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Come vote in my poll on v7n's forums: What do you do when you sell all your link space?
I have a number of sites with no ad space left and advertisers asking for ad space. I tend to build another site in the same niche to accommodate overflow, but I think this is doing it the hard way. It would be easier to concentrate on the one site and just jack up prices. I have something against raising prices so I never do it...
I was recently able to get Mike Sewell from v7n contextual to answer a few questions about their program:
Buy-links.com: What makes v7n contextual a better option (for advertisers) than less expensive imitators?
Mike: The thing that separates us from our imitators is the quality of the blogs in our system. We screen each blog thoroughly before allowing them into the network. We also side-step the ethical issues involved with paid blog publishing. We don’t require our publishers to review the sites they are linking to, just to include their chosen anchor text in a blog relevant to the topic. This makes a win-win situation for all involved.
Buy-links.com: What are some of the better link buying strategies you've seen (what are the most effective techniques for buying v7n contextual links)?
Mike: A good link buying strategy is one that appears natural, increases domain authority and targets your selected keywords. The most effective use of contextual links is to buy a wide variety of links aimed not only at your top domain but also at deeper links such as product pages, etc. A mix of keyword and non-keyword anchors should be used, this will increase domain authority and focus search results on your keywords without triggering any alerts from search algorithms.
Buy-links.com: Where do you see contextual link buying in realtion to directory listings, reciprocal links, and other link building techniqes?
Mike: Contextual links are a unique and powerful compliment to the other more common forms of getting links. They are not a replacement for these other, more common techniques, but used in combination with them they can provide a much bigger boost to search rankings than using those other methods alone.
For te record, I've always been happy with v7n contextual links (buying and selling).
I recently came across another service where webmasters can get some link love from blogs in return for a little money through this Indiana web design company. They were kind enough to answer a few questions about their service:
Buy-links.com: What separates Dewitts' contextual link program from V7n contextual, Payperpost, reviewme, etc.?
Dewitts Media: Well from other pay per post services our links run at a consistent $20 dollars per link, and are permanent. We focus on high quality blog publishers, so therefore all blog publishers are required a pr3+ blog.
Therefore the blog is more established.
Buy-links.com: Are bloggers required to maintin links permanently or are they free to remove links after a certain time?
Dewitts Media: Yes all blog publishers are required to keep link on there site. Take a moment to view this agreement.
Buy-links.com: Are bloggers required to identify which blog entries are paid? Is any disclosure required?
Dewitts Media: Question answered above
Buy-links.com: Why should webmasters advertise with Dewitts instead of another service?
Dewitts Media: Why because the links are permanent, all links are pr3+, our links are higher quality and better price. Plus all links are unique the same link will never be posted on the same blog, plus we keep the relevancy up.
Buy-links.com: Are bloggers free to use several "get paid to blog" programs when they sign up for Dewiits?
Dewitts Media: Yes, why not?
That's that. My next thing is going to be to spend $200 with several different companies (200 each) to see if I can reach some conclusions about what each delivers for the money.
Several months ago I decided to try to make a little extra money using payperpost. I registered my health blog and here we are 6 months (or so) later. I'm $29 richer (minus PayPal fees) and have had to put up with a lot of crap from Payperpost.
I must say that heir support is abysmal. This is true for both publishers and advertisers by the way since i have one of each account with them. But this blog entry is for publishers; bloggers trying to make money should have better options.
Anyway, if you actually get a response from support it's usually fairly helpful. However, I only seem to get a response about half the time - that's pretty pathetic in any business.
Recently I did a post for a wopping $10 (and mine is a high traffic PR 4 blog). The post was rejected because they didn't see my disclosure (where I say that some blog entries are paid). I sent them the link to my about page which has the terms.
Not good enough. Disclosure has to be on its own page and part of main navigation. Whatever, it's my blog but I can follow their rules a little so I make a new page titled disclosure. I email them and ask for confirmation that I'm following their stupid rules.
No answer. A week later the opportunity vanishes from my payperpost dashboard. It doesn't show up as rejected or pending. It's as if I never blogged it all. Meanwhile the advertiser got a ton of free traffic and I'm a chump sending visitors off my site for free.
I sent a follow up to payperpost support to find out why the thing vanished without getting approved or rejected and to find out if I am in compliance with their disclosure requirements.
No response.
Now if you have a PR 0 blog that gets no traffic, Payperpost is for you. If you have better than PR 3 go to v7n contextual.
Unless this is your first time here, you know that Linkworth is doing pretty well for me. Well they just got a whole lot better for bloggers:
LinkInTxt – Keyword Selling
The first product is called “LinkInTxt”. LinkInTxt is a way for partners to sell individual keywords/phrases within their existing content. You can sell one instance of a keyword or you can sell as many as you want, just as long as the keyword exists in your content. Currently, you dictate what pages will offer LinkInTxt from within your LinkWorth account. To setup your account follow these steps:
LinkPost – Paid Blog Reviews
The second product is called “LinkPost”. LinkPost allows partners to be paid for reviewing products and/or services from an advertiser. To qualify for this service, you must list your blog/site into our system. Once advertisers select your blog for a review, you can review their requirements and product to be written about. At that point, you can either select
I mentioned that a $250 review I paid for was written pretty badly and they said some mean (and untrue) things about one of my blogs...
But I've also sold 3 $120 reviews on ReviewMe so I don't mind recommending them. Just call it a qualified recommendation. When you do advertise see if you can get a discount on your first order.
What reviewme really needs is a way for advertisers to rate publishers. I'd love to warn all the other advertisers to think twice before spending $250 (actually they raised the price to $280) for a review that might not pay any attention to the site...
I got 20 through payperpost setting no PR or alexa limits and paying 5 bucks per entry. I ended up with about 120 visitors one day and abput 10 oe 20 extra on a few other days.
I got around 10 through the digitalpoint.com forums. These were more expensive from $10-50 each and didn't bring in any more traffic. I also spent more time on these talking to webmasters and whatnot. They tended to link to a couple pages of my site. The links may have been more convincing to Google (or the keywords may have been less competitive as we're talking about a different site) since referrals from Google took a big jump on this second site.
In all, I had to work harder for the more expensive ones I got from the webmaster forum and there's no clear indication that they were more effective.
We all know that links in content are good. We know that one way links are good. We know that links which bring traffic to your site are good. We know how to get these types of links: blogs.
Webmasters and SEOs have some great tools for getting text links from blogs. Here are three in my personal order of preference:
V7n contextual - 20 bucks a link. The blogger writes whatever they want. You choose several anchor text combinations, links are "life of site". Links are not identified as ads. Blogs are screened before given assignments. Advertisers can't choose mimimum traffic or PR but the blogs tend to range from PR 3 to PR 5. Bloggers can say whatever they want about your site. The v7n guys are responsive to advertiser feedback.
Payperpost - Price varies. If you want a minimum PR or Alexa, you're going to pay. I don't particularly like their interface, but after a little fooling around you can get bloggers linking to you pretty easily. Plus you have loads of choices. Blogs are only required to maintain the link for 30 days but most leave them up forever. Sometimes payperpsot people respond to advertiser feedback, sometimes they ignore you.
Reviewme - Tends to be expensive but you can get higher quality blogs linking to you. There's no requirement to leave the links up as far as I can tell. There's no qulaity control so the review of your site might be completely wrong. One of my sites was treated very unfairly during on a review that cost me $250.
Reviewme.com is owned by Patrick Gavin, of text-link-ads.com. The names are a bit similar and I was confused a bit at first, but text-link-ads.com is not to be confused with Jarrod Hunt's textlinkbrokers.com (in the comments on that post I link to he says he feels sorry for me because I'm too poor to pay for his overpriced links - I don't know why I feel like answering him now after all this time - actually I did comment on this once - but the fact is I haven't run out of better deals yet. You won't either if you read this blog).
So actually I've never used text-link-ads.com as Linkworth has been fine for me selling ad space (I really don't have much unsold space) and I do my buying personally, without a broker.
Anyway, reviewme.com has some popular blogs that charge a good bit of money to review your site. I chose three blogs and my total came to $700.00. Thanks to the discount, I only had to pay 350.00.
If you're curious about the markup here, the blogger gets half and reviewme gets half. However with the "trial" discount code I guess the blogger gets everything and reviewme.com gets nothing. Obviously that can't last forever so if you're going to try reviewme.com, now's the time. Pick your blogs, type in "trial", update your shopping cart, and pay.
Just know that bloggers don't have to review your blog. And they certainly seem to take their sweet time in deciding, at least with the three blogs I chose. So it may be a few days before you find out of your site is even getting reviewed.
I think this smart link building service is worth a look as a different way to buy links in content than the one I wrote about last time, another way to buy links.
You get 20 short articles written and published on 20 different sites (spread over 20 different IPs) rnaging from PR 4 to PR 6 (though the page your article and links goes on would be lesser PR - I'm not sure how many clicks away from the homepage we're talking about). This comes to about $75 an article.
Each article contains about 10 links (you choose - they recommend 10 but I would vary it some - 7-20 works for me). Say you go with 10, each link cost you $7.50 as you end up with 200 links.
This is probably the best way I know of to get lots of deep links to lots of your content pages fast.
While I applaud transparency - they link to the 20 sites that where they put these cutom articles - it does pose some danger. Right now it would be very simple for someone at Google to stumble across the page and find out exactly which 20 sites are selling links and who is buying. Google might decide to penalize the sites involved (consider Matt Cutts recent attack on another link building service). Considering that this is marketed as a way to get links, not a way to get human visits, I do think buyers should consider this.
I don't know if I would call this reducing the risk or spreading it around, but it seems like you can involve a few sites when you purchase this service. So I might have 10 articles focused on one site and its content, 5 articles focused on another site, and then 5 articles that talk about my network of 4 sites and link to parts of all 4. Don't quote me on that though. If you plan something similar talk to them before you buy and make sure I haven't misinterpreted.
I'm back from vacation and have been busy buying links. I've also tried a new service from v7n where you buy links in context for $20 each. Now I tried it out and tell you about that in a moment, but first let me tell you what I liked right away.
Remember a while back I wrote about a big ripoff where textlinkbrokers charged $25 for a link but only paid website owners $5 for the link? Well that's about what the link was worth in my opinion since they went on links pages, but what I liked even worse was the 500% markup.
V7n provides better links because they go on content pages instead of links pages. And it's fair since publishers get $10 while buyers pay $20. So I tried it. I went for a pretty rare keyword to kind of test them and a few days later I got an email with the URL to a blog entry about my site.
It was on a blog in the right niche with PR but I can't show you exactly because of the NDA. Anyway, the service works. It will get you links in real content. I'm not sure if this replaces the 500 links package I wrote about a while back or if that's still available.
In October, I wrote a couple of entries about how the text link marketplace might change with new US laws restricting online gambling. However I ahve heard from several Americans that many poker sites are still allowing US players as normal:
I dont bet on sports but i play online poker everyday. I still dont get why sites like PartyPoker had to shut down, while PokerStars and Full Tilt are still standing. Not that it matters, because i'm doing very well on the stars right now.
I copied this post from my Giants football message board. Has anyone got more information on these laws or has anyone felt the effects?
Recently I started paying $150/month to advertise my web directory on Search Engine Guide. I got good traffic, but sales didn't increase. I felt that taking the $150 a month and spending it on permanent links would be more effective. I ahve my doubts because many other directories advertise there but I'm back to looking for cheap links on webmaster forums, even though most of them don't have the quality I'm looking for.
By the way, I haven't been posting much recently because I've been acquiring links for my sites and for some live action roleplaying games.
It looks like webmasters really are going start losing big linkbuyers as online casinos start losing US customers.
Unfortunately, on Friday October 13th President Bush is expected to sign into law the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The legislation is designed to restrict Americans from being able to fund their online poker accounts and in doing so to prevent Americans from participating in one of their national past times...Paradise Poker, as part of the SportingBet PLC group of companies, is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange and is obligated to act in accordance with the new legislation.
Casino sites are famous for buying links, but the ones targeting US customers may ahve a lot less interest in advertising soon thanks to new US legislation:
"The precise effect of the legislation is unclear," 888 Holdings said in a statement. "However, this legislation indicates Congressional intent to treat Internet gaming, whether sports-related or not, as illegal."
The legislation, if enacted, "will make it practically impossible to provide U.S. residents with access to its real money poker and other real money gaming sites," PartyGaming said. "If the president signs the act into law, the company will suspend all real money gaming business with U.S. residents."
Obviously webmasters who make money through affiliate programs will also be hit hard if this legislation mostly ends online gambling in the US. European companies who do business in Euros should not be affected much.
I got some spam today from a webmaster excited that his site's PR is going up. Now he can raise prices:
Thank you for your continued support to NewDesignWorld.com where one of the websites you have listed is: http://www.travel-plan-idea.com/archives/002931.htmlIt amazes me that people still get excited about PR updates and that they base their prices on PR. Hasn't it proved to be mostly useless over the past year?
As you may or may not be aware, Google has begun their page rank update, and fortunately NewDesignWorld.com has begun to see an increase to a Page Rank 5.This is will lead to advertising prices increasing on our website, however we have a special offer for all of our clients.
Until Google update all their datacenters with the new PR, we will offer all clients the chance to buy advertisng at the current lower monthly rate shown below.
Header Sitewide Link: $17.5
Footer Sitewide Link: $12.5
Sitewide Banner Ad: $30
Homepage Link : $10
Category Link: $5
I've noticed that bigger companies / sites will use text link brokers like Linkworth when buying links, but that individulas will buy from other individuals. Small webmasters like myself spend their time bargain hunting and don't want to give a broker 30% or more.
But what kinds of links can you buy on webmaster forums like Digital Point? It seems to me that the ones that sell are the cheap ones, not the quality ones. You've got people selling cheap PR 7 homepage links. However, link placement is poor (buried on one side of the footer) and the reason links are cheap is because there are so many links on the page.
I wonder if webmasters are going about this the right way, buying the cheapest possible links.
Well I'm back in action. It took me longer than I thought becase my not so great host powweb was bought out by the even worse web host Endurance. They really screwed up my site hosted with them (not this one) a week ago and they still haven't fixed it. In fact they've stopped talking to me altogether. Endurance = evil. Stay away from them or any host they own (they've acquired a few).
Anyway, back to blogging. My friend's search directory is offering permanent links for only 10 bucks each but this is a limited time offer (I don't know how limited, maybe he'll comment here and let us know). But anyway, you can pay 10 bucks now or more later. I know which one is better for me so you'll see my sites in Frog Engine...
I have little patience for webmasters who try to waste my time, and frustratingly many do. Many people submit to my web directory, my paid inclusion web directory, looking for free links. If you like reading and laughing at stupid webmasters, enjoy. The email subject was Listing at http://www.jtrotta.com/Home/Furniture:
The idiot wasting my time wrote: Hello, do I know you? What is this bill for? Thanks.My reply: Just like the subject of the email says, this is for a listing at http://www.jtrotta.com/Home/Furniture. Listings that are not paid for expire from the directory in a few days but links that are paid for remain in the directory permanently.
The idiot: you want $35 to be listed there? It doesnt even have pr?
Me: The cost is 35.90 because Jtrotta.com is an exclusive web directory. Currently there are only two sites listed in http://www.jtrotta.com/Home/Furniture because yours has been deleted. This way I can provide as much value as possible to webmasters who have paid for their listings.
Good luck with your site!
Maybe not for sites that will never make money, or sites that rely on word of mouth rather than links (yes, it's possible, although word of mouth does end up generating a few links - mostly from myspace it seems) but take my new Healthspan Blog which I promoted with an article and a few directory links.
Cost-wise, an article might cost 5-10 dollars and then I paid 30 dollars for submission to 250 article directories. The directory listings are more like 40 bucks each although the range is 40 - 300/year (Yahoo).
Results clearly favor the directories. Within a few days, all the directory listing showed up in backlinks searches. It took a month for me to see three of the 250 article backlinks show up in Yahoo results.
The reason i say the directory listings seem to be worth it is because a few minutes of your time and 150 bucks could get you 4 quality backlinks real fast.
Linkworth's new rotating ads have brought some more business my way in the form of homepage links on both my stock market investing blog and my travel blog. I estimate that Linkworth is now bringing in as much text link ad income as my own personal efforst have been able to. I really like that because I'm no longer 100% dependant on Adsense. Anyway, if you don't already list your sites or advertise there, it's worth checking out: Linkworth.
I want to advertise my new health site. There are still only a few places where you can buy permanent text link ads and paid inclusion directories are still the most common. So I'm promoting my new healthspan blog in a few:
Jtrotta - health
Umdum - health & fitness - aging
Bluefind - health & fitness - general health
Sevenseek - health - education
Naturally, my own directory doesn't cost me anything, but I'll let you know what kind of investment this turns out to be. I'm new at promoting health sites, so comments are welcome.
So if you're looking for 500 links from different IPs, here's the serious 2,000 dollar package that builds up links over three months.
Because of some crazy PR being handed out to new sites and even pages on established sites, you have to be very careful if you're using PR to indicate value or quality.
For example, no one would call www.steelers12thman.com/ a valuable page or even quality link partner, at least not because of its backlinks. However it is PR 6. Thanks to the latest PR update, we see lots of PR 6 pages that are worth about 2.00/month to a smart advertiser...
This is going to be a brief overview of text link advertising options on Cheetah Find web directory. I've read the advertising page and spoken with the owner so the information should gives us an idea of the text link marketplace I'm always trying to define.
If you're cheap, you can get a directory lising in exchange for a reciprocal link. for $9.95 (one time payment) you get a link at the top of the category and of course no need to link back.
Now for the big spenders, run of site text link advertising. Your text link ad will appear on top left corner of each page of the site for $100/month. With almost 40,000 pages indexed, that's a lot of links.
The one I'm most interested in is the $20 per month plan where you can sponsor one of the sections of Cheetah Find. Your link will appear in the "Recommended Links" section of your chosen category. Anchor text can be up to 100 characters and can include 2 links to your site. I'm interested in the more expensive keyword sections like business and money for my stock blog. I'm also interested in the travel section for my travel blog. If I go for it, I'll be sure to let you know how good a value the ad space is.
There's an interesting thread on the value of buying cheap one way links over at DP. In short, some people say they are worthless because they are low quality links and some are not all that permanent. Then people like me (My DP username is "Jim") say that we don't expect much for 3 bucks a link, cheaper than any paid inclusion directory and at least we get some links that don't come from directory pages. They may not be valuable, but what do yo expect for 3 bucks a link?
Webmasters with several sites in the same niche can save a fortune in ad space (if they are willing to spend). I first realized this a few weeks ago when an advertiser with 5 travel sites contacted me about a package deal advertising all his sites on numerous pages of 3 of my sites.
As an individual webmaster, when someone says "I'm going to buy thousands of dollars worth of text link ads from you" and asks for a deal I make a deal!
So I started taking adavantage of the same principle. Someone I've done business with before was advertising links on his travel site for something like 5.00/month in the footer. With my three travel sites, I was able to negotiate a lower price for the footer ads or get my ads placed under the main naviagtion at no extra cost. I chose the better placement.
Anyway, my point is that owning several sites in the same niche gives you more bargaining power when it comes to buying ad space.
Most website owners really need to read a book or two about marketing/selling. Consider this conversation with a travel webmaster responding to my thread on Digital Point about advertising my travel writing contest:
What you think about that http://www.... Wait your answer.It looks like a travel site. What kind of traffic do you get and where can I have my ad placed?
I am 65,505 on Alexa now
I need to know how many uniques/day you get and where my ads would be placed.
I send you PM before, cant understand why you not received. I have 150-200 unique day, PR 2,3,4,5 Pages, Alexa = 65000. Wait your answer
Note that I still don't know where my ad would be placed. The publisher has not given me one good reason to advertise with him. He doesn't mention good price, or anything else that would make him diffrerent from the 10,000,000 other low traffic travel web sites out there.
Anyway, if you have travel or writing related websites and can help me get the word out, do let me know. Just remember to tell me why I should spend my money advertising on your site...
I recently received a submission to http://www.jtrotta.com/Internet/Web-directories/Free-inclusion so I reviewed the site, approved it, and sent a paypal money request for 19.90.
I got an email: "Too expensive for PR 3 link. I am ready to pay 9.90." I explained that Jtrotta.com is somewhat exclusive. After all a page with 3 links on it is many times better in terms of link popularity than a page with 40 links on it.
Anyway this just goes to show you that people judge a link's value based on a page's Google PageRank and that at least one webmaster finds 19.90 too expensive for a permanent link on what is now a PR 3 page. Of course even if PR were very important (and in this case I think the number of outbound links has to be considered more important) it is transient, not a good way to measure the value of a permanent link since it is so volatile.
LinkWorth now has a new line of text link ads called "Rotating Keyword Ads". It is just another step in the right direction to help our advertisers better their online businesses and another product partners can offer on their websites. With Rotating Keyword Ads advertisers have the ability to provide a list of keywords, or anchor text phrases, that will be shown. Now one single text ad can be created with a list of keywords that will be rotated on each page view.
An article on www.culturedtravel.com that contains up to 10 links to your travel related site is up for sale here. See http://www.culturedtravel.com/travel-blog.php for an example.
There will be a maximum of 5 featured sites but I'm only auctioning one here and now. I'm kind of testing the market and the rest will be available after I've done some more link building and have more traffic. This is your chance to get in relatively cheap.
Each article gets a link from the "Featured Travel Sites" box on the homepage and from http://www.culturedtravel.com/travel-sites.php which is part of the main navigation (upper right corner).
I prefer annual paypal subscriptions and the price now is 50.00/year. Only travel related articles please although creative people can pm me their ideas. For example a ticket broker could write a travel to New York article with links to Yankees tickets, Giants tickets, broadway shows, etc. In other words if your links are embedded in a travel article then your site does NOT have to be a travel site.
I'm allowing advertisers to sponsor a page on my site. It works out well because they get their link on a related content page. Their link is the only outgoing link on the page and the page gets great link popularity since I link to it from every page of my site.
So for example on the footer of every page of my site is a link to http://eslgo.com/classes/advanced/hot-tub-health.html and on that page is a link to my sponsor.
When one of my sites recently went from PR 7 to PR 6 a webmaster who had been paying 45.00/month asked what the new price would be. I hadn't considered changing the price since the value of an ad on my homepage seemed the same or possibly higher.
Considering how infrequent PR updates occur, and how (in this case) PR can drop even when links are added, I wonder when we'll find a better way to measure link popularity.
New message from Linkworth:
The word is being passed around of possible new Google system checks for advertiser/sponsor links. It is being said that Google is looking for keywords on websites related to the selling of text ads. Rather than waiting around to see what happens, or if it is true, we feel it\'s in the best interest of all partners and advertisers to consider changing the titles used, alter locations of text link ads and separate ads. Let us explain:
Title Changes:
Most people use words like, SPONSORS, PARTNERS, FEATURED, ADVERTISERS, ADS and other synonymous terms related to advertisers. Our suggestion is to use \'different\' titles for these ads. Something like RELATED SITES, COOL SITES, RESOURCES, ALTERNATIVE LINKS and so on. As unique as you can make it the better.
Alter Locations:
Most partners are putting advertiser links in similar locations like the foot or side bars. A suggestion is to use unique locations for ad links like within content. Between paragraphs, put a left or right justified table and show LinkWorth advertisers within the body of your content. This would allow it to appear more natural and in unusual locations. Anything different from the norm will help your advertisers and keep them around.
Separate Text Ads:
For those partners who host a long list of text ads, consider separating the group into smaller groups and strategically place them throughout your content layout. Remember that the better visibility you provide the advertiser, the better chance they will stay for a long time. Differentiating advertisers from other advertisers is a super approach to make them very happy.
Linkworth has found another advertiser willing to pay 42.00/month for a homepage link on www.stock-market-idea.com. This leaves me with a fair price even after Linkworth takes its 30% commission.
This should bump up my Linkworth income to nearly (but not quite) 15% of total ad revenue, just below the deals I negotiate personally (about 20%) with Adsense bringing in the other 65%.
My auctions have finished. The directory listing went ridiculously cheap, but I'm sure the exposure for this site, my SEO blog, and the directory itself made it worthwhile.
I did sell a one month home page text link ad on www.eslgo.com, but surprisingly the winner did not opt for a PayPal subscription. Perhaps they are testing things out and will go for the subscription later...
I have 2 auctions up for text links at the moment. One for my directory at www.jtrotta.com and one for PR 7 links at eslgo.com.
Billboard ads are a new offering from LinkWorth.
What is a Billboard Link Ad? Think of it much like a billboard you see driving down the highway. The only difference is you will see this billboard on the information super highway. Our Billboard Link Ads are entire web pages dedicated solely to the advertiser and the content contained within that page is written by the advertiser themselves. Create one single billboard and place it on many partner websites or create a uniquely written billboard for each partner site and tailor it to fit on a particular partner website.The content on a billboard page can consist of simple html (no scripts or images are allowed) and text. The idea is to write an effective advertisement about your product or service that gets the entire point across and at the same time, it is making the link back to your site relevant. Within your content, link specific keywords to your homepage or to several pages (Maximum of five links to one domain) inside your website to create effective inbound linking. The billboard will be much more convincing to readers than a simple text link, helping increase traffic to your site and also creating a very strong link popularity campaign for your website.
I ahve several ticket brokers contacting me for text link ads and I thought I would share my low cost text link advertising solutions with you. I currently have three sites with ticket broker ads:
www.nfl-giants.com is a PR 5 site that sees several hundred unique visits/day depending on the season. I prefer sports tickets advertisements for this site. A homepage link is 20.00/month and will be placed under sponsors on the right side. Discounts are given to those who purchase multiple links: 2 links = 36.00/month 3 = 48.00/month 4 = 56.00/month 5 = 60.00 month
www.grungeforum.com is a PR 4 site. I acquired this site quite recently, and I expect the PR to increase. Traffic has been increasing steadily the past two weeks and is now averaging 136 uniques/daily. Home page links are 15.00/month while sitewide links are 20.00/month. Again discounts are available if you wish to buy multiple links.
www.eslgo.com/classes/listening/music is PR 4 and has numerous subpages like the PR5 www.eslgo.com/classes/ironlady.html. This is a high traffic site, but the traffic is international and may not be high quality for you. Text link ads will be 15.00/month with discounts available for multiple links and/or multiple pages. For example www.eslgo.com/classes/listening/music/the_voice_within has the index page and 4 subpages. One text link on each of these 5 pages is only 25.00/month.
Any combination of ads in which you spend 100.00/month or more entitles you to a free permanent link at www.jtrotta.com. After payment each month you get a free directory listing that never expires.
I got an email from Linkworth today; it seems that they ahve accidentally been paying some publishers twice and the amount they have overpaid will be deducted from future payments. I don't think I'm going to be affected because so far as I can tell I have never been overpaid.
I'm adding a new site to LinkWorth since they were able to find people paying over 40.00/month for home page links on a couple of my blogs. This one is my first, ESL go. It has a linkrank of 5 which is quite good (Google PR 7) and decent traffic (900 uniques/day) so I imagine I'll get some buyers. I just wonder how many I'll be able to approve since I want to stick to education related sites...
A recent comment left on letter to advertiser with expired ads: "That's why I prefer to handle selling my own advertising. The brokers just take to big a cut."
I do sometimes sell ads through the brokers. There are big buyers out there who don't contact small web site owners like myself directly. For example I am now making some money through Linkworth. I charge a higher price than I would from people delaing with me directly to cover most of their 30% commission. I currently have a hompage link at 42.00/month and another at 45.00/month (on two different high traffic PR 5 blogs) and everypage links on another PR 5 blog (300+ pages indexed and 500 uniques/day) getting 85.00/month. Even after Linkworth takes their 30% I'm doing OK.
Textlinkbrokers has a new thing where you can sell and buy permanent links in directories. I contacted them about both buying and selling. When you sell you get 5.00/link. When you buy you pay 25.00/link.
Do they really have to quintuple their money every time they sell a link? I mean how about providing some good value instead (like charging 10.00/link) they still dounle their money but the buyer gets a really good deal too.
Yes I know I'm not factoring in other their expenses (hosting, software, etc.), but seriously!
I was recently able to send this email to someone who bought 45.00 worth of permanent text link ads:
Just so you know, I have submitted NFL Giants to Site-sift web directory, Massive links web directory, and BigAll web directory in an effort to make your ads even more valuable.
Linkworth has a new thing where you can email support for advice on what to charge for text links. I got this advice about my Giants blog:
I would suggest your homepage price of $20 is a great deal. Your site run (all pages) link of $85 I would recommend lowering it to around $45 to $50. It appears there are only a few hundred pages indexed, so based on the number of pages, it would need to be a little lower in price.
The prices below are for text links and only travel related sites may take advantage of this offer. Contact jtrotta@gmail.com
www.travel-plan-idea.com PR 5 (I think a high 5 since it used to be 6), averaging 386 uniques/day
Any PR 4 blog entry: 18.00/permanent
Any PR 3 entry: 12.00/permanent
Any PR 2 entry: 7.00/permanent
homepage: 15.00/month
____________________________________
ESL go is PR 6 and averaging something like 900 uniques daily:
http://www.eslgo.com/classes/travel/ - 15.00/month
http://www.eslgo.com/classes/travel/cruise.html - 69.00/permanent
http://www.eslgo.com/classes/travel/rome.html - 69.00/permanent
Each of these sites is on a different IP with a different web host. With either of the monthly options, you have the option of paying for ten months and getting 2 free. Do this and you will also get a free blog entry (which you write) about your site. This may contain up to 5 links to different pages of your site.
Linkworth has found an every page advertiser for my NFL Giants blog. They're getting 85.00/month while I end up with just under 60.00 (not including PayPal fees). I'm pretty happy with this, as i should be since I set the price...
Here's an article on buying text links from sitepoint. The author argues that unrelated links don't help SERPs, but I see a lot of evidence to the contrary.
I like the reminder that text link ads won't work forever. The search engines want pure results, not the kind you can buy...
This is a different way of selling advertising space but bear with me and you'll be glad you did.
Choose a blog and find a blog entry you want a permanent link on:
My blogs taking on advertisers include ESL blog, which is currently getting about 280 uniques daily. NFL Giants is getting a bit over 240 uniques daily. My SEO blog is getting around 160 uniques daily.
A permanent text link advertisement will cost you only $18.00 on one of my PR 4 pages, a PR 3 is 12.00 and a PR 2 is 7.00. Double these prices for a banner ad and the banner must be hosted on your server.
To sweeten the deal even further, all the money I get from selling these ads will be used to buy directory listings or other link popularity enhancing things (permanent ads like the ones I'm selling for example). When the PR increases, your link stays up and you don't pay another cent.
To take advantage of this offer, you have to email me at jtrotta@gmail.com the URL(s) you're interested in advertising on, your web site's URL and the anchor text or banner you want displayed as well as your paypal ID. When I approve the ad I will send you a paypal invoice.
I will not be taking on adult sites, casino sites, link farms, affiliate sites, or any sites that I've seen spamming my blogs. Email jtrotta@gmail.com with any questions.
While I prefer selling monthly text link ads, I've never bought one. Rather I spend my money on directory listings. The idea of paying a one time fee is much more appealing than the idea of paying a monthly fee.
I wonder if we can create a niceh market by selling permanent links? I mean I have thousands of blog pages on the web. Why not sell permanent links (1 ad/entry) for some crazy cheap price like $5.00?
So I had been deciding about whether to accept advertising dollars from a casino site. I am taking the money. Someone reminded me that Google's own advice is not to worry about search engines. Well the only reason I was considering not selling the link was because I was afraid of search engine penalties.
Of course the other side of that is that instead of worrying about search engines you should worry about your users. I don't expect many of my users to notice or care about the link. The ones who are uniterested won't click, the ones who are will. If I get much negative feedback I'll drop the link and refund the money. Here's the email I sent to try and close the deal:
Having done my research, I agree that a search engine penalty is unlikely; I would like to publish your ad.You mentioned in a previous email that you needed to check out the site's keywords. The site is www.nfl-giants.com - The keywords would be NY, New York, NFL, Giants, blog, football but maybe "new" would be OK? Naturally the anchor text and description are up to you.
I mentioned previously that a homepage link would go on the right side column underneath the heading "other sites". However, if you decide to advertise on this page, I will create a new heading along the lines of "betting". Your link and the NFL online betting link would go under that category.
As you know this site is PR 5 - it is stable and has been PR 5 for a number of months. I have been adding it to some paid inclusion directories (sevenseek, uncoverthenet, and thisisouryear). I am confident that the PR 5 is in no danger of going down to 4.
The cost for the link and description would be $20.00/month (US) payable by paypal. To get started, send me your URL, anchor text (sorry, no bold), and description as well as one month's payment via paypal to "gumpersag@yahoo.com" (this is my paypal email).
If you'd like to lock in the 20.00/month you can pay for up to 6 months at a time. The advantage here would be that if the page increases to PR 6, you'll have locked in the 20.00/month price for a few more months.
I've been getting requests to sell links to Casino sites recently. You can see it in the comments of my last post, a sold link on a PR 5 low traffic page. I got another lead from my Adwords ad for selling text links. Probably from the same person. I got another email (sent to a different address) because I mentioned selling links on a forum.
I said I had no related sites so I could not sell a link to a Casino site. They replied that it was OK with them as many people like to gamble. I did a search on Google for "link casino site google" and a few other similar ones. In the top ten results were spammed blog entries with tons of casino links. In this case the links to casino sites were actually boosting the pages SERPS because otherwise they would not have contained the word "casino".
So obviously a site with casino related links (hundreds in some cases) is not penalized for a casino related search. There are numerous articles out there which claim you should not link to unrelated sites. Many calim you can.
I firmly brlieve you can get away with linking to unrelated sites, but casino sites may be considred adult or non-family friendly and may cause a linking site to be penalized where a link ot an unrelated family site would not be.
A little experiment. http://blogsearchengine.com/blog/index.php?p=33&c=1 is a blog entry from 10/15/2004 that has lots of comment spam dated 10/30/2004. It's title "blog linking and other fun sports". It's number one and two for a search - blog linking and other fun sports (I didn't use quotes). 1 and 2 for blog linking sports. #3 for blog linking. That's pretty good. Doesn't seem to be getting penalized for those one month old casino links (and there are a lot of them).
I'm going to check out this casino site and consider selling it a link. I already have an NFL betting link... I'll let you know what happens...
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?
My new Adwords ad goes something like this:
Advertise sports/ticketsThe price is there so that only people who are interested in spending money click on the ad. I don't want a high CTR.
270 text links on NFL Giants blog.
$75 US dollars/month
www.nfl-giants.com
Here's my landing page: Advertise your sports or ticket site. Related post: Signing up for Adwords.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I've decided to increase the prices for sponsors of my ESL site. I've been getting too many requests from sites that are after my PR, sites that my visitors are unlikely to be interested in. New prices for 12 months:
http://www.eslgo.com/ = $330
http://www.eslgo.com/classes.html = $265
http://www.eslgo.com/resources.html = $225
http://www.eslgo.com/resources/sa.html $185
http://www.eslgo.com/quizzes.html = $185
http://www.eslgo.com/classes/business/ = $140
http://www.eslgo.com/resources/ba.html = $140
My main page is PR 6. All these other pages are PR 5. The price variations come from traffic.
I recently signed up for LinkWorth. I registered my New York Giants blog, and am asking 15.00 for a homepage link and 75.00 for sitewide links. The blog is PR 5 (although LinkWorth has their own system for determining link popularity) and gets over 200 unique visitors/day. LinkWorth takes a 30% commission if they send any customers my way.
My blog seems to be the most reasonably priced sports site. I went through the links for sale and sites with less link popularity and less traffic than mine usually wanted 15.00 just for a sub page! If you're looking to buy text links, I would sign up and take a look, but shop around before you buy. I think a lot of webmasters are overestimating the value of their links.
Do you remember my link selling experience with buyalink.net? Well I was not terribly happy with the price, but the price has been raised:
Our new payment structure to sellers is now as follows: PR 4 Links - $5 per month PR 5 Links - $15 per month PR 6 Links - $50 per month PR 7 Links - $100 per month PR 8 Links - $200 per month These new prices apply to any new link purchases made from today.Naturally the prices have also increased fo buyers:
PR 4 Links - $10 eachAs you can see we're still looking at some healthy markups.
This will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 4, for a minimum of 1 month.
PR 5 Links - $30 each
This will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 5, for a minimum of 1 month.
PR 6 Links - $80 each
This will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 6, for a minimum of 1 month.
PR 7 Links - $150 each
This will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 7, for a minimum of 1 month.
PR 8 Links - $300 each
This will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 8, for a minimum of 1 month.
I received the 25.00 for the 5 PR 4 links. It came to 23.78 after pay pal fees. As I mentioned I wasn't sure if I would be paid monthly or if I was getting 5 dollars for three months. Perhaps it's an honest mistake or maybe buyalink wants to confuse sellers. If you look at the buyer's information:
PR 4 Links - $10 eachThis will give you a text link of up to 10 words from a webpage that is searchable by search engines and has a Google PR of 4, for a minimum of three months.
You can see that buyers are paying ten dollars for three months which means sellers are getting 5 dollars for three months. That's less than 2 dollars a month! I must be a pretty nice guy selling my links so cheap!
Perhaps after the three months is up I can continue a relationship with the buyer that's a bit more profitable by eliminating the middle man's huge profit margins.
I recently received another email from buyalink.net (see huge profit margins) offering $5/link for up to 5 PR 4 links. I set them up on:
Will Eli Manning lead the Giants to a superbowl?
If I only got my way every time I complained
The next step was to log into pay pal and request the 25.00 which I've done. I should get the money as soon as they verify the links. One stipulation in the email was that if I remove the links before three months is up I get kicked out to the program forever. I presume that I'll continue getting 25.00/month for the next three months but I don't know for sure. I might have just sold 3 months of links for 5.00 each. I'll let you know.
Anyway, the ads are not intrusive at all and considering the number of PR4 pages I have, I hope I get more offers like this. There is some concern that the link is unrelated to my content, but many sites get away with lots of unrealted links on each page, so I'm not too worried about one/page.
From a recent email offer:
This email is to ask whether anyone is able to provide PR3 links, even though they may not have indicated so on their application to Buyalink.net. We are able to pay US$2.50 per link, up to US$75 (for 30 links). Please note however that if you can supply multiple links they need to be from different domains (and preferably from different IP addresses too).
Here are the important bits from a recent emial from Text Link Ads Inc. The price seems too expensive. I know I've sold links from one PR6 page for just a little less than 14 dollars a month. This "deal" gives you links from PR3 to PR6. A PR3 link is just about unsellable and there's no great demand for PR4 sites either. I have some other concerns: these sites are supposed to be general content: What is general content? A directory? an affilaite farm? I'd like to see some example sites and I've sent an email to the company saying so. I'll let you know what I find out.
Note our ads are hard coded static text links linking directly to your web page with no tracking url or _javascript. This allows search engine spiders to find your website and associate your keywords with your website.-You can purchase links in sets of 25. That is links from the homepage only or site-wide from 25 unique domains.
-Each set of links from 25 sites will get your text link ad approximately 1,000,000 page views per month!
Here is the homepage PR breakout for every set of 25 links:
PR6 (1)
PR5 (9 )
PR4 (12)
PR3 (3)
The pricing is below:Single Page Home Page Only Links Price Is PER MONTH
25 Unique Domains $ 350
50 Unique Domains $ 600
75 Unique Domains $ 800
100 Unique Domains $1000
200 Unique Domains $2000
200+ Unique Domains NegotiableSite Wide Links Price is PER MONTH
**Note each domain averages 500 pages indexed in Google. Your link will appear on ALL pages of each domain.
25 Unique Domains $ 500
50 Unique Domains $ 800
75 Unique Domains $1200
100 Unique Domains $1500
200 Unique Domains $3000
200+ Unique Domains Negotiable
So I sold two more links on my PR 6 site site with 600 uniques/day. These were two links for 6 months at $65.00 each. Clearly I'm not getting the 40.00 - 80.00 /month some sites suggest. Not to mention the 150.00 -250.00 price/month suggested by Serge Thibodeau.
Still no links on my text link auction. I went through the other auctions and there's only one bid total. I guess that site's a waste.
These are the prices buyalink.net promises if you sell links through them:
Link from a PR 3 page - $2.50It must be noted that only pages with fewer than 10 links to external sites are eligible for the program. Still, this pricing system (presumably monthly prices) is pretty weird. The keywords in question have to be considered: a PR 5 site about deciduous forest habitats is probably not worth as much as a PR 5 site about web hosting. Traffic must also be considered along with link placement. I'd rather have my ad at the top of the top of a busy page then at the bottom of an unpopular page.
Link from a PR 4 page - $5
Link from a PR 5 page - $15
Link from a PR 6 page - $40
Link from a PR 7 page - $75
Link from a PR 8 page - $150
For the curious, if you buy a link through buyalink.net they charge double the prices listed above. A 100% markup is pretty good, hence the title of this post. I'm testing out this service - I submitted one of my sites to be added to their database of link sellers. I'll let you know if they bring any link buyers my way.
So I just started an auction on buyselllinks for my stock market blog. We'll see what happens, but I don't have high hopes as the sight doesn't seem very busy (only 47 auctions total). I'm the only auction in the Finance links category.
The auction itself looks pretty bad - the text editor where you write your description is not WYSIG, and during the preview I was afraid to hit the back button for fear of losing all my work (when I visited the help section and then went back, I did lose all my work and I didn't want to type the same stuff a third time).
According to Serge Thibodeau, text link prices "range between a low of about $ 15 a month to a high of about $ 70 (too high I think) for a PR 4. In the PR 5 category, costs ranged between $ 40 at the low end to about $ 110 at the highest. In the PR 6 and 7 categories, they were all over the map, with ranges between $ 150 to $ 250 for a PR 6, all the way up to $ 450 for a PR 7."
I get less than 150/year for PR6, and I've only sold one link at this price so I find these prices pretty hard to believe. If you see text links for sale in this range, I would look elsewhere unless there is lots of potential traffic and branding.
www.learn-english-grammar.com is selling every page text links to no more than 5 education or language related sites. At the moment there are 353 pages indexed by Google, but that number will increase. Pricing as follows:
>500 pages indexed by Google = $20/month
500 - 699 pages indexed by Google = $25/month
700 - 999 pages indexed by Google = $30/month
1,000 + pages indexed by Google = $35/month
This way you know what you'll be charged as the forum grows. Page Rank should increase as well, but no charge for that. Regarding traffic - I'm averaging about 100 impressions/day with Google adsense but this should increase dramatically in September (school starts). Of course I can't tell you the exact CTR, but it seems to be quite good so you should see some traffic from these ads. Ads will be placed near the bottom, under the adsense. For an additional $10/month I'll put your ad near the top, just under the banner/ navigation. I won't sell more than 5 external links. You can lock in a low monthly rate by paying for a full year (pay for 12 months and you pay 20/month regardless of how much the forum grows). Contact gumpersag@yahoo.com for more information.
Probably not. Jill Whalen argues that link popularity is based on relevant links and the best an irrelevant link can do is temporarily boost Page Rank. Jill Whalen certainly has her detractors and could very well be wrong about this. But there's another issue to consider. When you buy a text link ad, you can get three things. One is better natural search engine placement thanks to link popularity and anchor text. But you also get traffic and brand name recognition if you buy text link ads from the right places.
I'm thinking of raising the price, but I charge 110/year for index page advertising on my most popular web site: see ESL go.com's sponsor advertising page for more specifics. I hesitate to raise the price because I only have one customer at the moment...
Hotel Marketers is offering 65,000 links for $495/year. There seem to 15 of these sponsored links on most pages, which seems like a lot. I also estimated about 140 internal links on the one page I chose as a random example. There may be some traffic as the paid links are listed above the majority of internal links. Of course the number of links will be a huge drain on any Page Rank that would get passed your way. Still that is lots of anchor text, and anchor text will help your search engine placement. However you must also consider that you need anchor text coming in from different IP addresses for maximum effect.
I recently got "a special text link ad offer for you to purchase text link ads off one of the top websites on the Internet".
-Your text link ad will appear on approximately 10 pages.
-You will be one of only five advertising links on the page.
-Your link will be a hard-coded, static text link going directly to your website.
-Your link will appear on pages that are related to the general theme of your website.
-The pricing is a flat fee per month:
PR7 $150.00 USD
PR6 $ 75.00 USD
I'm suspicios though: don't I need to know what kind of traffic these pages get? And don't I need to know the URLs so I can make sure these are pages I want to be associated with? And don't I need to know where my text link ad will be placed?