Its a terrific idea. Over time, in one form or another, I’ve “tipped” those that have been of great help.

This is a formal way to do it, and its nominal for most folks.

Of additional comment, Mike’s ideas make enormous sense. Predominately let the tippers see how much money and volume can be made by the recipients.

One last comment, relative to something Donna referenced at the top; amongts links and traffic to some business sites, I have a couple of links that happen to be no-follow for various reasons. They were no-follow long before the recent issues with no-follow.

Two in particular are the best traffic generators to my site(s) after direct and major SE traffic. One of the link sources is totally on topic. One is very on-topic–but somewhat less on topic than the other.

Both generate more traffic than 2ndary SE’s such as Ask or AOL. Both generate not only traffic but conversions with the totally on topic link doing better than the second (expected).

I’d go for highly relevant no-follow links any day of the week.

It looks to be highly valuable, especially for blogs that are regularly helpful. The whole thing makes loads of sense and to reiterate Mike’s comments make lots of sense especially as it relates to spreading the info on the value to tippers and others interested in adding Scratchback.

Thanks for all the comments.

As I said before, there’s so many things we want to do, but only enough time in the day to do some of them. So right now we’re prioritizing and focusing on one or two main things.

Great idea though, and definitely something we will do.

Check out the buy page, we updated it a bit with a friendlier graphic/explanation. It’s a start.

Reading Lea’s comment is what gave it to me (thanks Lea! ). Customizable, brandable, landing pages. Allow people to do some simple modifications to their own landing pages with a logo and approved sales pitch. I’m thinking all you would really need would be a very simple interface consisting of a place to put in a logo url and a textarea for the custom text. The landing page you have now heavily emphasizes “tipping”, whereas on professional blogs I think “cheap advertising” might actually be a better plug. Either way, it would allow each publisher a little more control and say in what their audience sees when clicking on the links.

For instance, I have a “What’s this?” link underneath the widget on Bad Neighborhood which leads to a page explaining what the widget is for, but far more people click on the actual widget itself than do the explanation link. I have a hunch that if the landing page had my logo and a slant towards the advertising value of the “tip” then there could very well be a better conversion ratio.

I am still not sure the cost is the holdback, as much as not knowing how it will effect my readers to see yet another (misunderstood or questionable) sidget staring them in the face.

I guess I need to really get a better understanding first, and that has certainly started with this great post of yours. Since this thing is for 99% of people I think I will send this link out to my entire readership.

Again, thanks for the insight, and…

Merry Christmas!

And theres a ‘get your own’ link that takes me through to a signup page. I may not like a hard sell, but this seems ridiculously far the other way – shouldn’t you tell me what I am signing up for?
I think you need to revamp the overall navigation on that page (if not the site – I haven’t looked through it to thoroughly yet) to target it to ‘new visitor who doesn’t know what scratchback is’

What Michael says about the widget itself makes sense, too

Hope it helps!

Basically, I paid a buck, and got maybe two or three clicks.
However, my link is still there on the page, so there’s more to come.

I’ve just paid five bucks on this blog and we’ll see how it goes.
(5 bucks is expensive though)

I have been meaning to go back and check out more of MR SEo’s podcasts but you know how busy we get and forget.

But when I saw his link here, I go Oh Yeah I forgot about that and clicked the link.

And in the meantime clicked a couple more and bookmarked your site as a good resource .

Thanks