Blog Revenue Source: Selling Text Link Ads
November 17, 2008 by Kelly
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There are a few ultra passive ways to earn revenue with your blog and one of them is to sign up for a service that markets text link ads on your site.
There are good opinions and bad opinions about selling links and every blogger should be informed about the possible risks.
Google frowns on it and even threatens to boot your site out of their index if you sell links that pass link juice. This has scared a lot of bloggers away from the business of selling links and I completely understand that.
Link juice is a term generally used to express the amount of page rank given to a page from an external link. Page Rank is the popularity of a page as seen by Google. (Thanks to impnerd.com for the definitions.)
Here is an excellent blog post about just how deeply Google frowns on the issue.
My personal experience with selling text links.
I earn a steady monthly income from selling text links on one of my blogs. I do fear the Google frown, however, the blog I’ve had paid links on for a long time has never suffered even the tiniest bit - so I continue to stay involved and enjoy the revenue stream.
I don’t display Google Adsense on that blog, though I did before I accepted text ads and I make way more with the text ads than I did with Adsense.
To be honest, it feels a little like playing a game of search engine chicken with a big truck with ‘g’ on the side - and I wouldn’t do it with a site that was crucial to my business success.
Mom’s Opinions of Selling Text Links
I’ve spoken with dozens of moms about the use of text link ads on their sites and blogs and it seems that while many have given it a try, few have experienced much success with it. But, those that do earn - earn well and consistently.
Text link buyers are looking for high page rank and good Alexa numbers. The more pages on your site that develop good page rank, the more chances there are that you’ll sell links and earn profit. That means you should be concentrating your efforts on building deep links into your content so that you pass link juice to them to build their page rank.
What if you don’t have much page rank?
That usually means that nobody wants to buy links from you.
It seems to me from reading their website that the LinkXL program is trying to change that.
They are encouraging link buyers to turn some of their efforts towards websites and pages with lower page rank - saying that the links are less expensive and you can accumulate more of them.
If link buyers accept this idea, there’s a good opportunity for younger blogs to benefit.
I can’t tell you I think you should sell text links. And I can’t tell you I think you shouldn’t. If you do decide to offer text links on your blog - just make sure you’re doing it with your eyes wide open.
I did text link ads for ages because I wasn’t being penalized, and then last month I was hammered with a drop from Page Rank 5 to a zero, a ZERO! ouch….
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What sort of impact has this had on your traffic Erica?
I sell text link ads on a handful of my blogs and get a nice chunk of money from it every month. Two of my blogs were hit with the big PR0, but my traffic never changed and I still have readers and subscribers. As long as someone is reading, I try not to worry about that little bar of green pixels. My SERPs seem to be okay too, I haven’t been deindexed or anything as of yet.
I used to be a big fan of Google, after all they offer a lot of great tools like gmail and google docs etc… I still love those things, but I’ve been really turned off of their search engine this year. They penalize bloggers that want to earn money legitimately, but you still spam blogs and scraper sites getting “rewarded” with PageRank, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. Their search results for a lot of terms seem a bit jaded as well at times.
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