I have never been a big fan of the guru induced hype surrounding social media, especially with Twitter . It's nothing but a money making con. I'm not saying you can't make the odd few bucks from Twitter by fooling other people into buying a "get rich with Twitter" product and take advantage of the hype, but as a sustainable online business with reliable recurring income the whole social media management company Twitter business model is a sham.
Just a bit of thought and testing shows how it cannot work. People do not have Twitter open for 24 hours a day waiting anxiously for our "special offers" to be tweeted to them. The pathetic, and expensive, software that auto builds thousands of accounts on different IP addresses is just a machine for churning out deception and false hopes.
I am trying to imagine what it must be like to have a thousand or more Twitter accounts with a few hundred people in each. Do these people wake up in the morning and think "Great, I'll just make a coffee and spend a few hours making another 500 Twitter accounts?"
So, if you have a thousand Twitter accounts with just 100 people on each, the 'gurus' selling you this software build the false impression on their sales pages that you now have a huge Twitter list of 100,000 which, they argue has to make you money. Well, it's just pure lies.
What you actually have is 1000 auto generated accounts with 100 followers in each. The only reason they are 'following' you in the first place is because they have a Twitter application set up to auto-follow. They don't know you and you have no relationship with them.
Years and years ago, (back in the day!), before the days of double optin and the Can Spam laws we used to buy useless co-reg leads by their tens of thousands. These leads were dirt cheap and you could build lists fasts. The only problem was that the vast majority of these 'subscribers' were inactive, they never read your emails and had no interest in you or your product. I think it was the great Terry Dean that started the thinking toward targeted lists or it may have been Yanik Silver... anyhow it was a time ago so forgive my memory lapse.
So, we have come full circle and are now just using Twitter instead of the co-reg, exit pop strategy. We never learn. In the second Jurassic Park movie, millionaire John Hammond said something like, "We won't make that mistake again" to which Ian Malcolm replied, "Nope, you're just making a whole load of new ones". Yet again Internet marketing has shown itself to be nothing but vultures circling your wallet.
Enough of Twitter. Lets briefly talk about another guru favorite, Web2.0 social media websites. Are they powerhouses for authority link building loved by the search engines and guaranteed to give you a Number 1 Google ranking in a few hours?
Please, please! Let's get real. I am not going into the Google debate other than to say I personally test a wide variety of factors and most of what you read is nonsense. If there's a 'buy now' button in the article you can say it's cr*p with almost 100% certainty. It's an easy way to go about losing $97 time and again but there are probably better ways to lose a hundred bucks - like over a rib eye and a few cold beers with friends!
Seriously, are the Web2.0 properties any good for link building? Well, It depends upon your objectives. Presently the importance of links from almost all of these sites is drastically reduced in the eyes of Google. My last 2 test sites over a period of 4 months, (using good content and slow link building), has resulted in no back links being shown by Google. Google knows about the pages but is not giving them back link status.
For one of the niches you could see that Google liked videos, because the search term returned a lot of videos on the first page, but my videos are way down the list so they need some more link juice.
Yahoo and other search engines are however indexing like crazy. My Hubs, (in HubPages obviously), was showing up after a few hours and most everything else has been indexed including the videos. Traffic to both is slow but I shall see what a couple more months of link building does. I wasn't expecting a traffic avalanche as they are both in high competition, oversubscribed, niches which is probably part of the reason for Googles reluctance to give them some authority.
If you jumped on the Angela's backlinks bandwagon and were dismayed by your results then don't be. Google knows your link is there but it may not be willing to give it back link status. If anybody has any anchor text links showing from Angela's method being indexed by Google using the link: operator please leave a comment or let me know.