One of the things I have heard over and over are people saying “I don’t have time to join another one of these sites”. Well if all people are doing is hanging around in these sites all day I can understand why - YOU WOULD NEVER DO ANY REAL BUSINESS.

I am a member of quite a few sites. Do I visit all of them frequently - No way. Did I have a purpose in joining them besides being one of the “in crowd” - You bet I did. Each time you join one of these sites it is an opportunity to have an inbound link to your website and blog. As you know, over time this is helpful in your SEO efforts.

Hi John. Thanks for doing Outbrain more way justice than I did. (Amazing how you can get a guest post just by being terse sometimes!) I may indeed give it a spin. It’s on the pile of things that have not yet spun.

In addition to the free ratings widget, we offer our bloggers a cool Blog Rating Report that shows your posts ranked by popularity and other metrics. This report is especially helpful to bloggers that aim to impart tips and helpful information to readers - kind of like what you are doing in the real estate market. Ratings may highlight a certain topic or issue that your readers are into. Many of your installed bloggers have reported that this report surfaced some surprises in how their content was being received and is now part of their daily review on how their content is being received. If you would like to see a sample report shoot me an email @ john (at) outbrain (dot) com. Also, our bloggers can opt to add a Top Rated badge that shows a river of top rated posts on your blog. This is meant to drive readers around your blog and increase page views.

Next up for our bloggers will be the release of our recommendations which is again designed to drive readers further into your content and drive new traffic to your blog.

Anyway, we love this stuff and would welcome you to give it a spin. Feel free to email me at john (at) outbrain (dot) com for more info if you want. Hope you are staying dry out West :)cheers

#1,327. Is that all? Doesn’t it feel more like 15 million? I have to agree, the long term benefits can seem a bit elusive as far as the networks go. If nothing else, you’re concreting your presence as a professional in your area. Kind of a drip system…

I’m sure Bruce has a long client list. He does great work, and anyone who can make it to page one of the SERPs for perhaps the most competitive keyword combination there is, “Search Engine Optimization”, must be doing something right.

Readers, anyone used Bruce?

I’m with you on the party hopping. It’s certainly nice to see you and Bill and Missy everywhere as we “bar-hop” so to speak around the Internet.

From a business perspective, the outstanding question in my mind is whether the time is justified in terms of the likelihood of a a transaction, or whether the latter is so vanishingly small as to make such networks only worth it for the incoming traffic.

There’s probably a win in terms of link reputation for them either way. I think such networks may tend to be worthwhile the more you’re targeting an “internet crowd”, and in that respect are more appropriate for businesses like this than businesses like real estate. The nice thing about search marketing in contrast is that it’s more like what a phone book used to be twenty years ago — targeting people who are looking right now for a certain service. The reason for a lot of the hype is that Internet Marketing authors write about these services, and people looking to do Internet Marketing are already hanging around there, so it looks like it all fits.