It has been a long-established practice now of asking for someone’s email address in exchange for something free – a report, an ebook, etc. This practice has also now morphed into asking for Facebook Likes.
And while both email addresses and Facebook Likes are valuable, so are links. But it seems not very many people use this same basic idea of trading something for a link.
Except for Adagio Teas, that is.
In an on-going campaign to improve their link profile, the company offers visitors free tea in exchange for links.
Not a bad idea – one that could be transferred to any market (especially where the giveaway is digital).
Will some immediately remove the link once they get their freebies? Yes.
Will everyone immediately remove the link once they get their freebies? No.
Featured Plugin - WordPress Pop-Up Chat Plugin
Another Twist – Twitter
It occurred to me that you could put another twist on this idea and ask for a link in a tweet.
Conditions
Of course you could put stipulations on these links, saying they had to be from sites with a certain PageRank or from Twitter accounts with a certain number of followers, but that’s a detail for you to work out.
Potential Drawback
There is one drawback, of course. The links or tweets will need to be checked. And unless you have some software to do that, that will be manual job. But it may be worth testing out. You never know how valuable it may turn out to be.
Photo: Trick from BigStock
Not sure if this is such a great idea.
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. More info here.
Luciano – True. Maybe just asking for a link instead of requiring one would be a way to go. Only those that really wanted to give you a link would leave it up anyway. It’s still worth trying, I think. Asking for a link instead of an email or a FB Like might be what some need in certain situations.
Agree, they could be in for a nasty penalty for the very terms they want to rank for :/
I doubt there would be much of impact. After all, isn’t all affiliate marketing geared towards buying links?
Isn’t googles whole model based on buying links?
Geared more forward seo webring bs
Which also brings up main issue. Google working hard to discredit people paying others to appear in search instead of them. They hit microsoft with an antitrust for bundling msn on a pc. How can they let google get away with this crap?