For traffic? Yes, it does.
But for relevant links, it does not necessarily help. There are a lot of things that we have to consider in link baiting. It is sometimes, as complicated as psychology. Better understanding to human behavior is the key to practice link baiting effectively. Link baiting also requires enough comprehension of the difference of every individual having different personalities and different tastes of what pleases them. Thinking like all other regular internet users is also needed for you to create link bait that would catch links.
Link baiting is a practice of attracting links from other websites through worth-reading article or content. Even if this kind of web marketing strategy is proven to have worked for countless online marketers already, there are still dangers of getting irrelevant links. Google search engine is very particular with the relevancy factor when it comes to ranking your site in the search engine results page for particular keywords. Somehow, your ranking can be affected; the degree of depreciation may vary on the quantity of irrelevant sites that links to your site.
The characteristic of link bait is that it should be intriguing, controversial and arouse critical-thinking. In other words, a link bait works if it provokes emotions to the audience–elicits reactions that are either negative or positive. When link baiting is successful, there are benefits that you can get aside from traffic and links. You can also increase your subscribers who can be converted as customers. Most importantly, you can increase your online business sales.