What do you think about link exchanges. By this I mean that I get offers to exchange links with this web site and that. The biggest negative I can see is that soon, my website sidebar will be full of links to other people's site. I know this would give me some juice from these sites, but is it a good idea?
Steve,
I don't like link exchanges and will not accept them. However I do have a special page on my blog where I have added some of my favorite healthy living/foodie blogs but only because I really do like them and feel comfortable recommending them to my readers.
It's best to use other methods for getting backlinks.
Yes, I noticed early on that Lynn and other savvy bloggers tend to huddle obligatory outlinks onto a special link page somewhere on the site rather than include them on the sidebar of every page. I strongly suspect the search engines can get wise to the link exchange concept, too. Your incoming and outgoing links need to be relevant to the concept of your site.
That said, I've got one all-link site with hundreds of outgoing links that consistently ranks #1 in Google and gets 10K visits/month with no effort on my part. I guess the most important thing is that your outgoing links serve your visitors well.
Hah! It's a free Webs.com site I originally set up just as the front end while I hosted eBay photos in the background: Paper Hollywood. This site's gotten at least 10K uniques/month for a good 2-3 years and the only backlinking I've ever done has been a few mentions at one forum and two EZA articles. Unfortunately, it doesn't make me any direct income. I keep meaning to do something about that, but Webs has some restrictions, so I haven't. Fans of free card models don't tend to want to spend much anyway. I'm open to any suggestions, though.
I checked out your site Wade and I must say it is one of those really cool "niche" sites. Excellent stuff and I can see why you get so many hits due to its unique and unusual content. Thanks for the info.
Yes, I've always been a model collector to some extent and ran across this web-oriented paper model subculture a few years ago. It's very big in places like Germany, Russia and Japan. I just think it's neat that individuals can create these thing and post kits on the web for anybody to download. There are designers that make money doing that, but I've never gotten into design.
There are lots of great architectural models online, but they demand too much internal real estate for me. I think the paper medium lends itself well to sailing ships and aircraft, thus the 1930s airship hanging from the ceilling over my head.
Wade if I was you I would purchase my own domain and transfer your site to your own hosting provider. That way it would be much easier to monetize your site which should produce some income with that many hits and your "nichey" content. Ignore my comments if you wish, just my opinion. Perhaps time is a barrier at present?
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