Convert Offline

Yodle was kind enough to reach out to me after my most recent post regarding their link building strategy. It turns out I had some things not quite right so I appreciate them letting me know so I could correct it.

The process that I described in that post was not the link building for their new organic product but rather a pilot program called the “Expert Authors Program.”

The Expert Authors program is free and intended to bring in additional leads at no additional cost to the advertiser. Interestingly, the articles are ghost written by Yodle’s internet marketers and not by the business owner. Interesting because Bryan Phelps of Orange Soda and Nick of Brick Marketing commented on the last post that leaving this up to the customer would be a bad idea. Turns out Yodle agrees.

Yodle was careful to point out that the client I cited was not part of their new organic product and “they would not block robots on a Yodle Organic client’s site nor set up duplicate Web sites for Organic clients.”

One of the questions I was anxious to ask was whether the new organic strategy would be applied to the client’s site or the .net site they often create for sem customers and I was shocked by their answer. They told me that on and off-page optimization would be done to the client’s domain and NOT the .net site. And here is the part that shocked me. I then asked what happens when the client exits the program and they told me the client keeps his or her site.

I’m surprised by this because it removes rather than puts up a blockade to quitting the program. Like cutting the wheel in the direction of a fishtailing rear-end to come out of a slide this seems a counter-intuitive way to reduce churn – actually creating a better product. Who knew they’d come up with that?