Heard of Pageflakes? It’s one of the many personalized start page options out there. It’s also a handy little tool for Internet marketers.

You can set up a Pageflakes account faster than Al Franken can yell “recount”. You’ll get a personalized subdomain that you can rig up to meet your needs. Pageflakes rests on an Ajax platform and customization is super simple.

“That’s nifty,” you may be saying, “but what do I need with a start page?”

You don’t. Well, maybe you do, but that’s not why I’m recommending Pageflakes. There’s nothing wrong with Pageflakes as a start page, but it’s value to marketers lies elsewhere. The benefits you can glean from Pageflakes might not match with every Internet marketing model, but it can be very useful for many people–particularly those who do the “bum marketing” thing or who rely on similar models of article marketing.

New site indexing. If you add a link to your newest site on Pageflakes, you’ll be shocked just how quickly the search engines will find it. I’ve had a completely new blog discovered and indexed within a few hours, using nothing but Pageflakes as an incoming link source.

A cheap backlink. On top of indexing, there’s probably some marginal value to the backlink. All of the Pageflakes links are dofollow. Now, that’s not a big deal when you’re focusing on building an authority site, but it does have a bigger advantage in terms of article marketing. That’s where Pageflakes really shines, so let’s give it it’s own little paragraph.

Article backlinks. We all know that a properly-targeted article published at EzineArticles or elsewhere can find a home toward the top of the SERPs. Unfortunately, these articles are often evicted from the Google penthouse in a matter of days. The best way to keep them up top? Get some links to the articles themselves. Pageflakes makes that insanely easy–and completely hands-off. That’s because you can set up your Pageflakes page to publish the RSS feeds of your choice. Plug in your EzineArticles author feed, your GoArticles feed, your Squidoo feeds and any other RSS action you’d like. Every time you publish something new. your Pageflakes page is going to update accordingly. Set it up once and you can get an incoming link to every single article you every publish without lifting a finger. When you consider the fact that very, very few article marketers bother building links to their articles, every little bit can make a disproportionate difference.

Flexibility. Although you can’t use Pageflakes as an advertising platform without running afoul of their TOS, the pages are easy to set up and you have a ton of different options. You can actually turn a Pageflakes account into a halfway decent site that isn’t that much uglier than a Squidoo lens or Hubpages hub. There are comment tools, an easy-to-use little blogging feature, etc. There are real limitations (it was designed just to create start pages, after all), but there are opportunities to use the free virtual real estate to your advantage in a number of ways.

Cost. Free. Can’t beat that with a stick. And there isn’t much of an opportunity cost in terms of time expenditure. The whole set-up process is painless and intuitive.

Embarrassing confession: I use Pageflakes with several different marketing projects under various pen names. I have not, however, started using it with respect to Big Red Notebook. It is on the to-do list.