Selling Links

What type of sites are best for link selling?

If you have a site that has a nice pagerank, has been around for 3 or more years and ranks well for several keywords your website is an ideal prospect to sell links. Of course, the higher your pagerank the more you can charge for your links. Sadly, buyers base 90% of what they are willing to pay on pagerank – but give me a nice HTML PR5 contextual text link rather than a oversold PR9 footer text link anyday.

Many sites are strong authority sites in their niche, but really don’t field enough impressions to make decent money with traditional banner ads or JavaScript contextual ads. However, these same sites can make several thousand dollars a year selling links.

I have worked with webmasters that were making nothing off of their websites, and have taken them to $4K -$10K per month in less than a year. I laugh when I see a post on one of the SEO forums where someone brags that the finally hit $20 a month with adsense and there next milestone is $50 per month. I guess this is fine if your a teenager and need mall money, but if you want car money, at least think about selling paid link advertising.

How to Sell Links

First you need to decide on where you want to put the links and on what pages. Rule number one -don’t be lazy, rule number two – don’t get greedy. I have seen way too many great sites that could guarentee a nice stream of income if they just spent a bit of time integrating their paid links into their website nicely. Instead they get lazy and throw the links in the footer or side bar of their site. Whatever you do, make it look good, when selling links, customer retention plays a big part in how much you can make per month. Make sure your advertisers are happy.

Then when links start selling, many sellers don’t know when to stop. Before you know it they are selling 20 links on a page, have unhappy customers, their Pagerank drops at the next Google update, and their link sales revenue pluments.

If you can’t do HTML contextual text link ads for your customers, at least figure out a way to place 5 links on each of your pages in a way that blends in with your site. In other words, they links should not scream PAID LINKS.

The advatage of this strategy is numerous. You will be able to get more per link, your customer retention will be higher, and chances of a Pagerank drop due to too many outbound links is slim.

In an ideal world…

Keep this in mind, if you are selling links to related websites, there should be a way to work their keyword text into the content of your existing pages. If you can figure out how to do this, you’re sure to have a long term happy customer and your chances of being labled as a link seller are very slim.