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Make money with paid links, yes or no?

Good morning! Today we continue with our series about making money online. You can check the previous posts about

Starting your own website, 

Choosing a name, domain and hosting, 

My July blog income and stats, 

How many hours are you willing to put in?, 

Blogging mistake #1: blogging in the dark , 

How I got my Alexa below 100K in 8 weeks, 

Monetize your site with affiliate and Adsense, 

August blog income and stats recap, 

Going self hosted right away: How to link Godaddy, Hostgator and WordPress, 

Go self hosted or migrate your blog to a new server for $5 or less, 

What to outsource on your blog

If your blog is growing, you may start to get offered direct advertising opportunities, generally in the form of sponsored posts. The advertising agency puts up a post with a link to its client on your site, in exchange for a fee. Should you say yes or no?

Make money with paid links, yes or no

What is the deal with paid links?

 

What an advertiser is looking for when placing a link on your site is not so much the exposure on the day you publish, but the power of the link back to his client’s site, also called link juice. Paying to be featured on several sites will increase the link juice back to his client, and help the client rank higher in search engines. This link building strategy is considered unnatural and frowned upon by Google, as it defeats the purpose of its powerful algorithm to spot the best search results for a keyword. Say you look for a hotel in Chicago. There is a very nice hotel that hasn’t paid for links, it has good reviews and a few people who did stay there have linked to its homepage as a vote of confidence that this is really a great place to stay. So far, it ranks first when you search for “hotel in Chicago” on Google. Comes a brand new hotel that is not very good, but buys out links from authority travel sites all around. Google’s algorithm sees a lot of links coming from great sites, vouching for this new hotel. The good old one now ranks number two and this new one who paid to pass ranks first. Knowing that about 40% of the clicks will be for the #1 search result, the amount of online business it can bring is huge. The #2 site will only get 10% of the clicks or so. Imagine how big of a business referral we are talking about when the keyword companies fight for have millions of hits each month.

 

A personal choice

 

Your readers are coming to your blog to read your posts. They enjoy your writing and follow your adventures regularly. If they see you publish a paid guest post, the first time, they may read it. After all, some (a minority, generally the ones you are required to write yourself) are well written and informative. The second time, they may only scan the post and the next, skip it altogether. Most readers will understand that you provide a ton of quality content and occasionally, to help with your blog expenses or get compensated for your time, you’ll put up a paid link. Some will stop reading you, or start calling you a sellout.

As I said before, linking back to any site is considered a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. The same applies to your readers. But again, most of the post’s traffic will come for search engines. If people search for “gambling” and end up on your site, you will have one more pageview and improve your stats. Can you be blamed as a bar owner for people getting drunk? That is a question only you can answer.

You can decide to focus on affiliate sales instead, and ask yourself if pushing 12 different credit cards you have never used to get a referral fee is better ethically than putting up a post about payday loans. With affiliate sales at least, you are doing nothing wrong for Google.

 

Selective linking

 

You may have seen some bloggers say they will not link to a payday loan or a gambling site, to a site that operates abroad or one that is not in line with their values. They do not want readers to think that they endorse the company because they link to it. Other bloggers will publish anything for a quick buck, even posts that will net them $25, or not realize when they start blogging that those friendly emails offering “free content” are just trying to push links they get paid on their side to publish. Some are fine with linking to almost any site for the right price.

 

If you decide to publish paid posts, you will have to decide on the following

A minimum rate. Market rates are hard to determine, you may accept $100 for a post only to find out your blogging buddy got $180 because he haggled better, even though you have similar stats. Whatever you accept, set your minimum and don’t sell yourself short.

Types of posts. Don’t lose your time emailing back and forth with a rep only to find out after 10 emails that they want to link to a site you won’t be ok with. Set the record straight from the first email.

The risks. If you agree to put a dofollow link to a site in exchange for money, you are violating Google’s rules about linking, and risk being “Google slapped”. You may lose your pagerank, see your site ranking drop in the search engines, and  decrease of traffic. Know what you are getting into before you accept a paid post.

 

What is your take on paid links?

This post was featured on the Making Sense of Cents, How to Blog Carnival, thank you!

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Lovely comments

  2. Hey Pauline,
    This is why they invented the “nofollow” tag,
    Google have a problem with selling links that pass PageRank, (dofollow links),
    you may sell links if you wish, as long as you attribute them with a “nofollow” tag, you’re fine, no violation.
    but either way this is very old news, good serp results does not depend solely on pagerank, there are 101 factors that affects serp ranking and pagerank is just 1.
    also guest posts are no longer that effective in the new seo game.
    Many thanks and Best wishes!
    Mitch recently posted…Loading, Web Design Lebanon, full-service marketing and advertising companyMy Profile

  3. Google has a tendency of shaking up things so often its tough determining what will get one ranked or penalized. Three things though, if am to accept paid links:-
    a) I have to ascertain whether its a company am comfortable linking back to.
    b) I have to heavily vet their writing to ensure they are providing awesome and relevant content to my readers.
    c) Haggle on the price as if my reputation depended on that link 🙂
    Simon @ Modest Money recently posted…How to Get a Mortgage When You’re Self-EmployedMy Profile

  4. I usually have more than one site in any niche. One with quality content I spend a lot of time on and at least one where I pay foreigners to write the posts for cheap. When I get requests for paid guest posts or guest posts on my real site I refer them to the crappy site(s), which usually have just as good pagerank and gets decent traffic even though the content sucks. They’re happy to get a good link out of the deal and I don’t mind posting another garbage post.

    I’d never post a guest post or paid post on a site I actually care about but on sites that are just there to make money and push up my main site, why not.
    Tyler Herman recently posted…WordPress 3.7 is in BetaMy Profile

  8. I think I might have let a debt site write a free post for me in the early days because I didn’t know what I was looking at. 🙁 The content was ok but I will be much more cautious in the future. I would consider paid links but I would definitely be selective in the future.
    Hayley @ A Disease Called Debt recently posted…Friday’s Fab Links #11My Profile

  9. I’m still forming my opinions on this and haven’t had a paid link yet (though possibly very soon). I’m definitely concerned about the message it sends to me readers, and of course the possibility of a penalty from Google. I certainly wouldn’t sell a link for only $25.
    Matt Becker recently posted…Learning to Live Without the ResultMy Profile

  10. I think the fact that some of these posts/links (if not most) might not even be seen by your readers – if you use certain approaches – makes it much more favorable for a publisher. You don’t have to “bother” your reader and the company still gets the link juice. There’s too much money in it not to participate, in my opinion. I would prefer affiliate sales but it’s also a lot harder to get the same amount of money from affiliate sales as paid links, at least in my experience.
    DC @ Young Adult Money recently posted…The Weekly Quick Hits RoundupMy Profile

  11. I have no problem with them in general. I am somewhat selective in what I’d post but overall, as long as it’s a reputable company then I have no real issue with it. It can be good money and I have benefitted from it, though I do think we’re going to see more of it dry up as G cracks down on it more. As an aside, I believe part of the reason G is the way they are with them is because they could be losing out on ad revenue and we know they don’t like it. That said, I am just trying to diversify as much as possible so I am not to dependent on one revenue stream vs. another.
    John S @ Frugal Rules recently posted…OptionsXpress Review: An Online Brokerage Worth Looking AtMy Profile

  15. It reminds me of a scene in the Bad News Bears movie when the coach needs sponsorships and he goes to places he knows like strip clubs and bail bonds to get funding for team uniforms. The parents are all upset and he says something like, “Hey, these are all tax paying businesses, do you want to fork over for the uniforms yourself?” I think it’s kind of that way. If a company wants to pay me so that I can keep writing as I do, then that’s OK in my book. I would not expect a newspaper to never run an ad or a TV show not to have a commercial. I might not like seeing erectile dysfunction commercials during football games, but I understand why they need to be there. Without the payments, you are basically a volunteer, which is fine up to a certain extent, but at some point we all have to be compensated to do a better job and keep growing as a business.
    Kim@Eyesonthedollar recently posted…Maybe First Graders Should Run the GovernmentMy Profile

  16. Hey Pauline and thanks for an informative post 🙂

    I have yet to be approached on The Joy of Simple for paid links/posts…but on my Jazz Guitar Life site, which has a PR 4 page rank, I am always getting requests for this type of thing and I either ignore them or turn them down. The reason being that they never have content relative to my brand or niche and it would be completely ridiculous for me to add a post that had nothing to do with Jazz Guitar just to make 150 bucks or so.

    That being said, there are some legitimate sites out there that can use the help/link and if hey ever contacted me…I might consider their offer.

    As you state, it all boils down to how you feel about your audience and your brand.

    Thanks again and take care.

    Lyle
    lyle @ the Joy of Simple recently posted…My First Guest Blog Post And My First Reader Q & A 🙂My Profile

    • Hi Lyle, it sure feels weird to see a non related post on a specific niche site. However you can also exclude them from RSS, from your homepage, etc. which is what some bloggers do and the reps don’t mind since they just buy link juice.

  18. The text links are something I don’t do anymore, but I realize that it’s kind of the low hanging fruit that’s easy to make some decent money on, especially when you’re a newer blogger and your traffic isn’t big enough to make a ton of money in other ways. At one point in my first year or so of blogging at one point I was making in excess of $1000/month from text links, but after seeing my page rank drop and my search rankings suffer, I stopped selling them and removed them from my site.

    Thankfully by that point I had other revenue streams to more than make up for it, but I do understand why people accept them – it’s an easy source of decent money – although I think as time goes on it may not be sustainable. I think text links are going to start going away as Google and other search engines rely less on those things, and advertisers see less benefit from buying them.
    Peter recently posted…Motif Investing Creator Royalties Program: Get Paid When Others Buy Your MotifMy Profile

    • it takes a lot more work to increase your affiliate sales instead but once it starts to work out, it can generate way more thank links.

  19. I don’t have a problem with a blog accepting sponsored posts/links as long as it doesn’t make up the bulk of their content or isn’t a good fit to their niche, then it can be a bit oft-putting. But every blogger needs to decide what’s right for them and the risk they are willing to take with Google. 🙂 I do, agree, that if you accept a sponsored post that you need to be compensated appropriately.
    Shannon @ The Heavy Purse recently posted…Blog Round-Up: Week of September 30, 2013My Profile

    • It depends on what the advertiser is looking for, some are only wanting link juice and will pay based on your pagerank or mozrank, others want exposure and will pay based on your pageviews. About $50 per page rank and $5 per point of mozrank is an average price for a link for a year, for banners it depends on the size, location… I’d say a 125×125 banner should cost about the price of a yearly link for a month if placed on the homepage, that would be $150 per month for a PR3, and then about $150 per year if placed on a category that brings as much traffic as a normal post.

    • it takes some balance, although more than half my readers come from SEO for example so they land on the article they look for (sometimes an ad) and visit a couple more pages, I don’t think it bothers them. Regulars sure.

  28. At this time it appears like BlogEngine is the best blogging platform out there right now.
    (from what I’ve read) Is that what you are using on your blog?