Get a Free iPod for gaming del.icio.us (link bribery)

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this, but someone else is giving away free iPods to get links. When the Italian dude did it earlier, he only got 20 links — which isn’t very hard to get. The guys at mostlysavingmoney.com are doing a much better job. The contest ends on November 22nd, 2006 and they are giving away 3 iPods.

• It’s an older site with deep archives.
  • Deep archives are great. You can take a week off of posting and still get ~1800 pageviews/day.
  • This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do with a new site. You want to have other content that can get a side benefit. There’s no point in doing link baiting (wikipedia definition) and getting a lot of traffic if you have nothing to show the users other than the link bait.
    • Unless you are planning to do a bait-and-switch, where you create content that gets a lot of links and then switch it so that it points to something else. IE: write a popular article, and then switch the URL so that it always displays the front page of your blog.
• Low barrier to entry. All that is required is bookmarking the site on del.icio.us
  • I am doing something wrong. The last backslash on the url creates different links on del.icio.us. There are ~1500 bookmarks on del.icio.us and 36 block backlinks.
  • Compare this to writing good content. It took me 6 hours to write my ScheduleWorld post (including research) that has ~1400 bookmarks on del.icio.us and 177 blog backlinks.
• Is this cheaper than traditional web advertising?
  • Yup. The amount of traffic a scheme like this generates is huge. But does it translate into increasing your audience? In this case of mostlysavingmoney.com it will. Their audience is people who are interested in free stuff.

Here’s a bonus for reading this far: the seven stages of owning an iPod (just in case you win).

Related Posts

• Building PageRank Through Bribery
• The Death of iPod
• How to build an audience for your blog