How Much Is Link Baiting Services Or Projects Worth?

Honestly, the purpose of this post is selfish, I want someone to come up with the value of a link baiting effort. I am looking for someone to tell me how much time, money and effort should be put towards a link baiting project. What is the minimum you need as an outcome of that link baiting effort to make the link baiting tactic a success? These are questions running through my head over the past couple days.

Over at my personal, Cartoon Barry Blog, I wrote an entry named How Much is Link Bait Worth?. In that post, I do my best to compare two link baiting efforts (not sure if either of those developers would classify their efforts for the purpose link bating). I then asked Andy Hagans his opinion on the topic and he wrote an entry named What is link bait worth?

Link baiting has been a recent buzz term in the SEM industry. Andy still classifies it as “the least popular method of link building” but he does imply that link baiting is growing. I personally feel that link baiting has been around since day one. Yes, viral marketing. But with the term link baiting out there, you have more and more efforts out there to create bait for links. We have seen tons of recent top ten lists, we have seen several recent games launched, we have seen tons of controversial posts thrown up – all in an effort to capture links from authoritative sites.

But at what point does the time and effort and money cost more than the links you acquire? You see, I am giving someone an excuse to create some funky AJAX tool that enables you to enter a number of hours or dollars spent. The tool should then spit out a figure in links by PageRank score or something, detailing the number and quality of links required in return for that link bait investment. If you come up with that tool, I’ll link to it. The question is, is the development of that tool worth the link?