What happens when the key words or phrases that directly associate with your company or brand increase your visibility at the top in all search engines? Pretty soon you get email requests from strangers like this: “Hello I Have An Interesting Business Proposal… I found your site really enchanting… and would like to buy a number of text-links on your site.” Now It sounds both flattering and fishy at the same time… Right? My response to this recent request: Please tell me more?
But let me backtrack a bit to provide a frame of reference.
When I was in China I was incapable of tending to our Codedsignal.com website. China blocks all Godaddy servers and Wordpress blogs and this Wordpress blog happens to be hosted on our Godaddy server. Now this is a dilemma for any individual or group wanting to maintain their online presence. Yes there are proxy servers but I decided to wait till I got back to the states to make more sound decisions with my team.
Anyway, since I am the sole blogger for our site, I do have to consult with our internal team when we make decisions for the site. Due to our inactivity, our rankings in Google had significantly dropped in relevance. Since I have been back in the USA, we have strategically added new content to the site and enhanced our SEO (search engine optimization). So within one months time we have now pushed up our visibility on all search engines. Here’s several examples: in Google we rank in the top #5 among search results for “Digital Media Network” | “Media Tips” | “Digital Media“. That’s quite an accomplishment considering we did this all the old fashioned way, hard work and patience and we did it all free with no extra SEO costs.
Now that that’s out of the way. Let me bring you back to the theme of this post. To be continued…
Continued from previous post
What happens when you start to get emails from nameless strangers “Hello I Have An interesting Business proposal… and would like to buy a number of text-links on your site.” Well most of the time my team would generally say no thank you. But this one time I decided to play along and see what the offering was. A week later we get an email stating the following:
“I shall pay you a total of $75 for five of your blog pages where you can easily add a small paragraph with links below the post. These links will be on specific pages. Important: I would be paying only a $75 one time fee and the paragraph’s will stay permanent i-e as long as the page stays.”
And here are my Terms:
• My editor will write the paragraphs
• You will have the right to edit our text after consultation.
• The text links will go to non spammy related websites.
• The length of paragraph can be of 50 - 100 words at max.
• Number of links can be from 3 to 5.
• You can place the paragraph at bottom or middle.
• Paragraphs will remain throughout the life of page.
The hilarity and the audacity of it all is mind boggling. Just who do these people think they are fooling. First of all I’m not comfortable with allowing an unknown entity edit any content on our website, especially someone who we would have to refer to during future posts. Secondly you can’t offer someone a measly one time fee and lifetime permanence on their site without providing a sound byte laugh track.
I’m all about making money and providing relevant links to our site, but not at the expense of such terms. Everyone knows that with regard to internet culture, linkablilty is part of the social currency exchange. A linkabilty can lead to a higher relevance and higher rankings in search visibility. When this happens then you are just better off finding your own affiliate service that you control and can customize on your own terms.
So dear sir if you are reading this post, here is a little advice. It would have been more effective if you simply said “hello… I want to reach people in your market, because we have similar content¦ would you kindly host the following links on your page(s)¦ also I will make sure to link back to you. My team would then go to your links to see that you were legit and then we would likely decided to happy subscribe to your request. At that point you could be following the traffic coming from our site. But here is the big thing, If you did not want to cut us in on your affiliate deal then thats fine, its our loss. However! If you chose to be honest… you would say .. ‘hello, it appears that the links from your site seem to be driving lots of traffic to our site … We are grateful of this exchange, we would like to pay you for hosting our links. And then at this point we could discuss some terms.
That at least would make your intentions transparent and our team would have obliged. Either way you would have had the opportunity to host your links for free regardless if they successful links or not. Your initial email is compelling but once you introduced the one time fee and lifetime permanence terms it was absolutely laughable. Plus how do I know for a fact that you will not redirect to a nefarious website at some point in time. That kind of inflexible business will absolutely piss people off. Some traffic is always better than no traffic, and sometimes its best to ask for free first before you proceed with offering money attached to demands. BTW if you really want to know how to increase your visibility I can provide you consultation at an undisclosed consulting fee.
Thanks but no thanks Mr funny proposal man. 
- bendrix
Codedsignal | bendrix | 
September 25, 2008 10:44 am | 
Comments (0) 
