Linkworth - An Innovation Story

We all like to think of ourselves as innovators. And, in one way or another, we all are. From the guy who invented the pet rock to the guy who invented the Internet, we all add value to the people and things around us. When we invent something new or evolve an existing idea, we really can make a difference in peoples’ lives.

Here’s an excellent quote from an interview with Jeff Bezos, the mad genius behind Amazon.com:

“If you’re competitor focused, you tend to slack off when your benchmarks say that you’re the best. But if your focus is on customers, you keep improving.” (i)

Real change happens when companies focus on people instead of profits. In mid 2003 I was having a candid chat with a long-time friend of mine, Ron Wicker. If you don’t know Ron, he’s the CEO of LinkWorth, LLC., a search marketing and optimization firm based in Dallas, Texas. We were discussing the importance of search engines and trying to figure out how one could achieve lasting visibility. I remember Ron and I going to town on the dry erase board in his office. When we were done with our brainstorming session we were quite satisfied with all of the ideas we came up with. We had come up with a great way to approach search optimization strategy for our Web sites. The board was peppered with scribbles, lines, and illegible text. Had you transposed it onto a football game, it would have looked like something John Madden does during a replay-confusing to an onlooker, but makes total sense to the guy who wrote it.

We were looking for a way to boost our visibility in the “free” search results pages. We knew all about paying for our traffic. Any Jack can bring traffic to his site (or her for you Jills out there) in as little as an hour. But we didn’t want to stay slaves to Yahoo, MSN, Miva and the other cost-per-click (CPC) behemoths whose prices don’t go anywhere but up as competitors supersaturate Internet markets.

We wanted to break the top listings for FREE!

Naturally, one of the driving factors was the possibility of additional revenue to our monthly income. On the flip side of that coin we also spent a lot of time discussing the benefits our customers received from the products and services we were offering.

We knew all about back links and the variety of available methods for acquiring them. We’d mapped out how our sites should be structured, keyword phrases to use and how we would go about acquiring our back links. I was happily using the link exchange programs, email-to-email exchanges, link bidding sites and even SEO professionals who brokered the deals, always making sure to meticulously track my link building campaigns in an Excel spreadsheet.

Several of my own websites were beginning to make serious strides in the search engines, but the spreadsheet had become unmanageable. It got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with who I sent links to, who sent them to me, how much money someone was paying for advertising their links on my site, or how much I was supposed to send my SEO as payment. It was now late 2003/early 2004, Google’s Florida Update had come and gone, and I was still rocking on our company’s search strategy. Great, but I had lost complete control of the back-end management of the project. I voiced this concern to Ron and asked if he had any ideas.

Boy, did he.

Ron opened his trusty dry erase board, where the scribbles from our meeting five months earlier were now replaced with very cohesive arrows and blocks, as well as some fluffy cloud-looking things for good measure. This wasn’t Madden anymore. This was something new. This was a serious plan!

Ron asked me, “How much is your link worth?” He then went on to tell me about a new application he was building. I eagerly listened as he told me what the application would do for SEO and how it would benefit anyone and everyone. I was salivating.

“You have to let me beta this, dude!” I exclaimed. Then I quickly added, “Also, if you go public please let me buy some IPO shares. Thanks!”

The system he was building would give people who wanted to move up the search engines a way to interface with other webmasters who had space on their websites. In its most basic form, the system would allow one person to place a textually relative hyperlink on a third-party website and point it to any page on their own website.

While the concept itself was not new, the innovation lay in the user interface, now dubbed ‘The Control Center’.

Many SEO professionals were manually managing their campaigns, and undoubtedly they were just as disorganized as I was.

When LinkWorth finally launched a few months later, I was uber-excited! Ron gave me the heads up on the coming launch of the site.

To this day I make it a point to tell everyone who asks me about LinkWorth that I am user number seven:

1. Because it’s one of my lucky numbers.
2. Because I am truly honored to have been one of the first people that Ron let know about his new concept.
3. Because I love being part of the grassroots of any new movement that might change the world, especially if it’s online marketing related!

Several months later, as Linkworth began to take off, Ron brought on a close friend of ours named Matt Stoddart to help him take the company to the next level. This, in itself, was an innovation.

Since I’ve known Ron and Matt, they’ve been customer service oriented people. Twelve years ago, the three of us were waiting tables together, and we did so for several years. Not because we had to, but because we loved the experience. We loved our coworkers, we loved our customers, and we loved working with each other. It truly was the good times.

We’ve remained close friends with each other since our ‘waiting tables at Pappadeux’s and partying until the break of dawn’ days ended.

It only made sense that Ron brought Matt on board as his Senior Vice President of Sales at LinkWorth. Not only is Matt one of the sincerest, most people-oriented individuals I know, he also brings with him a solid resume of sales and marketing innovation from the many years he spent as a head honcho at a major IT recruiting firm.

After Matt hit Linkworth, the team literally exploded. They added pros like Mitzi and Enrique, both of whom have some serious SEO knowledge, to their SEO team.

LinkWorth’s technical team? They’re off-the-hook, yo! Seriously, Neo (Tom) and Juan(Juan) are ingenious. You want to talk about thinking outside of the box? There is no box for these guys. Unless of course you’re talking about a freakin’ tesseract. And finally, a shout out to Theresa, who keeps all of us Linkworth partners paid and happy. (Meet the entire Linkworth team here.)

LinkWorth began to release products that were light years ahead of their competition. It took the market nearly twelve months to catch up with LinkWorth ’s original Control Panel beta launch.

In addition to LinkAds (the original text link advertising solution devised by LinkWorth’s mad genius), they introduced rotating ads (known as LinkMura and LinkSura).

Over the last several years, the company has launched even more organic search and direct traffic solutions to their product roster.

LinkInTxt, their newest product, takes text link advertising above and beyond the humdrum Google AdWords sphere. User generated feedback at Linkworth and within the webmaster community is the driving force behind LinkInTxt. Users demanded more relevancy than traditional text links — and once again, Linkworth delivered in 30 minutes or less like an All The Meats from Domino’s! LinkInTxt is literally the Grand Poobah of text link advertising. (No, I am not kidding.) Rather than just being placed in a header, left menu bar or footer, the LinkInTxt advertisement is placed directly within the content of a page. If you have SEO experience, I’m sure you can see the value that this sort of in-link technology can have for your website.

Linkworth doesn’t stop either. Since their original launch in 2004, they’ve added over ten products to their suite of SEO/SEM solutions, and I assure you they’re always developing more.

In fact, WeWriteIt, Ink. recently partnered with LinkWorth to help deliver high impact, highly optimized content to their user base of 22,000 websites. You may have already come across LinkWorth’s LinkArt, LinkPress and LinkBB products. These are the next evolution of promotional tools for online SEO/SEM professionals so get ready. Linkworth is one of the first companies to bring them to you.

Rather than a one to two line testimonial, I wanted to provide everyone in the online community some real insight into who these people are, where they came from and where they’re going. It’s often difficult to determine the right action plan to take when you’re running a small business. If you’re looking for SEO services, then hopefully this story will help you to choose Linkworth as part of your SEO/SEM service provider team. I’ve known these guys for a long time and I can personally attest to what this company can do for your business. They’ve done wonders for ours! And, if you happen to want to check them out, be sure to click this here affiliate link!

Thanks for reading. Don’t be a stranger and make sure to bookmark this website or get the RSS Feed.

All the best ,
Mark Holy

Director of Operations

WeWriteIt, Ink.

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