Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

Over the last couple of years, frustrated webmasters that have tried all other SEO measures unsuccessfully (or with partial but not significant success) have turned to link networks to build links very fast very quickly.

 I am talking about sites like articlemarketingautomation.com , seolinkvine.com (which launched today - Brad Callen's latest venture), Etc. There are many more. The idea is thatyou are part of a network where your articles/blog posts with links to your sites are picked up by others in the network (who benefit from the free content) and post it to their blogs, giving you quality contextual links. The idea sounds great, IN THEORY.

 In reality, what happens is something totally different. People looking for free content usually DO NOT have great quality blogs. Which means you write awesome quality articles but they get published on crappy blogs. This approach can work for some websites though because of the sheer quantity of links you can build this way. seolinkvine.com gives one example where they built 29000 links for a site and got it ranked at #3 on Google for a competitive phrase. That's great, but now you stand the risk of Google changing their algorithm to weed out the effect of these mass-acquired low-quality links at some point (and it will happen at some point if you know Google). So may be a good idea for a short-term website. For example, if you launch a blog that you are going to write only for a year (like the Julie and Julia blog) or something like that - then may be I'd go for this (hesitantly.

But if you do really have a great product or website that you love, it is worth the years spent on building quality backlinks via legitimate methods. Not by getting a 10000 links from a link network but by building relationships with people, getting in on quality websites where your site gets noticed, Etc. There are tons of ways of doing all that, but of course it takes TIME, and often money.

But I know you are a marketer and don't want to let go of the opportunity to use a link network while your competitors are using it. So here you go. If you really must, then do this:

Content is still king. Write one good, I mean really really good, article per month (or quarter) and you know when you've written one like that, and post it only on one site - YOURS, and promote that article at these links networks via other lower-quality articles that you get written from services such as needanarticle.com . This will generate a few links to your main article which might just help your main article get a kick start and then once it starts getting noticed, it'll just keep getting better by its own virtue...

I maintain, link networks are just a passing thing though -  a few years from now, their popularity will be just like link directories which used to rule to roost once upon a time but don't even get talked about in SEO circles anymore..