Link baiting and viral marketing often get intertwined. After all, both tend to produce lots of talk and links on the Internet. There's even a lot of overlap...link bait can go viral and a viral idea can serve as link bait. When it gets down to it though, they're simply not the same thing. One focuses on building your brand and driving new customers, the other focuses on, well...links. As such, the two processes need to be approached in different manners. That begs the question...just how do you go about link baiting? Todd Malicoat has a great post on this topic over at Stuntdbl right now.

Todd does a fantastic job of breaking link baiting down into Nick Wilson's 5 "hooks" and offering up solid examples of each tactic.

For those that are unfamiliar with these hooks, they are:

• News hook
• Contrary Hook
• Attack Hook
• Resource Hook
• Humour Hook

For each hook, Todd gives a fairly comprehensive set of information including pros, cons, ideas and examples.

The post will take a while to read through, but it's chalk full of solid advice and information.