NONE: RE: ONLINE-ADS>> If you list me, I'll list you ...
RE: ONLINE-ADS>> If you list me, I'll list you ...
Larry D. Thompson (Larry_at_fishingworld.com)
Wed, 10 Sep 1997 12:08:43 -0500
Carl Crisostomo wrote:
"a very prominent web designer ...told me that a site will not work without
links"
Certainly not everyone can utilize our model, but I am a strong believer
that "Content is King". We are exceeding a million hits per month, over
150,000 page views per month and nearly 6 Gigs of data transferred each
month.
"if you never link how are going to get anyone to link to you"
We do have several hundred web sites that link to various pages within our
site. Many of these have linked to us without notification and many have
asked. Those that asked, I explain our position and quite a few still want
to link to us because they are providing that type of linking information
to their visitors.
For the first 2 years of having our web site, we constantly asked ourselves
"are we doing the right thing?" by taking this position of not linking out.
Now we have seen the results of this and can compare to what we see other
sites doing in the amount of advertising (very little) they have and in
many cases the amount of traffic they have.
By reviewing our stats, we see that less than 1% of our hits come from
search engines and less than 1% of our hits come from the several hundred
sites that are linked into our site. Don't get me wrong, as I cherish all
traffic. But we also would have to ask what would be the cost of sending
our traffic away. If we saw that we could have a sizeable amount of
incoming traffic from the other sites, we would then consider buying banner
ads on those sites and paying for this service rather than "trading out".
"If information is to be shared we need to link"
We provide a great deal of information to those interested in angling. I
think there is a difference in sharing information and sending customers
away.
"Calling yourself the final destination is a bit big headed"
I'm not going to call myself a directory or jump page.
"are you telling me that there are no fishing sites you can link to without
endangering your commerce?"
If I have made the committment to my advertisers that I will not send their
customers away, this must an absolute committment. We have turned down a
number of requests from businesses wanting to buy a banner ad linking out
from our site.
I think that a web site must ask the question of "what do I want to
accomplish and how do I accomplish those goals?" Our answer was that we
wanted to be the "best choice for our target market (fishing), and wanted
to create value that advertisers were willing to pay for." If you give
away your traffic and give away your advertising, how can anyone think that
you have value?
Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic that has not been addressed
from this viewpoint.
Larry D. Thompson
(903) 882-8877
Larry_at_fishingworld.com
www.fishingworld.com "The Anglers Place in Cyber Space"
www.easttexas.com "The Texas Place in Cyber Space"
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