Brandpoint.com

[eric_since1910.com]

We were recently made aware of brandpoint.com.  They produce content and guarantee the content will be listed on a minimum of 600 websites that they have agreements with.  This includes the LA times and others.  Their agreements state that the content will be a maximum of 2 clicks from the homepage and will live for 1-2 years before getting archived.

Does anyone know anything about this company and/or the overall strategy of achieving links on these highly trafficked/valued sites through articles?

Will these links help us or is this similiar to sending out a press release on prweb where you get picked up by benzinga and other sites automatically and the value for the links isn't really there?

Any insight you can provide about this company and or strategy would be most appreciated.

[KeriMorgret]

It looks like they used to be ARAcontent and recently changed their name. http://minnov8.com/2011/03/14/minnesota-brand-storyteller-changes-name-to-brandpoint/

I don't have any experience with them, but am including the above link and note in case people have experience with ARAcontent they can add, since the name change was just a few months ago.

[akaigotchi]

I do not have any experience with this company, BUT what really makes me listen up is that they GUARANTEE you to get into LA Times. I may lack a bit of knowledge here (hopefully not) but I believe that this most definitely means advertising / advertorials. Within a journalistic context I don't think they can guarantee you to get onto a site as they would have to bribe somebody to write stuff that he/she is probably not interested in. I have a partnership with a very big European PR company and even though one of Europe's most favourable skiing resorts is one of their clients they still do not get everything they write about that resort published, whether it is small or big magazines / sites. I'd be very suspicious about that point and ask them how exactly they manage to get you there...

If they come up with advertorials / advertising, I think you should be aware of that fact that Google doesn't like followed links within an advertising context. They most often see it as a bought link (which it is in fact) and ranking could go south for your page.

[Envoke-Marketing]

I have used Brandpoint about 10 times. Yes, they used to be called ARA content. Their writers are professional journalists and they write very high quality articles on your behalf after you fill out a questionnaire and do a phone interview with them. Their background is in creating "mat" articles for community newspaper editors to pick stories to run for the purpose of having more content to run ads around. They're still in that business but they also now offer this online service.

The articles do appear on about 600 sites, and yes it is advertorial. The sites are almost entirely local TV station websites, but also some online newspapers, such as the newly added LA times.

I ran a test last year, linking to a very specific term to see if it helped rank a page for a specific term and it did have a noticeable impact. You won't get any traffic from the links, but the links do show up in opensiteexplorer as good quality backlinks to your site.

I've wondered if Google will devalue or penalize this now with the Panda and Penguin, but I haven't seen a problem with it yet.