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The Link Building Cookbook was made to be the internet’s most popular free link building strategy guide, and I would say it has achieved that status long ago.
In doing so, I am proud to announce the first user-submitted link building tip from a reader of mine named Ben, who owns and operates a site called EveryCall.us.
The site Ben offered me to share with you is called AmericanTowns.com. Rather than explaining it myself, I will partially quote Ben’s email (with a few minor spelling edits to the quote).
[...] it’s a website which has local sites for each city. I’ve used this website in the past to announce site launches, new features, [and it has] driven quite a bit of traffic for my efforts.
What interests me most though is that you can write an announcement or press release and then use the American Towns Press Services to have them send your story or release to local news outlets to possibly get picked up. This lead to an enormous amount of press for a past project [Postacrime.com/press] and eventually a 5 minute interview on Fox News [...] Not to mention your stories on American Towns will generate backlinks and some traffic…
In my opinion, this is an excellent tip because of how detailed AmericanTowns is. The site will not only help you build backlinks for any posts you might write, but it also has the potential of sending you targeted LOCAL traffic, as well as the possibility of local offline exposure. Just taking a quick glance at their site, and by navigating to my city it looks like they are looking for anyone who blogs in the city and they get a free link, so head on over to your city and see if the writers are doing anything similar.
AmericanTowns just received a $3.3 million dollar investment, so you can assume they are here to stay.
AmericanTowns looks like a great free way to promote your website, so head on over there and enjoy Ben’s free website marketing strategy. If you are looking to learn more about AmericanTowns, you can read their about page. If you have a lot of luck with them, be sure to give me an update as I would love to see how AmericanTowns has helped your site.
Is this also applicable to people active outside the US?
I don’t think so, sorry.
An info-driven Craigslist…very cool
Awesome, thanks for the tip. It’s not actually accurate for my hometown at all, but I’ll send over my link.
I posted something on AmericanTowns.com and only noticed now that none of those press release/article pages that you write are spidered by google. They aren’t indexed at all, so I’m not sure how those backlinks are effective even if they’re dofollow.
Care to ellaborate on where you posted your articles/press releases? I saw a dofollow backlink offer from the /minneapolis local blog around the time I made this post.
Definitely a US only trick, but a good one nevertheless. One needs to look for similar services in other geographic locations. Anybody got suggestions for other parts of the world?