Blogtrepreneur | Entrepreneur Blog

I wanted to finish the small series I started which opened with Pay Per Article and Pay Per Post on Forums. The main aim of this series was to show entrepreneurs and online webmasters that there are other ways to make money online away from the stereotypical Adsense, Amazon and affiliate programs.
In this post, I will show you how you can sell links on your website for money.

For a long time, advertisers have been willing to pay to get viewed on popular sites. In doing so, they would appear in front of a large audience, and more importantly, if they advertised well, they would get targeted traffic to their sales pages, product pages or ordinary sites. This also meant that the webmasters who had a community, were able to profit on their traffic. This is something which you should be trying to do as an online entrepreneur (unless of course you don’t want to make money online or you have offline business).

But what does your site need in order to be able to sell links? Preferably, your site needs a reasonable amount of traffic. Also and of more worth, your site needs a good presence in many of the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The former, owned by Eric Schmidt and co. uses the technique of Pagerank to determine a website’s importance and authority (for more information on PageRank go here). Although many internet genii say that PR is not important anymore, it still is an indicator for proving how reliable you and your site are, and is thus a turning on point for advertisers wishing to get the most bang out of their buck!

The links themselves could range from using the normal “a” html tags into getting a system like Text Link Ads (aff.) or Adbrite to insert a piece of code, but which they then insert the relevant advertisers links. On a side note, these 2 systems I have just mentioned are great for those who simply don’t have the time or man-power to go searching for advertisers themselves.

TLA in particular handles all the stuff for you, all you do is approve ads (to make sure they’re relevant) and watch the money roll into your Paypal account. On the other hand, they do take a mighty chunk out of your earnings, so if you do know a few big guys who want some more traffic, try heading in their direction!

Here are some more tips to get the most income out of selling links:

• Start your pricing low. There’s nothing worse than finding a publisher who’s wanting far too much money, and then finding out that your inventory places never get sold out. Begin small and build up once you know how popular your spaces are.
• Sell a few link places rather than a lot. In this way you are giving each of your advertisers more of a prime position and pride of place - a factor which will definitely encourage them in signing up for another month or year.
• Put the links high up your page. The text links will become more valuable as they will be in the premium area of your site. If you can manage to get the links “above the fold” of your site then you will be bound to do well.
• At the end of each month, write a post thanking your sponsors for choosing you out of a great number of sites. This will add personal touch and will show loyalty - again enhancing customer service and ensuring repeat buying in the future.

To sum up, selling text links is probably the easiest part of maintaining a website and no doubt the easiest money that you will ever come across. Take full advantage of this fact and flirt your site to the extreme, making it impossible for advertisers to say no. In effect you are not only offering people traffic, but you are giving them a quality backlink as well, which will do wonders for their SEO (search engine optimization) scheme. This in itself is another reason to boost your prices and take advantage of the fact that a lot of people want to have their sites put in front of a large audience in a short space of time.