Click-Partners.com suddenly in business
by
Rick Hendershot, www.small-business-online.com
January 27/04
The idea of a promote-yourself blog-style site has been
developing in my head for a few months now. Finally yesterday it became a
reality.
I'm sitting here in the middle of twenty-five or so
half-finished projects, trying to figure out what inspired me to throw
click-partners.com together over
the last couple of days.
Well, I actually started it back in December. I worked at it
for a couple days and then let it sit for six weeks or so. I wanted to build
in the ability for members to interactively enter articles, reviews,
testimonials, that sort of thing. I figured I needed something like PostNuke
running on my site to make this work. And I hadn't been able to get it to run
back in December.
Well, yesterday I gave it another stab, and sure enough, it
fired right up. Vlad and the boys must have been tweaking the server over the
weekend...
Get that content out to the masses
Actually, come to think of it, there were two things in
particular that inspired me.
First, I've been spending some time submitting articles to
ezine directories and article distribution sites, and I've been amazed how
easy it is to get stuff published. This is definitely the way to get the word
out there about your site, your content, your products, whatever...
Did you know there are HUNDREDS of sites willing to take
articles, and HUNDREDS of ezines and online publications looking for fresh
content? What better way to put your message in front of THOUSANDS of readers?
And it is ABSOLUTELY FREE.
My eyes were especially opened to this when I bought
EzineAnnoucer from Jason Potash. This is a dynamite product. It
helps you get your articles and ezines ready for submission, it tells you in
amazing detail where to submit them, and then it actually helps you do the
submissions. And when you're done, you have a record of where you left off. Very cool.
Using this tool has reminded me of the tremendous potential
there is in writing and submitting articles. Not only do you get your message
in front of thousands of people, and provide them with a link or two directly
back to your site, but you also end up with a bunch of links on high traffic
sites -- just the sort of thing Google seems to like when they're handing out
rankings.
OK everybody, let's all suck up to Google
Still, it is a relatively hard way to get a link (if that's
what you're after), and that brings me to the second thing that inspired me.
Google. And my very mixed feelings about the influence they
have over web content. Oh yes, I know. They are a private company. If you
don't want to play their game, it's a free country. Sure, sure. Everything is great as long as your
sites are scoring well and you're getting hits. But what happens when a couple
pages get removed because they consider it spamming to create duplicate
US/Canada pages with different prices. Yes, that happened to me a few days
ago.
Funny thing. Back in the real world, companies do this all
the time. But ah yes... the content police at Google don't allow this sort of
thing, and you have no practical recourse. You either play the game their way,
or you're on your own.
That got me thinking that I probably wasn't the only one
questioning the wisdom of giving a bunch of computer geeks the ability to make
such weighty and arbitrary decisions. So after a quick Google search I landed
on www.google-watch.org.
If you've never visited this site, I suggest you do. Daniel
Brandt, the site's founder has many interesting things to say about the
dangers inherent in a completely private Google. For instance, there's the
cookie they plant in everyone's computer that doesn't expire until 2038.
Nobody else -- not even the CIA -- can get away with this. And there is much
more.
Google and the blogger lifestyle
But what interested me most was Brandt's rant about
Google's love of blogs and
bloggers. Now I can't say I understand the details, but I think I've got
the principle. If you create a lot of little entries (in a blog), and each of
these has a link to a virtual page containing the full article, and Google
indexes these pages -- well, then you've got a whole lot of indexed,
potentially high scoring pages. Much of it is garbage, mind you.
But that's OK, because Google has gone ga ga over blogs.
They actually like these pages. Or at least,
unless I am badly misinformed, they don't DISLIKE them like they DISLIKE my
duplicate US/Canada catalogue pages. Because as trivial as the content is, it
is unique, and therefore worthy of Google's Page Rank stamp of approval.
Why not kill two birds with one stone
So hey. Why not have it both ways. Give Google what they
want (lots of unique pages with lots of legitimate inter-linking) and get your
promotional hit at the same time. It's "Write your own Promos" and "Create
Your Own Links", all in one neat little package. A pretty good idea, (I
think).
And so, a site was born —
www.Click-Partners.com. Now I just
have to figure out how to write an article in less than 1,000 words.
For more information, contact
Richard J. Hendershot, www.small-business-online.com
We specialize in helping small business reach local markets through the web.
This article is called "Click-Partners.com suddenly in business"
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