There are multiple types of linkbait, those that are known as controversial and those which are informational or comprehensive.
Some tips about link baiting:
    * Make it easy to identify and connect with. Think about human emotions and tap the sense of empathy.
    * You may want to make your idea look polarized such that it especially appeals to one group and/or especially offends another. If other people are fighting over guessing your intentions you will get quality links.
    * Make your link bait look comprehensive.
          - Perception is more important than reality.
          - Most writing is quite wasteful in nature, because you have to trim off much of what you create.
          - By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not.
    * Cite research, further reading, and link out to related resources from within your content. It makes your story look well researched and associates your work with other trusted names or brands in your field. You may even want to cite a few people that you want links from.
    * Dress up your link bait using quality design and / or relevant images from sites.   
    * Ask for feedback from people who may be interested in helping you improve your idea or helping you market it.
    * Leverage friends and contacts via instant message and email.
    * Pitch relevant bloggers and media sources. It is preferable to build rapport prior to pitching.
    * Build accounts on social news sites.
    * Some social news sites allow you to place voting buttons on your site. Do so on your most important ideas.
    * Consider the best times and locations to launch your idea.
    * Have a friend or yourself submit your best ideas to the most authoritative and relevant social news sites.
          - Ensures your story has a title that is easy to vote for.
          - Ensures your story is submitted at an appropriate time.
          - If you do not do it soon after mentioning a story on your own site someone else may submit for you, using a dumb title or dumb post content.
    * Make your link bait EASY to link at.
    * Don't over-monetize it right out of the gate. Make it look like research which is easy to cite rather than a piece of commercial information.
    * In Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content Clay Shirky stressed the importance of gaining authority to gain scale and distribution if you want to make money online.
    * Spread out your ideas. For example, if you are forming a new partnership you can triple dip on publicity:
          - Interview partners on another channel.
          - Announce the launch.
          - Add linkbait to the site at a later point in time.
    * Link bait rarely makes much money or directly pays for itself from the direct traffic. However, it has amazing indirect value.
          - People who pay attention to the active portions of the web are far more likely to be web publishers than those who do not.
          - Even if people do not link to your link bait idea right away you still gain mindshare and brand recognition amongst a group of people who have significant authority.
          - Many search engines, such as Google, use authority centric relevancy algorithms. Editorial links are seen as votes or signs of trust.
          - In Google, getting a link to any part of your site will help make all pages on your site more authoritative.
       * Social news sites and social bookmarking sites have recently popular lists that many people read.
    * Meme trackers track what stories are quickly spreading through the blogosphere.
    * Exposure on either of these can cause additional exposure and more linkage data. Many bloggers and some mainstream media outlets (like the MSNBC Clicked Blog) use these social news sites to find stories or sources.

Advantage of the link baiting such as 1. Backlinks to the article, 2. Branding, 3. Rankings and 4. Direct traffic.

Be careful what you name your link bait ideas. If your link bait is well executed and targets keywords important to other pages on your site the link bait will likely outrank
your other pages in the search results.