If you’ve been an active user of the Internet for any length of time you know that the first form of online advertising was text link advertising. While most such ads now are served by contextual ad servers that scan websites for relevant topics, both paid and free text link ads are still a popular way to advertise on the internet, and they’re also a proven method of generating additional income from your own website, especially once you learn how to sell ads online.

Buy or Sell?

While the link buying and selling market has settled down in recent years, it is still easier to buy links than to sell them, especially if you are just getting involved with web advertising. After all, the big search engines already sell online ad space, and most of the highest ranked pages that show up in their search results sell internet ad space as well.

So how do you go about selling text links? There are two main ways. You can either join some kind of link selling program, or you can do everything manually. Let’s look at both methods:

Joining a program

By joining a program offered by a link program, you are buying the expertise of a professional who knows how to sell online ads, as well as all of their contacts. While many of the larger search and marketing firms, like Google and Yahoo, offer the buying and selling of text link advertising, it is easier and less expensive to contact a link broker.

A link broker doesn’t just sell advertising space, web site optimization, and banners, they also help you bid on keywords and design winning text ads. Here are brief overviews of three popular companies that specialize in text link advertising:

• AdBrite is just three years old, but they share the same venture capital source as Google and Yahoo. According to their real-time stats, as of December 10th, 2006 they had served ads on 751,669,185 pageviews, from 30,480 sites. They have a huge client base, but maintain a breezy informal style that puts new advertisers at ease, and their targeted advertising options also include interstitials. Their primary focus is customers who wish to BUY ads.
• Text-Link-Ads.com is based in Cincinnati, not Silicon Valley, but they still have clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to individual site owners. They have a simple step-by-step process for buying ad space, and an equally simple interface for those who wish to submit their existing websites and sell text link advertising on them.
• Link-Vault doesn’t sell anything, but specializes in the exchange of free text link ads, which don’t necessarily bring direct income, but do help to generate traffic. Free links are actually pretty beneficial, as they help boost page rank in addition to merely driving viewers to your page. Link-Vault helps this by requiring each member of its network to bring at least one high-quality link.

Do It yourself

While finding high quality links may be easier with a link broker, or networking program, you can choose to go about buying and selling web advertising on your own. There are two ways to do this. The active method is to seek out advertisers yourself, by finding sites that are related to yours and offering them ad-space for a fee. This will involve many emailed negotiations, and may be more time consuming than the end result is worth, but with enough perseverance it can be successful.

Alternatively, you may wish to create a page on your website just for advertising, and put a blurb on your homepage that basically says “space for rent.”

Estimating cost

If you are going to buy (or sell) text link advertising, it is important to know the cost, so you can devise a budget and stick to it. It is far too easy to get caught up in bidding wars over keywords, or in networks that seem fruitful, and forget that there are real dollars involved.

Tools for the trade

Both LinkVault and TextLinkAds.com offer tools to help estimate the value of web advertising on your site. While LinkVault specialiazes in free text link ads, it still wants to make sure that the ads don’t devalue pages. TextLinkAds.com, however is aware that people sell online ad space for money, and they have a graphic display that calculates what the value is of an ad on your site, based on the number of links you plan to sell, the category into which your website falls (automotive, real estate, etc.), and the positioning on the page.

In addition, there are four tools that almost every link broker and internet marketing company use for determining link value, and estimating link cost. They are:

Pagerank or PR is not the position of your website within a list of search results, but a ranking system devised by the folks at Google. It rates webpages on a scale of 0-10, with higher numbers being more desirable. In the link selling world, one link from a PR 7 page can be more valuable than 10 links from PR 3 pages. You can find out your pagerank, or that of whatever site you are browsing, by downloading a toolbar from Google.com.

Alexa is a web search engine that provides detailed traffic patterns for any website searched, with information usually gleaned from the browsing habits of people using the Alexa toolbar. A traffic ranking is generated, with a lower number being better than a higher number, based on the trends of the previous three months. It provides a fairly comprehensive picture of the kind of traffic a single website will generate under normal circumstances. Sites with low Alexa numbers – high rankings – are more valuable links than others.

 Inbound Links or the number of external sites that link to your site, are used by some search engines to provide ranked results and by many to determine “linkpop” or link popularity. The more sites that link to yours, the more popular your site is, the higher it is ranked, and the more traffic you are likely to get. Linkpop has always been a factor in how to sell online ads, but Google made it crucial – it’s a factor that directly contributes to their scale-of-ten pagerank. Generally, more inbound links means more value.

Site Traffic is, like the number of inbound links, a contributing factor to good rankings from Google and Alexa, but it is important to note that it is not just the number of pageviews a site generates that is measured, but how long each visitor stays on the site, and how many visitors are unique. As well, finding the source of a site’s traffic helps to determine the best way to target ads.

With all these factors determining how valuable your page, or even just your link, may be, getting involved with either buying or selling text link advertising may seem daunting. In truth, once you understand the factors involved, paid text link advertising can be as successful for generating income (either by selling ads or from revenue from customers responding to ads you bought) as free text link ads can be for generating traffic.