Rich Toops writes:

This is an excellent question for discussion. One of the most perplexing problems while marketing your information is how to let people know where you are on the WWW, and what makes your site worth their time to look at. My wife and my mom came by but only because I was standing there with them:/.

Looking at the value of a link as strictly a numbers game, a text link on resource35.htm of a PR1 site is not going to carry the relationship potential of a link in the resource box of an article at EzineArticles.com. But it goes a lot deeper than that.

When someone chooses to read an article posted, they want that information at some level, which means there is INTEREST there. And I personally believe it is that INTEREST that generates value. Its not very likely that a purchase will be made from that one link (though not impossible), but if that article is chosen for inclusion in a 3000 member ezine, the original interest has the potential to be multiplied exponentially.

A brief example. I purchased a front page text link on a PR8 financial services page. Even though we shared keywords, the focus of that site was off just ever so slightly to my link wording, and I didn’t get one visit. Conversely, I share a link with a PR3 site that brings several hundred visitors a month to my site, largely because of the relationship we have developed with each other. A dollar value? Absolutely. But had I gone after the relationship based on the dollar value, I personally don’t think it would have ever happened. Those relationships are just too fragile. Boy, you hit the spot with this question, Chris!

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Dennis Mellersh writes:

This is an interesting question.

I am not experienced enough in link-value-factoring to make a comment on the absolute value of a link.

However, let’s look at it another way and regard the Google Ads on the EzineArticles Blog as links.

Essentially, because of their small size, they are indeed basically a link to some kind of site where the advertiser or link creator hopes the click-through will produce sales conversion.

So in this case the Google AdSense links may mean pennies to the site publisher for one click, but many dollars to the link creator. For the publisher also, those pennies can eventually turn into a lot of dollars with enough clicks.

Then add to this equation the idea that a resource link on an EzineArticle placement is in effect factored many times by its exposure.

The more successfull EzineArticles is in gaining placements for its authors, the higher the factoring of the link’s value in the resource box.

It’s really exponential.

Links are really shorthand “phone numbers” to our places of business. The more people see our “phone number” the more calls we are likely to get.

A good concept to raise for discussion Chris.

Dennis Mellersh

— Helping you build you work at home business —

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Lance Winslow writes:

I agree that all links are of value and one must consider also the quality of the article. A great article which is properly targeted and picked up because it was felt to meet the readership of a particular ezine editors percieved wishes of that reader, will pull people to click over. Yes it is very much a numbers game. Here is something. My company use to sell franchises, we no longer do. However since posting articles, I see many people have inquired about information on our sites, it is up significantly even though we stopped advertising for franchise sales in 2003. The only reason could be these articles I have written, mostly as a hobby. So, then I know from experience that of 100 inquiries, 80% are of no financial value. They are competitors, looky lous or people interested by no funds to buy anything. 20% are potential. In the case of our company before we stopped franchising to put in company owned units, each franchise sold for $20,000. $12,000 was cost of set up and we figured we spent $4,000 to 5,000 per sale for advertising. If we paid someone or a few authors to write articles it would cost us about $4,000 per month to do, if we got in 100 leads and converted 3 of those to sales, then the value would be $8,000 in profit. To do this we would have to put up about 100 articles to make $8,000 in the franchising industry. Of course this is one example of one industry. Perhaps all the people in the directory of my Franchising Site, Franchising.org #2 on Google under key word “Franchising”, should be writing articles. I realize that info-advertising is quite common in the Biz Op industry, but really franchisors stand to make a lot.

Now then once the articles are written here is the issue, they stay up forever and are written once, therefore these articles should pull forever. Could that mean that you would have $8,000 per month forever in sales based on harvesting the good leads from the 100 leads? The answer potentially is yes. So the monetary value is “quite high” and it could be in the thousands. I wonder now why more people do not write articles instead of wasting money of some of the print ads I see, whose self life is one day, one week, one month, when EzineArticles.com is forever and that is a mighty long time indeed. Think about it.

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Stephen Mistretta writes:

Awesome question.

I look at writing articles first from a providing information standpoint and then a SEO tool.

In my opinion Articles will gain greater weight as the algos continue to adjust.
The search engines are looking for natural content. Self written articles are a darn good start. (And one part of a great internet marketing campaign)

Interesting comment on buying a PoweR
8 homepage link and getting no traffic, yepper correct anchor text is very important (thats another article) :)

One question I have is how long do the articles here stay live or in an archive so the SE can spider them?

Just my 3 cents worth.

Steve

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Kal writes:

My cents worth:

Minimum charge per Google is 0.05

But how often will a reader click on the link after reading the article? Depends on article quality. But I’d guess that 1 in 10 get a click on the link.

So about 0.05/10

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

We’ve done tests with our seed articles and the average response we got was 3.3% CTR for links that were in the resource box.

Your milage may vary…but if just getting a click was the only reason that you submitted articles, then you’ve missed a major part of the value equation.

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