I hope everyone is enjoying the start of summer. In celebration of my favorite season, I wanted to announce a sales promotion at LinkAdage to kick things off….

From today until August 1, 2008 LinkAdage Auctions will not be charging closing fees on successful text link ad auctions. The only charge would be for any upgrades like front page or premium features that you can select for your auction. If you don’t upgrade, your text link auction will be free. If you want to sell links and pocket all the money, this is the way to go.

I also want to mention that last month we made a small change to increase maximum auction listing time to 15 days. We did this in response to members that wanted to renew their ongoing auctions less frequently. If you haven’t listed in a while, now is the time to start listing again.

Other news…

Content Plug-in for WordPress bloggers

I recently had a WordPress plug-in developed that creates Twitter mashup posts based on keywords/and keyword phrases. I use the plug-in extensively at Lessnau.com and my traffic has increase dramatically. Free unique relevant content, it doesn’t get better than that… The plug-in has quite a few cool options. Learn more here: http://www.lessnau.com/twitterdoodle/

The Lessnau Lounge

I started this new personal blog a few months back and call it The Lessnau Lounge. At this new blog, not only will I discuss LinkAdage and LinkXL text link advertising, I’ll cover a wide range of SEO topics and other interests of mine. I found that I am not a prolific enough writer to maintain a one topic blog so I thought it is best to have a blog that covers life on the web from many different angles. After all, how much can I say about paid links other than they work and Google wishes SEOs would not buy them.

Twitter

To follow the masses, I have become involve with Twitter over the past few months. For those still not familiar with Twitter, it is an online micro-blogging site that allows only 140 character posts. So far, I have not decided if Twitter is a time waster or the next great marketing tool. If you are already on Twitter or decide to give it a try in the near future, make sure you follow my tweets at http://twitter.com/John_Lessnau — I promise not to bore you with mundane Tweets.

Need an EDU blog, let me know. This is a very unique opportunity for Webmasters and SEOs not affiliated with a university to control a personal EDU blog.

The opportunity that running one of these blogs presents is tremendous. Your blog will be a legitimate EDU blog that you can use to promote your business and increase revenues. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s face it, most link buyers are PR obsessed and base what they pay for links on the PR of your link page. With Google lowering PR across the web it is more difficult to make money selling links.

Text links on web pages that are just as good as ever, but have a lower PR, only bring a fraction of the revenue that was possible only a few months back.

Selling links page by page takes more work and makes less money than ever. The only way to increase text link advertising revenue is to sell individual links across your entire site. However, selling thousands of links on hundreds of pages, one at a time would be a full time job for a team of people.

To help better serve our text link publishers and advertisers, LinkAdage now offers Links Direct - an automated system that allows you a way buy and sell individual links across 100s or even 1,000s of pages on your website. Our goal was to have a simple to use, highly automated product that allows publishers to monetize as many pages as they wish with no extra effort.

The new LinkAdage Service Links Direct meets that goal while at the same time giving publishers more control over who buys what for how much. If you are a publisher with a lot of nice web pages where you could sell links please check it out.

Well it’s the start of a new year and paid links, despite the wolf cries, are as powerful and working as well as ever. The main difference from a year ago is one should be much more careful about where you buy links and who you sell links to. In content links are the holy grail of link buyers but this is not to say a good footer or sidebar link won’t work for you. Depending on how many links in the same footer or sidebar and who else is buying links with you, chances are better than 50/50 the link will work for you and help your rankings.

Some Link Buying Don’ts

• Never buy a link on a page with more than 10 other paid links, the fewer paid links the better on a page.
• Don’t link on a page with a notorious link buyer. Check the back links of some of the other link buyers on your link page. If there backlinks are clearly all paid links this puts you at risk if they get spotted by the SEs.
• Don’t buy links from large high profile link networks.
• Don’t buy links on a site that does not rank for their domain name.
• Don’t buy links on languages different then your website.

Some Link Selling Don’ts

• Don’t over sell any web page.
• Don’t sell to blatant black hat sites.
• Don’t sell to sites that are only propped up by paid links
• Don’t advertise you sell links on your site
• Don’t give out your URL to every potential link buyer. The fewer that know you sell links the better.

Since in content links are difficult to find, footer and side bar links will need to remain part of your link buying strategy. Just make sure you use a bit of common sense and caution and your chances of success will be much greater.

Making text link buyers and sellers scramble for a fair way to set the price of one way links, Google has depreciated visible PageRank (Toolbar PageRank) over the last few months. Most all high PR websites, whether they sell links or not, have had their PageRank lowered by 1 - 4 points. Websites with 100,000s of natural backlinks have gone from PR8 and PR9s to PR5 and PR6s bringing chaos to the link buying and selling business. Buyers are complaining they are paying for a PR8 and want a PR8 link and sellers are saying it’s the same link with the same value, just a different number of green bar pixels. Read the rest of this entry »