Don’t get me wrong, I love Text Link Ads (TLA), how easy they are to use, the money I make from them each month and their excellent support. It’s a great way to monetize a website. BUT! It still irks me that they take a whopping 50% of every sale. It also annoys me that you have no say over what price your links sell for.

This got me thinking that maybe I could sell links directly off my websites…so I tried doing just that!

What I Did

I set up a “Advertise Here” link on one of my sites. People clicking on this link are taken to a short form:

• Your Name
• PayPal E-mail
• Link Text
• Link URL
• Link Period with options of:
  • 1 month - $20
  • 3 months - $40 (save $20!)
  • 6 month - $75 (save $45!)
  • 1 year - $140 (save $100!)

Upon submitting this form, the details are e-mailed to me and the advertiser is presented with a PayPal button for the chosen amount. Nice and simple.

Pricing

Note my pricing - a 1 month link on TLA for this site sells for $15, so for any period over 1 month, it is cheaper to buy direct. The great bit is, even though the links are cheaper, I actually make more money because TLA isn’t taking 50%:

Link Length	Advertiser Cost			My Revenue
	TLA	DIY	+/-	TLA	DIY	+/-
1 month	$15.00	$20.00	+$5.00	$7.50	$20.00	+$12.50
3 months	$45.00	$40.00	-$5.00	$22.50	$40.00	+$17.50
6 months	$90.00	$75.00	-$15.00	$45.00	$75.00	+$30.00
1 year	$180.00	$140.00	-$40.00	$90.00	$140.00	+$50.00

Now I could probably do some tinkering with these prices, but this is what I came up with. At first look, this seems a no-brainer - advertisers can pay less and you can make more by cutting out the middle man. However there are other considerations - see pros and cons later on.

Why Price 1 Month at More Than on TLA?! 

The reason I don’t want to make 1 month cheaper is because of the hassle of updating links each month. At the moment, I want to sell long term links. Long term links also tend to attract higher quality, more serious advertisers IMO, so I’m quite happy for TLA to handle the 1 month links at present. It also has the side effect of making my bulk discounts look good!

Result

I’ve had the link up there for about 6 weeks now and have sold 1 x 6 month link for $75! Not bad going.

After this, I got thinking that I should implement this on all my sites, but then comes the problem of management and the realisation that this is where TLA has some benefits after all!

Pros of TLA

• Management - TLA handles all payments for and expiry of purchased links
• Marketplace - Advertisers can visit the marketplace and choose sites to advertise on
• Ease of use
• Excellent support

Cons of TLA

• 50% revenue share
• You can’t set your link prices
• Uses Pagerank & Alexa rankings. Alexa is a particularly poor indicator and open to manipulation (you may see this as an advantage though!)

Pros of DIY Link Sales

• You keep all revenue
• You set your prices/advertising periods
• You can comply with Google guidelines on the use of NOFOLLOW
• Advertisers pay less, you make more - everyone is happy!

Cons of DIY Link Sales

• Management - when you have a number of sites, this becomes a significant problem
• Exposure - you are really relying on advertisers finding you with nothing other than a link on your site to advertise you are selling links. You may be OK on this front if you have a very popular site though.

Overall

The management and marketplace of TLA make this the only viable option if you have a number of sites when compared to the DIY route. It would be far too time consuming to manage this, even over 5+ sites. 

I don’t give up that easy though - it seems to me that overcoming the cons of DIY link sales could make this a viable option.

Short term - for any links sold, I am embedding them using some php code:

<?php
$expiry_date = mktime(0,0,0,05,20,2008);  //enter expiry date of link h,m,s,mm,dd,yyyy
if ($expiry_date > time()) {  //check if expiry date is after current date
echo '<a href="http://www.somelink.com">Some Link</a>';  //display code for link
} else {
echo '';  //dislay nothing as link has expired
}
?>

I set the mktime bit to when the link expires (format is hour,minute,second,month,day,year) and this simply displays nothing when the link expires. I also set myself a reminder in Outlook for 5 days prior to this to e-mail the purchaser to ask if they would like to extend their link. Still a bit hard work for my liking.

Long term, I think I might write, or have a script written, that will handle all this stuff and enable a webmaster to manage ads on all their sites from a central location. Maybe also have the option to allow the webmaster to publish their site details to a central marketplace if they wish.

Do you see a product coming on here?!