Internet Marketing Interview - LinksManager

Welcome to today’s sixth installment of the WebAdvantage.net Internet Success Series Interviews. In this issue we are featuring a series with Joel Lesser, President and CEO of CNVI and LinksManager.

LinksManager is a online site linking software solution that was launched by CNVI in 2000. Since that time, site linking has become a household phrase in the world of Internet Marketing.

Today’s interview is an interesting look into the challenges of differentiating an ethical web marketing tool from the “rest of the pack” of fly by night linking schemes.

In addition, Joel’s software has always been run on a monthly subscription basis. In the interview, Joel stresses the importance of online customer support to his base of thousands of webmasters (the minimum cost for an account is $19.95 per month).

The Interview

WebAdvantage: Joel, thanks for doing this interview with WebAdvantage.net. To inform our readers about your service, could you please explain what LinksManager is in three or four sentences.

Joel Lesser: LinksManager is the first and only US patent pending application service that completely manages a website’s links pages. LinksManager is a tool, not a “program” or “club.” You don’t “join” LinksManager, you purchase online software to utilize on your own. While LinksManager does NOT automatically swap links or force link swaps, it is a time-saving tool that helps reduce HTML coding and manual scanning for reciprocal links and dead links while creating quality, organized links pages.

WA: Google and other search engines have penalized users to to heavy linking and link farming. The latest Google Update has put shadey SEO and site linking more into the light. How does Google view LinksManager?

JL: A distinction should first be made between “heavy linking” and “link farming.” Heavy linking is basically swapping a lot of links.

This can be done in an intelligent and thoughtful manner, or not. Link farming is the latter instance, where a site will swap links with any other site, regardless of whether that other site is related to their own. A link farm usually has hundreds of unrelated links on a page, little to no real content, and with a blatant disregard for categorization.

We are not aware of any “official view” by Google regarding LinksManager. We do maintain regular contact with Google to let them know that LinksManager has evolved into a highly ethical search engine friendly application service. LinksManager assists its users in creating organized, quality links pages that follow Google’s webmaster guidelines seen at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.

Google also has other Quality Guidelines that the LinksManager software abides by. In order to remain search engine friendly, LinksManager does NOT generate dynamic pages with the exception of search results. LinksManager provides an automated process that allows webmasters to have their links pages stored on their own web servers under their own domain. LinksManager does NOT employ the use of doorway pages. LinksManager does NOT employ cloaking or the generating of text that can only be seen by search engines but not by site visitors.

LinksManager was inherently designed to be editor based and search engine friendly by both design and ethical standards.

We advise LinksManager customers to swap links with relevant and quality sites that will benefit the website’s visitors, and to realize that reciprocal linking is a long term traffic builder. Webmasters looking for a “quick fix” to get search engine ranking will not find LinksManager useful to them.

WA: Besides LinksManager being Google friendly, what else differentiates LinksManager from other linking tools and solutions?

JL: There are two areas where LinksManager will always beat out the competition.

First, is LinksManager’s customer service. We pride ourselves on fast, friendly, and detailed customer service. Our service helpdesk is staffed 24/7/365. We are continually updating our online FAQs, How To Guides, and Knowledgebase to provide the most comprehensive customer service on the net. We know most of our customers by name, and strive for personalized service.

The second area where LinksManager truly shines is our wide range of features. We offer Top Links Lists, automated Email Notifications, automated FTP Upload Controls to store your links pages on your own web server and under your own domain, link statistics, search statistics, and full cosmetic integrations to make your links pages match the rest of your website.

WA: How many members do you have (ball park figure)?

JL: LinksManager is a private company and so we do not disclose specific sales figures. Our official launch was January 1st, 2001. At this writing, we have thousands of satisfied customers, many with multiple LinksManager accounts.

WA: You’ve been around for a long time. WebAdvantage started using LinksManager back in 2000, before Linking Popularity became a “must” for SEO, we were using linking for site traffic. What was your muse for creating LinksManager?

JL: LinksManager was basically build out of necessity. Back in 1997, we needed software to manage linking when we were designing our first websites. Software available at the time didn’t have the features we wanted. It took 3 plus years to design and code LinksManager. We are always making improvements to the software as we grow.

WA: What are your online goals? How well are you meeting them?

JL: Our goals are simple and haven’t changed from day one. We strive to help webmasters create quality, organized links pages that are user friendly and search engine friendly. We provide webmasters with the tools and guidance needed to manage their links pages. We are meeting our goals well and in many cases exceeding our goals!

WA: What forms of Internet marketing have worked well for LinksManager, and what bombed?

JL: We do not currently advertise LinksManager. Our customer base has grown solely from word-of-mouth praise and recommendations.

WA: How do you define growth?

JL: We would define growth as slowly building quality relationships with our customers. We give most webmasters who want to use LinksManager a chance, but would rather fewer, more quality websites use our service than thousands of low quality, fly by night sites. We have no qualms about terminating the LinksManager account of a webmaster whom we feel is not practicing ethical linking.

WA: What obstacles have you faced with LinksManager?

JL: One obstacle has been maintaining customer support in a fast and efficient manner as we grow. LinksManager staff are all web users, and we know what top notch customer service is. We set our service goals high and work hard to achieve them. This is one of the reasons that 75% of LinksManager staff are Customer Support Representatives.

WA: Do you see LinksManager being around in the next three years?

If so, in what capacity?

JL: Swapping links with related sites is a great long term solution for building quality traffic to a website. This ideal has been around long before “search engine optimization” or “link popularity” were part of the internet marketing vernacular. As long as there are quality websites out there that want a low cost, long term solution for building relevant traffic, LinksManager will be around to serve them.

WA: Any new developments we can look forward to from CNVI?

JL: CNVI recently launched FindANewsletter.com, a fr3e website where people can search for websites that offer both free and paid newsletters and ezines. We also launched WebWorkExchange.com, a free website where web professionals can “swap” skills to get their projects complete. Both of these sites have been warmly received, and are growing fast.

On the LinksManager front, we are adding more support staff to our team in 2004, and we are continuing to develop exciting new LinksManager features to further improve our customers’ links pages and websites.

WA: Thanks for your time Joel, we feel that we and our readers have learned a bit on the importance of customer service with a growing company.

JL: You’re very welcome.

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