[natalie]

Last year I started a thread called "A Positive Step Forward in Link Strategies", which was about looking for new ways to exchange links with other sites, namely article exchanges. While the thread received some good responses, our efforts at the whole "article exchange" program never really produced the amount of interest we were hoping, in regards to our own optimization efforts.

Over the past several weeks we've implemented a new evolution of this linking strategy, which has performed quite well in our initial testing. Again, I want to bring it to SEW to get input and ideas, etc. etc.

Here is what we got going one:

1) We write an article about an industry related topic. For this example, let's say it's a site that sells baby products. We might write an article called "important baby care tips." The article has a couple of opening paragraphs and a closing paragraph. The Bulk of the article will be written by sites we wish to exchange links with, under a section headed as "Here are some tips and ideas to assist you in your baby-care needs:". To start things off, we also write the first tip. We then invite related sites to write a 50 (plus or minus) word tip that also links to their site however they want. After we get about 10 tips, we then start the process over again with a new article, or even have several articles covering multiple topics at the same time.

2) In exchange we write a completely original article and ask them to place it on their site. Of course, we give them the option of having a full article of their own (with no other outgoing links) on our site should they choose to write one up.

As for the merits of this, it rids websites of those nasty "link" pages, while giving each site valuable content. The likelihood of these links driving traffic is substantially greater than any link page and the value of these pages to the search engines is also superior.

So there it is. I would be interested in hearing any comments, or anything that perhaps we are overlooking in this process.
New twist on linking

I've spent the last year working my butt off to promote my HOW TO GET SPONSORED FOR FISHING TOURNAMENTS manual (ebbok) available on my web site [url removed].

I've advertised with banners, exchanged links with other sites, written articles, given away free product, got a pro to endorse my book, listed on ebay, and the newest thing I've done.......................

Natalie