Semalt Speaks On How To Properly Monetize Your Website With Links: Risks And Ways To Avoid Them
We often hear that link building is becoming more and more useless. However, as long as there is SEO in general and the link ranking factor in particular, we still have a lot to discover about it. How to sell links and how much you can earn with them: this is what our content today will be based on.
Did you know that you can also earn money easily by promoting SEO tools? Maybe you've already heard of several other ways to earn money with SEO, but we suggest you discover Semalt's Partner Program. Through this program, you can earn money with SEO by promoting the best SEO tool: the SEO Personal Dashboard.
To start today's article, let's first check if the link ranking factor still makes sense.
Is the link ranking factor still alive?
Link sales revenue is older than the first iPhone. But if previous optimizers were more concerned with the number of backlinks, today their quality is unconditionally emphasized. From now on, for a thoughtless purchase and setting of external links, you can quickly fall under the sanctions of search engines. This is the main reason for the annual panic about "Does link promotion work?".
However, if you make your link building properly, the threat of being banned is minimal or negligible.
According to Sape 2021 SEO and Link Building Market Research, 90% of the experts surveyed believe that the likelihood of being hit by filters is low.
Indeed, the essence of link promotion remains the same: buying links from donor sites in order to increase the authority and popularity of the site always has a positive effect on the ranking. Therefore, selling backlinks is still one of the main ways to monetize a website. Yes, it is not as popular as it was 5-7 years ago, but the success of this revenue source depends on the prudence of buyers and sellers.
Is it profitable to make money on links?
The aforementioned Sape 2021 study showed that more than 90% of respondents - opinion leaders, private professionals, agency representatives and internal teams - create links and buy links. Among the specialists, there is not a single one who does not use backlinks. This proves once again that the external linking environment is no less valuable than technical or mobile optimization.
Let's take a look at what links are in demand and how much you can earn by selling them.
1. Temporary links
Rental links are placed on the resource for a certain period of time to quickly manipulate the link mass. As a rule, the payment for these temporary links is fixed for one month and is debited every day. One of the valuable varieties of these temporary links is contextual links, as they are relevant to the content and integrate organically with it.
The price of links varies depending on several factors. In the case of temporary links, earnings depend on the number of pages on the resource and the number of links to them (there are some risks associated with this, but we'll talk about those below).
2. Perpetual links
Perpetual links are published on the resource (usually in texts) and remain there as long as the page exists. As a result, the payment for these backlinks is much higher than for rentals, but it is done only once.
Thus, the cost of perpetual links is much higher than that of temporary links. Moreover, on the related platforms, you can find their gradations by format and, therefore, by price. Often, such platforms allude to 4 types of perpetual links:
- Links in the news. They are the fastest way to earn money: placing a link in a relevant news item on the site does not take much time. The payment is one-time.
- Links in articles. These types of links are also not too resource-intensive: the webmaster posts a useful article about his / her resource (as a rule, it is provided by the optimizer) with a contextual link to the recipient resource.
- Links in journal articles to products or services relevant to the resource's topic. Such links will require some effort: you will have to create the content yourself. But the return on this monetization method is 3 times higher than, for example, placing a link in the news.
- The link in the archive. These links carry almost no SEO risk. The wizard places backlinks on pages already indexed.
On average, it is possible to earn rental links from a reasonable amount. As a publisher, you can set the price yourself.
Risks of earning money on links and how to avoid them
The biggest danger of link manipulation is to be filtered by a search engine. After that, the site will collapse in all respects, which means that the links on it will become useless from an SEO point of view.
Sites created exclusively for advertising and link trading, which do not provide the public with useful information, fall under sanctions quickly.
How to make money by selling links, while avoiding familiarity with search engine filters?
Selling links to make money is a simple process. However, if you don't know the exact methodology to follow, it will be difficult to succeed. Just follow these guidelines:
- Set prices several times higher than on the link exchange. This will help weed out non-targeted advertisers who are willing to go anywhere. Strive to collaborate with projects that are as relevant to your topic as possible - it's strange to find an article about polycarbonate structures in a blog about UX design.
- Don't try to fool the search engines: make sure you have enough content to balance between 20% "blank" pages and 80% "for sale."
- Don't get carried away by anchor links, posting without anchors is safer.
- Create a commercial offer for direct advertisers, in which, discreetly, without giving unnecessary signals to the search engines, you tell them that you are willing to participate in the link building en masse for a certain fee.
- A lot does not mean good. Don't add reasonable amounts of backlinks. For example, for an information resource that publishes 5-10 units of content per month, 5 links are more than enough. The optimal number of links to sell is no more than two per page.
- Sell slowly, no matter how much you want to speed up the process. Frequent sales can serve as a signal to search engines that the site exists solely to make money. And then you may be subject to penalties.
Best way to monetize your website
The biggest concern of all website owners is to find the best way to make money with their website. Indeed, having a website is not an end in itself. You have to think about promoting your website in order to make it known and take advantage of this advantage to use it for other useful purposes.
Do you have a problem promoting your site or rather you don't know how to monetize it or what to do with it? Whatever your concern, with Semalt's Partner Program, you are sure to find a better way to make money with your site.
Plus, if your site is having problems, we suggest that you fix it first by using the DSD tool to fully analyze it. This way, you will know more exactly what you need to do and what not to do to get your website in a better position.
Let's summarize
To generate income by selling links and at the same time be friends with the search engines, follow these guidelines:
- Develop a resource where you sell links. It should have a high citation and PR, good traffic and a large number of pages in the index.
- Look for buyers on trusted exchanges and reliable services.
- To determine the price of links, consider the age of the domain and resource, its purpose, CSI, traffic, locations and their number. You can focus on the stock prices of competitors, recommendations of SEO exchanges themselves (as a rule, they are based on a BigData analysis), you can also use services.
- Do not publish more than 1-2 links per page.
- Make sure the link is placed in the subject text and is relevant to the topic of the resource itself. In addition, you should not get involved in dubious areas - gambling, casinos, adult resources (there are prerequisites for which Yandex intends to classify esotericism, dream books, horoscopes and other pseudo- or pseudo-scientific topics that do not provide users with content that is actually based on dubious).
And don't put all your eggs in one basket. If you have a resource developed with a quality, targeted and constantly growing audience, don't refuse to monetize it - sell contextual advertising, teaser or banner (how to make this business profitable - come in, we'll tell you).
What is your opinion on today's topic? Feel free to share it with us in the comments. Also, if you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact us directly.