Against Linkbaiting
Brian Clark is a tremendous blogger and copyblogger is a tremendous blog. You’d hope so, really - the guy is a copywriter and devotes his blog to passing on the tips of the trade. Really valuable information for anyone involved in writing at any level.
This week, he’s been holding a poll on whether or not he should use the term ‘linkbait’ any more. This post is my vote. The gist of the argument is that if we agree that ‘linkbait’ is simply compelling content, then we shouldn’t be using what sounds like a disparaging term for it. The new word for this stuff is ‘viral copywriting’, which would have sounded even worse a couple of years ago, but now sounds very cool.
My vote on the issue is to continue to call “linkbait” what it is. Linkbait-y blog posts are not ‘compelling content’. They are deliberately written to get people to strongly agree or disagree, and then write about them on their own blogs or submit them to social news engines like digg and reddit. They have titles like ‘10 Reasons Why Microsoft Vista Will Ruin The Company’ or ‘iPhone Heralds End of Humanity’. That’s the sort of thing you see on digg’s front page every day. It gets people excited.
But in my view, it’s not at all good news for the quality of writing on the web. It makes people want to write an article people will link to, rather than the article they were really able to put together. Probably these would have titles like ‘4 Reasons I Don’t Fancy Upgrading to Vista’ and ‘Why I Probably Won’t Buy an iPhone’. The truth is normally banal; deal with it. Linkbaiting, on the other hand, drives people to extremes and it gets in the way of the truth.
Getting linked to is generally a good thing from a Google and a profile perspective; hitting the digg front page feels very nice (I expect). However, when someone forces themselves to write something they probably wouldn’t do otherwise solely in order to achieve these aims, they’re probably not being true to themselves. I think that’s more important. It’s the difference between writing and copywriting.
