You want exposure. You want backlinks. What can you, as a budding Internet entrepreneur, do? Maybe it’s time to set up some linkbait. Maybe you need to run a hot contest. Maybe you should order a ReviewMe review or purchase some text links. Or maybe, just maybe, you could bid your way to the top by getting listed on Mike Lovatt’s Zorg Links.

The Paid Web Directory

There are many free web directories on the web that you can use to get some free linkbacks to your site, but if you’re looking for added exposure and a greater audience, these may not exactly be the most effective. With Zorg Links, everyone has to pay in order to get themselves listed on the site. There’s no set rate, so what this means is that you have to outbid your competitors. At the time that I wrote this review, the top site has a bid of $380, getting featured on the front page as well as on the site-wide sidebar.

These bids are not time-restricted. By this I mean that if you fork out $381 to oust the current top dog, you get that linkback for the life of the site. It’s permanent and will not ever be removed… that is, until someone else puts in a bid for $382.

Zorg Links ranks high in Google for key terms like “bidding directory” and “bidding web directory”. The site has a good custom design which got voted the best of its kind in a recent poll on Digital Point forums. The site features many custom mods and additional content like free themes and a blog to make it more unique, provide additional resources for visitors.

A Directory of Directories?

In the sidebar, you’ll notice that all submitted listings have been placed in different categories. They’ve got categories for everything from Advertisement to Webmaster Tools and everything in between. Some categories are more popular than others and nowhere is this more evident than the categories for paid directories. Of the about 150 (or so) sites listed, 52 are in Directories [Bidding] and 40 are in Directories [Paid].

As a matter of fact, when you check out the front page of this bidding web directory, all fifteen of the top links are other web directories. Am I the only one who finds this terribly ironic?

Capitalize on the Cheap

While getting listed near the top in the directories categories can get pretty expensive, such is not the case with many of the other categories. The competition just isn’t there, so if you’re looking for a web directory with some prime real estate for your pets or shopping related site, you can pull it off with Zorg Links for less than $10. For Webmaster Tools, there is currently just a single link for a buck. And that’s a lifetime link. I’m sure we’ve got some webmasters out there that can afford to bid $2 for a link.

More Than a Linkback

In addition to getting a linkback from a PR5 site (the developers predict a PR6 with the next update, when and if that ever comes), each submitted link — you can buy one here — gets its own dedicated page on the site, which has custom META keywords and description, and SEO friendly URLs to help them rank high in the search engines. On this page, you see an Alexa graph and information regarding the number of backlinks, pages indexed, and the site’s PageRank. Below this is a series of buttons for you to submit/save that site (not its page on Zorg Links) to a range of social bookmarking services like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, and StumbleUpon.

Will You Really Get More Traffic?

I’m not sure. I’m no expert on the effectiveness of using a web directory to promote your site. Depending on your site’s content, there are probably cheaper ways to get some quality linkbacks too. Order up some paid posts on PayPerPost or ReviewMe, for example. Hold a contest wherein people have to link back to your site using a specific anchor text (”make money online” anyone?).

That said, because of the categorization and the bidding system, Zorg Links might be able to provide you with targeted traffic referrals, specifically from webmasters in the same or similar niche as you. If the bids haven’t gone too high, then this could be an inexpensive source of traffic.

UPDATE: Between the time that I started writing the review to the time that I put it up on the blog, several new submissions have come into Zorg Links, bumping the top link leader to $1,460. Mike Lovatt may have a winner on his hands.