Online Money Dot.com

A few months ago it seemed like there was a new money making program popping up every other day. There was WidgetBucks, AuctionAds, and then ShoppingAds, among others. Of these, nothing or almost nothing is left. So maybe today I have another way of making money, but this time selling links. With the link selling business doing alright, this has been my best month with Text Link Ads, I have also signed up for LinkXL.

LinkXL lets you make money selling links, but unlike Text Link Ads, which sells links on the sidebar, LinkXL inserts the links within your content in a “natural” fashion. So what really happens is that we sell “words” from our posts, where the advertisers choose which words they want to buy.

The end result is something very similar to Kontera, but instead of getting paid per click, we get paid for insertingthe links. Also, much like Kontera, we can choose how many links (”words”) we sell per page (post). I opted to sell a maximum of 10 words per page. The links themselves look pretty much like normal links, as if we had put them in ourselves, linking to any other site or post. The readers won´t even know it´s a paid link to another site unless they actually click on the link.

After we sign-up for LinkXL, and install the WordPress plugin, we can start selling links. We can set our own price per page, based on the PageRank for the page. We also have the option of excluding certain words, and having words with a “premium” value. For selling these words on your blog LinkXL will keep 40% of the money, which is reasonable considering Text Link Ads takes a 50% share.

The whole concept seems interesting, and the link selling business is going well, mostly because so many sites stopped selling links from fear of Google. LinkXL also seems to have a better earnings potential than Text Link Ads, just because of the shear inventory of posts and words in most blogs, with some of these words not having any particular value for us. For those that are more fearful of Google, there is the option of selling only “nofollow” links, but I don´t know how much luck you will have with that. On a totally unrelated note, the newest version of WP Affiliate Pro also comes with the option of setting our links to “nofollow”.

As is usually the case, LinkXL comes with an affiliate program, that like Text Link Ads, pays out $25 for each member you sign-up that buys or sells a link. This in itself is a good enough reason to try out their program. With all this, it doesn´t seem like LinkXL will have much of a hard time finding sites where to sell links, the only question remaining is if there are advertisers willing to buy the links. I have been using them for about one weeks and haven´t sold a link yet, but I guess that would be expected. Judging from the demand I have had from Text Link Ads lately I do expect some success from LinkXL.

As is usually the case with buying and selling links, we should make sure we are ready to withstand any Google retaliation. But I would guess most of us have sites where we are not counting on any help from Google to make money, in which case selling links is always an alternative. LinkXL does say that their link selling will not be easily spotted by Goolge, but you can never be too careful. Ironically I didn´t see any link selling on LinkXL´s own blog!?!