Rand’s post about his possible ‘link bait consulting’ service got me thinking:

Seeing all this in advance and taking into account the lessons of the
past, it may be wise to jump ahead 24-30 months and simply offer
linkbait services only to those who are ready and
financially/organizationally ready to make this leap. My initial
thoughts are that services would cost from $75-$150K and we’d only take
3-4 projects like this per year.

Is anyone else offering link baiting as a service? It seems like the type of thing that would be hard to ‘price’, as good link bait can be a 2000 word article, or a sexy AJAX app, and anything in between… there’s no one-size-fits all. I searched for "buzz marketing" and "viral marketing" (loose synonyms) in Google to see what comes up (if they can rank, they must be decent, right?).

Buzzmarketing.com services – "Whether it involves PR, events, stunts, remnant TV, or the Internet…we take responsibility", but couldn’t get pricing info
Buzz Marketing Group – appears to specialize in market research, no pricing info
Buzzoodle – appear to specialize in strategy and tracking, again, no pricing info
DMC – appears to do the ‘implentation’, you guessed it, no pricing info available (hey guys, why don’t you all read Jakob Nielsen once in a while)
Viral & Buzz Marketing Association – pretty extensive list of firms who do this

I suspect buying buzz marketing services is a lot like buying PR services — there are a few good firms, a lot of pretty terrible ones, and you never know what kind of ROI you’re going to get.

I got to give props to Rand to showing his pricing. Yeah, it ain’t "cheap"  if you have a "what can I get for a hundred bucks" mentality, but, from a value-based perspective, if you can get 500k of links out of 100k worth of link baiting, well…

So does anyone have tips for buzz marketing / link baiting services? Who is doing this? And what do they typically pay?

I am guilty of it and so is my friend Andy Hagans.  I am going to wake him up with this post though and we both will do a better job of getting some original linking news up on this site again.  In the meantime I have to link out to a couple new interviews I stumbled through recently.

I did one for Brad Fallon’s SEO RADIO, here.  Brad Fallon is one of the most underrated seo’s in the world.  How this guy is not bribed into the seo conference circuit is a mystery to me.  Check out Brad’s blog when you can.

If interviews that are rated 3/5 stars are your thing, check out the interview I did at IT Conversations.  3/5 is no complement from the listeners but I’ll take it because it was nice being able to sneak on such a high quality site.

Hagans come back soon before our rss subs go in reverse…

We couldn’t resist giving www.text-link-ads.com a new "web 2.0" design.  The design is the handy work of the talented Chris Pearson.  Take a peak for yourself and let us know what you think of the new look!