I have shipped a lot of small sites. The part that never got easier was the week after launch, when the product worked and almost nobody could find it.
Content helps. So does a clear page title. What still moves a new domain, slowly, is a link from somewhere else that already has an audience. Finding those places is tedious. A directory wants a profile. A forum wants a real account. A "write for us" page wants a draft, a bio, and a wait. Half of the lists you download are dead, paid, or nofollow in a way the seller forgot to mention.
I kept the useful ones in a spreadsheet. Then I had more than one site, and the spreadsheet became a matrix I did not want to maintain. That is why I built LinkTRX.
A shared list, not a link farm
LinkTRX is a catalog of places where you can publish a link: directories, profiles, communities, blogs, and similar sites. Each record says what the site is, how you publish there, whether it costs money, and, when we have one, an example of a link that already went live.
You do not buy a blob of links. You unlock a write-up, then you go do the work yourself: register, fill the form, leave the comment, or send the email. When you are done, you paste the URL of the page that now points at you. The point is a record you can finish, skip, or come back to. It is not a promise that Google will rank you.
Submissions are reviewed by hand before they show up for everyone else. That does not make every opportunity good. It does mean someone looked at it before it landed in the list.
The exchange is 1 for 1
The catalog is not a free dump, and it is not a subscription wall either.
- Unlocking one backlink record costs 1 credit.
- Submitting a record that passes review earns 1 credit.
- Registered users also get one free record each day.
Share a place you already use, and you can open a place someone else found. Invite a friend and you both get credits. You can buy credits if you would rather not contribute, but the loop is meant to work without that.
I like this better than a paid list that goes stale. The people using the catalog are the ones restocking it.
Your sites times your saved resources
The part I actually use every week is the workbench.
You add the sites you own. You save the resources you want to use. The workbench crosses the two lists and gives you one task per pair. Three sites and twenty resources is sixty tasks. That sounds worse than a spreadsheet until you try to remember which pair you already finished.
Each task can go one of three ways:
- You publish, then paste the URL of your live link.
- You mark it skipped, with a reason, when the site is dead, paid, or a bad fit.
- You temporarily skip it. It drops to the bottom of the queue so you can clear the easy ones first, and you can bring it back later.
The header on that page shows the arithmetic on purpose. The total is not a vanity metric. It is "my sites" times "resources I saved."
There is also a Chrome extension for the repetitive forms. It is optional. The workbench is enough if you would rather click through yourself.
A second page for what to write about
Publishing a link still needs a sentence, a profile, or a short post. Discover trends is a separate page of rising search phrases, with a Chinese gloss when we have one, so you can see what people are typing before you draft that post. It is not required for the exchange. It is there for the same job: get a new site in front of people who are already looking.
If you want to try it
- Open linktrx.com and sign in. Google is the fast path.
- Take the daily free record, or submit one you already trust.
- Add your site under the workbench and save a few resources.
- Refresh tasks, publish on the easiest one, and paste the URL back.
If a record is wrong, skip it and say why. That note is more useful than a silent fail.
I am not going to tell you this replaces writing, or that a pile of directory links will carry a thin site. It will not. It will stop you from losing the one afternoon you were willing to spend on distribution. That afternoon is usually the one that gets skipped.
If you maintain your own list of places that still accept a link, I would rather have it in the catalog than in another private spreadsheet. Submit it. Someone else is staring at an empty launch week too.
Top comments (1)
skip-with-a-reason is the bit spreadsheets never had. half my old lists were dead links nobody flagged