How much is a text link worth?

[DaveMurphy]

I've just had an email from a consultant who represents clients interested in social media marketing on smaller sites with little or no existing advertising to ask if I'm interested in getting paid a fixed upfront annual fee for a small text based ad on my personal blog. What sort of fee is reasonable and is there anything I should be asking before agreeing? My blog is PR4 and currently gets 2 to 300 visitors a month, not particularly targeted - I write about programming, copyright & whatever I feel like really but not often enough.

[Thomas]

Some of these companies have money to burn and they are probably just buying based on PR, so maybe quote $1000 for a yearly link?

I'm sure you'll get a bunch of advice from others on EP, but to be honest, the blog gets no traffic, so sell the link and move on without thinking too much

[grynge]

You need to know what url the link will be going to, where they want the link placed, and how many pages they want it on. More pages means more cost. I normally ask them what they will pay and sometimes they have surprised me with values above what I would ask.

If they ask for a footer or sidebar link then they probably don't really know what they are doing and I would suggest that if you would think about linking to the site then maybe charge them more than what they say they will pay. If they ask for a link in content, with all googles reshuffle of the link rules, I would make sure that the content would be something similar that you would normally write.

If your whole site is nofollow and they want a follow tag that will be a red flag to google, if you already have a mix of follow/nofollow tags you should be fine.

In the old days a pr4 link was worth somewhere between $30 and $100 per month depending on how many links, the content of the site and traffic. These days I am not sure, a few of my pr6 sites are still making a couple hundred per month in links sales. The P/P updates are so fresh that just about everyones link strategies are up in the air.

The above is really only if you care about google traffic, if your traffic source is something else then do whatever you feel comfortable with.

[bwelford]

Clearly in offering a Dofollow link, you are running the risk that Google might become aware of it and apply a penalty in the SERPs. This could then reduce the traffic to your blog page. However if such links are a rarity on your website, then you might hope they would not be picked up by Google.

If you accept that risk, then the rates quoted by grynge are certainly achievable. I must admit to having a certain moral dilemma in doing so. Undoubtedly links still work in Google but I personally believe that the Google PageRank approach is completely wrongheaded. However if others believe links are useful, then who am I to fight against the tide.

[cash ninja]

I don't think there's any way for them to know algorithmically (is that a word?) it would need to either be spotted by a person or reported, so the paranoia about getting/paying for links is a little misplaced.

I've taken paid links before on sites one company paid me 120Euros for a link that is supposed to stay on a page indefinitely but I don't think the page has particularly high PR (if any) it was just relevant to what they wanted to link to, on a well trafficked site with reasonable PR. Someone else enquired about a link on the same site, I can't remember how much they wanted to pay but it was a lot lower than we were willing to take. I'd have to trawl through emails to find out. I'll have a look later.

I've also taken paid links (in the past) to gambling related sites, again on another site with little to no PR but they were paying very little - something like $25 per quarter! (all of those links are gone now) and a couple of days ago someone paid a bit more than that for a banner ad for one month.

So it's a bit of a how long is a piece of string question. It's worth as much as they are willing to pay but I'm not sure there are any hard and fast rules for valuing the link and if there are I would love to hear them too.

[mikeb]

I get these kind of requests more or less every day, and so far have not taken up any of them. I worry about damaging the sites. Might get interested north of $50 a month, makes it worth the effort.

I wonder what other business models there are: like paid to blog, or paid to post - ie a subscription service that allows people to blog on your site, which gives them power of linking, making the charge for "editorial work" - one step indirect from paid linking and gets some content - but the links disable if the member ceases to subscribe. There are plugins I think that do that, just as forums can disable sig links from non paying members too.

[signorm68]

You can get $30-$50 maybe more monthly, but be careful because you can drop on that way PR and that you will have nothing to trade with in future. long time ago, i bought PR6 sports related blog, with a lot of traffic, and started very soon to receive requests for links, since wasn't so experienced then it was sound good to me me to accept some of offers ($100-$200 / monthly) and off course highest offers were from sports bet / bingo and similar sites, but I don't care, for first 5 links I paid off blog so monthly advertising profit will be net profit in future. But... PR dropped in next update on PR4, then in next to PR3, traffic decreased and in next 5-6 months I sow where was my mistake. Think this can be helpful to you.

[Brassneck]

What you get offered varies enormously. For .uk sites I have seen everything from $50 to £1000 per year for home page link for equivalent sites. It's very easy money really if you have a decent network of sites.

[DaveMurphy]

Thanks for all the replies, some good info here I hadn't even thought about.

So, they got back to me with what seems a bit of an odd reply but I have no experience of this so it may be perfectly normal.

There's no client wanting a link from my site, they apparently want my permission to send a technical team to determine which of their available clients might match my site's values and audience. I'm really not sure why they would need my permission for that and it seems like something that could have been done before approaching me but I can understand that they might want to know if I was interested before doing that work.

They'll provide me with a URL and specified anchor text and I can link to it in any manner I see fit from a post or article on my site. I can write the post as a review or simply as an article on the usual topics I write about.

They're offering 140 USD for a year for the link which seems a bit low - TLA were offering around $30 a month for the same site but I decided against using them for this site. The links TLA sold for other sites weren't really things I would have chosen to link to if they weren't paid but obviously the money was nice and the link destinations weren't things I would specifically object to linking to.

The part that makes me slightly nervous is that they aim to complete payment through Paypal or Moneybookers within 1 to 2 days of the link going live. I'm not so sure I'd be terribly keen on going to all the effort of writing a specific piece for a given link destination and risk not being paid for it.

I'm tempted to just ignore it and move on but maybe it's worth seeing if I can talk them into making some partial upfront payment and upping the ante a bit for a permanent link. Seems a bit odd to be writing a blog post with a link that may be disabled a year down the line or at some point when they decide it's not worth paying for any more.

What do you guys think? Is it likely to be possible to get a non refundable payment for writing the post and the rest of the fee when the post is published and approved by the client or should I just ignore it and move on?

[grynge]

Seems a bit odd to be writing a blog post with a link that may be disabled a year down the line or at some point when they decide it's not worth paying for any more.

You could always write a generic article that you could change the link at anytime from their link to one of your own?