Mining Text Link Ads For Hidden Gold
There was a time when Google AdSense was the the only game in town for monetizing a small site. Then came Text Link Ads.
These days, it isn’t unusual for TLA revenue to outstrip AdSense revenue. Grab a few PR5 and PR6 blogs, sell 10 ads per site and you’re looking at four figures per month. While Ben’s Four Figure series was mostly focused on how to nail 4 figures per year from a single blog, you can certainly use his principles across several blogs to get to the $1000 mark much sooner.
But this post isn’t about TLA publishing. It’s about TLA advertising.
You see, when publishers sign up over at Text Link Ads, their site gets analyzed based on a set of criteria, mostly having to do with the current Google PageRank of the site. PR6+ seems to be the holy grail commanding $40+ per link.
There’s a kink in the system though.
Many new publishers submit their site to TLA as PR4 and PR5 sites. The value of their links is usually assessed at less than $25. But, if the blog or website is continually updated with good content, its overall value tends to increase with time BUT this is not reflected at TLA.
TLA Provides A Perfect Opportunity For Value Shopping
…and here’s a five-step recipe for how to do it.
1. Identify a set of niche topics that fit your website.
2. Browse through each of these niche topics at TLA, starting with the cheapest links.
3. Look for sites that were priced at PR4, but now have PR5 or PR6
4. Evaluate these sites further using the fantastic SEOMoz Page Strength Tool
5. Buy links from low-priced but quality (not run of the mill) sites
An optional 6th rule that I’ve found to work pretty well for quick scanning techniques is to look at unusually high Alexa rankings for cheap sites. Alexa can be manipulated, but you can almost always figure out when it has been by checking other site metrics such as the SEOMoz tool mentioned above.
Putting These Ideas To Work
As an example, I recently purchased a Gaming blog off SitePoint that I plan to monetize using TLA as soon as Google gets its butt in gear for a new PR update. So, I decided to go over to TLA to inject some PR juice into my gaming blog. I already had a nice dose of PR4 and PR5 links coming to my Gaming blog. But I wanted some relevant PR6 link-love as well.
At TLA, the niche categories I decided on were, intuitively enough, Entertainment -> Gaming and just plain Technology. So I opened up the Gaming category and listed the prices from lowest to highest. Then I just started cranking through looking for undervalued sites. I happend upon two good sites out of hundreds. One site was a PR6 home page link that had been originally valued at $20/link (in other words, at PR4). Another site was PR5 and had been valued at $35/link (a PR5 value), but it was such a well-run, popular site and had such an unusually high SEOmoz score of 5 (which is very significant) that I had to bite.
The moral of this story is that you too can mine the text link ads inventory for hidden gold in the very same way that I do. And if you play things right, you can leverage your boosted page rank to score big the next time Google does their PR update….that is, assuming, that you play things right;-)
Related Articles:
- Why Not Go Mining For Text Link Ads?
- Are Text Link Ads Like Crack?
- A Model Website Portfolio
- The value of a link will remain
- Exams aren’t stopping me from niche blogging
Related Ads:
BTW, College Startup was listed at $20 on TLA until yesterday. It got bumped up to $40 after we realized that College Startup was itself Hidden Gold.