Buying links for mindshare, not search engines

After Aaron gave notice that ReviewMe was going to be offering half-price posts this month, I figured I should give the service a closer look.

We already know Google wants to devalue paid links, and for once I’m not looking at buying ReviewMe posts for direct ranking benefits - instead, I’m looking to buy mindshare.

One of the big problems in starting new sites is getting good exposure to targeted traffic. The explosion in social media says that this is a legitimate stream of traffic.

ReviewMe offers the potential to do that.

So, for one of my developing news sites, I’ve bought a few ReviewMe posts for it. I haven’t even looked at their PageRank values - I’ve focused on their Technorati rankings.

Although there are no Top 10 Technorati blogs in the purchase list, I have bought posts on sites with decent Technorati rankings - 2000-4000.

If the review posts are accepted, I hope to be able to grab readers from these and turn them into RSS subscribers and return visitors. These in turn may link to some of my own site articles, helping with the process of organic link development.

To help with this, I’ve edited the site template to make it more attractive, bought in some stock photos for news items, and I’m about to set up a small blog section.

I also need to track the success of the ReviewMe campaign, so I’m going to set up a Google Analytics account to better track visitors. I’m also going to take snapshots of the RSS subscriber numbers, before and after the posts are published (presuming they are).

What’s really interesting about the entire process is that to grab mindshare, I need to make sure I have great content. Social media traffic is too clued in fall for cheap and nasty Made For Adsense (MFA) sites, so I have to put on my Sunday Best for these visitors.

Some would say I should be doing that anyway - and I have, but in a process of staged developed - content first, then redesign, then continued stages of development to expand and better present the site content.

In that way, it won’t matter in the slightest if the ReviewMe posts have no link benefits. But if I fail to capture significant new return visitors and feed subscribers, then I know I need to look again to the drawing board.