This author’s open-source marketing plan, as announced on June 29, 2005, is mainly for small and medium-sized businesses. By keeping it simple, this author hoped it can be useful to businesses with a limited budget, can get "more bang for buck".

The objective is to gain 3000+ inbound links within one year by sending:- A. 48 free-reprint articles in one year. B. 4 free e-books in one year. C. 4 free software similar to corporate gifts or freebies D. 6 press releases in one year.

Getting many inbound links is vital as a hits generator - sources for new visitors. Sometimes, internet users on reading articles, e-books or using freebies may visit originating site directly.

The site www.seecrets.biz started in early May 2005 with one article. In following two months, ten articles were submitted and two press releases were issued. All these are available at this author’s site with dates concerned.

After two months, over 300 inbound links were obtained. It is difficult to be accurate because Google does not list back-links from sites with PageRank of less than three. During first few weeks, counting was easy when number was less than 100.

The results from Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines on July 9, 2005 at 0800GMT are as follows (the figures within brackets represent total competing pages):

"Seecrets" got 1(7570), 1(1040) and 1(3681). "Stan seecrets" got 4(338), 1(215) and 1(737). "Joe Nogood" got 4(694000), 8(1330) and 1(2447). "Rebrand software" got NR(84000), 15(88800) and 11(31124). "Open source marketing plan" got NR(26.7million), 10(5.2million) and 12(1million). "Open source marketing plan" got 3&4, 6&7 and 2 through Press Release sites. (Please note that "NR" means not ranked in top 20.).

The first three keywords (seecrets, stan seecrets and joe nogood) are important to this author’s site’s brand.

The keywords (joe nogood, rebrand software and open source marketing plan) were only introduced in late June 2005. The last two are relevant to site’s activities.

These are preliminary results. Readers can always inspect this author’s website and decide that no unfair or illegal methods were used. Knowledgeable readers should be able to see meta-tags with ease.

This author’s take

But one method used by a growing number of webmasters is that of building link popularity through syndication of original articles. Syndicated articles are becoming increasingly popular because article syndication builds permanent links from many different, topically related, keyword rich pages. There are several steps one can take in order to ensure that an article is syndicated as much as possible, and that links from those syndications are of highest quality.

1) Write High Quality Articles

The amount of syndication an article receives is directly proportional to demand for that type of article. Higher quality articles will prove more valuable to webmasters looking to reprint articles. Perfect spelling and grammar are requisite in order to ensure widest syndication possible. Webmasters will be more inclined to reprint well-researched and well-written articles. Most articles are not of highest quality, so a higher quality article will stand out significantly.

Articles should be more than simply a place to put a link in a resource box. The goal of article writing should be to make article itself interesting. An interesting article can be syndicated on websites with high traffic and PageRank. Increasing article syndication will cause link in resource box to be copied by many Web sites.

In addition to building more links with higher quality articles, webmasters will find that quality content articles will result in an immediate traffic increase to a site. An article that is appealing to readers will naturally attract a large readership. The more readers an article has, more likely those readers are to click on link in resource box.

2) Manually Submit to Related Sites

Another technique used by many webmasters to increase an article's syndication is to submit articles to related sites. The best syndications and links come from quality sites in a specific niche, not simply article banks. For example, there are many Web sites that will only accept business-related articles. Any webmaster of a business-related website looking to build link popularity should write an article concerning business and submit it to these sites. Potentially, other business sites could take note of a high quality business article and syndicate it on their sites (which are all related under unique subject of business). Doing this will build topically related links which can improve a Web site’s search engine rankings dramatically.

3) Write a Compelling Title