Are Text Link Ads Like Crack?

January 9th, 20076 Comments

I’ve gotta confess. I make quite a bit from text link ads. So do several of my clients. But sometimes I feel like I’m dealing in crack cocaine (or maybe marijuana). Let me tell you why.

If you’ve been dealing in text link ads for a while, you probably realize that Google (and search engines in general) frown upon them. They are manipulative. Yet most people agree that you should be able to do whatever you want with your own property, even if that means selling text link ads. So there is this lingering sense that dealing in text link ads is wrong in the eyes of the people that matter.

To make matters worse, there is a sense in which text link ads create unnatural dependencies in both the buyer and the seller. The buyer soon realizes that part of the value in buying a link is holding it over long periods of time, so there is this constant pressure to retain the links that you’ve already established. In the seller, it is easy to get to a point where your primary source of income on an informational site is in the selling of links. Even if you want to go clean, you’ve gotten to this point where your lifestyle and webstyle are all built around this “fiction economy” that we call the PageRank market.

I still buy a few text link ads, here and there. But when I first got started in this biz, I bought text link ads up the wazzoo. The logic was pretty straightforward: I had no leverage on the net, and to get leverage I needed to be agressive. The easiest way to get agressive is to buy text link ads (as opposed to doing the hard work of networking with the right people, producing a worthy product, etc.).

So anyway, when I was just starting my initial plan was to buy text link ads for just a few months. Then a few months became half a year. Then half a year became an entire year. I kept saying to myself “Just a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer.”

Don’t get me wrong. Text Link Ads work. They do. Just like crack. But they are also super addictive, and one day you wake up realizing how freaking dependent you are on them. That day happened to me about 1 year ago. Here’s how I (almost) broke my addiction:

I started by realizing that rather than gaining leverage by “renting” links (like renting a home), I needed to acquire my own web properties that I could use for personal leverage. So I went out looking for quality, established PR 5 or 6 sites selling for between $1000 and $2000. Over the year, I acquired several of these which now serve as a primary base of leverage for any new sites that I might launch.

Addiction over? Not quite. I still buy the occassional link to jump start a new website, but the good thing is that as soon as I’ve jump started the site, I can link in from my base of web properties, use the leverage I’ve acquired, and then cancel the text link that I used as a jump starter.

The moral of the story is that if you want to break the Text Link Ad addiction, then start by building a portfolio of sites that can take the place of your text link crack.

Related Articles:

• Why Not Go Mining For Text Link Ads?
• A Model Website Portfolio
• Mining Text Link Ads For Hidden Gold
• The value of a link will remain
• Exams aren’t stopping me from niche blogging

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