Making cash with your website through links sounds a dream, but is it easy? Are there any risks or downfalls? What does your web site need to be successful in selling links? We look at how to make money through links and the potential problems.
A website that makes money through links sounds a fabulous way to make cash and there are three basic ways of doing this. All are easy, but not without risk.
First, the methods of earning money.
* Google Adsense - this is the simplest way of making money through links. You sign up to a Google Adsense account, set up how you want the adverts to look and paste the code into your web site. Every time someone clicks a links you earn a percentage of the PPC fee. Perfect for sites that have international visitors.
* Affiliate Selling - quite straightforward and useful if you have mainly national visitors or might promote an electronic product. Merely sign up to one or more schemes and place the links that they provide on your web site.
* Sponsored Links - if you are blogging, then this is a quite popular way to make money. But there are also people who will happily buy links from any decent site. If you are blogging, then sign up to sponsored posting web sites and start following their instructions. For normal web-sites, then you need to approach SEO consultants and see if they are buying links.
The risks of selling links
Well, what are the risks of any of these methods? First, if you are not careful you will clutter your website with links and scare away visitors. Done well and you might add to the value of visiting your website. For banners and Google Adsense, only keep to one or two advert positions about the page to keep it clean.
But the big worry is with affiliate selling and sponsored links. With these, there is a worry that if you are found to be selling links then the search engines could downgrade your search rankings, perhaps even blocking you all together from their results. To prevent this, be certain that if you are posting sponsored links you are doing so within loads of content on the pages and also have a good ratio of unpaid posts to paid posts.
How to prepare your site
There are two different aspects to this which apply to these cash making schemes.
First, for Google Adsense and affiliate schemes, the links will just make your any money if your web site is receiving sufficient visitors to click on the links and make purchases, in the case of affiliate links. If your site is new or you have not worked on generating proper visitors, then these methods are unlikely to work
For sponsored links, sometimes visitors is what matters, but on the whole the advertisers want a site that is popular with the search engines. This is typically defined as the number of backlinks pointing to your site and the web site's Page Rank, which is itself dependent on the backlinks (and where they come from). So you need to be article writing and other methods to get masses of links pointing to your website to make cash this way.