With linkbait talk swirling in minds of those looking to capitalize on the Social Media Market, I understand the need for icons which allow users to bookmark good posts on their favorite social media site. But how many are too many?

As a good rule of thumb I would recommend keeping your icons or links to one line, featuring the top sites, and maybe one of the newer social media sensations you would like to promote. So in total maybe 4-5 or maybe you are one that prefers to stick to the good old Digg button.

Today, I stumbled on a nice SEM blog that has good content and has been up and running for a few months. With several insightful posts the blog made for an interesting read, and I may even subscribe his feed. However one thing blatantly stood out. Can You find it?

Count em’ there are 55. My blog isn’t even wide enough to display the image properly so I scaled it down, but take a look. I didn’t even know half of these sites existed so could they really push any noticeable amount of traffic.

Now let me ask you, are you desperate for traffic? Because it looks like it to me. Listing even the most obscure social media sites may get you a few extra visitors daily, but is it worth putting all of this clutter on the page?

I think not. So stop Begging for Traffic

I love Bookmark Me and I’m sticking to it. Its clean its easy to implement and it gets the job done.

Recently, I have been amazed at the amount of blogs posting articles about “link baiting.” The key behind this phenomenon is nothing new. It’s something that nearly all successful websites have. Compelling and useful content. If you don’t offer content that makes your audience want to return then you just lost a visitor. After all the content is why people want to visit your site in the first place. If you have compelling content this will inevitably leads to links. The term “link baiting” is really just a new term for an old concept with a twist.

Wikipedia defines link baiting as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites.”

In my own terms link baiting is: Offering compelling content with a hook. This hook is anything that will make people want to put you on their site or to get people talking.

As blogs have hit the mainstream, it seems that every webmaster needs content. Often times they write about something that left an impression on them. This is exactly what link baiting is. If you can leave your visitors wanting more then there is a much higher chance that they will link to you, because you gave them something to write about.

Today Neil Patel over at Link Building Blog spoke on the use of widget to get back links. Within this post he references Flickr with over 1 million back links. This is a prefect example of compelling and useful content. Flickr has made photo shareing a global sensation and they have offered many features that allow users to integrate their photos into many other softwares, thus providing them with numerous back links.

Putting together a widget can be as complex or simple as you want to make it. A couple of great examples of useful widgets have been published by ProBlogger and Hype2.0. Although both of these range in complexity, they both offer the end user something useful.

If you would like to do some more reading on link baiting (although you probably already have) I would highly suggest:

• Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing
• 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting: The Year Of Widgetbait?
• How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide

And suprizingly good:

• Link Bait How To: Obtain 42,000 Unique Hits and 1,000 Inbound Links in 1 Week