FREE Ad Spots Strategy Advice

Ad Spots | Link Swapping | Strategy

Once you have an Ad Spot designed, and setup. It's then your job to find other web sites and businesses to swap links with. But how to choose? How to prioritize?

Example: Restaurant

If you have a restaurant, and you are fortunate enough to get a visitor to your web site, you want that person to give up looking for other places to eat, and commit to a plan of action that involves them spending money at your place. So you don't have links on your site to other restaurants, otherwise you may have introduced visitors to your competition. Not a smart move! If they make it to your web site, you want them to stop looking for food right then and there and buy yours.

So now we've eliminated other food service businesses, what do we look for?
The answer is other businesses which customers might use just before or just after your business. Where do people go before the eat out at a restaurant? Where do people go after they eat out at a restaurant? If it's all you can eat, probably straight to bed or to a recliner. Which means that business would be the end stop. Otherwise perhaps, "diner and a movie." So you might look for live theatre, movie theater, drive-in theatre, and talk to the manager's or better directly to the owners there. What about before diner, put-put, golf, any public sites to go and see, etc.

Also always include any small mom-and-pop gas station or country store (which would have direct control over their own advertising where a large corporation may not allow that kind of direct decision making).

For example, if one has a business in a town that serves tourists, one might include links for:

a) 1 gas station on the way there,
b) 1 bed and breakfast or other lodging provider
c) activity providers, example: carriage ride, public pool, movie theatre, any public show,
d) a few particular shopping businesses to introduce visitors to a "larger shopping area."

Use the swap links to create a "clear path" to get them to your business and back home again. Don't give them too many choices or they wont be able to decide, and another day may get away, not to mention in that time they may find another path which does not include your business.

Also note there are many web sites reporting link swapping as not helpful for search engine results. However they are talking about "link farms", a stack of say 100 links to 100 other pages and each of those pages reciprocate etc etc. That is not good for search engine results. What makes Ad Spot link swapping distinctly different? A carefully select short list of links, each to a stop along a journey, which can take a potential customer from home, to your business, and back again (a Lord of the Rings Hobbit reference, LOL). These links actually serve a logical purpose to serve customers and direct real web page readers from one site to another, where as link farms were never actually for web page readers.

One might also consider not including a particular business if it is likely to lead some tourists not return to your business because the options that business provides for future fun may leave your business in the dust. That being said there may be major events which are compulsory to send your customers to.

Again, only with those who have direct control over their own advertising decisions. So if the local Walmart won't list you, screw them and don't list them as a resource on your web site. There may be special exceptions to this rule. If such a particular business had essential resources that every tourist might need. For example, the one and only gas station in town. Even if they won't swap links with you, at least on your web site, including them does make for a more complete picture. No one wants to drive far away to do only one thing, which would eventually become boring. And especially if they don't know where or how they will get any essential resources to get them there, sustain them, and get them back home.

One of the most idyllic scenarios of this type of strategy would be a town which in spite of being small is also a significant tourist attraction. Having a limited number of businesses to compete with, as opposed to competing with a few hundred gas stations, a few hundred restaurants, etc. What makes that scenario so lucrative is that each web site for each business is actually an opportunity to collect new customers who may have never gone to the small town in the first place. This moves competition away from only competing for the attention of those who were already committed to visiting to include a new stream where you have the potential to really steer where they go, along the way to your business, and after your business along their way home.

In the small town scenario the competition would likely be less hostile in general. But also, if currently every business in the small town didn't really have a significant web site to capture new comer attention and direct them to all the possibilities of visiting, then the opportunity to greatly increase total traffic would be substantial. How much is a 10% growth rate in tourist revenue worth to a small town.

Even businesses which do not draw someone from another town, say a gas station, having a good linked web site to business that could draw visitors, say a live theatre, the linked web sites would help to drive up search engine placement and total traffic to the web site for the live theatre, which means more total tourists and ultimately more gas sold.

You just have to capture random internet passer's by and show them a "clear path" which they might enjoy, getting them to your business and home again, using carefully chosen Ad Spot chains.

Get your own Ad Spot for link swapping here.