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.

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.

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.

Then I was pointed in the direction of this on Google Webmaster Tools:

We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.

Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.

Where did this come from? If paid links are against Google’s quality guidelines, where does that leave the likes of Text Link Ads who make money for everyone in the blogosphere, including John Chow.

In Google’s quality guidelines I found this:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I understand that Google wants to try and stop websites using Page Rank enhancing schemes, but surely this will have a backlash. For a start, there is an area in Google Webmaster Tools where you can tell Google about a site that you think is buying or selling links. I suspect this will inspire a situation in which people will start submitting their competitors’ websites, creating a vicious cycle.

What this means is that us bloggers have to be particularly careful about how we use this information. For example, if you have a section in your sidebar titled “Sponsors”, you might want to change that to “Recommend Links”, or something similar.

Matt Cutts had this to say on his blog on July 25:

As always, webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results

When you think about it, this would be a sensible move were it not going to have such a gargantuan and confusing knock-on effect. The problem is that Google cannot tell the difference between a link you sell on your blog to someone who wants clicks and exposure to a link you sell to someone who wants page rank. And as for link exchanges, which are effectively the same thing as buying/selling text links, Google will have its work cut out to spot the difference.

How this will play out, particularly in the blogosphere where many top bloggers sell text links will be interesting.

The problem I have with even thinking about Kontera is that those links could easily annoy new readers. Once I’m established and can get away with the sort of things people like John Chow do, then I will consider implementing Kontera.

John Chow has a link on his site where he says that he has a partnership with Kontera, who normally only accept sites with 500,000 page views a month. That’s not going to be me any time soon, so I signed up for Kontera so I could learn a bit more about it.

This blog will likely not be accepted, but if it is I want to see what Kontera has to offer before I even think about using it. At this early stage I obviously want to make money from my blog, but I don’t want readers to be scared away at the first instance. Kontera adds clutter to a blog – it’s clutter that makes money, but it’s still clutter. Thanks for the offer John, but not right now.

Somehow Amanda is making $800 a month with her blog after just two months. That’s impressive, and so following her examples is a surefire way to boost potential earnings.

The way Text Link Ads works is that they sell links on your website for you, taking a 50% commission. A link’s value is based on how good your blog is in terms of Page Rank, Alexa Rank and Technorati rating.

I signed up World of Angel with Text Link Ads. The process was so simple that every blogger should use this to monetize his or her blog. You add your site to the directory, download a plugin and activate it if you’re a Wordpress user, add a tiny bit of code to your site, and that it’s – you’re done.

Text Link Ads tell me that the ads they will sell could earn me up to $50 a month for each add. I have 10 ad spaces but don’t imagine these will be sold quickly as my blog is still fresh out the packaging.

In July Amanda made over $500 from Text Link Ads alone, through a combination of referrals and ads sold. She is an experienced blogger and has a number of blogs, but she tells it like anyone can do it.

Sign up for Text Link Ads to see what all the fuss is about.

Thanks for the tip Amanda. I’ll let you know how far I get with this.