the marketing target rather than the man (this is an old tactic that has been around for decades).

If you are looking at a viral marketing campaign, stop and consider who the key influencers are in your niche. Can you influence them? Can you develop a relationship with them first that can then be used at a later date to promote your campaign? If you can develop a relationship then you may find a viral marketing campaign much easier. Of course, you still need to have the right marketing materials.

In a word, viral marketing is any type of marketing that catches on and gets people talking about you. When an idea spreads, either spontaneously or as a part of a planned effort, then it is said to have gone viral. That can happen in a variety of media.

Videos, for instance, can go viral in a number of ways but one very popular way that they often catch on and take a life of their own is through the popular video channel YouTube. Articles can go viral through one of many e-zine directories or on a content website. Photos can go viral at places like Flickr and DeviantArt.

What medium are you using? It helps to know what you have to offer in order to present it to the right people in hopes that it might go viral. Your blog can viral if you get it in front of the right eyes. One blog post can go viral if the right people see it and share it. The key is to get it in front of the right people.

So how do you do that?

One mistake that marketers often make is to present their material to all of their friends hoping that their friends will share it and then their friends will share it and so on and so on. But a better way to ensure that your content goes viral is to present it to half a dozen influencers. These are people on social networks like Facebook and Twitter who have thousands of followers. A single tweet or Facebook update can often lead to thousands of hits to your website in minutes if the right influencer likes it.

But simply submitting your link or content to an influencer isn’t enough. You should study the influencers you want to target and learn what they like. Develop a relationship with them. Interact with them and get to know them as a person, let them get to know you.

People, even influencers, respond better to people they know than to random strangers. Get to know the right people and your content will stand a better chance at going viral.

Simply defined, viral marketing is any kind of marketing that gets other people talking about your brand and sharing with their friends on a large scale. That can be done online or off line.

Off line viral marketing usually begins with a customer experiencing a product or service. Then that customer goes out and tells a handful of other people – let’s say 10 – about the kind of service or quality experienced at your business. Some of those 10 people – let’s say half – go and check it out for themselves. Each of them likes it in turn. They go out and tell 10-12 of their friends each and a handful of them go into your store to experience the product or service. Repeat that 100 or 1,000 times and we have off line viral marketing.

The same phenomenon works online as well. The difference is that people are now more likely to talk about you to their online friends – in chat rooms, forums, on blogs, and through interaction on social networks.

Viral marketing is nothing new, but it sure is powerful.

I think the most obvious way that Google TV will change video marketing is in giving video marketers more options. Currently, you have a few online video directories – like Hulu and YouTube – where you can upload your videos.

All the video directories have their own unique spins and ways to profit from video marketing. YouTube is the most popular. Google TV promises is to make those video channels available to more people. It is no stretch of imagination to consider that people who are not currently on the Internet will have access to it through Google TV.

Another way video marketing will change with Google TV is with distribution. I don’t know if anyone has considered this yet, but can you imagine uploading your videos directly from your TV, VCR, or DVD player to an online directory like YouTube or MetaCafe? It might not seem possible now, but I think it could be possible in just a few years to convert analog video like VCR recordings into digital in a few clicks – and you’ll likely be able to do that on your TV.

A third way Google TV will change video marketing is by making the videos a higher quality.

If this seems like science fiction, it is. But the technology is available to make it happen so it isn’t far fetched. In what ways do you think Google TV will change video marketing?

Viral marketing is just another name for word of mouth. It can manifest itself in any number of ways, online or off line. For instance, online viral marketing can occur when a video grows popular because many people have bookmarked it or shared it with their friends. Maybe they sent the link by e-mail or they bookmarked it on their favorite social bookmarking site. Perhaps they favorited it on YouTube or shared the link on Twitter or Facebook. The fact that a lot of people shared the video in a short period of time means the video has gone “viral”.

This phenomenon takes place off line in the same way. Suppose you open up an ice cream shop in your neighborhood. On your first day of business you get only 10 customers. But all 10 of those customers tell five friends, each of whom visit your store the next day.

That’s 50 customers on day 2. But what if those 5 customers told 10 of their friends about your ice cream shop? They e-mailed their friends, called them on the phone, talked to them at church or school. Wherever they bumped into their friends, you were mentioned.

Now you have 510 people who know about your ice cream shop. On day three suppose that half of your first day customers came back to visit you again. And suppose 20% of your second day customers returned. Furthermore, suppose that half of the people they told about your shop came in as well. On day 3 of your shop you’d have 265 customers. Now you’re really growing!

Now, suppose those customers each told 5 of their friends about you. And they all came into your ice cream shop some time over the seven days. Getting the picture yet?

Viral marketing can, and often does, take place off line as well as online. The key is to provide a remarkable service, something that people will talk about. If you can do that then you’ll go viral, whether you are online or off line.

• Sending lots of traffic to many websites
• Being responsible for high bounce rates and low conversion rates

Many webmasters use that second point to justify not using StumbleUpon at all, but that is a msitake. It is true that conversion rates are low and bounce rates are high as many people will stumble a site sent to them by a friend then immediately leave without really reading what they stumbled. Of course, users on other social media sites do the same thing.

But it is possible to go viral on StumbleUpon. And when you do you’ll be really excited that you got some Stumble notoriety.

If you do the following three things on StumbleUpon you’ll greatly increase your chances of going viral and getting a reaction from your Stumble traffic.

1. Write a killer headline. Content is good, but no matter how well written and compelling your content is, if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention then they will never read your content. Make your headline outstanding.
2. Get rid of the popups. Most people don’t like them and if your site is full of popup advertising and other annoying web pests then Stumblers will not give it a thumbs up.
3. Be active. Don’t just stumble your own content. Be active in stumbling the content of your friends and other users. Use the StumbleUpon toolbar to send a note to your most trusted friends about a page you want stumbled. Let someone else be the discoverer. If you thumbs up your own content and that’s all you do then you could get banned.

Going viral on StumbleUpon is not as hard as it seems. It is possible, but you’ve got to have great content that starts with a great headline and a clean site free of annoying ads.

Hotmail was also followed by other copycat services – free web-based e-mail services. And that was really the beginning of viral marketing. After Hotmail, other marketers began to see opportunities to promote themselves for free or to get other people to promote their offerings for free.

Viral marketing works on that principle. Get others to do your marketing for you and if it is successful then an idea can take off and spread virally in a very short period of time.

Hotmail may have been first, but there are other ideas that have gone viral since Hotmail. YouTube has been instrumental in seeing certain videos spread rapidly. Other social networks like Digg, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have also done well in helping ideas to spread. And, of course, e-mail is a viral marketing mainstay.

No matter the medium, if you have a hot idea and you can get that idea to catch on then you can have a viral marketing sensation.

Cisco is also predicting that by 2013, 90% of web traffic will be for video content, a significant jump from today’s 30%.

Let’s assume that it’s also accurate. 90% of a galaxy load is a heck of a lot. The question is, do you classify it as viral marketing or social media?

I think you can say it’s a little bit of both, but viral marketing has a very distinct definition. If a video goes viral it’s because it has found its audience and the audience took it viral. Video marketing is social if, and only if, the element of networking is involved. The sharing aspect of video marketing is certainly a social element, but if video marketing consists only of uploading and viewing then I wouldn’t call that social media marketing.

So why the distinctions? I think it’s important to understand how you employ the technology. I can a lot of the videos to come being uploaded to websites for the purpose of showcasing products and services and the only viewers of those videos will be customers of the website owner or potential customers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not social media. That’s using video as on-page content.

Can such content go viral? Sure, if it hits the right audience and the audience shares it in the right places.

When it comes to video marketing, whether now or in the future when it has taken over the Web, it’s best to know who your audience is before you begin production and when you start distributing to know where your audience hangs out and to put that video in front of them there. If it’s on your website, fine. If it’s on YouTube or somewhere else, that’s fine too. Just have a solid plan.

I’m talking about Facebook Apps.

You’ve seen them. Your friends send you the requests for kisses on the cheek, vampire bats and reading naked in the dark. They’re called apps and despite their silliness, they can be used for marketing your small business.

If you develop a really useful Facebook app then it will receive a lot of downloads and get a lot of usage. Every time someone uses your app they’ll be marketing your company.

To develop your own Facebook app you’ll need to get a developer’s API and go to work. Try to create an app that is somehow related to your business or something that is useful to your target audience. If your audience likes your app and finds it useful in some way then they’ll share it with their friends and you’ll get more downloads. As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your Facebook fan page and your web property.

Can all this result in viral activity? Yes, it sure can. And some companies are already doing it. You can too.

Among the things that could happen locally are:

• An increase in spam
• A greater potential for more viral marketing campaigns
• A boom in local search engine marketing
• More social media involvement at the local level

And who knows the potential for any of these?

On the viral marketing front, anything that catches on locally and seems to move on its own without much effort could become viral in seconds. Through Facebook, Twitter, SMS or local forums and community websites, content could go viral just with a simple nudge. But local viral marketing campaigns still must follow the same rules and principles as all other viral campaigns. On that we can rely.

Unfortunately, e-books have not arrived. But they’re not exactly in the Stone Age either. There is a transition.

Thanks to two developments in the e-book publishing industry – the iPad and the Kindle – there is a revitalized interest in e-books. But it seem like the big frustration for consumers is there isn’t one standard. That makes it difficult to get a viral marketing effect with an e-book.

Not impossible. Just difficult. There is still a possibility that an e-book can go viral, but if it does so it will have to go viral in one of three accepted formats:

• Kindle
• iPad
• PDF

Right now, I’d say e-books are more likely to go viral if they are in PDF format. But you can create a mini-viral effect with either Kindle or iPad versions of your e-book. But the most important thing about e-books going viral is you have to have great content. Mediocre just won’t cut it.

But can you plan a viral marketing campaign? Are those things plannable?

Well, every marketer would like to think so. And, in truth, yes, you can plan a viral marketing campaign. But planning something and seeing it through to completion are two different things. Sometimes the plan just doesn’t work out.

So what’s it take to make a viral marketing plan work? It takes more than a plan. I guarantee you that.

However, it starts with a plan. If you don’t plan for the viral marketing campaign – and I mean every detail down to where you intend to submit your content and who your target audience is – then you might as well plan for it to fail. You can’t leave it to happenstance. Or serendipity.

That said, don’t expect your viral marketing campaign to succeed just because you planned it. You have to also monitor your efforts, and your results.

When you’re ready to build a viral marketing campaign and see it through to completion, find a viral marketing expert to guide you through the maze.

Let’s just lay one thing out on the table right now. Any social website could make your marketing campaign go viral, but not if you don’t have the right stuff. So what’s the right stuff?

Your content has to have mass appeal. If you serve a very niche market and your content appeals to that niche market well, but not so well to any other market then your content won’t go viral. Even on Facebook. Simply being on the most trafficked website online is not enough to make your content go viral.

Another thing you need is to get your content in front of the right people. Simply sharing your content with ten friends hoping they will push your content to the top of the viral chain isn’t going to cut it. You need to get your content in front of the Facebook movers and shakers. Until you do that, it won’t go viral.

That’s not to say that you should spam the people with the most friends. But you might send them a private message asking if they’ll take a look at your content and share it if they like it.

Viral marketing is about making the right friends in the right places and sharing the right stuff. You can do that on Facebook or anywhere there might be people who will really dig what you have to offer.

No. 1, whatever it is you are trying to promote should have some kind of popular appeal. You may have the very best motorized widget on the planet, but if your target market is smaller than a little league baseball team then quality is a small consideration. An idea has to have some popular appeal if it is to ever go viral.

Secondly, it helps get your idea into the hands of a few well connected individuals. Your product or service can be high quality and popular, but if you can’t get at least one well connected person with influence to plug it then chances are you’ll have a hard time getting it to go viral. I hate to plug it as a popularity contest, but that’s what it is. Even 100,000 average Joes won’t have as much influence as 1 kingpin with 100,000 average Joe devotees.

That last sentence needs some elaboration. 100,000 average Joes have friends and their friends listen to them, but they have no one to appeal to as an authority but themselves. The 100,000 average Joes who follow King Cheese, however, can always point to King Cheese as the authority. “Hey,” they could say to their friends, “If you don’t believe me then listen to King Cheese; he’s the man.” Those kinds of appeals work so it’s important to have at least one highly popular and influential person to like your idea enough to promote it.

Finally, your product or service has to have quality. It can be popular, but if it isn’t full of quality then popularity will wane.

Here’s to your next viral marketing campaign. May it be successful.