Linklists and Free Sites: How Do We Move Forward?

[HarryM]

Originally Posted by kit

Marc said, he like to accept good handmade sites and don't like autogenerated spammy sites. Do you really know, how much "good handmade" sites you accepting every day is a result of relatively good automated process?

I havn't reviewed as many free sites as other ppl in this thread but it takes about 1 second to determine wether a free site was handmade or autogenerated/spammy. Usually you can tell even before the page has even loaded by looking at the recips (usually the same link list grouping submitted every single day set out in some default looking table), header (looks like it was made in paint), horrible description (makes no sense in English), submitter's email address (like spammer@lesbian-actions-xxx.biz).

Viewing the source opens another can of worms...

[Greenguy]

Originally Posted by kit

Yes, it will seriously increase FS usability. Each additional click between entrance page and content decrease FS usability...

Maybe it's your wording, but I think Free Sites are pretty easy to use as they are & I don't see where taking away one click is going to make the site easier to use. Click your mouse 3 times. Now click it twice. The time difference is mind boggling.

Originally Posted by kit

...Yes, it's a HUB in your terms...

So you've invented a marketing method that already exists, but you just named it something different? I just invented something that I like to call Radio Ads v2.0 - normal radio ads are just sound, but v2.0 will have sound & image! I'm thinking v3.0 will have both sound & moving images

Originally Posted by kit

...Yes, I want to work with their HUBs as one object
Galleries set + their Descriptions became one post which HUB webmaster can post to my LL and update his previous post. May be I'll store last 10 posts, may be not. There is difficult to say right now...

People are doing this already, so why would you decide to eliminate the standard Free Site? Why not just inform people that you'll be accepting a list of their galleries?

[Useless]

Originally Posted by mb

This is my response to the following thread:

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ad.php?t=46266

I didn't want this long response buried on page 6 as I think it brings up points not currently being discussed and should stand alone.



No disrespect to Kit, whom I find to be a very creative and smart business person, or the others who have provided valuable input on an interesting topic, however, I must provide my opposing opinion and offer some suggestions on how to improve the landscape of our business.

The link list and free site business is not dead.
The link list and free site business is not dying.
The link list and free site business is in a recession of sorts. And this one isn't because of George W Bush.

Automation tools and lazy webmasters are the two major reasons why people are finding it hard to make a buck submitting free sites or running link lists these days.

Face the facts. Money is not easy to come by. Every legal business has it's ups and downs and those that bust their ass day in and day out are the ones that will succeed in the end. The day that you tell yourself "let me find a way to cut a corner or two and make this easier" is the day that you decided to step out of the system and enter the realm of the "common webmaster". There is a HUGE distinction between "cutting corners" and "optimizing a work flow".

CUTTING CORNERS:
So you are making a few dollars by building free sites and decide you want to step it up a notch or two and double your income. You decide to purchase a tool that automatically makes mirrored pages for you to include the extra lists you are going to submit to. You set it up and bam, two identical versions of a free site. You submit and forget. Then move on to the next one. As the process seems easy, you multiply it 3-4 times so you are now spitting out 10 mirrors and 100 linklists are covered. Now it's getting easy. So you buy a program to automatically build the free site and generate random text on the pages and randomly grab content from a huge pool of content. Next, you decide you can't hand submit all that stuff, so you use a program to auto-submit. Next thing you know you aren't doing anything and have effectively cut every corner there is for the sake of making a buck.

THE RESULT?
You have thousands of pages out there and have made a little extra in the short term. Slowly sales begin to sink and the questions start to arise. Link lists are dead? Free sites aren't appealing? No! The unique qualities that your free sites started out with in the beginning are gone. The hand-picked, hand-optimized content and hand-picked sponsors you used to work with are all gone. For the sake of automation, you've ended up with mirror after mirror of bland, basic, non-selling free sites pushing sponsors that don't have anything interesting to sell.

NOW. Consider thousands of other webmasters JUST LIKE YOU doing the same things day in and day out. You want to save time, you want to increase your chances of a sale, you want to only spend 1 hour a day with these free sites. THE MARKET IS NOW FLOODED WITH GARBAGE. Google starts to notice patterns in the mirrored system you are using. They penalize it because it's bad practice. Your penalized sites trickle up to the link lists that link to them and in turn the value of the link list is lowered. This has happened hundreds of thousands of times over the last few years across many networks of free sites.

IS THERE A SOLUTION?

Sure there is! Start doing things by hand again. Start by finding unique paysites to promote that offer exclusive content. Make sure those sponsors are not scamming the surfer. Look at their join page. Are they cross-selling? If they are, fuck them. It's a scam. Work with revshare programs if possible. It almost always works out better in the long run. Now that you've found a good sponsor, contact them and tell them you want to build a network of free sites with their content. They will most likely be happy to give you an archive of stuff to work with. Don't always rely on what's on the surface of the program's webmaster tools section.

Now that you've got a nice archive of content, start building your free sites.

HERE IS HOW I WOULD DO IT:

Try to make your free sites cover one niche theme. Once you get a group of free sites that cover a theme, build a hub site to link to all of those niche free sites. When you get a good number of niche hubs built, build a site to list all of those niche hubs. Now, and this is important, make that main page that lists all of the hubs a dynamic page. You can blog on it. You can pull links to free sites to the front as "feature items". Do whatever you can to make sure that FRONT PAGE changes daily. That is what search engines like google enjoy seeing. And guess what, if google likes your front page, they will see your hub pages and in turn will see your free sites which will in turn see the link lists you have linked to and bring relevance back to the linklist/freesite dynamic. Don't forget to include a link to your main page that lists all of your hubs on every free site you build! One simple link will do. And take it easy with those recips! 40 recips on a page is ridiculous. If it seems spammy, it is spammy.

This is not easy. This is not quick. This takes some thought. That's business folks. It's not easy. If you plan to make the real money, plan to spend many days working 14-16 hours. Take some time off in between those spurts, but always remain focused.

I can't stress the point enough that you have to work with good sponsors. Contact a bunch of them so that you can gather a gorgeous archive of content to build with that covers dozens of paysites across many niches. Don't just stick with one of those "all in one" large programs that have 50 sites in their portfolio. Typically, those programs are scammy and have very little to offer the surfer. I like to stick with programs pushing 1-3 sites at the most. Check out the popular review sites to get an idea of what's good. They've seen them all.

IN CONCLUSION

Our solution is not to change the format of our free sites. It's to take a second look at how the entire system works together as one organism. If we all decide to take a step back and start doing things better and linklists help to police this by not accepting cookie-cutter, auto-generated spam sites, then the bad seeds will be weeded out and the entire system will begin to breath easier. It's going to take time and everyone has to work together to get there, but I'm certain it's possible.

marc
hoes.com

I've never read so much nonsense and bullshit in a single post. I didn't read it thoroughly and I'm not going to give it any amount of thought, but I disagree - completely.

Yes, I'm being deliberately contrary.

So is this a yea or nay for a subtle change to free sites? Do I have to have a main page? Can I not link to my galleries from the warning page? Does Hoes have a cap on warning page reciprocal links, not that that would be an issue since I have a lot of empty spots on my new recip table. A lot.

[borgivan]

Originally Posted by Greenie

Click your mouse 3 times. Now click it twice. The time difference is mind boggling.

Sometimes you are right, sometimes you compare a finger and ass! What clicks are you talking about? Lets imagine another situation: you are preasured by a piece of shit in some cool restaurant, eager to shoot this poop off and storm into the door with label "WC room", but instead of toilet sink you see posters of great WC rooms and posts about how cool it is to crap there, and that if you don't want to crap, you'd better leave. But you are fucken persistent shit-shooter and storm in the door "WC HERE!", and what you see? WC? No ! You see the same as the first room, but too doors that MAYBE follow to WC! Will you go here, if you were deceived one time allready. 90% not! You will crap the floor there, and mayby just won't even go in to the first door, and crap the first room. The result - you will never return this restaurant any more.
Do you like this situation? Can it be this way? Yes it can, but only in your imagination. It is the same, that you think surfer comes on FS with a stopwatch to see, how fast will he find fucking action!
P.S. Every good idea can be taken to marasmus, if you want. But if you dont want, it can live fine. DON'T BE SO HAIR-SPLITTING, it is your headache and

slow death

as Sergeyka said
To TS, you said great and said nothing one time. You see, you told the thing many submitters follow without your words, and we and even GREENIE understand it will effect the situation. The same time GREENIE says that Kit suggested HUBS, as many COOL webmasters do, byt this is bullshit to suggest! I can't understand this situation, it's hard to my engineer brain, sorry.

[LD]

Originally Posted by borgivan

Sometimes you are right, sometimes you compare a finger and ass! What clicks are you talking about? Lets imagine another situation: you are preasured by a piece of shit in some cool restaurant, eager to shoot this poop off and storm into the door with label "WC room", but instead of toilet sink you see posters of great WC rooms and posts about how cool it is to crap there, and that if you don't want to crap, you'd better leave. But you are fucken persistent shit-shooter and storm in the door "WC HERE!", and what you see? WC? No ! You see the same as the first room, but too doors that MAYBE follow to WC! Will you go here, if you were deceived one time allready. 90% not! You will crap the floor there, and mayby just won't even go in to the first door, and crap the first room. The result - you will never return this restaurant any more.
Do you like this situation? Can it be this way? Yes it can, but only in your imagination. It is the same, that you think surfer comes on FS with a stopwatch to see, how fast will he find fucking action!
P.S. Every good idea can be taken to marasmus, if you want. But if you dont want, it can live fine. DON'T BE SO HAIR-SPLITTING, it is your headache and as Sergeyka said
To TS, you said great and said nothing one time. You see, you told the thing many submitters follow without your words, and we and even GREENIE understand it will effect the situation. The same time GREENIE says that Kit suggested HUBS, as many COOL webmasters do, byt this is bullshit to suggest! I can't understand this situation, it's hard to my engineer brain, sorry.

Poor designs suck, whether they be freesites or WC rooms...

[stuveltje]

oke i am right, no usa or english, "WC room" word is not used in that language, but sure is used in dutch, well only wc then

[Linkster]

Marc is on the right path for not only the hows and whys of what has happened in the last 3 years or so for free sites - but provides the solution that has been posted here so many times in different threads that I cant count them all

If you want to make money on link lists and free sites - you have to WORK - any automation step you insert just lowers the amount you make - period - and no need for discussion - if you arent here to make MORE money then you can argue till youre blue in the face

[kit]

Let's go from the other side of FS nature and usability.

1) What can link site owners say about traffic trend on their link sites?

2) Pleas make a prediction of traffic on your site in 2012?

[KCat]

Awesome post Marc! I haven't done free sites in a quite a while now, but I never was one for creating mirror sites. The time it takes to make them different enough to not get slapped with the Google duplicate content penalty seemed like just about enough time to make a whole new free site.

My sites would only get submitted to 12 or 15 LLs each, but I could rotate the smaller LLs each time so my sites didn't have the EXACT same pattern. I always submitted to the big guys, but there would be 8 - 10 recips to smaller sites that changed with each submission.

I'm still getting sales off those old sites, so I guess I was on the right track!

Biggest thing I learned? Don't give up too soon!

[swedguy]

Originally Posted by kit

Poor english isn't good for sure, but surfers don't read, they preffer scan and watch. They do not spend their attention too much on the texts except the text in the link list.

Wrong!

My best pulling ads has been text only ads.

[swedguy]

I heard through the grapevine that this is the beta of Free Site v3.0

http://www.globalsexnews.org/pic/1357-porn-85/

[Sven800]

Originally Posted by swedguy

I heard through the grapevine that this is the beta of Free Site v3.0

http://www.globalsexnews.org/pic/1357-porn-85/

A folder w/ files? lol.

It takes me 4-6 hours to build a freesite.

At one point I was playing around with php includes, pulling in updated content - problem was, everything started looking the same. Needless to say, those FS only got listed at 30-40% of lists and didn't make all that many sales.

But they did help in figuring out who actually reviews submissions, who will send traffic once you are listed, and what sites are a waste of time.

There are way to many sites out there that are "dead", meaning:
1) A working submission form, but you never get listed.
2) Links to dead freesites
3) Links to Link Lists that have gone under
etc...

And many still list them as good places to submit to.

Even some of the bigger LL's have dead links in them (Richards Realm is one example - links to the submission form returning errors. Not picking on anyone, thats just the most recent one i found)

i think part of the reason why there are so many garbage submissions is that people are trying to get traffic any which way they can. So if they can submit to 500 list, get listed at 150 and make sales...

It takes work to find the good lists, and it can be very frustrating when you have just wasted 1-3 months submitting to a site that will never list you.
It also takes work analyzing who is sending traffic.

A lot of webmasters are lazy and don't bother - and why should they, when they can submit garbage and still get listed/traffic.

Sorry, I'm venting.

[Tekster]

Originally Posted by Sven800

A folder w/ files? lol.

It takes me 4-6 hours to build a freesite.

At one point I was playing around with php includes, pulling in updated content - problem was, everything started looking the same. Needless to say, those FS only got listed at 30-40% of lists and didn't make all that many sales.

But they did help in figuring out who actually reviews submissions, who will send traffic once you are listed, and what sites are a waste of time.

There are way to many sites out there that are "dead", meaning:
1) A working submission form, but you never get listed.
2) Links to dead freesites
3) Links to Link Lists that have gone under
etc...

And many still list them as good places to submit to.

Even some of the bigger LL's have dead links in them (Richards Realm is one example - links to the submission form returning errors. Not picking on anyone, thats just the most recent one i found)

i think part of the reason why there are so many garbage submissions is that people are trying to get traffic any which way they can. So if they can submit to 500 list, get listed at 150 and make sales...

It takes work to find the good lists, and it can be very frustrating when you have just wasted 1-3 months submitting to a site that will never list you.
It also takes work analyzing who is sending traffic.

A lot of webmasters are lazy and don't bother - and why should they, when they can submit garbage and still get listed/traffic.

Sorry, I'm venting.

You know what? I agree 100%, I am still finding dead LL and LL that will not list you for no good reason. I submit to almost 60 LL and get listed at 59 of them and then the 60th will not list the site but there is no reason for it. Oh well, just move on.

[Nickname]

Nice post I must say

[pc]

OK.
I'm sick myself of auto submitters and I'm really thinking of start PA on my other small LL.I just spend two hours reviewing new fs and most of them were bad bad bad.This way I can at least narrow submitted fs to the good ones.Just my 2c.

After long lecture I decided to bump this thread for lot's of reasons.
for marc.