Why are bloggers turning down thousands of dollars in income?
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.
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3 Responses to “Why are bloggers turning down thousands of dollars in income?”
With the “make money online” bubble every one became a blogger (myself included) and the only reason we are in the blog is to “make money online” hurting our long term credibility and our passive flow of cash as well
You have to choose if you want a easy $100 dollars now or if you want a recurrent income of $100 dollars in the future
I think you can get away with a couple of irrelevant links. I don’t have any sold likns on my blog yet, but if I get good enough offers, I might sell a couple of unrelated links, too. Google isn’t that sensitive. However, I agree with your points, and becoming greedy too early will surely hurt the long term gains.
Thanks for the info. I am still pondering the whole text link thing. But I would hate to harm my credibility with non-relevant links. And I’m v anti-gambling, so I couldn’t allow that sort of stuff on my blog.