Link Exchange For Tough Times

Advertising on Google is getting expensive, very expensive. This year advertising costs for Adwords rose between 40% and 60% for some advertisers. Companies like eBags.com and Babyage.com have seen the cost of advertising online soar to 45% of the cost of the product they are trying to sell. Margins are diminishing and its only going to get tougher as consumers spend less.

Everyone dropping Adwords seems to be flocking to organic search. Caught in the middle are bloggers where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) competition has gotten brutal. SEO communities like Sphinn.com are soaring in popularity because bloggers are seeking any advantage over the competition. As authors spend more and more time promoting and optimizing, less time is spent on content and post quality. Its a vicious cycle thats going to lead to a blog bubble where the cost of blogging will outstrip most peoples resources.

Take or example a site by Nicholas Aretaki on relationships, Ditching Mr. Wrong. For Nicholas the costs of Google advertising became counter productive this year. He was simply forced out by multi dollar click through costs for the top Adwords positions. He’s shifted his efforts to SEO through an outsourced team with better results. Nicholas is fortunate, not everyone has the resources to hire an SEO team.

As the competition for traffic rises the game will have to change. I think all to often bloggers get caught up in the hype. Following every SEO trick of the day does not scale and cannot work. There are over 112 million blogs and growing on the web today. Webster’s Dictionary defines over 165,000 English words. Add an estimated 500,000 extra names, phrases, and slang words. Simple math yields 168 blog pages per Google keyword. Each blogger is competing for the top ten spots. Add all the other sites outside blogs and the numbers get even more daunting.

The point is that returns diminish quickly, the average blogger does not have the resources necessary to get to the top 10 spot and expect to stay there. As competition for the top spots on Google, Yahoo, and MSN heat up many blogs will simply not keep up in this economy.

The solution is as simple as it is frightening. Find alternatives. Before Google came around Yahoo and Lycos were thought to be the end all. Google changed the game and saved online advertising when it was about to burst by introducing page rank. All signs point to another bubble, crippling advertising costs, an SEO frenzy, and a hurting economy. Page rank is going bust, the saving grace this time will be relevance rank.

The new wave of relevance rank is already starting to swell. The first one out of the gate, Sphere just sold to AOL for $25 million. AOL stock jumped a tenth of a percent as a result of the acquisition. Following close behind is Zemanta which just received $2 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures. Yet to be funded companies like Arkayne are starting to drive significant amounts of traffic based on relevance. Overall, alternatives to Adwords and Google SEO are starting to emerge for bloggers to take advantage.

The barrier to entry for these new relevance engines is nothing compared to popularity. Take Arkayne as an example. Any blogger embedding the widget creates ten instant links based on post similarity. Every outbound link has one or more inbound links in an Arkayne widget on another relevant post. If a more relevant post with higher relevance rank is added the list in every widget affected is updated. The result is a highly relevant set of links on every post driving traffic within a niche topic of interest.

The new technologies are not just shifting from popularity to relevance, some are looping in social and viral aspects of advertising. In the case of Arkayne, the widget provides an additional one click Get and Put link exchange between any two posts. The feature allows any reader to cross pollinate relevant links between blogs. Readers become a bloggers best tool for building reciprocal links.

Anyone interested in exploring relevance linking tools can request an Arkayne Invite.

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