Selling Text Links Without Getting Into Trouble

With Google making its stance abundantly clear, several big name blogs getting slapped pretty hard, the occasional white flag (or tighty whiteys in this case), and the general text link market sitting under one big question mark, there are a lot of bloggers who are questioning, what next? What can I do to monetize my blog without getting slapped by Google, other than running AdSense ads?

For big name bloggers with tens of thousands of page views per month, weathering the text link fray is tolerable. After all, they have the SERPs and traffic to monetize their blogs in any number of ways. Unfortunately, most smaller blogs, like this one, do not have such a luxury. For many of us small-time bloggers, we are left with a sore jaw and an empty pocket at the end of the month.

The simple fact is, many bloggers who were attracted to the ease of implementation and profitable services offered by any one of the major text link services simply lack the monetization knowledge necessary to make the kind of money they could make with services like Text Link Ads. Others may have the knowledge, but prefer to not deal with advertisers and are willing to take the initial hit in revenue to save headaches. Another major factor is exposure. Not only do text link services manage the negotiation headaches, but they also provided exposure to blogs that might otherwise have slipped under the radar.

All is not lost though. While the major text link services are getting slapped around by Google, there is still a huge market for paid, contextual text links. In fact, some sellers of such links are reporting that they are making more money now that Google is targeting paid text links. While this is great in the short term, I wonder how nice that money will look if Google starts de-indexing sites that use text link advertising methods that don’t use rel=”nofollow”. Personally, the risk is too great for the short-term profit, regardless of my personal feelings on the subject.

For those of us who want and/or need to stay in Google’s good graces, but still need an effective means of monetizing our site in order to make a living, there are some new services coming out to help us out.

Recently, I wrote about Scratchback, a service that uses a JavaScript applet to sell ad spots on your site for a “Tip”. So far, I haven’t had much love using this service; however, my experience is not a good measuring stick. The two sites I run this service on don’t fit into a nice tight little niche, which makes them exponentially more difficult to monetize. Also, this site gets very little traffic, which makes it difficult to monetize.

I’ve taken the time to browse a couple dozen sites that are running the Scratchback widget on their site and I can assure you, my results are quite a-typical. Most sites running this widget are doing pretty well for themselves; especially if the site has a reasonable amount of traffic and the widget is placed prominently.

Another very promising tool I’ve run across is WPTextAds, a text ad management plugin for Wordpress. For fellow WP users, this is an excellent tool to offer text link advertisements directly, with full control over whether rel=”nofollow” is used. I’m in the process of preliminary testing of the free version of this very nice plugin on the MyWebAuthor site. Expect a comprehensive review of this useful plugin very soon.

My initial impressions of this plugin are very good. The plugin is very easy to use, the documentation is extensive and the new API gives me the flexibility to customize the plugin to suite each implementation. I also like that Alex provides a free marketplace where advertisers can browse for sites running WPTextAd. This solves the exposure issue that many small-time blogs have the most difficulty overcoming.

With just these two solutions, many small-time bloggers can overcome the setbacks they are experiencing in monetizing their sites while still maintaining a relatively hands off approach to monetization. What is most important for many bloggers is that these two solutions provide a Google-friendly alternative to the major text link advertisement services.

UPDATE: Fresh off the Feed reader!

Wendy Piersall of eMoms at Home just posted 9 New Blog Monetization Companies I Learned About at the BlogWorld Expo. If you are looking for Google-friendly ways to monetize your blog, Wendy’s post is another must read article on the subject!

You’ve read my two cents. Now have your say!
Are you continuing to use services like Text Link Ads to monetize your site?
If you have left such services, how are you now monetizing your site?