One of the hardest things in online marketing is probably to get your online business of the ground and let it run on autopilot.
Although I’ve done it before, it is still a big challenge for me whenever I start a new website.
Today, I’m going to show you how a new website put a simple twist to an old concept and achieve extraordinary results in less than 3 months.
The website that I’m talking about is Qassia.com.
Qassia is a new website started in January 2008. But today, it ranks 4,762 in Alexa ranking and has more than 4000 webpages listed in Google.
So what is Qassia?
Why are people crazy about it?
More importantly, what are the marketing mechanisms that are making people crazy about it?
Let’s see……
If I were to break down Qassia into its simplest form, Qassia is nothing more than a combination of an article directory and a link directory. (For newbies, some examples of article directories are ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com, and some examples of link directories are DMOZ and Yahoo!Directory.)
If you were to start another article directory or link directory, chances are you are going to fail because the idea is no longer novel and there are thousands of them out there.
Think about this: If you were to start an article directory, how are you going to find thousands of people to submit articles to your directory, especially when you are just starting.
But Qassia has done it. Qassia is hardly 3 months old, yet thousands of people are happily sending their unique articles to Qassia and eagerly promoting it to other online marketers.
The secret lies in its credit system.
Qassia positions itself as a free link directory that gives you unlimited one-way backlinks to your website for free. Why do webmasters like one-way backlinks? Well, backlinks are good for two reasons: 1) for direct traffic, and 2) for better search engine ranking.
The catch is in order to achieve better ranking for your backlinks, you will have to earn credits.
The more credits you earn, the higher your website ranks in their link directory, which translates to more web traffic to you (both direct traffic and search engine traffic).
See the twist in the system? That’s why people are working hard to submit articles to Qassia.
Similar to all other successful websites, Qassia also has a referral system. It’s the same old story. The more referrals you have, the more credits you earn and the higher your website ranks.
Does this concept work?
Check out its Alexa ranking. It’s moving up superbly fast. This means the website is receiving lots of traffic.
If you do a search on Google.com by typing in site:www.qassia.com, you can see that it already has more than 4000 pages ranked in the search engines. Most of these are articles submitted by its members.
Whether this system is sustainable or not is too early to conclude. But it is set for a great start and I believe there is a great deal we can learn from this website, especially its marketing strategies.
This website is currently in closed beta and everything is kept secret to the public (I’m not sure if it’s another well-planned marketing strategy). There is no way you can signup Qassia unless you are referred by an existing member.
If you want to signup this website and see for yourself some other brilliant marketing strategies they’ve used, you can sign up through this invite-only link: http://kohym.qassia.com/.
Hi there readers,
Thanks for the update on this, Kenneth – it’s interesting to read the stats for Qassia; I joined up several weeks back and have referred a couple of people, submitted a few articles and rated several.
My one (critical) comment is that it’s my perception that some articles (or “intel” as they are known on the site) are written purely to write SOMETHING… without considering whether the conten will actually be of any use to other readers. But hopefully the reader-based reviews will be a good enough quality-control system.
Another thing to be aware of: you don’t (yet?) have a choice as to the type of “intel” you’re presented with to read & review, so as a UK resident, reading about Charlotte in the US is of little interest to me, for example :-)
Still, I like the idea as another source of article exposure; I think it will be heavily dependant on reviewers of articles to ensure that the quality is kept high.
Join Qassia now while it’s still in Beta, at
Regards
Tracey
I agree Qassia is an excelent source for getting backlinks and traffic. I was lucky enough to get invited, Ive created a couple of intels and started to see some flow of traffic from them even though my intels have not been rated as popular as yet.
There are 2 benefits to Qassia in my mind …
One is to learn from their marketing strategies as Ken has pointed out.
The second is to benefit form their rapid rise while it is in its early stages. If you look at say, ezinearticles.com there are only a few people with thousands of articles … and those few people starte early and they are the ones who get the most benefit form that directory.
Also note that it is much easier to get noticed when Qassia is really small compared to when it grows luch larger and your competition grows. For example there were people who got significant marketing benefit from the likes of MySpace 2-3 years ago! It is not so easy now … sure it is still possible the “friends requests” is nowhere near as effective today as it was back then.
I am now recieving lots of such requests form my own friends joining lots of other such netwroks and I’m now ignoring them coz I just can’t keep up with all thes registration (a condition of accepting a friends request) and then subsequent requests that follow.
As always, “the early bird gets the worm”.
Sami
I launched this site (aahaa.net) about 4 weeks ago and have achieved the following results…
Top search queries
The top 20 queries in which your site appeared,
and the percentage of the top 20 queries
represented by each search.
# % Query Position
1 78% yaoo answers 8
2 6% marketing pls 5
3 6% “niche market examples” 6
4 6% “benefits of managed internet marketing” 10
5 6% hosting vergleich
I attribute this to using the Google webmaster tools which are free and available to all with a google account.
The most important thing is to have Google Verify your site.
This is achieved by placing some code on your home page and once done can be verified immediately.
I am on the number one page at Google for..
“benefits of managed internet marketing”
and “niche market examples”
I just wanted to show you what is possible without spending huge ammounts on promotion.
Hoping this will be of some help.
Regards,
Rob Watson
Hi there
I agree with everything the previous two comentors have said.
I would also like to say that Article Msrketing is still one of the best methods of getting your websites indexed and syndicated.
I have my own Article site which accepts articles and all of the articles submitted to my site are also syndicated through over 100 other Article sites so it is worthwile Article Marketing if you do it the easy way…do it via a syndicated site. Submitting to hundreds of sites using article submitters is still a tedious opperation, so Syndication is the way to go.
you can register at my site and submit articles there for free
http://www.tss-articles.com
Qassia is an exciting site so far. Concept is new and fresh. Should be a good source for getting backlinks and traffic. I was invited to join several months ago. I’ve created some ‘INTELS’ and see some flow of traffic from them even though they have not been rated yet.
Article marketing is new to me. I just write articles for my blogs but it never occurred to me this way. Thanks.
I guess quassia is gone, or the link is bad??
If some one needs expert view concerning running a blog afterward i
suggest him/her to go to see this webpage, Keep up the nice job.
Fantastic site. Lots of helpful information here.
I am sending it to several friends ans also sharing in delicious.
And naturally, thank you for your sweat!
I hardly leave a response, but i did a few searching and wound up here How to get your
online business off the ground. And I actually do have a couple of questions for you if you don’t mind. Is it simply me or does it seem like a few of these remarks look like they are coming from brain dead folks? :-P And, if you are posting at other places, I’d like to
follow everything fresh you have to post. Would you list of
the complete urls of your shared pages like your
Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
I just wished to just take a couple of moments and let you
know that I enjoyed the blog post. I really don’t think many people know how many hours of effort that gets put into creating a good web site. I’m aware that this
will be kind of random however it bugs me sometimes.
Anyhow good blog.
wonderful insight. Really enjoyed looking over this blog.
Keep up the good work and to everyone keep on tweeting!
Lots of useful information here.
Just got a pen and paper and reading your old blog posts. Seems promising.