A Journey in Link Development
I’ve been doing internet marketing for 10 years now. A lot of SEO, even more PPC. Email. Domain name speculation. Hosting. Far and away, the least fun part of it for me has been link development. Nobody likes to do link development. It’s tedious. It requires little brain work but takes a lot of time. And if you have issues with rejection, it can be disappointing very quickly when your links don’t get accepted 9 times out of 10. That’s why you may get so many of those automated link request emails. To do it in volume takes a lot of time that people just don’t feel like taking.
But getting some good links has tremendous value for your site. The amount of quality traffic that can be generated is huge. Google’s attempt to put the kibosh on paid links for search engine ranking improvement makes link generation even more of a challenge. I don’t think that will kill the paid link industry or sites like text-link-ads.com, but it may have some impact on the cost of the links. After all, if sites implement the no-follow tag on paid links, the only value of the link is in the actual traffic generated. It means that you need to be very targeted with where you are buying your links to maximize the value of the traffic.
So, if you’re buying links for traffic, you need to figure what the average ROI is for visitors to your site. Do you think the cost of buying that link will end up net positive? If it costs $50 a year, will the amount of traffic generated to your site make that investment worthwhile?
Forget Google. Forget Yahoo. Forget the search engines. Could you build your online revenue and traffic streams to the point that you wouldn’t rely on search engine traffic at all? It’s a big challenge, but an interesting one. I bought lifewithoutsearch.com after wondering if it could be done. Haven’t developed it yet, but I’m putting plans together. I’ll publish those plans here so people can critique them.
