Linkworth.com

[thebassman]

Anyone used them or heard of them before?

[awall19]

I have heard of them. I have not used them.

[thebassman]

What have you head about them? Good, bad... same as other similar company's/sites?

[James Trotta]

I signed up one of my web sites with more reasonable prices than any other web site I saw on linkworth. That was October 17th and I haven't heard anything. Once you sign up they give you an affiliate number. Hopefully I won't get banned for linking to mine: http://www.buy-links.com/archives/000724.html

Anyway, it's free and easy to sign up, but you probably won't get much business (presuming your selling links). If you want to buy, most webmasters seem to be asking quite a bit of money. I didn't see any bargains.

[thebassman]

Hmmm, that's what I figured... guess it can't really hurt, though... I'll check them out and see what happens.

[Papadoc]

For a site within that genre, it has a pretty low Alexa. You can fake good, but you cannot fake bad traffic with Alexa and to me, that means this site has awful low traffic. Also corroborated by such old posts as being the most recent.

[assiah]

Doesn't seem serious to me.
I was offered a link from some guy, and it was all good to go - and then he cancelled out, so I didn't get paid, so to say. Now, that happens - but here's a funny thing:

The guy behind the website, gave my site a review with 5 stars, as an "apology" for the inconvenience of setting the thing up. That perhaps sounds fair, but it's not against new customers - since he didn't mention anywhere, that he was the editor of the site. That's just bull****ting other advertisers who might want to buy a link there.

Sincerely,
Martin

[avaden]

Ahhh ha! A post about us!!! I will admit...LinkWorth is my creation. I was shocked to see people talking about it. Of course, some not so good posts...which I welcome. I guess I can answer any questions you guys might have about it. I typically stay anonymous in forums so to not come across as a self promotion. I'm in several other forums and don't think i've ever mentioned I was part of it.

Anyhow.... pappadoc.... "Alexa"? I sure hope you do not judge every site on their alexa rating!! I've had really off numbers with alexa before on other sites. I know people are into it, so we use it as a stat in our system. As to our traffic, we average a couple thousand visits a day (unique). It's hard to decipher between actual new customers and returning customers checking their accounts. Does almost 1000 partner listings help? :-)

now assiah...I'm sorry we do not seem serious. I am curious to hear what makes you say this! The fact we've been developing the system for 8 months? Or is it because of the one situation where someone joined, paid to place a link on your site, then emailed us telling us they didn't do it and wanted their money back? That was the situation. It was one of those weird people that do things, then say they didn't do anything. So we had no choice but to give them their money back and cancel your deal. "YES" I gave you the rating....because you had to deal with it. I will be more than happy to have our programmers remove it for you. I thought we were doing something good for you.

As for LinkWorth itself...we are a "serious" service and are growing fast. We have really only been live for a few months, so with time our business will be plentiful. If you want to see what prices and sites we have in our system, feel free to look at our database display section.... (I hope it's ok to post it...if not, feel free to remove it and sorry!) http://www.linkworth.com/inventory/ It shows pricing and PR..since this is the most asked about by people.

Really, I appreciate any criticism. It will only help us get better. We have to start somewhere and the companies we have helped are thrilled with their results. If those of you are still doubtful of my words...a few of our clients would be happy to give testimonials.

And please....if anyone has questions...I'll be happy to answer them.

[thebassman]

Well, I joined up, with reasonable priced links, haven't heard a word, been over a week. I guess that's not a question, but perhaps a comment that further opens up the floor for ya.

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by avaden

Anyhow.... pappadoc.... "Alexa"? I sure hope you do not judge every site on their alexa rating!! I've had really off numbers with alexa before on other sites. I know people are into it, so we use it as a stat in our system.

As I said, you can fake a good one, but you cannot fake a bad one. Sites that are geared towards marketing have much better than average Alexa scores. Like any tool, it has it's issues and it's how you use it and if you understand the weaknesses that make it worth using.

Originally Posted by avaden

As to our traffic, we average a couple thousand visits a day (unique). It's hard to decipher between actual new customers and returning customers checking their accounts. Does almost 1000 partner listings help? :-)

Actually, no! The only thing that has any value to it is economic performance. Partner listings and traffic is irrelevant. A man last month wanted to sell his job site to me with over 5000 resumes on it. It wasn't worth it because there were no job listings. You could have a million link partners set up and half of them checking in daily. However, if your site doesn't sell links, nothing else matters. I will be happy to see if anyone else has any real success, and I'm not just talking about whether it makes gas money.

[assiah]

Avaden. Yes, as I mentioned in my post, it would "seem" a good thing you did for "me" - but that's not the point, the point is the moral conduct of your business towards the internet community in general, and that's also the advertisers who's considering to buy a link, and to me, the way you're doing business, it seems rather inconsistent giving customers a "good" rating based on an advertiser which cancels out, pretending we in any way did business and you, as a "fake" advertiser were happy with that business. There was never any use of my services.

That's scamming everybody else who views it into thinking that there were a business relation with X who liked the service I provided, which never happened. What you did was a friends favor, as in covering up a mistake, which just happens.

What you did was a "friends-favor" which wasn't based on honersty - but deceit, and business should not be based on friends favors, it should be based on honersty, integrity and straight-forwardness. Not some scheme running behind the scenes, manipulate rankings, prices, and so forth. Hence why I don't recommend your service, it proved to me, to be based on a bad moral of conduct in business.

[avaden]

assiah....I think you could consider that a "friends favor" if we were friends. Based on your quick, but innaccurate opinion of myself and our service, I would not consider us friends. But, hey, everyone is entitled to their own "opinon". I think your description of "Scamming" people is WAY over dramatic. Preventing the advertiser from being able to give you a negative rating, which he claimed he would do, is not "Scamming" people. We have never pushed anyone to buy anything...and we never would...it's 100% up to the advertiser to buy and the partner to accept. Our advertisers are not idiots and they do not make decisions based on 1 "rating", they base their decisions on the statistical data provided. There is also much more that is involved in the situation assiah, but I see I don't need to waste my time on your opinion since it seems to be set. Thank you for the kind words though.

Pappadoc...traffic has no merit on what we offer! If we were selling advertising on our website, I could see your point, but we do not. Also, exactly where does it state that 35k out of MILLIONS of websites is "bad"? Maybe you should reconsider your comments on what is good and what is bad with others in the forum.. (Ex: www.assiah.net). It's not fair to bash them as well. Sure you can say that we do not have a top Alexa traffic rating, but to say we are a "bad" website, makes it sound like there is a hidden agenda to bash our website, which is fine. But I think if you have negative things to say, without upsetting others, feel free to PM me. I wanted to include this post by you on another topic.....you even agree with my comments above...this is what you said:

All other things being equal, a site that has 100 visitors per month and converts 25% is far more valuable in my book than one that has a 100,000 visitors per month and only converts 0.5%, even though it is a larger gross number.

The first one doesn't have traffic, but the owner has a killer conversion method. I can get traffic in the door and if I do, that site is a goldmine. The second site has much traffic but has no idea how to convert their prospects into clients.

Tim (thebassman)...do you play bass? or do you just have a deep voice? I'm a guitar man myself...I love music!

Anyhow, to answer your comment...while we do not have thousands of advertisers currently, we "are" getting several new advertisers signup on a daily basis. We also have several corporations, we have assisted in getting their corporate sites to the top of the SERPs, spreading the word to other business owners and they are coming in with large budgets. These customers are having us control their account, which means we are buying the links for them. If we get something up your ally, I will definitley throw as many your way as I can. We are very careful to remain relevant to their services which is giving us super success with their results.

Also, we are noticing a trend of many advertisers looking for partner websites that already have text links placed on them. Our thinking is, rather than doing the research, they are following the lead of other advertisers, assuming they did good research on that partner.

To sum up our site and this discussion....we are very new. While I wish I could say we were the busiest service on the net, made every disgruntled customer happy that lost out on business and had the most traffic, I cannot, nor do I try to say this. Unless someone wants to invest a few million to get the word out quickly (hint hint :-), then it will take time to grow. Since a couple of you seem to know what is right from wrong and/or good from bad, maybe you can be positive and give us your insight on how to become a super giant company in a few months. It seems as if you might know more than us, so please help us be as successful and politically correct as you would be. :-) I hope you know I'm poking fun. Sure assiah seemed to take it a little too far, but I love criticism. It makes us grow in a positive direction. Without those people telling us everything we do wrong, then we would never get it right. So "Thank You" guys.

[thebassman]

Yeah, I play bass. Plus I have a pretty kickass soundsystem in my car... but the handle was created back in 95 or 96 or something, when I was a bassist in a band... anyways, I think you're on the right track... just keep building up the site, maintain your integrity, and you'll do fine. If you want to pass some advertisers my way, all the better. Feel free to PM me to discuss further.

[klaas123]

Firstly I have to admit that I am fairly new to the link advertising world so if I ask a strange question it is due to that.

I just visited Linkworth and I fail to understand something. When looking in the inventory I selected travel and a list of results were shown. So far so good but besides the useful information of their PR etc the only thing I know about the sites is a Website ID. If I want to have more information I first have to sign up, drop 25 US in my account before I can find out if one of those travel websites are relavant to me. In my understand relevancy plays also a role. Well maybe Avaden or someone else can help me here. I like the concept though

[avaden]

klaas123,

The problem with giving our partner websites out before joining is people will just bypass the system. Although, several of our partner webmasters have already "tattled" on advertisers trying to go around the system. We would love to give you all of the information up front and allow you to visit every site you might be interested in, but it's those few bad seeds that cause us to block it.

Now we do have a "stats" link in the inventory section that we have currently disabled while we fine tune a few more features on it, which will be back within a day or two that will open a new window with descriptions and website statistics on each listing.

You can also PM me, or communicate with us on our website asking if we have what you're looking for in the meantime.

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by avaden

Pappadoc...traffic has no merit on what we offer! If we were selling advertising on our website, I could see your point, but we do not. Also, exactly where does it state that 35k out of MILLIONS of websites is "bad"? Maybe you should reconsider your comments on what is good and what is bad with others in the forum.. (Ex: www.assiah.net). It's not fair to bash them as well. Sure you can say that we do not have a top Alexa traffic rating, but to say we are a "bad" website, makes it sound like there is a hidden agenda to bash our website, which is fine.

Avaden,

Sorry for any misunderstanding. I never said the website was bad or that you had any other agenda. Actually, I think you have a very decent site. My only comments were about ranking, not your site. A marketing-centered site has a much better ranking than a business or consumer site with similar traffic because of WHO visits the site. And let's face it, different types of companies have different success criteria. One for a blowmolder manufacturing company would be a raging success at 200 visits per month whereas a publication that depends on advertising would be a miserable failure at that number. I'd think you'd be the last to condemn Alexa since you use it for every page you have up for sale.

Where traffic matters is in it's ability to convert, and that depends on what kind of traffic you get. You can get thousands of sellers in a heartbeat, just like you can get thousands of people to post their resume on a job board or millions to list their house on a free listing board. It's a no lose proposition. Where traffic is important is getting people to ante up with the cash and in sufficient quantities to make it worth the bother. In other words, who is buying is what is critical.

I understand where you are and I can appreciate that it's hard to get a machine like this going. I'd suggest complete transparency though, especially in the early stages. If all you talk about is your partners (link publishers) and never mention the actual deals that are penned, I think you build up a sense of over-expectation. To some people, this then looks like you are being hokey, even though that is not your intention.

May I suggest that you divest yourself of what is obviously junk inventory and put some overview and minimum standards in place for publishers. I have a hard time seeing how a site with an Alexa of 1.7 million, a PR0, and 26 outbound links is of value to anyone. Some would say ANY inventory has value, but that simply isn't true. This is a bit far-fetched, but consider what would happen to the value of all clothing at Saks if they bought out the entire stock of Goodwill Industries and put that on the shelf. Their original clothing has not declined in value, but the perception is that it is lower because of what surrounds it. The whole thing looks like a yard sale.

There is no way that anyone can know the reputation of any site because they are not visible. They have to rely exclusively on your site. If they know you have high standards, it seems to me that the reputation of ALL of your inventory goes up. Simply put and perhaps it goes even to what assiah said, your reputation has to be completely above reproach to get people to buy inventory, site unseen (sorry for the pun).

Since I occupy both posititions, here's my take:

As a publisher: Realistically, if you have a 1000 link partners that want to sell space and if values were equal, 3 deals per day means that on average, the odds of selling a link would happen about once per year. I have no idea what the average sale is, but just looking quickly at one segment, I'd guess about $40-50. To some site owners, this might seem like a windfall. But to anyone doing this seriously, it's not worth wasting the time.

I'm also looking at your page that say, "LinkWorth is a breeding ground for thousands of hungry advertisers looking for people like yourself." Technically, the operative might be "breeding ground", but to me, it sounds like you HAVE thousands of advertisers. It seems like you are playing on words.

As an advertiser: I'm looking and seeing a lot of junk inventory and wondering about the quality of the rest of the inventory. As a serious website owner who take serious pride in where my links are found. With one site at about 7000 uniques per day, another one at about 1000 per day, and a third getting ready to launch that will dwarf them both in 6 months, I am in a highly competitive position and I need to be very critical of places that I would seek advertising. If I have a doubt about your inventory, I am simply not going to sign up. If it looks impeccable, I would have no problem with trying the service.

Anyway, best of luck to you in your endeavors.

[avaden]

AHhhhhh....gotcha. That makes more sense. I respect your opinion and your comments. I understand what you are looking for and your reasons for having a negative opinion on it, but I don't expect 'everyone' to think it's the greatest thing on earth. If that was the case, I probably wouldn't be sitting here discussing things with you, I would be swimming in a pool of money.

The fact is, what you say is worthless inventory, many others say is a pot of gold. I guess it's that old saying, "one man's trash, is another man's treasure". Some people buy links on the basis of certain factors and others buy links for other factors. We have researched and tested many different linking methods and have found that we had the same success with low to mid "ranked" sites as we did with the higher ranked sites you mention. The big difference was....one cost several hundred dollars more than the other, yet the same result.

As for who we allow to be a partner/publisher, we do not just let "anyone" be a publisher. The number one factor we look for is content related to the theme. If a site is full of content related to travel, but their pagerank is 1, their alexa ranking is 4 million, they have several outbound links, and have just a few inbound links....we're not going to turn them away. For one, we have a directory that pushes ranking to partner websites. So just being a partner with us will help their stats. Not to mention, a travel related advertiser having an inbound link from a heavily content filled website based on travel will help...especially once their ranking starts to increase. So there are many reasons why sites you deem as useless are worth a ton in our eyes.

The last thing I'll touch on is this comment....

I'm also looking at your page that say, "LinkWorth is a breeding ground for thousands of hungry advertisers looking for people like yourself." Technically, the operative might be "breeding ground", but to me, it sounds like you HAVE thousands of advertisers. It seems like you are playing on words.

Have you ever heard of sales? hehe. I mean if we put... "LinkWorth has only a couple of advertisers right now, but hang in there, we'll have more later!" ... Do you think anyone would signup? hehehe. And, the intention was not to say we have thousands of advertisers....it was meant to say, it's a place where advertisers will breed by word of mouth and advertising....which is it. Very well I might add.

Ok...I'm ready to start talking about things unrelated to myself or our service If anyone else has questions about linkworth.com, please PM me so we can leave the forum for SEO help. I feel like this is some kind of self promotion and it's weirding me out.

[thebassman]

Just to continue the topic, I actually just had someone buy a sitewide link from my site from my account on linkworth... I'll keep people updated. The link is up on my site already, but we'll see about payment, and how long it lasts.

[avaden]

Tim, whatever money you earn this month will be paid to you on the 5th of next month. Advertisers ads automatically renew on the 1st of each month unless they cancel. Glad to see you aboard. :-)

[thebassman]

Thanks... I have some questions/suggestions for you, though... should I post them up on your board, or maybe chat on MSN or something?