Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Win-Win Vs. Win-Lose
Ah, yes. Monday again, which means I spent the day in my client's office, discussing strategies (the fun part), managing his dropship program (generally good, but with an occasional headache) and managing his reciprocal linking program (pure purgatory).

I don't know if the kind of trash link requests we get are typical of the state of the reciprocal linking world, or if, like my client says, we simply got on a really bad list. Every Monday, there are 50 to 100 link requests for me to review. On a good week, I might accept three or four of them.

Really pathetic! Most of them are automatically generated sites with no worthwhile content. They're created in the hope that visitors will click on the glut of AdSense ads that fill the page and "reward" the site-builder for tricking them into coming to a site that offers them absolutely nothing.

I found a grand prize winner today for blatantly worthless sites. Some loser submitted about a half-dozen sites that were on topics completely unrelated to us. The "content" of each site consisted of one two-word phrase (the keyword they were targeting). That was it. The rest of the page was made up of as many AdSense ads as Google allows.

Dealing with site owners who submit such total junk always amazes me. Their attitude clearly is one of Win-Lose. Namely, they feel that for them to gain, someone else has to lose.

In this case, any visitors who find their site lose. They lose time when they discover that the site has nothing to benefit them.

Other site owners lose, too. They lose time that they waste reviewing these worthless link exchange requests.

Then, too, Google or any other directory that sends people to those sites lose. They lose credibility when searchers find that the links they relied on weren't as relevant as they expected.

But the most baffling part of this Win-Lose mentality is that the builders of those worthless sites lose, too. It doesn't take long for Google to discover that a site is worthless and remove it from its listings.

So the site-builders who rely on this Win-Lose mentality ultimately have to work twice as hard as other site-builders. They remain in a constant loop, throwing up site after to site to replace the ones that get de-listed, and hoping that each site makes a couple of bucks before it becomes worthless to them, too.

Me? I'll stick with a Win-Win approach. Build a site, make it better and better. Benefit others and earn your money by giving them something they need and benefit from. In my book, Win-Win wins every time.
Jeff