GoGuides Directory - GoGuides.org

GoGuides is one of the best directories on the Internet to get a backlink from. Not only is it relatively affordable compared to some of the other directories online, but the listings of other websites there are generally of a pretty good quality, which is exactly the kind of listings you want alongside your listing. (Getting listed in a directory full of crappy sites is exactly the kind of listing you want to avoid. My strong suspicion is that search engines believe the old adage about "birds of a feather".)

About GoGuides.org

GoGuides.org is actually a continuation of the now-dead Go network from Disney, which was an earlier volunteer edited directory. It's not as good a quality link as you might be receiveing from DMOZ or Yahoo, but it's still a good solid link from a reputable source, and it's probably one of the few directories that's going to stick around for quite a while, IMO.

There are a couple of different ways to submit your site to GoGuides.org. The easiest way for someone who only runs one site and who just wants to submit and move on is to pay the $69.95 review fee and submit the site. The editors at GoGuides normally turn around a submission fairly quickly, within a day or less, in my experience. You won't see that kind of turnaround time at most other directories.

Submission Specialists at GoGuides

Another option is to become a GoGuides submissions specialist. This membership has 3 levels at 3 different price points:

• VIP for $19.95 per month allows you to submit 5 websites per month.
• Junior Membership for $29.95 per month allows you to submit 10 websites per month.
• Senior Members for $39.95 per month allows you to submit 20 websites per month.

These programs are designed to help website specialists and SEO's offer service to their clients for less money.

Free GoGuides Submissions

I am a submissions specialist at GoGuides.org, and if you're interested in a listing there, please contact me. I'll submit your site for free if you'll provide a link back to my blog, as long as I have any submissions left that month.

More Information About GoGuides on the Web

You can read more articles about GoGuides on the Internet. A couple of the sites worth taking a look at include:

• Search Marketing Info's GoGuides Page
• Wikipedia Article About GoGuides (This article really needs to be expanded. If you're not already participating at the Wikipedia, you should.)
• HighRankings Discussion of Whether or Not GoGuides is Passing Link Popularity

No matter what the topic of your affiliate website, a few good directory listings are good to have. GoGuides is definitely one to consider. Other good directories to look at can be found here: DMOZ Directories. (God bless those DMOZ guys btw; you can always find good stuff over there.)

Wicked Fire - WickedFire.com - 10,000 Forum Posts in 6 Days

There's a new affiliate forum in town folks, and it's off to a big start. The site is called Wicked Fire, and as of this morning sometime, they're up to 10,000 posts and over 800 or so threads. What's impressive to me is how they managed to pull this off in just 6 days. (In contrast, my newly launched movie forum has only managed to generate about 8 members in the last month or so.)

But the brilliance of having an active forum isn't lost on me. It's a white-hat way of achieving a black hat goal: generating tons of content pages without having to write or publish every single page yourself. With an active forum, the users generate the content for you. A forum is even better than a blog in this regard, because in a blog, even when you generate a conversation, you have to start the ball rolling. With a forum, anyone and everyone can start the ball rolling.

Among some of the other gems I've found at WickedFire.com are some links to great sites that got my imagination fired up, including:

• Forum Trends - Which is all about running forums. Why have a blog network when you could own a forum network?
• The Super Affiliate Marketing Blog - I'd seen Jon's affiliate marketing blog before, but like so many things you see on the web, it wasn't something I paid enough attention to. But anyone who can generate 10,000 posts on a forum in 6 days is someone worth paying attention to, in my opinion.
• Hott for Teacher - This is one of the member's sites from WickedFire. It's bizarre, seemed funny at first, then just weirder as you start reading the stories of this really sad and sick women who are taking advantage of young people. This isn't a niche I'd approach to make money with, but who am I to say that someone shouldn't? (Besides that, the design kicks ass, IMO.)

Anyway, that's about it for now, but I'm planning to start blogging a little more heavily here. I'm starting to get the bug again, which I haven't had in quite a while.

Shoemoney Discusses Ringtones Landing Page Sold on eBay

If you're not already reading Shoemoney, then you should be. He's funny, smart, and the stuff he writes is almost always useful as all get out. Today I read a post about how someone actually bought a ringtones landing page on eBay for $10,000. The discussion in the comments over at Shoemoney's site is pretty interesting, so check it out.

Oh, and while I'm talking about Shoemoney. The best post I ever read over there was the one where he said that Markus, the owner of Plenty of Fish, was lying about how much money he's making with his site just to get attention. (For those people who have already seen this post and the comments but haven't figured it out yet, the whole thing was a joke that Markus was in on. Turns out that controversy makes great linkbait, and that particular post at Shoemoney generated a ton of backlinks to both sites. Nice work.)

Blog Directories

My blog isn't so much about blogging for dollars as it is about affiliate marketing, but there are any number of bloggers who qualify as affiliates. And one of the best ways to get traffic and backlinks is through directory listings. Over at Successful Blog today, I found a list of blog directories. She claims that her links lead to over 1800 blog directories, which seems to be quite a few. I don't know that anyone needs backlinks from all of them, but I'm also convinced that a lot of sites, especially if they're in non-competitive areas, can do just fine with 40 backlinks or so to start with and then just rely on naturally occurring backlinks.

Anyway, the list looks like a great resource, and the blog itself looks like a pretty solid one. (I just found it today.)

Reciprocal Linking Isn't Dead

People keep saying it, and I for one am tired of hearing it. "Reciprocal linking is dead". Or "Reciprocal linking doesn't work anymore."

Nonsense. A lot of the people who think that reciprocal linking doesn't work just suck at it.

Here's the deal with reciprocal linking, and it's not complicated at all:

Don't link to websites that suck, and don't link to websites your audience won't be interested in.

You don't want websites that suck linking to you, and you don't want to link to websites that suck. Linking to crappy websites is a great way to send a clear signal to a search engine, "Hey! I link to crappy sites. So my site is probably crappy too."

If you can't figure out which websites suck or not, then yeah, reciprocal linking won't work for you. Here's a hint though. If you don't see anything useful or original on a site, then it sucks.

On-topic, high quality link exchanges have a place in any link builder's bag of tricks. And while I don't think for a minute that link exchanges should be the only tool in your toolbox, it's certainly a silly one to leave out just because people go around parroting to each other that link exchanging is dead.