SEO From the Dark Side

What’s article marketing? Here’s Wiki’s definition:

In its simplest form, article marketing is a type of advertising through which a business writes short articles related to its respective industry. Once written, the business makes these articles freely available for distribution and publication in the marketplace.

Each article contains a ‘bio box’ and ‘by-line’ which include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of gaining the author business credibility within his or her market, as well as new clients.

So, basically it’s about submitting articles to sites like ezinearticles.com, goarticles, etc, for extra backlinks and traffic.

I was thinking a few months ago about how dated those article marketing sites look (certainly Web 1.0) and wondering how they will evolve over the next few years (I’ve done this before)… then I came up with a novel twist: Blog for a Link

Here’s the idea. Instead of using dated article marketing scripts, use Wordpress. Create a network of blogs, one per niche, and allow webmasters to promote their sites by posting on the blogs which obviously includes backlinks to their sites – but only one link per unique post. So, effectively, I would have a network of user-generated content blogs.

I even built a prototype: it comprised several plug-ins and modification to the core code. So, alas, I can’t release it yet. However, I’ve since realised most of the code can be bundled into a single plug-in, which I’ll release sometime soon. Here’s some screenshots - submit-a-post & my-posts.

The business model behind this idea was build-to-sell. Build and promote the network, and after becoming established sell it to the highest bidder. However, I just don’t have the time so I’m sharing the idea with you guys just in case some-one is interested in pursuing it. Let me know if you do, I’ll feature your network on this blog.