Buy links

PR 5 low traffic page = 15 (

I received 14.11 today, 15.00 - PayPal fees for a PR 5 text link ad arranged by buyalink.net. For sellers, I would use both buyalink.net and Linkworth.com - neither one has been bringing in a lot of business, but each has brought in some. Of course you can also try reaching the advertisers directly through Adwords...

For buyers, however, I can not recommend buyalink.net - you never learn what site or what page your link is on and it's difficult to set up a permanent situation. You buy a link for one month, but how do you renew?

Using Adwords to sell text links

My new Adwords ad goes something like this:

Advertise sports/tickets
270 text links on NFL Giants blog.
$75 US dollars/month
www.nfl-giants.com

The price is there so that only people who are interested in spending money click on the ad. I don't want a high CTR.

Here's my landing page: Advertise your sports or ticket site. Related post: Signing up for Adwords.

Home page link sold

Linkworth.com has reported that the error I experienced yesterday was due to some code being updated. Sure enough, today everything worked and I sold one home page ad for 15.00 a month. Of course I'll only end up with 10.50/month, but that's something.

Warning about text link brokerage

Here's a warning about textlinkbrokerage. I won't pretend that the thread I link to is not very one sided and that there's probably another side out there somewhere...

You might think I'm being lazy since I'm not doing the research for you, and you might be right. But it is 1:30 AM here in Korea, and I have to teach tomorrow morning...

LinkWorth good & bad

So I got an email from LinkWorth that someone wants to advertise on my Giants blog. It said to login into your account, click on pending links, and approve or deny the link. Sounds good.

But, when I click on "review pending links" all I get is an error message. I've submitted a help ticket, and I'll let you know if they resolve this problem and if I ever get a chance to see my offer.

Clixgalore Affiliate program

I joined
Clixgalore a few days ago because I was planning to write a review of WSNlinks. I've already earned 5.00 from one sale of WSN links. It's taken me over a year to get ten bucks from Amazon and 35 or so from Commision Junction so this is a promising start. I would suggest trying them out. They've got some interesting advertisers. In addition to the WSNlinks, I'm also trying one of their ads out on my network marketing blog.

My only criticism would be that the site is not easy enough to use. For example I wanted to find another WSN Links ad so I did a search. The search turned up WSN Links, but then I couldn't find a link to the affiliate links. I guess I have to to browse through all the links in its category until I find it which is somewhat irritating, especially since it doesn't say what category WSN Links is in (I'm guessing "computer").

Signing up for Adwords

I experimented with Overture, but now plan to try Adwords. This time I'm going to see if I can find some people who want to buy text links from me. Anyway here's a guide to signing up. It's easy.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/WizardChooseAudience?newaccount=true

1. Choose areas where people will see your ads.
2. Create the ad. Don't take too long or it will time out and make you start over.
3. Choose keywords.
4. Set up your CPC/dialy spending limit.
5. Set up an account (email and password).
6. Verify your email.
7. Give Google money to activate your ads.

Adwords to market affiliate products

Here are some practical guidelines for using Adwords to promote affiliate products. Guidelines are given for how much money to spend testing new Adwords campaigns, as well as how long to test new ads:

If a particular keyword gets 100 impressions with no click throughs, that is a good sign to erase it. If a particular keyword has over 100 impressions with a click through rate (CTR) of less than 0.5%, erase it. Likewise, if your entire test product has received 100 click throughs and no sales, it's time to end the promotion of that product.

I can't agree with some of the advice. For example a low CTR (less than 0.5%) is not bad if the few visitors who click are buyers. I certainly agree that 100 clicks and no sales would be time to give up!

There's also advice on when to stop testing and begin a campaign in earnest. Basically, if the ratio of "how much you're paying to promote the product verses how much you've made on the product is 0.75 or less, keep promoting the product." In other words, you should be seeing a 25% profit margin (or greater).

Further advice goes something like this: If you can generate more than one sale of the product and still have a good cost to revenue ration, you can stop testing and create a new campaign just for that product.

Personally, I'd like to see more than two sales before creating a new campaign. I'm not a scientist, but I would guess that from a scientifc perspective, two sales might be statistically insignificant.

Search engine honesty

In an article about a paid search study (in which 15 librarians exmained popular searc engine results fro 6 months), search engines like Yahoo! are being called on to disclose which search results are sponsored and which are natural. Currently, users must click on the "about this page" link to find out which results are paid (through Overture). Google is given credit for clearly differentiating between paid and natural search results.

Do you want a high CTR?

Here's an article that I completely agree with by Kevin Gold. It discusses (after some elementary definitions) that optimizing your PPC ads for higher CTR is a waste of money. You don't want to pay for surfers, you want to pay for visitors who are likely to spend some money.

Who's buying text links?

You might be wondering why this blog hasn't been more active. The fact is that there hasn't been much to talk about. I advertised some text links on the V7n forums, but haven't received any offers. I did advertise on these same forums a few months ago. That time I had lots of responses, lots of negotiating, lots of promises, and no action.

It seems to me that selling text links is very difficult. Even when I was offering PR 6 links on a high traffic page for $12/month I wasn't generating a lot of interest. It makes sense really. Everyone I know has a few PR 5 and PR 6 websites, and they are willing to sell text link ads. The supply is simply much much higher than the demand.

As soon as I can set aside an hour or two, I'm going to write to webmasters who are advertising their sites on Google for my keywords. At least I know the right people will be getting the word. The 40 people who have read my post on V7n may be uninterested in buying links (seems like everyone over there is asking questions about selling links, not buying) and if they are interested in buying, they may not have a related site. I think directly contacting the people advertising for my keywords is the way to go.