Our Industry Represented at SES NYC

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, the SES is currently underway in New York City. My previous entry discussed the art of not putting a target on your forehead if attending and how to ask questions smartly.

Upon reading about our industry reps giving a session, it made me wonder about another thought. These sessions involve many search engine employees talking about what is good and what is not so good, including the business of buying and selling text ads. Is it a good idea for certain companies to get up and talk about exactly what they are saying not to do in the next room? I am all for spreading the word of our industry, but it seems like you would bring undue attention to your business. Chances are, they know all about us. . .well I know they know about LinkWorth, but it just makes sense to run low key and focus on helping your customers rather than networking yourself within the search community.

I need to follow up the paragraph above with our stance with the buying and selling of text ads. No matter what search employees say at conferences, blogs and/or forums, it is your choice to monetize your website or promote it. Search engines say “don’t buy or sell links”, but then they tell you to do so in their terms. If you market online, you have to do what you have to do to get a leg up on your competition. The buying and selling of links is not against their terms of service . . . read them here. It says not to participate in “schemes” or “trickery”, but what LinkWorth offers is not a scheme or trickery. We place text ads for apples on an apple website. Everything is relevant and all about improving your name recognition and traffic. Just so happens, the buying and selling of links helps this.

The last thing I’ll say about this is search engines themselves live off of text ads. It’s a little different model, but there is a common denominator in all of these methods, to make money. They do it, we do it and we help you do it. As long as you do it the right way, which LinkWorth does, everything will be fine. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years and are professionals about it.

Off that rant :D, the point of this entry is to give props to Patrick, Eric and the others who represented the text linking community well today at the SES NYC.

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Season Greetings To All

The LinkWorth Team wants to wish all of our customers, readers and everyone else a special holiday season. As there are many celebratory occasions, here are a few of the well known greetings. . .

MERRY CHRISTMAS

HAPPY HANUKKAH

HAPPY QUANZA

We would also like to wish everyone a wonderful and very prosperous 2006. Have a great New Year’s Eve and be safe!

From all of us at LinkWorth

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Contest Money Giveaway

As most LinkWorth customers know, we are always trying to make LinkWorth a better and more user friendly atmosphere for all. Over time, we have grown to learn that what might seem trivial to us, might be confusing to others. After many discussions of how to make our control center interface easier, we have come up with a new and unique idea. We are calling it our “Facelift Contest“.

With any software program, one of the most important parts is the initial homepage. It can be constructed to give a quick insight to all major aspects of the program, much like having a bird’s eye view of an entire city. We, at LinkWorth, feel our initial login homepage could use a major facelift to better illustrate important features and/or sections of your account. It could provide more accurate statistical information about your account and be laid out in a much more user friendly manner. So instead of us putting our thoughts into the layout, we feel the best way to get something everyone could greatly benefit from was to allow our customers, who use their accounts on a daily basis, the power to do it.

This leads us to the actual contest. We want you to submit your best login homepage of how you think it should be laid out. It can be submitted in the following formats: jpg, gif, bmp, pdf, html or psd. While the design/artwork is a plus, we are looking mostly for the art of information provided on the homepage. What bits of information would you like to see on the login homepage? How would you like to see it shown? . . . and so on.

There are TWO (2) login homepages; Advertiser Home and Partner Home. There will be one winning submission for each homepage with either one or two actual winners. The contest will run until January 1, 2006. After the deadline has passed, we will select the top 5 submissions for each homepage. We will then construct demo pages of each and open the voting up to the LinkWorth customers. The voting process will run for a total of 30 days and at the end of the 30th day, we will crown a winner for the advertiser homepage and partner homepage.

Now for the part everyone is reading this for! ! ! The prize.

Grand Prize Advertiser Homepage – $500 credit to account (total of 1 prize)
Grand Prize Partner Homepage – $500 credit to account (total of 1 prize)
Runner Up Advertiser Homepage – $25 credit to account (total of 4 prizes)
Runner Up Partner Homepage – $25 credit to account (total of 4 prizes)

This is a view of the current advertiser homepage:

Current Advertiser Homepage Design

This is a view of the current partner homepage:

Current Partner Homepage Design

To submit your entry, login to your LinkWorth account and look for the submission directions on the homepage, located in the announcements/news section.

Tips and Hints to participants are:

1. Be creative and informative
2. Fast loading page (low image use)
3. Great use of statistical data
4. Detailed labeling
5. Extremely User Friendly
6. Simplified but detailed

Best of luck to all who participate! We are excited to see your idea’s.

Be sure to read our rules and regulations of this contest.

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New LinkWorth Location

With the continued success and the future plans of LinkWorth, the need for additional staff and additional space was important in taking our next big steps. We are happy to annouce that LinkWorth will be moving into our brand new office just north of Dallas, in Lewisville, Texas at the end of the current month (October). For our local customers, please call ahead for directions if needed. All other customers nationally and internationally, the reason for this announcement is due to the changes it will have on all customers.

Shortly after we are moved in, the massive hiring frenzy will begin. The majority of our new employees will be sales staff that will actively seek new advertisers. We will also add additional personnel to assist in support, perform daily tasks, additional programming help and assistance in payouts. This will not only help business for all partners, but it will allow LinkWorth to grow. We have been limited with space and personnel due to our existing office, so our new location will definitely benefit everyone.

During the move there will not be any downtime to services and it should be seamless. Of course, anything can happen, but we have anticipated all options and are ready to move.

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LinkWorth.com Facelift

After many tests and many failed attempts of putting a new look to LinkWorth.com, we finally have the much needed facelift! Page and linking structure has definitely changed quite a bit, but it was something we desperately needed. Our previous site was extremely tough to grow at the fast pace in which our company is. Our new design was setup to grow progressively as we do.

We have many additions that will soon be available on the new site, so continue to check back. We have many new solutions for advertisers and/or partners, so these will be available very soon. We hope you enjoy the new look and feel as it better represents our company.

Let us know your thoughts.

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The Disappearance of PageRank

As of today, May 28, 2005, the Google PageRank has been grey’d out of everyone’s toolbar. Is this just a glitch? Is it a huge update? Is it a move to something new? Or is this the disappearance of PageRank to you and I?

Personally, I believe it will be back anytime, but what if this is a turn towards PageRank being invisible? How does this effect webmasters and most importantly, how does this effect LinkWorth?

LinkWorth has been built around “link popularity”, not PageRank. The reason we do not base prices of links and the way our system works off of PageRank is for reasons just like we’re experiencing today. PageRank can disappear at any time without notice. If this happens and LinkWorth is built specifically around PageRank, then “goodbye LinkWorth”! This would not be a smart business decision, therefore, we focused on something that is the base of EVERY search engine…LINK POPULARITY.

So if PageRank disappeared today, LinkWorth would only benefit. Others in our market who sell text links based on the PageRank of that site will suffer tremendously. While this would help our business, I personally would hate to see that happen to any of those guys. It might just put them completely out of business and that is not good, no matter how you view it. I can only wish the best for those companies.

What does this mean to individual webmasters? Nothing really. Google isn’t going away, they’re just making changes (possibly) to how their search results are displayed and ranked. As long as you are building your link popularity with great relevant inbound links, you are fine.

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Announcing the anticipated LinkWorth Toolbar

Well after a while of tweaking, changing, adding, removing, scratching and waiting…we are proud to announce the new LinkWorth Toolbar 1.0! Hats off to Tom for putting his hard elbow grease into this project and it’s really turned out great. It’s a free tool that is very beneficial to anyone buying links, reciprocating links and most of all, to LinkWorth customers. Now the tool is available to LinkWorth customers AND non LinkWorth customers. And you have our 100% guarantee that there is no hidden programs that come with the toolbar. There is nothing beneficial to LinkWorth by way of using this toolbar, other than seeing our toolbar on your browser. No adware. No spyware. No hidden programs. No sponsored search results.

Just as a SEO tool, it speaks for itself. It currently will gather valuable bits of information on any website you visit. Just click the “Get Stats!” link and it will pull up the information and plug it into the toolbar for you. It’s a great way to see if a possible linking partner meets your satisfaction. You would want to know their overall link popularity based on the major search engines. Our toolbar will not only show you their backward link numbers and the number of pages indexed, but it also adds the numbers up to provide a value we call Linkrank. Not to be confused with Google’s PageRank which is a much more complex calculation that focuses on a particular page, not a website as a whole. Our Linkrank value is a scale ranging from 1 through 7, with 7 being the most popular. Our goal of the Linkrank is not to offer up a elaborate ranking system like the all mighty PageRank, but to help organize a given website’s overall popularity, if you’re looking for a quality link building service you can contact the right experts. The Linkrank value also includes more search engines not listed on the toolbar, so for those who are familiar with our Linkrank chart, we want to make sure it causes no confusion. 😉

The value of this toolbar to actual LinkWorth customers is wonderful. Partners who want to get notified quickly of a new pending link or an unread message in their account, the toolbar will do this. There are changing icons that alert you when a new item is in your account in which the icon can be clicked to access the LinkWorth login. Advertisers, there is also the unread messages icon alerting you of new messages in your account. If you have a combo account it will serve as both. Most important, it allows advertisers the ability to see valuable partner stats when searching through our database. Sometimes our stats window can be time consuming to open, so the toolbar will pull several important stats to help in decision making. We already have several additions to the toolbar for the future version that will put your account details in your toolbar, along with additional tools to run on website domains. We have created a new forum category specifically for the LinkWorth Toolbar, so any questions, comments or suggestions, please direct them to the forum.

Visit the LinkWorth Toolbar page now!

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The LinkWorth Affiliate Program

To become an affiliate for LinkWorth, one should create a new partner account. Once the account is created, you instantly receive a unique affiliate id. If you choose to be an affiliate and do not wish to sell links on your site, you can simply take your listing offline once your account is a approved.

Our affiliate program is one that we felt should be rewarding enough to keep people interested. Paying someone for an advertiser referral with just a one time small fee wasn’t enough. So putting myself into the shoes of an affiliate, I felt the thing that would make me most happy was to earn money not only on the referral, but to earn money on the money spent by the referral. If an affiliate refers a client that spends twenty five thousand per month, I would love to earn a commission on that money. After all, I did send the customer.

All affiliates who send a new “ADVERTISER” referral, will earn $10 just for the advertiser signing up. Then, for the life of the customer’s account, the affiliate will earn 5% of all renewal transactions. The only thing we do not pay for is the first time a link is purchased and the reason for this is because some links are purchased with one day left in the month, so the price may be less than one dollar. We felt earning a commission on the renewals would pay the affiliate much better in the long run and as time goes on and an affiliate refers more and more advertisers, the monthly renewal portions paid will be a great steady payout.

At this particular time, we do not pay for partner referrals. This is something many of you have asked about and our reply to all of you has been we are looking for the best possible solution and want to reward for partner referrals. While the majority of people in this world are good people, there are the few that find ways to beat the system, so we have to ensure our protection against anything like this. We have too many scenarios that leave us wide open for this, so we are discussing many options to try and find the best solution. So hang in there, we WILL find a solution, and soon.

Affiliate payments are included each month with regular partner payouts. The amount is indicated on the invoice you can print from within your account. Affiliate stats, which show all earnings, are available in your account affiliate section.

Ways to promote LinkWorth are endless. We have provided a few tools/images/text you can use that contain your unique affiliate id. One of the more popular methods of referring new advertisers is by using our STATS LINK TOOL, or also known as the BUY DIRECT TOOL. This is a small text box which can be placed anywhere on the affiliate’s website offering to sell links on their site. It links potential link buyers directly to a LinkWorth page which shows all of the stats for that affiliates website. This helps convert a potential advertiser to purchase a link on your site. They can click the buy a link button and instantly purchase a link from you.

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