Whoring Out Your Sites With Links

I read an interesting post on building blogs strictly to sell links (my paraphrasing of his post). It was actually quite a timely post given that I was pondering whether I should whore out some of my sites by selling links while I was sitting in Starbucks yesterday morning. I was thinking to myself while trying to determine how to maximize my revenues, that if I just took some of my PR4 sites, and slapped some Text Link Ads code on them, I could pick up an extra $50ish per month for each site for about 30 minutes effort total.

So, what was my conclusion you are probably wondering? Sadly, I don’t have a conclusion. I am still pondering the possible outcomes:

• The $50ish per site per month is a nice influx of cash (many sites)
• The upfront effort is nil
• The future of link sales is hazy if not just plain murky. With Matt Cutts pushing the Cuttlets towards ratting out sites that are selling links (that’s even if they have not already fingerprinted TLA code), there is a lot of FUD about being banned from Google.
• Potential losses from my excursions in to this could be managed if I limited it to a select subset of blogs.
• Using blogs that also monetized with paid posting could actually be a double-boon

I know the more pristine webmasters out there would say (like my post on webmaster revenues) to just build good content and let it do the work. However, if you have the right kind of blogs… say, less active, less actively maintained, less solid content-based, with a decent PR… it is at least tempting to be a link pimp.