Hosted Marketing Pages (HMP) - Are They Worth It?

Definition: Hosted marketing pages (HMP) aka presell pages are unique pages purchased on relevant, non-competitive web sites that allow links within the content, aka contextual linking "under the radar."

Hosted marketing pages are becoming a popular trend and can be very valuable if you can land your content and links on the right web sites. It's essential to spend some time analyzing each potential prospect and know what to look for using a basic approach.

In this post I'll highlight some tips on how to research, rate, and make the offer on hosted marketing pages. Search engines despise this as much as any kind of link building, but if you can purchase HMP's effectively enough, you'll almost always receive a huge ROI and quite possibly not have to pay for the recurring monthly fees associated with presell pages. Here's how you can get started...

Step 1 - Finding Hosted Marketing Pages Under the Radar

• Spend several hours searching for sites within your market but in vertical niches. Competitors will not ever likely link to you, and that isn't the goal anyway. So, go to Dmoz and Yahoo Directory and traverse up and down categories related to your niche.
• Find sites that preferable have been around for 4 or more years. The older the better. If you can score presell pages on sites that are from the mid-to-late 90's, with good aged backlinks, you're set.
• List all sites that have misc. static pages that are preferably not more than one or two levels down from the root domain. Something like "greenwidgets.com/folder/page.html" would work well. Also make sure that you try to spot relevancy and relationships between pages, navigation or column interlinking, and where you're likely going to fit into those pages if the site allows you to purchase a page. Proximity is everything. If you can get a couple of paragraphs with a few links on an existing and relevant page, say at the bottom of said page, that would be a huge score because the page has already been crawled and you don't have to start with a new page added to the site.

Step 2 - Contacting Hosted Marketing Page Prospects

• First, already have several unique pages/articles written with at least 3 or 4 links pointing back to your web site. It's best to be ready to go when/if the prospect(s) say yes.
• Always offer a flat one-time dollar amount to the prospect(s). A good rule of thumb is to initially offer around $50 for permanent placement on the presell page. But if the site is older and has lots of "link juice" already, you might easily go up into the $200+ range for the page. To some, this is a steep price to pay, but it requires a good knowledge of understanding the worth related to the site's age, PR, backlinks, and relevancy, current linking structure, and even assessing their site's longevity for worth.
• Email potential presell page sites and keep the message short. Add a more enticing subject like, "Yoursite.com - We'd like to pay for a page on your site" instead of a subject like, "We want to advertise with "Sitename" here" or similar.
• Keep the offer at a one-time fee if at all possible. If they persist for an ongoing fee each month, then offer up a discount scenario for long term and billing once every 6 months or even better, once a year. You'd be surprised how many people forget to charge you twelve months later, especially without a good reminder system in place. If they're smart, they'd simply set up a Papal recurring (or auto-renewal) payment method. But you're obviously not required to mention that when ou buy a presell page ;-)

Hosted marketing pages are definitely worth the effort and time considering the kinds of gems you can often locate if your a top notch researcher. We've had several clients bump up to first page of Google with terms in very competitive markets from just a dozen or so presell pages strategically purchased and placed on 4+ year old web sites. Two clients now make roughly $25k+ monthly extra for approximately one week of writing, researching, and a monthly spend of $1200-1600 to maintain the HMP's. I don't think anyone would disagree with spending that to make $25k/mo. any day of the week, would you?

The next post will be specifically on sites you can use for hosted marketing pages and which offer the best deals. It's always good to find prospects on your own and under the radar though. If you can have someone research and correspond with potential presell prospects, it's well worth it to go outside of the hosted marketing page sites to find your own.

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