Oprah Winfrey once said “You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, even if you weren’t being paid for it.”
If this is true then there must be millions of bloggers on the road to success right now!
Surely we love our job and would do it even if we weren’t paid but it is still extremely satisfying to make some money of off the work we do here. To that end we have professionalized a few things in the past few weeks.
We now have an Ad Management system that works very well, gives us lots of options to customize everything and which makes it very easy for advertisers to get your advertisements on our blog.
In fact, it takes less than 2 minutes to get your 125×125 button in our sidebar!
Since yesterday we also started selling simple text links. We received some requests from readers to introduce this format and because it is a cheap and simple way to attract visitors and easier to set-up than designing a Button we decided to start offering it.
So, if you have a site which you want to promote you can now order a 30 day link to your site for just EUR 50-.
It is displayed in the right sidebar on the bottom and I put up a few examples in there to show you how it works. The first paying user is Best Web Hosting.
Related post: “Buy our ads or the dog gets it…“
Doesn’t selling text links affects your website Pagerank? Aren’t you penalized by Google? That’s what I know…
After the last Google update (last month) I see TheNextWeb mainpage Pagerank dropped from 6 to 5 (I’ve seen this on some other websites as well). Some of my website internal pages had a drop also (although the mainpage stayed the same).
If you sell text link, which aren’t “no-follow”, then Google might penalize you further…
You can read more here on Matt Cutts blog (Google guy): http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
Also, the forums at Digital Point can help too http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
Easy. I take back my comment and thanks for the links, I did refer them.
No problemo :)…it happens…
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What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote.
Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.
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from that blog….
Actually, in your comment I gave more focus to the term ‘selling’ than ‘PR’ and ‘no-follow’ and hence the misconception.
Great news that The Next Web is looking to monetise in ways that readers would prefer – user-centred journalism rocks :)
Good one! I will have to check that out. I looked into it before we started selling them but couldn’t find anything at first. We did recently switch from .ORG to .COM so that could have affected the PR change too…
Selling text links is no way linked to the Page Rank or at least don’t affect the Page Rank.
You may want to refer to:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-google-yahoo-askcom-treat-the-no-follow-link-attribute/4801/
Oh yeah, it affects the Pagerank IF you don’t use the “nofollow” attribute…
Of course, you can try and make it harder for search engines to detect if a link is sold…