47 Viral Content Ideas – Link Bait Ideas

Viral content is really the best and only way to create pages or posts on your website or blog. Matt Cutts calls it Link Bait. If you are always aiming to have your content shared widely, then you will always be giving your website the best chance to have links built to it. The main idea of GREAT link bait, is that you become an authority on something.

The main things to think about when aiming to create viral content are the following;

1. Would YOU link to this post
2. Would you want to share this post with your friends/industry
3. Can you see value in reading the post and then sharing it
4. Does it add to any discussion
5. Is it easy to follow/read
6. Does it appeal to a specific audience?

The golden rule is WOULD YOU LINK TO THIS POST. Not in a “link building” kind of way, but more to show off your achievement, or to say something like “yes we created this and it is worth reading/seeing”. We have created a lot of posts on this website that have generated natural links. Some posts that are our own examples, are our post on Time To First Byte, our post on Social Advertising, and our post on Guerilla Marketing. Not only are there the following 100 ideas, but you can turn these on their head by changing a few things about them, like the following;

1. Be antagonistic, start a fight
2. Take an unpopular view
3. Invite other people to write for you, and then write a rebuttle
4. Make the post comical
5. Syndicate the post to Video, Audio and presentation formats
6. Make your post HYPER local, talk about people in your street
7. Make your post Global, offer something to everyone, even those on the other side of the world.

You can also take these 100 ideas, and make them about people, products, places, services, events etc, so there is plenty of scope to create content. Anyway, without too much more drivel, here are 100 actionable ideas for creating link worthy content. Remember these only count if they are original, so you will have to work on making these ideas your own.

1. Infographics. If you are no good with Illustrator, you can find good artists on oDesk etc.
2. Collect Infographics from other places
3. Interviews with customers
4. Interviews with competitors
5. Interviews with notable people
6. Tutorials
7. FAQs
8. Top 10 People in… Post
9. Top 10 things you never heard of post
10. Top 10 ways to use your service effectively post
11. Top 10 best examples of… post
12. Top 10 Free…. post
13. Top 10 ways to reduce/increase your…. post
14. Top 100 times someone was proven wrong
15. Create the BIG list, of over 100 of something.
16. Publish the ingredients, code, atomic structure of your product or service
17. Product comparisons/reviews 1 vs 1
18. Product comparison/reviews tables
19. Video Interviews
20. Videos Tutorials
21. Videos Product Demonstrations
22. Time Lapse Videos of your work
23. Portfolio of your best work
24. Build a free service that has a function like loadimpact
25. Give away a free eBook
26.  Use Mechanical Turk to build data on a topic involved in your industry, like “How Often Is The Word ‘Awesome’ Used on Reddit“
27.  Get users to take a big survey and publish the results
28. Mechanical Turk: Top 100 incidents involving….. (dig through archives)
29. Mechanical Turk: Use a free service link OpenSite Explorer or travel time tables or census data etc and analyse the data
30. Mechanical Turk: Rank websites/services based on the information on their site
31. Mechanical Turk: Build a directory of people/products/services with information you would want to know
32. Mechanical Turk: Make a MAMMOTH list of the top 1000 of something ranked by your choice.
33. Write about current (in the last 5 hours) events
34. Create EgoBait: Write in depth reviews/history of people/services
35. Take original photos
36. Use Photoshop to create original images
37. Events: Live Blog at a specific event
38. Events: Create an event/meeting at a pub that people will want to attend
39. Events: Create an event that takes place on your website, build discussion, get people to submit things
40. Events: Hold a group Skype Session and publish the audio
41. Take a famous person from history, and write from their perspective “Hitler’s Guide To Link Building”.
42. Build a forum or social network (you could use buddy press etc) based in your area/niche
43. Build a website/blog (it could be free from Blogger), that takes a provocative, funny or interesting view
44. Create a character/superhero that answers questions, (maybe via video).
45. Create a charity page where you will donate money based on comments/feedback
46. Summarise the latest news on a topic
47. Give people a place to vent about an issue, use comments or your website feedback form to collate opinions.