Why waste time promoting somebody's website?

[DeePower]

Just a thought. Why should I waste my time backlinking and social bookmarking somebody else's virtual real estate, such as articles I've written on ezinearticles, my squidoo pages, blogger blogs and hubpages, etc.

Wouldn't I be better off promoting my own sites?

Dee

[dvduval]

I certainly don't waste my time doing that and I'm doing just fine. I think the main reason people take the other route is it can bring about faster short-term results, but the problem is the long term results are not nearly as good as promoting your own site.

[DeePower]

There is only so much time in the day. If the choice is between promoting a squidoo lens which could be locked, a wordpress blog which could be deleted, or a site I have control of, I'm promoting my own.

Dee

[TrafficGuy Claude]

I happen to 2nd what dvduval said.

For most people, they would rather spend their time marketing others products so they don't have to go through the whole time consuming and resource draining process of creating a new product from scratch.

Its a quick and easy way to make money online.

Quite honestly when you're first starting out, its better to promote a product already shown to produce sales, as opposed to trying to come up with your own.

After being successful for a while and as confidence in their marketing abilities grows, most money making affiliates who understand fundamental internet marketing principles will "wake up" and use their skills for their own products.

As far as it being a waste of time, I'd say a big and resounding NO! Even the top marketers still use affiliate marketing by promoting their best buddies products.

Don't believe me? Wait until the next big launch and watch every guru send you promos for the same exact product.

[DeePower]

I don't have any problem marketing someone else's product. I just don't see promoting virtual real estate that belongs to somebody else.

Dee

[xenergy]

In my opinion, not everyone is interested in 'making money' on the net. Some people are just love to go arround and browse the net, then when they found something that they like, they just 'bookmarked' it for future references.
We can also benefit from this by creating interesting and useful content, so many people hopefully will 'bookmark' our site. In this case... many people are promoting our website, isn't that cool?

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by DeePower

I just don't see promoting virtual real estate that belongs to somebody else.

There's a lot to be said for ownership but then there's the power of collective action. You have to weigh which works best for you in which situations. I split about 70% my stuff to 30% other people's stuff when it comes to hosting sites.

[mavischan]

that's call affiliate marketing if you get a commission for recommending people stuff.

[Kelly Verge]

If only you'd read Dee's post you'd understand what she's saying. When you reply to a post title, you make it painfully obvious you're in a race to increase your post count.

Dee, I prefer spending time building up my own site/pages, however many have advocated working on ranking of outside pages (lenses, hubs, EZA articles) since they tend to rank faster. Other than some social bookmarking, I've never done backlinking to outside pages. Perhaps I'm missing the boat, but I prefer working for the long term.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by DeePower

Wouldn't I be better off promoting my own sites?

Yes, of course, in general. This is one of the ways that people who imagine it's sensible routinely to put all their own articles on EZA before posting them to their own blogs/sites have got it so, so wrong.

[cashcow]

I think that the more "authority" your articles, lenses, hubs etc... have, the better off it is for your site. So, I bookmark and backlink them in addition to my sites. Just a few links to any of these can raise it from a PR0 to PR3 pretty easy and make the link from it to your site that much more valuable.

Actually, if you set things up properly, you can have it so that your link "juice" is being spread around to all your promotional vehicles with little effort and eventually making your main site that much stronger.

Lee

[RentItNow]

Im promoting three things right now...

One is just a labor of love and my need to help people.
Two is the long term money maker.
Three will get to my life's goal in the end.

I want to do some offline stuff because I was good at that aspect in my previous business and know it would be quick money but am still debating.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Originally Posted by DeePower

Just a thought. Why should I waste my time backlinking and social bookmarking somebody else's virtual real estate, such as articles I've written on ezinearticles, my squidoo pages, blogger blogs and hubpages, etc.

Wouldn't I be better off promoting my own sites?

Dee:

I do both, but concentrate primarily on promoting my own sites directly. The rationale is that since some sites are favored by Google (such as EZA) that it takes much less effort to get an article in EZA ranked for keywords than it may require for other sites that aren't as favored. Of course the trade-off is that it take two clicks and not one to get to your offer page.

So as I said, I do both. But I do my own site promotion first, then if there's time I'll try and promote an article of mine in a directory.

[Tyrus Antas]

Promoting a page in a popular domain has some SEO benefits. It's certainly easier to take a lens to the top versus taking your page on your own unproven and untrusted domain.

That said, since this is usually done to promote other people's products I consider it a waste of time. I don't want to spend much of my time building their businesses and brands at the expense of my own businesses.

With growing competition between affiliates I find it much better to be at the top building my own empire. Sure it takes a little bit more time and effort but the rewards are much bigger and you are in control of the entire process. If you screwup, you only have yourself to blame. If your affiliate program screws up, Adwords changes, Squidoo disappears, well, there is nothing you can do about it. It's a constant rats race to cope with the changes.

Tyrus

[BIG Mike]

Dee,

It's all part of the funnel - as long as what you're bookmarking leads to one of your own sites, even indirectly, it's worthwhile.

I can't begin to tell you the number of times I've ended up on a site because I searched for something, went to site A, clicked a link to site B with similar information and found a reference to Site C which ultimately provided me with what I needed.

More often than not, Sites A and B had nofollow too, and only Site A ranked high for my search criteria.

So, in my opinion, it's just as important to bookmark, submit RSSFeeds, etc., to anything you've got online, even if it happens to benefit another site as a result.

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Originally Posted by DeePower

Just a thought. Why should I waste my time backlinking and social bookmarking somebody else's virtual real estate, such as articles I've written on ezinearticles, my squidoo pages, blogger blogs and hubpages, etc.

I think it depends on the purpose of your content on those other sites.

For example, I don't see the value in spending my time to promote something like a Squidoo lens especially since, as many people recently learned, they can take down your content at any time. Today, it's weight loss. Tomorrow, who knows what it might be? And, all the work you've done building links to a no-longer-existent lens will be down the drain.

It may be worthwhile to have a lens on Squidoo for the link juice back to my site, but I think my promotional efforts are best spent elsewhere.

On the other hand, I can see the value in promoting articles I've written for EzineArticles and other article directories. You want people to see them *and publish them* on their websites and eZines so that your links get wide exposure. So, you want to stand out from all the other people that have submitted articles in your niche so that yours gets seen and gets published elsewhere.

[dvduval]

Very productive thread here. I know that in some cases it can take not months, but years to get a successful site going, but in the end you are left with something that is for keeps. And you don't need to depend on just one site. Get several sites going, and then put more energy into the sites that are producing the most.

I remember a long time ago I started about 15 forums at the same time. Now, 4 of them are doing extremely well, all with over 100,000 posts and one approaching 1,000,000. It's been 7 years, but over the coarse of those years, a lot of money was earned. In a sense, it's like having a bunch of stocks that pay dividends.

And then I also started about 10 different software products. They all sold decent, but a couple of them sold REALLY well.

I started all of this back around 2002, and it took till around 2005 to get somewhere, but now I have multiple streams of income coming in, and I they are all my sites.

[dndoseller]

Oh my god, sanity. It took me 2 years to get that piece of the puzzle. You are completely correct and that is why I stopped article marketing.

Beginners don't understand that no matter where you put content you still have to promote the content to get PR and beat other pages in the SERPS. I have no desire to promote someone else's site either so my original content is for my site only.

[DeePower]

Big Mike: I've got 4 of your products: article submission, directory submission, social bookmarking, and press release distribution. They are good products. http://www.incansoft.com I'd recommend them, whether promoting my own sites (I have 24 of the little darlings) or other's.

Dee