Thank you guys for responding to this thread. I find it interesting that there are 10 different ways we promote our websites shown on here and linkwheels seem to draw the most attention.
I think I'll change the name on it (maybe not)
Since linkwheels seems to be where most of the attention is focused I'll try and a few thoughts into the mix.
Best I can tell most people do not have a problem with article marketing. This is where you write and article (blog post) and submit it to a number of article directories. One difference is that you also submit it to various web 2.0 networks as well.
The question is why would you do that. Well there are two reasons: first is that fact that a lot of these sites will actually send traffic back to your website. The second is that your site gets a backlink from that site or directory.
Backlinks are a way for the search engines to rank how popular a site is. It works something like this. I sign up for doityourself.com I chose this because it was the #2 search result for "install a toilet" and it ranks well for a number of other contractor related keywords, after I sign up I'm asked if I want to create a profile. Of course I do...this is where people find out about me. Part of most profiles is a place where you can put a link to a site that you find interesting or useful. (not sure if
www.doityourself.com has that or not because I have not signed up for them)
The link you is put in that profile page is like a "vote" in the search engine's eyes as to how popular that site is. They use this system because the search engines want to give the searchers the most popular sites out there that are relevant to what they searched for.
Sorry for getting a little off topic, I wanted to give those who didn't know why backlinks are important a little background information.
So back to article marketing...the image below is a screen shot of one of our article directories and some of the names we have published content on. (before I get hate mail on the fact that we have multiple accts, remember we market a lot of our own products as well as products and services for our clients)
The first colum shows the number of time that article was viewed, the next shows the number of time someone clicked on the link in a resource box that took them to a landing page of ours or one of our clients.
7100+ visitors may not seem like a lot but remember...that is from just one article directory...there are 100's of very good ones.
So basically we marketing articles to get visitors to our website and to build backlinks (votes) to our site to increase it's popularity.
Now back to the linkwheel...the term linkwheel is used without much qualification. What I mean by this is the the term is used by many to describe multiple linking schemes (most of which dont work well because they are not thought out)
The typical linkwheel creates and article and then submits it 5 or 6 places and links back to the money site. Then they take that same content and build other wheels around the first batch of content they submitted. (stupid idea)
First is the article...if the same article shows up everywhere most of the content will not get indexed by Google because it is duplicate content. So all those links you are trying to build will not count for anything.
Second...why would I build links to something that is not showing up in the search engines...that's makes not sense and is a complete wasted of time and money.
A different approach would be to submit unique articles to 15 or so articles directories/web 2.0 properties (I would also include videos, do a search on googel for "how to do anything" and you will see a number of videos on the first page). All of these articles would link to the main site but also link to 2 or 3 of the more popular sites.
If I submit a video to Youtube on how to change a light fixture I want that video on the first page of Google...more people will see it and click on my link leading them back to our main page.
Now...is this blackhat? I don't know. I know that in August 2009 we build a site selling Halloween costumes. We used that approach to promote it and sent 20K+ visitors to it in 2 months. That was partly because we timed it with the season but we also targeted keywords that people were searching for.
The goal with any online promotion of your website is to get more visitors to your website at a cost that makes it profitable. What I talked about was just one small part in the process.
But I dont care how good the article is one your website or blog is...if people don't see it it does you no good. In this day and age people are getting smarter about how they promote their product or service on the internet.
If you plan on marketing on the internet it's essential that you have all the tools and knowledge to be able to compete, if you don't your competitors will leave you in their dust...it does not matter how good your service is.
PS..please forgive any misspellings or grammar errors, still on my first cup of coffee
PPS I'm not trying to convince anyone of the value of using this or not using it...just trying to put a few thoughts out there. Remember..."Contempt prior to investigation will leave a man in ever lasting ignorance"
