Selling text links has become a bit of a two sided coin for bloggers. In the good old days you could earn a steady income from them regardless of your traffic provided you had a decent enough pagerank. But now Google will punish sites selling text links without “nofollow” attribute by reducing their pagerank in order to make selling links less attractive.
But now, a German advertising broker called MyLinkState has invented a system that can beat this unpleasant practice. They recently introduced a proprietary ranking system that is based upon how well a page ranks in Google search results for their database of 300,000 keywords. They call it MLS Rank and advertisers are presented with the choice of booking a text link based on the pagerank or the MLS rank. Just as Google does with their pagerank, they use a logarithmic scale to make the ranks comparable. Booking a MLS rank x link costs the same as a pagerank x link.
Another nice feature for us publishers is that all pages, categories and tags of a blog are spidered and will be offered separatly to the advertisers. So links are booked on a per page basis. With a maximum of three links per page, it is theoretically possible to gernerate quite a bit of income this way.
The site is open to international customers, you can choose German or English as a language for your site and advertising. So far I have only sold links on my German blogs, but I also just registered my whisky blog which is written in English. I will keep you updated how the bookings for this site will evolve, as I am sure this will be of interest for international bloggers.
MyLinkState uses a point system for buying and selling links. 1000 points are worth EUR 0.60 or $0.87 at the current exchange rate. Earnings are paid out via Paypal if you have accumulated more than EUR 50.
Approximate earnings per link per month (from my own experience):
- PR/MLS 4 : 9000 points ($7.80)
- PR/MLS 3: 4500 points ($3.90)
- PR/MLS 2: 2250 points ($1.95)
- PR/MLS 1: 1125 points ($0.98)
- PR/MLS 0: 108 points ($0.08)
I don’t know if the points kepp doubling with higher ranks, so I won’t promise anything here.
This new ranking system has only recently been introduced, and so far most of my bookings were by pagerank. But today I sold two 9000 point links on PR 0 pages because they had a MLS rank of 4! This is what prompted me to write this article.
Everybody who knows a little bit about SEO will notice that with this proprietary ranking system you don’t have to care anymore about being punished by Google for selling text links, provided your pages rank well enough in Google searches.
