Has anyone tried to get a decent paid listing on a shopping review or lifestyle niche lately? When you visit these sites, they are very eager to show you they are #1 according to [insert favorite internet rating site] or that they rank #3 for some nice keywords. This in turn should guarantee that, after being charged sometimes for very high amounts of money, you will get niche-focused traffic from them, after all they have categories with niche content and lots of visitors. When you see these listings don’t really work, you ask for a direct link because sometimes these pages actually rank well for an interesting search phrase (why not?, let’s get at least some value for the money). Sure, you’ll get the direct link if you upgrade to a premium listing which of course means even more money on top of what you already payed. When you get down to it, if a paid listing is on a page that ranks well, is it worth that much extra money to get a direct link? Should we tolerate this kind of rip off tactics?

It will take a personal recommendation from a fellow online marketer I actually know to get me to pay for these listings anymore. Fortunately, there are alternatives to getting ripped off by greedy webmasters…

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