We all know that LinkedIn is a great networking tool used to get connected with past and present colleagues and classmates. The outlet is often referred to as “Facebook for professionals” because business leaders can power their career and obtain inside connections for job searches or new business ventures as well as having the ability to share and obtain advice from other industry leading experts.

What most professionals fail to recognize, however, is that you are 40 times more likely to turn up in search results if your profile is a 100% complete. Having a 100% completed profile is easy, with a few basic additions to your profile:

•    Upload a Photo
•    Add Current Position
•    Add Past Positions (2)
•    Include Education
•    Provide a Profile Summary
•    Describe Specialties
•    Get Recommended (3)

Once you have a completed profile, you may also want to continue searching for contacts within your network and become more involved in groups and associations. Updating status updates and integrating web based applications adds greater value to your profile. The more activity you present as a professional employee of your company, the better you and your company appears, since after all, your company profile on LinkedIn is comprised of all employee statistics.

Another helpful tip, from an SEO perspective, is optimizing your website listings on your profile for the keyword you wish to rank for in search engines. To do so, “Edit” your website and select “Other.”

For “Website Title” include the title of your website, category or keyword you wish to rank for. From there, simply enter your URL string.

It’s that simple! Now get out there and stir up some industry leading conversation.

What is Linkbait?

For those who are familiar with ProspectMX and linkbait, it’s no surprise that link bait and link baiting is a strong marketing tool used to attract new website visitors and more importantly, backlinks for greater rankings on search engines. But the more important question is, what is a successful piece of linkbait?

The good news is that there are several types of linkbait that can be deemed successful. First, like any marketing campaign, you have to know your target audience for the company, product or service you wish to promote. Any marketer or link baiter knows this is a critical element for the overall success of the campaign being put into action. Once you have your target audience down to a science, you can then determine which type or piece of link bait is most relevant to your audience.

Once you decide who to target, the fun part begins. It is now time to decide which form of linkbait is best for your website. Listed below are some of the most modern forms of linkbait flowing through the internet today.

• Useful Web Based Tools/Software
• Lists of Valuable Resources
• Interesting Infographics
• WordPress Themes/Plug-ins
• Widgets
• Just About Anything Funny (Videos, blog post, etc.)
• Press Releases
• Contests

Once you have created your linkbait master piece it is time to market it through the right channels. Remember when we found our target audience, well here is where it makes life a bit easier. Most linkbait ideas are always Digg and StumbleUpon worthy especially if it is funny or controversial. These sites allow you to display your linkbait in front of millions of viewers where it either goes viral or just gets a few hits. You can also market the piece on your social media outlets, broadcasting it to all your Fans and Followers. Other types of linkbait such as blog posts and press releases are useful as well to help with web traffic, rankings and online presence. If submitting press releases online, a few well noted ones are:

• I-newswire
• PRLog.com
• Pressreleasepoint.com
• PRWeb.com (Paid)

How do you tell if your linkbait is working?

If you are using Digg and StumbleUpon to market your linkbait, they provide a system that tallies up how many viewers were interested in your linkbait. The more Diggs or Thumbs Up you receive the more interesting your viewers find your linkbait. If you are using blog posts and press releases to announce your linkbait, your best bet is to use a web tracking service. Google provides this for free, it is called Google Analytics. Within this tracking system you can tell exactly where your website visitors are coming from. You can also track individual URLs (the exact URL that your blog post or press release was listed on) and view how many people are coming from those sites.

Example of a Successful Linkbait Campaign

One example of a successful linkbait campaign was performed by Red Bull, a company well known throughout the Western and European countries for their energy drinks. The company has built their website upon a strong foundation of linkbait. Their target audience is adrenaline junkies who thrive on high risk sports.

One of their most popular contests was the Flúgtag, or in English, Airshow. It was an event where a bunch of idiots decide to launch something off of a pier 30ft over a reservoir of water. What makes this contest so fun to watch is the fact that most participants create flying contraptions that rarely fly at all, and plummet the moment they are pushed off the pier. Once these flights are filmed they immediately become linkbait on the internet and are posted everywhere.

Contests are just a scratch in the selection of linkbait ideas available out there, as you saw when reviewing the “Types of Linkbait” above. But, since Redbull has such a well known brand there may not always need a backlink. All they need to do is advertise their logo, which encourages viewers to go to the website to see more.

Conclusion

So, the result? Any piece of linkbait can be successful as long as you know your target audience, gear the piece to them, and market it well. If you want a jump start with your linkbait piece, check out StumbleUpon for some starter ideas to get the juices flowing. Also, more brains are better than one, so call in some friends or co-workers to discuss creative ideas. It is important to remember that linkbait can be implemented into a project at any time during your products life cycle. It just depends on the form of linkbait you wish to implement.

We are really thankful for all of the feedback that we have received through our blog comments in 2009. We would like to share some of those comments (we refer to them as love letters) with you.

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I’ve been reading a lot of bloggers lately hyping up this new link building service called Tynt. According to a quick Google Blog Search, 1,083 mentions of Tynt have come up over the last 7 days. It is also getting enough buzz across the innerwebs that a client was savvy enough to email me about it this morning.

Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.

Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.

Tynt At Work

Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont

Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt

My Reaction To Tynt

Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!

When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my WordPress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.

So… where’s the link?

The Problem With Tynt

Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.

In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.

Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL

See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.

Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.

I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend WordPress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.

After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.

So, today the boys had a “Jammie Day”. These are days when my wife, Jodi let’s the boys stay in their jammies all day while they play games and stuff. They had a pretty healthy lunch and Jodi was away for dinner.

Well, my boys are rather picky and they weren’t in the mood for anything for dinner. So, I decided to get their attention and tell them that we were going to make the best sandwich EVER.

They got all excited about what it was going to be and will remember it forever. Here’s the video.

The “Toasted Triple Decker Peanut Butter, Jelly and Fruitloop Sandwich” is a remarkable thing for my boys.

What are you going to do with your website that’s remarkable enough to get your potential customers and/or link partners excited about what you have to offer and remember it forever?