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[A833]Avenue Q Bad Idea Bears

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Over in the Warrior Forum there was a post about dangerous advice being given. In the first 24 hours over 1000 people read it. Here was the advice:

"Find everybody you can with an email address that you know and send them an email selling them a product."

Would you really do that?

This seems like old school mlm marketing to me. In the old days of multi level marketing the theory was work your warm market. Write down the names of everyone you know and then start getting a hold of them.

This was probably o.k. the first time, but what happens after you have been in several different mlm businesses and already invited them to llok at those. All you do is get people mad at you and then they do not want to have anything to do with you.

Today the internet can take this refer a friend concept to a whole new level. Have you ever joined a program and been given the chance to immediately email 5 of your friends? This is pretty cool when you analyze it closer.

The email is already written and your name is already at the bottom of it with your affiliate link. All you do is supply the names and email addresses of 5 people and hit "submit" and you have just invited 5 people to join with you.

I personally would never email everyone I know and offer them my product. For one thing I do not know that many people in comparison to the amount of traffic my website gets.

Now what I will do is give a business card with my website on it in the natural flow of a conversation with someone. This can be a friend or anyone. When they ask me what I do I just give them my card and tell them to check it out sometime.

You can get 250 free business cards at VistaPrint.com. That seems like a good investment to me and a better way to do a little offline marketing.

Then if you want to do a refer a friend program of your own online just add your website address to your signature and send it with every email you do. This is a very passive way to let people check you out if they want. You will keep your friends this way!

Before search engines got smart, a site's page ranking was based on keyword match-ups. When webmasters stock-piled their sites with keywords, the wrong sites were getting too much attention. Google decided to focus on a site's "popularity" instead. The number of incoming links became the focus of PR criteria. The theory behind this system was that if a lot of sites link to another site, that site would contain valuable content.

But again, webmasters got sneaky. With this trend, we began to see the evolution of "Link Farms" and "Free-for-All" (FFA) sites. These pages were essentially a gigantic collection of (often times) useless links. In most cases, the sites were not categorized or descriptive. They became a place for webmasters to dump their links in order to make their site appear more popular.

This strategy worked for some time, but soon search engines caught on. "Link Farms" and FFA sites served no purpose to web users. Since Google prides itself on catering to web users (and NOT developers), a solution had to be formed. "Link Farms" were cluttering up the web and making it more difficult for users to find valuable resources online.

Google soon began to rate the quality of the links that determined a site's "link pop." "Link Farms" and FFA sites became categorized as spam, and thus contributed no value to a site's link popularity.

Today, submitting to a "Link Farm" or FFA site can be harmful to your website's reputation. Google takes a strong stance against these kinds of link pages. At best, the "Link Farm" will drag down your ranking and make it harder for the valuable sites to work in your favor. At worst, your site will be BANNED altogether for using spam sites to attempt to generate traffic. This is a very real possibility.

"Link Farms" and FFA sites present very little value. Although it may sound tempting, users will not obtain quality or relevant links from the submission. Plus, who wants to see their link among "junk" websites for adult entertainment, dating sites, and casinos? Submitting to "Link Farms" doesn't contribute to your credibility and is just not worth the risk.

Instead, spend your time submitting to credible directories and exchanging links with other relevant sites. The process can be time-consuming, but it is the only way to generate safe, site-specific traffic.

For an easier method to the tedious directory submission process, and to submit your website to 500+ link directories I strongly recommend Directory Submitter.

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Paul Martin has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Culture and Computers and The Internet. Tom Dahne and Paul Martin are the creators of the very popular Directory Submitter software found at . Paul Martin's top article generates over 880 views. to your Favourites.