With Being Smarter now having a tighter focus on how businesses and individuals get noticed, one of our ongoing themes will be around the concept of linkbait. If it’s a phrase you’ve not heard of before, then it’s worth getting your head round.

Linkbait is a piece of content which naturally attracts visitors and backlinks to your page or site. The content may not be directly related to the end result you are looking for people to do / visit / interact with, but it will get them closer to you and guess what, gets you noticed and in their mind’s eye.

Some examples of linkbait include:

• Building something of huge value and giving it away
• Providing a useful online tool
• Writing something funny
• Producing a video with wow factor, which goes viral

Which brings me on to today’s idea. Clearly Google doesn’t need to use linkbait to attract visitors to its site, however what it does, as part of its raison d’etre is to produce linkbait naturally and it does it for good reason. The video below will achieve (at least) four things.

• It shows viewers that Google people are innovative and creative and creates trust
• The blog post to go with it demonstrates teamwork and collaboration, the bedrock of any good business
• It shows viewers that Google is a very cool place to work and so helps from a recruitment perspective
• To say brand awareness is high would be an understatement, however it’s yet another way to get the brand seen by visitors

What could you do which is innovative in your business which could be turned into linkbait?