|
Creating
a Website
|
Top
500 Fallacy
|
The 500 Sites Fallacy
The following is a
reprint from Robert Townsend of Self
Promote
"Submit your site to the top 500 indexes on the net for
only..." Sound good, right? Certainly, sounds impressive.
But the fact of the matter is, it's probably not worth the
money they charge for most sites to do such a promotion.
That's not to say it isn't worth something (I certainly want
you to support this site!), but in my opinion, charging
$25, $50 or $100 or more to promote a
single site a single time is way too much money. Here's why:
The Facts:
Realistically, there are three types
of behavior that lead to a click through to your site - a
visitor can respond to an ad; he can casually encounter a
link on another site that seems interesting; or he can be
looking for something specific and find you in an index or
search engine.
With this in mind, I did a little
research in the logs of www.animeigo.com, which is the site
of a company I run that releases Japanese Animation and
Samurai films. It's a pretty popular site, and we do very
good business on the web. I wrote a quick program to scan
one of the recent log files (covering a small part of
January) and look for incoming connections. I threw away
anything that wasn't a page request, and also anything that
wasn't being requested by Navigator or Internet Explorer (so
as to filter out any search engines spidering the site). I
then eliminated all clickthroughs that didn't come from a
site that SelfPromotion.com can submit to (The AnimEigo site
has been pretty widely promoted, to all of the sites
SelfPromotion.com can currently promote to that are
appropriate)
Here are the top
sites:
yahoo.com...........1491
infoseek.com..........843
altavista.digital.com. 642
lycos.com.............295
excite.com.............235
webcrawler.com......141
looksmart.com.........41
bizweb.com............10
nlsearch.com...........10
gte.net....................8
snap.com................8
nerdworld.com.........3
turnpike.net.............2
usaol.com...............2
euroseek.net............1
planetsearch.com.... ..1
skyline.net..............1
manifest.com...........1
The Analysis:
Look at the drop-off! None of the
other index sites generated more than a couple of
clickthroughs! This tends to confirm my hunch; if you are
looking for something in particular, you go to one of the
major indexes or search engines; you don't go to "Joe-Bob's
Link List". If you just hit the majors, you're going to get
95% of the clickthroughs you would get if you promoted to
the "Top 500."
Further analysis of the logs was also
very illuminating. There were lots of sites with only 1 or 2
clickthroughs; these probably represented linkexchange
banner ad clickthroughs. But there were also sites that
generated a lot of clickthroughs, rivalling the numbers of
the big guys. These were all other anime-related sites.
Surprisingly, these sites combined generated more
clickthroughs than Altavista! The Anime Web Turnpike, for
example, generated more clickthroughs than Excite.
The moral - get
yourself linked with other similar sites, it is a major
traffic source.
Now, some of you might say, what about
"Free-for-all Links Pages?" These are pages where you can
submit a link, and only the most recent links submitted are
displayed. There are hundreds of them around, most of them
running the same software. I was intrigued, so I visited
Link-o-matic, a service that, for a fee, will repeatedly
submit your URL to hundreds of these places. They have a
free teaser service that submits your URL to 10 of the
pages, so I used it, and then analyzed the logs, only to
find...
Not a single clickthrough! In all
fairness to Link-o-matic, other users, in particular the
author of the VirtualPromote Newsletter, attest to good
results from this service. So I did some more checking, and
built my own Free-for-all submission tool (now part of the
Secret Net Tools suite). The results indicate that it does
generate a reasonable number of hits. A commentary: As more
people start using Link-o-matic, my Secret Net Tool, and
other autosubmitters on a regular basis, then pretty soon
almost every link on the target pages will be from such a
source. At which point, the usefulness of the pages as a
promotional tool will be greatly reduced. This is an
Internet version of the old "Tragedy of the Commons." Based
on how people use my Free-for-all autosubmitter, I may
re-evaluate whether or not to continue to provide it.
Conclusions:
So, what does this all mean? It means
that a good promotion plan is a stool with three legs;
banner advertising, promotion to the major search engines
and indexes, and equally important, encouraging sites
similar to yours to give you links (which usually means
giving them links in return; www.animeigo.com has over 200
links to anime-related sites).
All of this does not bode well for
sites that offer promotion services. Most of them will
promote your site to the big guys for free, so the question
becomes "Is it worth $50 (or whatever they charge) to put my
site in a ton of indexes, in order to capture an extra 5% of
traffic?" For most sites, it isn't.
The philosophy behind
SelfPromotion.com is to help you capture most of that last
5%, and let you judge how much the service is worth. If you
are promoting your personal web-page, it might only be worth
$5 or $10. If you are going to promote a bunch of commercial
sites, it may well be worth $50 or $100 or more. You decide.
I'm trusting you to be honest about it.
To encourage you, I'm also creating a
suite of tools (currently there are 6 of them) that will
help you improve site and your search engine rankings. You
gain access to them by contributing $10 or more.
It may sound strange that I've put a
page on this site telling you why you shouldn't pay money
for promotion services, when I want you to send me money for
doing just that! However, I've always found it to be the
best policy to be excruciatingly open with clients in all my
endeavors, even when it was to my apparent detriment. It
almost always pays off in the end.
So have fun, enjoy the site, and if
this advice saved you $50, send me half and use the rest to
have a fun evening. I'll use the other half to do the
same
|
