YouDoLink.com, 20 Minutes of Fame or a Waste of Time
Sunday, July 19th, 2009Have you ever visited a website where you were skeptical about it’s usefulness? I recently visited a site, youdolink.com, that I initially thought should belong to this category. Youdolink.com a free self-promotion service that guarantees at least 20 minutes of fame on their website. Here’s how it works:
After you enter your website address and description, your link will appear in position #20 on their “Hall of fame”. As other users enter their website information, your link will move up on the list until it reaches the #1 position. Youdolink.com guarantees that your link will remain in each position for at least 1 minute (20 minutes of fame).
First thought: In order for this service to be of any use, the website itself would have to get a lot of traffic. If no traffic, then it’s a bad idea.
As I looked around on the site, I noticed that the top 5 most sites (and number of visites) were displayed in the sidebar of the “Hall of Fame”. The top 2 sites had over 30,000 hits (and site #3 had nearly 30,000 hits). While this is a modest amount of traffic, it is traffic nonetheless.
I clicked on their twitter link and found that they also tweet the link of the website in position #1 whenever it changes. They have nearly 300 followers. Not a tremendous amount, but when they grow, they may be effective way to promote a new site.
I decided to test YouDoLink.com’s current effectiveness. I entered the name of my company website (www.intriguingminds.com). I used Google Analytics to track the number of hits to my site during my “20 minutes of fame”. After 12 hours, my link had moved to position #10, but I only had 1 visit to my site.
Well, I got my 20 minutes of something, but it wasn’t fame.