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.

Is It Really Easy To Make Money on the Internet?

I’ve been at this for a while now, and I still wonder about how easy it is to make money on the Internet. There are hundreds of companies whose goal in life (as they tell you) is to make you more money. Affiliate networks, ad networks, pay per post networks, and contextual advertising networks just to name a few of the verticals. So why are you not making any money?

My first guess would be a lack of traffic. Well that’s easy… buy some traffic. You can buy from ad networks (paying for the impressions), pay per post networks (paying to be reviewed or posted about), contextual advertising networks (paying for the clicks), or even affiliate networks (paying for the traffic/leads/actions). Gee, that seems funny, spend the money to buy the traffic to make the money that you use to spend on traffic. Sounds a little incestuous doesn’t it?

I have an idea…

1. Create a reasonably nice site
2. Put out compelling content
3. Put out more compelling content
4. Yes you guessed it, put out even more compelling content
5. Slowly build a base of recurring users as well as slowly build your search rankings
6. Make a little money (pay yourself back for the hosting you have been paying out of pocket for)
7. Go back to step 2 and continue

Now I realize that this is information that you can find in lots of places on the net, but I am truly starting to believe it. I’ve tried a bunch of the short cuts, and they do work to some extent. But I really believe that the good content is the safer, more conservative, and possibly more long run winning strategy. I guess it is the true dividend re-investment plan for smaller webmasters — it starts slow and builds on the power of exponential growth.

Increasing Page Views Part Two

Another simple way to increase page views on your site is to add search functionality. You are trying to keep the user on your site, and if they are searching your site, then you have at least one more page view (the search results), and assuming that you have some content related to what they are searching for, you will likely get another click when the follow through on their results.

Adding search can be done in a terribly easy manner or a terribly complicated manner, and at any level in between. The absolute simplest approach assuming you do not already have it built in (many blog tools do), is to incorporate a Google search box that defaults showing your website’s results. When a user searches, they will be presented with a list of matching pages (per Google’s algorithm) that have been spidered by Google. These pages do not need to have a phenomenal page rank, as only your results will be shown.

At the other extreme of implementing search is the development of a site specific search solution. For custom written sites, this may be the best solution. With a custom solution, you can come up with your own weighting scheme and search algorithm in general. You may want to tag your content with category values (ah, more blog built in features), or some multi-field meta value weighting system.

An e-commerce site may be limited to a custom solution as it is highly likely that some of the deeper product pages may not be spidered by Google due to having parameter based Url’s. Even if their pages are spidered, they may want a custom solution that ranks results on other variables (e.g., product price, product margins, product availability).

In any case, all websites with more than just a few pages of content should consider implementing search functionality whether for simply increasing page views, or to increase sales or leads.