From the category archives:

Monetizing

Selling Text Links with Pagerank 0

by admin on November 4, 2009

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.

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The Power of Deep Links

by admin on October 31, 2009

I just had my first small success in optimizing affiliate promotion. On my Whisky Rating site I have a prominently placed affiliate ad linked to one of the major whisky online stores, served by Affiliate Window. Although it receives a fair amount of clicks, so far I have not made a single penny yet by sales through this ad.

Earlier this week I had an idea. So far I have rated around 80 different whiskies on my site. Some of them are rather obscure and/or out of stock, but many are readily available. Why not help people who look for information about whisky by adding a direct link to the product in the online store? So I wrote an e-mail to the whisky store, asking for permission to use their product pictures for the whiskies they have in stock after mentioning my plan to add direct affiliate links to their prodcuct pages. Side note: Never, ever copy or link other people’s product pictures without permission or you can get into serious trouble! Luckily they agreed, but after all why shouldn’t they? It opens up a chance for them to get new costumers.

It took me two hours to add the pictures and the links for roughly 50 whiskies. Et voilà: Just two days later I had my first affiliate sale through one of the new links! If it works once, it can also work twice or more. So when there is enough targeted traffic to your site, there is a real chance that strategically placed deeplinks can generate income.

In the affiliate statisics, these links are marked as text links. But to the best of my knowledge, the practice of placing the links in images will not be affected by Google’s “bought text link” penalty because in the code it looks just like an ordinary banner ad.

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Make Money With Blogging – Pros and Cons

by admin on October 27, 2009

Blogging is fun. This is why we do it. Literally millions of blogs have sprung up in the last years; this wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a serious fun factor involved. But there are also quite few bloggers out there who earn a decent amount of money with their blog, some of them even blog for a living.

At some stage of their blogging experience, most bloggers will have asked themselves the question if they should put up advertising on their blog to generate a few extra bucks. In a way, the decision for or against advertising is quite fundamental. There are good reasons to use advertising as well as there are reasons to oppose it. To make up your mind, please consider these pros ans cons:

Pro Advertising

  1. You have the chance to earn money (duh).
  2. You might drive search engine traffic to your site from people who are interested in the things you advertise. This may be beneficial to your blog, if you manage to offer these people useful information so they will come back to your site.
  3. After your site has got some momentum you might even be approached by people who want to advertise on your site, eventually resulting in even more traffic
  4. With a careful choice of advertising partners you can offer your readers something they really want to have. This can even result in stronger reader bonding to your blog as opposed to a blog without ads. But as you can imagine, this is not an easy feat to achieve.

Contra Advertising

  1. There are always some readers who feel repelled by any form of advertising. They feel that a bloggers with ads on their sites have sold their souls. The actual percentage of these readers is of course highly dependent on your niche.
  2. Too much or too intrusive advertising can have a negative effect and will drive readers away from your site instead of attracting them.
  3. On a blog about anything visual, advertising can distract your readers. The more “artsy” your blog is, the more you have to take this into account. You would have to find a way to integrate the ads into your visual concept which sometimes can be very difficult if not impossible.
  4. Placing ads on your blog does not mean instant income. In the worst case, you might have spent hours upon hours fine-tuning your advertising system and still get no or only minimal return.

I made up my mind and decided to place advertising on my blogs, but I try not to overdo it in order to avoid putting off my readers.

Putting up advertising is an important decision and should not be taken too lightly. Every blogger should think thoroughly about this vital issue.

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