Test Link Ads is a great service and one that I wholeheartedly recommend, not just for selling links on your blog and making money, but also for buying links on other blogs. If you pick the right blog then you can push considerable traffic to your site and also get a quick boost from high-ranking blogs linking to you.

If you have a certain page or post that you want to promote (an affiliate landing page, for example) then this is a great way to go about doing it. The problem with Text Link Ads is that the process of choosing which blogs to advertise on is laborious and downright annoying.

For bloggers

The first problem is that the stats are next-to-useless without actually seeing the blog. What I want to know about a blog before I advertise on it is if it has a large number of comments on each post and how many RSS subscribers it has. These stats are not provided by Text Link ads, so I think mentioning them in a description is important.

What I also don’t like is that you aren’t given the url of a blog until after you have placed an order. When I was looking at blogs to advertise on, I would only go ahead and place an order if I could figure out what the url of the site was so that I could take a look. With many blogs, it was just a case of a quick Google search, but with others, I wasn’t able to find them and passed their offers over. I’d say that you should include the url of your blog in your description.

Placement is key with Text Link Ads. Some people links solely for Page Rank, but there are real opportunities to get traffic and use this to make money with your own blog. This is why it should be made clear on a blog exactly where the text links will be. This can be noted in the description and highlighted on the blog itself. Some blogs offer really sucky placement of their text links, and these were always blogs I avoided.

When advertising your blog on Text Link Ads, make it clear:

• What your blog is about
• What the url of your blog is
• Where the text links will appear
• What your Page Rank is
• How many RSS subscribers you have

For advertisers

The pricing system in Text Link Ads is all over the place. You can pick up some real bargains and get highly-ranked links in decent positions. There are some real bargains to be had. It’s easy to feel intimidated about taking the plunge and advertising your blog for the first time, but it’s an avenue worth exploring by everybody, and Text Links Ads is the easiest place to start your experimenting. The real steal is that if you sign up for an advertiser account now, you will get $100 in free links.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t sign up as an advertiser today and start buying links. As well as text links, you can also pick up cheap, high-ranked links in individual posts on blogs. You have so many options open to you.

So what’s the catch with the free $100? Well, you have to pay for $25 of links yourself. So you get a total of $125 for $25. You can pay by credit card or Paypal, and for such a small sum, you get a whole lot of exposure. You pick your links, view your cart, and then simply enter the coupon code “starter kit” when you go to checkout. Piece of cake. I’ve taken the plunge and I recommend you to do the same.

A word of advice though: check out the blogs you are advertising on to make sure that you don’t use the same anchor text as another advertiser.

Tags: Text links by Angel
No Comments »

Today wasn’t an especially productive day in terms of blogging, but I picked up a cool $60 for doing nothing. It’s little to get excited over, and I’m sure not making thousands of dollar in my sleep like other bloggers, but for the amount of work put in, the potential is there to exploit this method of earning money further. I’m happy with how things went.

All I did today was sell a dozen links in posts across a number of blogs. I sold in-content links for $5 each. Two of the blogs I sold on are less than two months old. This once again proves that there is money to be had blogging by anyone. All you have to do is go and find it.

I sold all the links today to one guy I found on Digital Point. The disruption to my blogs was minimal, it took 10 minutes to implement, and this is an avenue I will be exploring more in the future.

I’m starting to find it frustrating when bloggers post up their monthly earnings and the totals come to miniscule figures (one blog I read today posted up a loss!). There are so many ways of driving money to your blogs, but the key is to be pushing more than one blog around. This increases your potential for earning exponentially. With a few other inquiries about text links that I’ll deal with tomorrow, this week’s earnings could reach a tidy sum.

If you want to make money blogging, then be active and go after the money. Don’t expect it to come to you in the form of Adsense or PPC schemes. If you aren’t writing paid posts or selling links or ad space then you’ll have a hard time generating any income.

Tags: Text links by Angel
11 Comments »

Recently I’ve been turning down money from blogging – lots of money. I’ve been exploring the whole text link phenomenon for the blogs I author and I did a bit of digging on the Digital Point forums. What I came across wasn’t surprising really, but it’s left me wondering if I’ve made the right decisions.

In case you aren’t aware, there are tons of people who will buy links on your blogs for sizeable sums. The most I have ever sold a link for is $140 for a six months placement. That’s not bad going for something you don’t have to do any work for. What’s even better is that advertisers will pay you straight up by Paypal. Within 15 minutes of contacting an advertiser you can have money in your Paypal account.

Typically, a text link on an average blog (say, Page Rank 4), will go for about $70. There’s no point in accepting anything less than this if you have a decent blog. One thing I’ve found is that once you have an established blog, people will contact you. When that happens, it’s like money falling out of the sky. For this to happen though, your blog needs to be a few things:

Respected: People must be seen to value your opinions.

Established: You need to have been around for a while.

Popular : Advertisers normally only look at what Page Rank a blog has. That’s generally all they’re interested in. Once you have a decent blog, you can create an advertising page and show off you unique hits, page views, Page Rank and RSS subscribers. Alexa rank isn’t as important.

To make the most money possible though, you need to go after advertisers. This can be as simple as reading the most popular blogs in your niche, looking at who advertises on those blogs and then contacting the advertisers yourself.

Then there’s the sort of advertisers I’ve found on Digital Point recently. They will throw money at anybody with a decent Page Rank. Between you and me, I’ve turned down hundreds of dollars over the past couple of weeks. You want to know why? Because the links people want to buy are often totally irrelevant, usually related to cigarettes or gambling.

If you are selling text links that are relevant to your sites content then you have a lot more you can get away with than if you’re selling links that are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Multiple irrelevant text links are bad because they mean that Google can penalize you and you thus lose your link power, which effectively makes your Page Rank worthless to advertisers.

There is also some talk on forums that linking out to gambling, casino and cigarette websites will negatively impact your blog. The amount of money that these websites are trying to throw at bloggers suggests that most bloggers are turning them down. It’s tempting to accept a few llinks, throw them up on a blog and pocket close to $1,000, but this isn’t a long-term solution. If I was going to give up blogging tomorrow then I’d do this and let my blogs rot, but as it is, accepting irrelevant text links is like blog suicide. And if something is frowned upon by Google then it is often best not to rock the boat.

Tags: Text links by Angel
3 Comments »