AmericanTowns – Free Website Marketing

May 18, 2008 by
Filed under: General 

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.

Comments

8 Comments on AmericanTowns – Free Website Marketing

  1. Torsten on Sun, 18th May 2008 5:31 am

    2. Is this also applicable to people active outside the US?

  2. Collin LaHay on Sun, 18th May 2008 12:35 pm

    3. I don’t think so, sorry.

  3. Dennis Edell on Mon, 19th May 2008 3:50 pm

    4. An info-driven Craigslist…very cool :-)

  4. Stefanie on Fri, 23rd May 2008 11:17 am

    5. Awesome, thanks for the tip. It’s not actually accurate for my hometown at all, but I’ll send over my link.

  5. Rick on Fri, 30th May 2008 3:45 pm

    6. 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.

  6. Collin LaHay on Fri, 30th May 2008 4:01 pm

    7. 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.

  7. Internet Age on Tue, 22nd Jul 2008 1:04 am

    8. 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?

  8. joe doakes on Wed, 4th Mar 2009 7:07 pm

    9. Do you know who owns American Towns? Is is connected with the McClatchy chain?

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