Beware of Accidental Promotions

by Bill Platt

Published on this site: January 25th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

As an article writer, I am always on the search for additional information to give my readers, and I often refer my readers to external websites for extra information.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, many publishers prefer that you do. They like the fact that the many resources presented can teach a lot of information to their readers.

Articles Should Avoid the Appearance of Self-Promotion

The trick in this methodology is to avoid the appearance of self-promotion.

For example, I could say that I like buying printer toner from http://www.tonerr.com . I could say that I like shopping with Toner-R because they provide me access to all of the brands of printers that I have in my office, and they have good prices.

If the link that I provide is pertinent to the information I am presenting in the article, then my recommendation is generally viewed as acceptable content within the body of my article.

Another example I might show you is one of my favorite ezine publishers. The thing that makes the Your Membership Newsletter
- http://www.yourmembership.net - stand apart in my own mind is that they provide a combination of informative articles and people-helping-people features. The people-helping-people features include Website Reviews by other subscribers, and Questions submitted by subscribers followed by Answers submitted by other subscribers a few weeks later. It is a nice combination.

I don't own either of these websites, so the recommendation is within the scope of acceptable content for most publishers and webmasters, who might choose to use my articles.

The Generic Domain Question

There are times when we write articles that seek to teach others about the website design and construction for the purposes of ease-of-navigation or search engine optimization.

In August of 2005, I had done this myself. My point in that article was to show how the constuction of imbedded anchor text could dramatically affect how well your website performed in the search engines. If you are interested, you can read that article in one of my other favorite ezines, Site Pro News:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/aug/31.html

This is important to this story, because when I was writing this article in August, I realized a major problem with my previous articles.

In order to write the article that was published in Site Pro News, I needed to show links to a Sample Domain URL in order to teach people how to construct their links.

The Scary Part

I set off to use my old stand-by, YourDomain.com.

Then I was struck with a thought...

Is that domain registered to someone else? And if so, who owns it? So, I looked it up. On that domain, you will find a Pay-Per-Click Directory.

I realized that I did not necessarily want to promote someone else's website, if I did not believe that what they were offering was of good value to my readers.

After all, in the course of my article, I was using the domain URL in such a way that it might end up a live hyperlink on some websites.

I would be giving the owner of the website free advertising, free link popularity, and free PageRank.

So, I looked up my next old stand-by, SampleWebsite.com. This domain is owned by a Domain Name Speculator and Broker. Most of these brokers are waiting for poor, ignorant souls like me to come along and build the links for their site, and then they will turn-around and sell the domain for big bucks, because the domain will have tons of inbound links already built.

There Had to be a Better Option

In August, I was in a hurry to get my article finished and into circulation. So, I just hooked my article up to Blogger.com.

Blogger.com being owned by Google is awash in cash. They really don't need my free advertising. Next time, I would need to find something else to use as a Sample Domain URL.

I wondered if there was a way to get a domain that would be treated as "community property" that people could use in their articles. I also wondered if there was some way that this "community property" website could benefit the people who used it as a sample domain url, without being perceived as direct self-promotion.

The light bulb went on.

The only way that I could assure a domain would be given to "community property" status is if I bought the domain and made a commitment to myself to that end.

I found a couple of generic domain names that were fixing to expire. When they came open, I snapped them up.

It is a real simple website. And, it is Free to use by anyone.

If you need to use a Sample Domain URL in your article, then use
http://www.YourDomainURL.com or http://www.SampleDomainURL.com .Once your article is published on a website, go to the site and submit your personal information as well as the URL where the live link exists in one of your articles.

On verification of the live hyperlink, then your personal domain will be available in the website's Random Page Generator. Any visitor to the website can choose the random links they want to look at, by "one" or "all" of 24 topics / categories.

Although I might own the domain names, the only advertising on the website is a Paypal banner. Like I had mentioned before, participation is open to anyone who wants to use this "free community resource", so long as there is a live link back to the site from somewhere else. The only limitation that applies to this program is that each submission must use an unique Proof URL that links back to one of the two Sample Domain URL sites.

Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Article Distribution Service. He has been providing a number of free resources to the writer's community since 2001. Check out the Text-to-Hyperlink Converter at: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl