LinkXL Cloned by Text Link Ads Inlinks Service

I guess the cliché “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” fits well here. But I was shocked to see a large venture capital firm like Lake Capital /MediaWhiz (who owns Text Link Ads) do a near clone of our website LinkXL with their inlinks service – we must be doing something right if one of the big Internet Marketing players is jumping in our market .

Good or bad, they have deep pockets so they will get the word out about the power of text links in natural content and more people will learn about the type of advertising that we created at LinkXL.I am not surprised it took this long for a copycat to come along because creating a service that can place natural text links in existing content is not an easy thing to do so it takes someone with money and knowledge of the industry to clone a service like LinkXL offers.

If you look at both sites, it is amazing how closely they modeled their service to LinkXL. Of course there are differences, but these differences are at the presentation level – (i.e. two or four cup holders)

What amazes me most is the number of webmasters that think the new Text Link Ad venture “InLinks” is something new when we have been up and running successfully for nearly two years (open to the public since April 07 and before that in private beta since late January 07). We have had LinkXL booth at SES and PubCon over the past few years and I have spoken for 3 straight years at PubCon WebmasterWorld conferences and have always focused on the power of links in content and LinkXL.

This might be because MediaWhiz owns ReviewMe which allowed them to flood the blogosphere with paid posts that mostly all say the same thing. This is another topic for another blog post, but can’t bloggers think for themselves anymore and research what they post about even if they are getting payola to write about a website/product?

BTW: A few nice (cup holder) differences with LinkXL;

• Our service works with all types of websites, not just blogs,
• we offer the option to buyers and sellers to make their text links nofollow,
• we let publishers set their pricing, and
• we have a large 3 million page inventory built up over almost two years.

Here is our CrunchBase profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/linkxl-com

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: LinkXL, text links

Category: Internet Marketing, Linkage