See “ Articles,” “Blogs,” “Blog Comments,” “Doorway sites,” “Classified Ads,” “Craigslist,” “Directory Submissions,” “Forums,” “Testimonials,” “Social Bookmarking,” “Press Releases,” and “Link Swapping.”
Link swapping used to be a simple concept that just meant two webmasters could scratch each other’s back by placing a link on their websites, pointing to each other’s site, for mutual benefit in the search engine’s eyes.
This definition became inadequate when Google decided that this kind of swapping, although not actually bad enough to deserve punishment, was only done in fact to influence their rankings, and so they made some algorithm changes that complicated things for us.
The premise is simple, mainly because Google and the other big Search Engines see all incoming links to a website as a “vote” for that site’s popularity. (The PageRank method.) Webmasters quickly adapted and put up a link directory on each of their websites to automate the link-swapping of that site with other webmasters. This method has largely lost its’ effectiveness, however.
If your website is about Penguins, then having some rude spammer come and post his Viagra or Online Degree Program (or any other non-animal topics at all, really) links in your directory will bring down the wrath of Googlebot on your site in no time… Certainly before you get a chance to intervene and weed out the offending links.
Overnight, millions of link directories became useless or even hurtful to their web ranking because while trying to build them up as large as possible, webmasters simply allowed links from other websites on topics other than their own to swap links with them.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t use an automated link directory anymore, but if you do, you’ll want to manually verify each posting to ensure every linkswap is on topic.
If you’re still manually trading links with a few choice websites, especially the most authoritative sites in your niche, or at least the ones with the highest PageRank in your niche, and not using an automated link directory, you’ll be in good shape.
Here’s a great, free link directory script that you can install to your own website, however you really should be careful to limit your linkswapping to other sites in you immediate market niche:
http://www.homebizfactory.com/Link_Trader_Pro.htmlThis method has its critics, however, and some webmasters won’t even use a directory anymore because its obvious structure should be a real giveaway to Googlebot about what its purpose is. These are usually the same people who would say that you must link 3 or more sites in a circle, instead of just two.
However there has been no evidence that this works any better, as Googlebot can just as easily follow three sites linked as it can two sites.Online programs referred to as “list builders” are a modified form of Safelists where you must build a downline and at the same time only get emails from your own upline. They are usually free to join but have 2 or three upgrade packages where the more you’re paying for your monthly membership, the more emails you can send out.
One great thing about these services is that they are much more read than a safelist. Anyone who signs up for a safelist is told from the start that they will get “A lot” of mail daily, and must supply 2 email address, because they know that you won’t often be looking inside one of them.
List builders are all about who’s in your upline and downline, so the email volume is much smaller, say 5-10 emails a day from the worst ones. And, they don’t ask for a second email address.
If you take the time to build up a downline (usually by referring 10 or so people personally) you’ll be rewarded with a large supply of daily or weekly emailing allotments for the rest of your life.
The main benefit to keep in mind is that all these list builders offer you increased mailings (traffic in this case) for the more sign-ups you get underneath you. So, the more you spread it around, the more mail-outs you get for life, and eventually you'll have access to so many mail-outs that you’ll be able to plaster the planet in your ads.
If you are a full-time internet marketer, this is something that I encourage you to check into. I’ve had 1,500 member mailings where 50 people would clickthru quite often. (That’s a 3.33% conversion, which is pretty normal, and compared to Safelists with their 0.0001% conversion, it’s phenomenal.)
Of course if you don’t get any referrals, nor upgrade your account from the free version, your mailing list will be hard to make large enough to be worth your time.I’ve even gone so far as to figure out a very easy and powerful strategy to use your list builders together in a series to obtain the ultimate traffic flow. You can find it near the end of this book just before the conclusion, titled: “The List Builder Traffic Strategy.”
The best three List builders are: List Joe, List dot com, & List lotto. Unfortunately, the older ones like these don’t get as much publicity anymore like the new ones, including the latest one, List Bandit… But after testing these new ones out I find that they are completely rigged against you and waste more time than not. Steer clear of List Bandit and many of the newer ones completely.