Selling text links is one of this blog’s biggest money makers. Right now, all my link spots are completely sold out – you can’t buy a spot even if you’re willing to pay more than the $200 per month price. Here are some tips to increase your text link sales.
Put Your Links In A Highly Visible Place
It is not true that advertisers buy text links only for search engine benefits. Links are also good for traffic building. However, if you place the links at the bottom of the blog, or some other low visibility spot, the link advertisers won’t be receiving much traffic from it. You can assume that an advertiser will be checking out your blog to see where the links are placed before making a purchase. By making sure your paid links are above the fold and in a highly visible location, you increase your chances of getting a sale.
Call Your Sponsored Links Anything But Sponsored Links
Because most text links do not have a nofollow tag, they carry SEO benefits for the advertisers. However, Google doesn’t like it when advertisers pay for a link instead of earning it the old fashion way. The rumor is Google is working on ways to detect sponsored links and placing less trust on sites that sell them and sites that buy them. The problem for Google is how does it know if a link is sponsored or not?
It should be obvious that the easiest way to detect sponsored links is by looking for something that is labeled sponsored links. This is why my paid links are labeled featured sites. Calling your paid link section anything but sponsored links could get you more sales and will keep the Google dogs at bay (at least for now).
Seed The Links If You Have No Sales
Advertisers are like normal people – most like to follow and never want to be the first. When they see a site with no links on it, they are hesitant to buy. However, if they see a link or two, they’re much more likely to make a purchase. If you haven’t sold any links yet, the best thing for you to do is to sponsor your own links and put them in your paid link section. You can either link to me (use Make Money Online as the anchor text if you do) or some affiliate deal. You can see an example of this at Michael Kwan’s blog. His featured sites include a link to AGLOCO, Text Link Ads and PayPerPost. All are affiliate links. Showing a few “paid links†is much better than showing nothing. It’s evil but it works.
Sign Up For Text Link Ads
If you can sell your own links, that’s great. However, unless you’re a fairly decent size blog, your best chance of getting a link sale is by signing up with Text Link Ads. TLA will list your blog in their marketplace and exposes you to thousands of potential advertisers. Yes they will take a 50% cut of sales but it’s better to have 50% of something than 100% of nothing. Text Link Ads accounted for $1,308.06 of the blog’s March income.