About Paid Links
As described in
What About Free Links
in BungeeBones is free to list links in as long as the population
in the category is less than twenty. And in How the Auction Works we describe how our process of converting free categories to paid ones works. But I want to say a few thinks about the idea of "paid" link" vs "free links" and why BungeeBones is more like an investment in your website rather than a fee.
BungeeBones operates in some ways like the "Pay Per Click" system. One important thing to keep in mind about paid links in the
BungeeBones system is that revenue is shared (like PPC) with the webmasters
that host the directory widgets on their own websites. I believe it is a better system than Pay Per Click, however, and here are just a few of my reasons for writing that:
Web Directories Are Not "Dead" - Search engines have made incredible strides and I, myself, use them often and regularly. But I also look at links on other websites as well. Search engines are great when someone is looking for something (maybe that is why they are called, umm, "search" engines?)but linking works differently to get visitors to your site. Some of the appeal is the human review, the human recommendation, or perhaps the human reputation behind the recommendation. How, and from whom, a website is linked to is still a major method by which search engines determine rank of websites in their SERPs. In other words, directories are not dead, even to the search engines, but merely need to adapt because of them. Directories can be both used by search enines and USE search engines to deliver results to a website visitor. Search Engines Were Never Really Free- Because a user gets to look through the SERPs for free most rarely give a thought to how a search engine like Google, that became one of the most successful businesses in the world, did so by giving away their product and never charging a dime for it? Few stop and think about who and what Google, and the other search engines really are: they are advertisers. That is where they generate their income and profits and they advertise what? They advertise links. And they sell what? They sell traffic. And, lastly, who do they sell too? They sell to website owners, webmasters, and companies with websites.
It gets to be an awkward language construct to describe how the advertiser (i.e. the search engine) sells advertising (paid links) to the advertisers (i.e. the webmasters)
There Is No "Silver" Bullet Of Advertising
Realize this - whenever a company or business spends millions of dollars to buy a Super Bowl advertisement to then use the opportunity to flash their dotcom across the screen for a few seconds you have to start to realize that a website is both a part of an advertising system as well as a goal of an advertising system. Remember how I mentioned the strange language construct of an advertiser advertising an advertiser? Well here it is again in this Super Bowl example. You must realize that you will pay for every bit of your web traffic in one way, shape, or form whether that be by placing the url on your stationary, on your sign, in your newspaper ad, on a billboard, tv, etc.
BungeeBones Is An "Exit" Portal- It is a web directory placed on websites with the idea of providing your site visitor a list of high quality website recommendations. It is meant to "recycle" that hard earned visitor you got and, hopefully, recover some of the expense it took to get them there. Compare this with pay per click where they encourage you to place their ads where? Right next to your own content or products with the hopes of enticing your hard won visitor away before they have finished browsing your site. Why would a webmaster want to do that for what is, most of the time, just a few cents in payment?
BungeeBones partners with websites that place its directory on their sites and shares the paid category fees with them. It is in their interest,
too, to get as high a price for the category as possible and, since they are the
ones that bring the bulk of the traffic into the system, we desire to reward them
for that traffic with the highest earnings that we can. Higher paid link fees attract higher quality websites and more installations of our distributed web directory bring in even more traffic.
As traffic to a category increases so too
will the auction bids and prices. Again, we feel that controlling the population within a
category is in everyone's best interest so raising prices is one method used to
do that.
But be confident that,
because BungeeBones is competing with other web advertising mediums (such as Pay Per
Click and other paid and free directories) that our advertising prices will always be among the lowest. Because of our unique approach of "pooling" the exiting traffic from small to medium sites we welcome the opportunity to work in conjunction with all forms of website advertising whether they be other online systems or old realiable brick and mortar methods. We embrace them all and pass them on to our own advertisers. Advertisers can advertise in BungeeBones for free too. We recycle them all. We actively seek the input of both
the members with links and those that are hosting the directory widgets about
pricing, population levels, and the auction process itself.
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