KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays Comm, Joel (books for 8th graders txt) 📖

LINKADAGE

An advertiser that pays to put its name on your web site is looking for just one thing: traffic. That advertiser knows that you have the kind of users it is trying to attract, so it’s going to pay you to send them in its direction. But there’s a second benefit to having a link on a web site, and that advantage isn’t the advertiser’s, but yours.

Links improve search engine rankings. Advertising doesn’t.

Despite the billions spent every year on Internet advertising, the most effective way to bring traffic to a web site isn’t ad units, CPM banners, or even affiliate links. It’s the kind of links that you put on your site as part of your content because you like what another site has done. Google built its search engine on those recommendations, and those links determine, in part, where a site appears in search engine results.

Win a top spot in those search results for your most important keywords, and you’ll get massive amounts of targeted traffic for free.

For publishers, being linked to from other web sites is a vital part of marketing. It’s also one of the toughest forms of marketing, so the links have value. Publishers rarely hand out links like these on request; they demand something in return—as you should. That might be something as simple as a return link, but as we’ve seen, it can also be an interview or even a free article. There are plenty of article banks on the Internet stuffed with free (and generally low-quality) content that publishers can put on their own sites provided they include footer information that usually includes an author bio and a link to the author’s own web site. It’s an easy and cheap way to spread links around the Web.

There has always been another way to get your link on another web site. You can pay the publisher. If the link isn’t being delivered through an ad unit but through an informal deal between publishers and advertisers, there’s a good chance that not only will the advertisers get traffic, but they’ll also pick up some improved search engine rankings.

When you’re looking to make money by selling these kinds of links on your site, there are a number of principles to bear in mind.

The first is that the higher your own search engine ranking, the more valuable the link will be. When a high-ranking site links to a lower-ranking site, that lower-ranking site picks up a massive boost. Sites with a page rank of 6 or 7 will always be able to charge more than those with page ranks of 2 or 3. (There are a whole bunch of tools available on the Web that will instantly tell you your page rank, but the most trustworthy is Google’s own toolbar. You can download it for free from www.google.com/toolbar/ff/index.html.)

Like much of Internet business building, the bigger your site grows, the easier it becomes to make money—and the more money you’re going to earn.

That sounds obvious, but it’s an important point that’s often missed. Too many people start Internet businesses expecting to be picking up five-figure checks from Google within a few months of joining AdSense. That doesn’t usually happen. It takes time to build content, collect links, improve your page rank, build an audience and create partnerships with advertisers. Link selling might well become a useful part of your revenue stream, but it’s unlikely to bring in large sums of money until you have the reputation, the traffic, and the Google love to charge giant amounts.

Selling those links isn’t completely straightforward, either. Receiving payments for placing a link on a web site isn’t completely black hat, nor is it entirely white hat. The link is going to have two benefits: On the one hand, it’s going to help your users reach your advertiser’s web site. That’s legitimate. Every link does that, and Google, after all, has become a multi-billion-dollar company by helping companies do this. Selling links directly simply cuts out the intermediary and lets you pocket the entire fee.

But the link is also supposed to help advertisers improve their own search engine rankings, and that means deceiving Google, at least a little. Google will raise the advertiser’s ranking because it believes that you’ve supplied the link after seeing something on the site you like. You approve of the site, you think it’s something your users should know about, so you’ve told them the site is worth visiting. That tells Google the site is important, so the company tells its searchers that the site is worth visiting, too.

If Google knew that the other site had paid you for that recommendation, it wouldn’t count it. Google does have a way of discounting some of the links that sites receive. A link can be categorized as “dofollow,” and Google will count it, or “nofollow,” and Google won’t. Links placed on Twitter, for example, are generally “nofollow.”

I could tell you that it’s unlikely that Google is going to suddenly declare all of your outgoing links “nofollow” and take away an asset that you can charge for. And I could suggest that when you’re dealing with another site directly, you really should only be accepting links from sites you know and trust.

But in practice that’s not the way things work.

If another publisher asks you directly for a link, then you should either supply it for free—as part of your content or, more usually, a link exchange—or you can offer to sell that publisher advertising. If you’re looking to sell space for text links to sites you’re not familiar with, then there are number of services that act as brokerage houses. Even eBay has been known to list text link space, although the results have usually been pretty poor: Advertisers have paid and received nothing in return.

LinkAdage (www.linkadage.com) is at least reputable and reliable. You can set your own rate for a link, or you can create an auction, ensuring that you receive the best price