Forum Moderators: martinibuster
In another thread, I asked about the wisdom of picking up a few dot-infos on the free 1 year handout. Got some mixed answers, but in the end, decided to get a few.
If it doesn't go anywhere in a year, I can let the domain expire without any loss. If it does take, then I sure won't mind spending the bucks to renew it.
Anyhoo. I picked up a few, and grabbed a half dozen extras to give away as "stocking stuffers" to a few friends/family.
While I was running through the registrations, a friend IMed and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he asked if I could get HIM a freebie.
I shrugged and figured why not. Even aranged for free hosting. (it takes all of five minutes). I half jokingly told him that the only condition was that he had to provide a few prominent links to my sites.
He agreed. Not only that, but he told a few mutual acquaintances about it...
And I've since handed off a half dozen domains (just this afternoon), and am going to drop some e-mails to others asking if they want in.
Now, I know all these people in an online sense fairly well. NONE of the are webmasters, but easily have the brains to set up a ten or fifteen page website about whatever their hobby or time-killer happens to be. And I know they'll be honest enough about it to provide the links I asked for.
And it smells pretty sweet in a lot of ways. Even if all these sites never get much traffic, they'll get some traffic from friends and family, and that all has a potential to follow links to me.
Also, I get to have sites with prominent advertising for me at no cost, and I don't have to do the normal work associated with setting up dummy domains on my own. Because I'm not going to code it, or have anything to do with content, there's no way that the SE bots are gonna see this as link spam.
AND, it's built up a lot of goodwill in a very short period of time. It's pushed three people I know who've been "meaning" to get around to setting up a domain over the edge, and they're highly grateful for it.
So my point?
If you have access to the free dot-info domains, give this a try. At worst, it's cheap Xmas gifts.
At best, it's free Page Rank.
But, it looks like it's running out at the end of the month, so click or miss.
This is similar to an idea a friend had about building free websites for charitable organizations, in exchange for a backlink or two. These tend to get good inbounds and therefore decent pagerank - which in turn is passed on to him.
Not sure if it is worth the time investment though, it might be more cost effective to buy links or spend that time doing link exchanges.
One thing I would suggest is making sure all those .infos are hosted on different (class-c) IP's. Otherwise google may very well identify it as link spam.
