TNX.net text link ads

TNX is a new text link ads broker/network that has been gaining momentum lately. On the surface it looks like most of the text link systems but deep inside its quite different.

Any website owner with at least some pages with higher PR than 0 can register as a publisher. Upon registering you should include the TNX code into your site's template and let the system crawl your pages (which could take up to a week) and then you are ready to sell text links. TNX does not serve sitewide links. Instead each page can have up to 4 unique links from advertisers.

Advantages over other similar systems

• Individual page links are sold and this means more money for the publisher and greater text link benefit for the advertiser.
• The advertisers select pages based on their theme/subject and value of PR and not based on the actual URL. The system does not allow the advertisers to know the actual site that their links are placed on and this helps prevent fraud (i.e. google paid links reporting etc)
  
• The publisher has the opportunity to approve or disapprove advertisers on each and every page (up to 4 links per page)
• The advertisers have at their disposal a wizard that can help them easily create many different text links with slightly different anchor texts.
• There is a referral program in place that can help a user earn more money.
• As of 01/04/2008 there are 39 125 Registerd Users with a daily growth of +0.28%, and there are 31 201 403 text link ads sold so far

If you are a website owner interested to know how much you could be making there is an income calculator on their homepage. You can enter your websites URL and a rough estimate of your pages PR and get your site's maximum revenue from selling TNX text ads.

If you are an advertiser you can try the system for free. Register here and get your free 5000 TNX points by posting on this thread.

Make money selling text link ads

The reason why people buy links should be obvious by now to most of you. As a summary some buy links for the traffic it can bring to their site, some buy to increase their PageRank and some buy to make google see them associated with a frequently searched query phrase. If you want to read more on this please visit my post on selling links.

Some people that have been around for some time might have noticed the recent crackdown by Google on paid link publishers and advertisers. The internet community has divided itself in two camps because of this, one that is welcoming such actions from google and the other one that is calling them hypocrites. I am not here to point fingers at neither camp. The truth of the matter remains that links are still being sold and bought but not out in the open anymore.

If you have a site that has either good traffic or a nice PR then you can certainly find link buyers for it.

Depending on the traffic on your site, your PR or the theme (niche) of your site people might be willing to pay from $1 to a few hundreds dollars per month for a single link.

How do you find advertisers/sponsors for your blog ?
The easiest way that I have found is through the webmaster forums. Lots of people visit places like DP V7n and WMT on a daily basis to post their links offers or find such offers. In most forums you can find such deals in the "Buy Sell Trade" Business section.

For easier browsing the abbreviations used in the trade forums are WTB (=want to buy), WTS (=want to sell) and WTE (=want to exchange) so one can easily find niche specific offers using the appropriate abbreviations and the niche topic using the built in search (i.e. WTB travel).

Text link broker services
Finding your own advertisers is probably the most profitable way to sell links but it is time consuming. If you want to be free from the burden of finding advertisers for you sites there are professional services to do just that for you.


The way this usually works is:

• you submit your site for inclusion
  
• you copy and paste a code snippet in your sites pagess
• your site is evaluated to see if it is worth to display any text links
  
• after approval it is entered in a directory of publishers for prospective advertisers to see and purchase links
• when advertisers are interested you get a notification and approve their links which are automatically displayed on your site
• if you reach the minimum payout for the month you can withdraw your money with paypal or other means
  

This is just to give you an idea of the process. These steps are not always there, and each text link service will have their own step by step guide to set them up.

I have tried numerous text link brokers in the past, some have not accepted my sites, some have not delivered any advertisers and that is why its worth to try a few and see which ones are working for you.

The two automated link selling programs that I have used successfully in the past are Text Link Ads and Direct Link Ads.

What services have you successfully used ?

Bloggers/Writers: get $$ for guest blogging

I am looking for guest bloggers for this money making blog as well as my web design blog

Why do I need guest bloggers ?
I don't have time to post very often since I only post unique articles (not copy and paste)

How will this work ?

• Be a webmaster, designer, SEOer (other related field worker), or have ideas on how to make money on the internet
• send me unique article(s) that can fit well in geoland.org or here (There is no real guidelines other than being original and yourself and your articles are inline with the rest of the blog's)
• if you get 2 or more articles posted in a month I will pay you $10/per article minimum. I can probably give more if they are exceptional articles. The monthly period is not a strict requirement either.
  

As added bonues you also get

• my friendship (priceless ;-) )
• 2 permanent links to your blog on every article that you write,
• get exposed to my regular audience 50-100 uniques a day on each blog
  

The articles have to be unique and thoughtful, please don't waste my time and yours sending me articles that took you 1 minute to write or are just copied and pasted from elsewhere.

Hope I covered everything that needs to be said, but if you have more questions please post them here.

GiorgosK.
_________

Real People make Real money on the internet

Jim Westergren is a well respected SEO professional in the DP forums. He is also known for running his company seo-fusion.com which apparently was sold recently for $157,700. We had a chance to chat with him about SEO, seo-fusion, the sale, the future, and Jim as a person. Here is what he had to say:

-Jim when and where were you born ?

1982, Malmö Sweden


- any studies ?

Until age of 17, then I left school to do more important things in my opinion


- any other work experience (other than seo-fusion) ?

From age 17 to 22 I worked in an international organisation in Denmark. It was very tough but I learned a lot. I learned for example that you are yourself responsible for everything that happens in your life and that you are totally capable of doing anything, it is all in the mind.


- when did you discover the internet ? what did you use it for ?

1997 or something I guess. At that time it was mostly used for school to find information. I made my first web site in 1999. Then from end of 1999 to end of 2004 I had no access to internet. At end of 2004 I discovered Google and was totally hooked.


- when and how did you discover you can make money off the internet ?

I learned how to do web sites and so I started a small company offering web design. This was in 2005.


- when and why was seo-fusion conceived ? who was part of it ?

On the Jan 13th, 2006 I opened up that site and blogged about it
. I had bought the site from a person on DP. At that time it was only me and partners. Later on I got a few employes in Sweden. seo-fusion.com represented the english part of my company.



- what did seo-fusion help its clients with ?

Link building


- what was your workday schedule like ? (days/week ? hours/week ?)

Impossible to say. Some weeks I didn't so much other than work and some weeks it was more relaxed.


- how many clients did you get over its existence ?

This is a bit hard to answer depending on how you count. We had over 200 clients using our Directory Submission and perhaps 20-30 clients that bought link building packages.


- how much was seo-fusion making per month, at the beggining and before the sale, what where the expenses ?

When I started out with the company part time I charged $15 per hour. In it's high peak after about 1 and a half year me and my employee grossed around $30.000 a month.


- why was it sold ? how much ?

There is a lot I could write about it but I can say that it is a combination of many things that culminated me to do what I did. Some of these things are in order of magnitude: Wanted to follow my writing dream, not having a life outside the internet, having almost no friends in real life, a complicated big religious conflict, Googles campaign against link selling, the inability to service more as all resources was used up, the services became less effective and gave less results, the pain of always being behind and having backlog, the urge to find a girlfriend, my fathers dominant personality and much more (read about the whole story here)

$157,700 USD


- where did Epiphany find out about your willingness to sell seo-fusion ?

They read this article and contacted me. They were one of my biggest clients who was resellers. They needed the services to continue and so they bought everything. So I didn't even write anywhere that it was for sale.


- was seo-fusion a good experience overall ?

Yes, was a great experience and I learned a lot.


- what where your hobbies before/with/past seo-fusion ?

People, travelling, discussing, reading, writing, thinking, philosophy, metaphysics, personal development, learning, astronomy, sci-fi, future speculations, games, internet, internet marketing, movies, music, history, science


- what things do you do for work lately ?

I am planning my own web site projects that I will invest in, invest some in the stock market and continue work as a internet marketing consultant for bigger companies.


- will you continue in the SEO field ? any details ?

I will continue as a consultant for SEO and internet marketing and I am actually right now negotiating with a big company in Stockholm Sweden. If they accept my offer then I will work for them for some weeks and then part time externally. Otherwise I am not doing so much SEO except for my own web site projects.


- what would you advise people that want to make money on or from the internet ?

You earn a lot of money if you help companies make more money. Don't think about money in the beginning, make something that people really want. Study personal development.


- Is there anything that you would like to share with us ?

At the end of 2004 I returned to Sweden with no education, any kind of money, experience or friends. I sat down in front of my computer to learn web design and SEO and today 3 years later I have a company with assets worth over $300K and I personally own 90% of the company. So IT IS possible!

To read some more, you can see:
http://www.jimwestergren.com/second-annual-report-my-success-online/
http://www.jimwestergren.com/first-annual-report-my-success-online/

Here are 2 great forums:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/

Make money writing and distributing articles

Webmasters need backlinks
One of the ways webmasters can get one way backlinks to their websites is through article distribution. There are on the internet lots of websites that would hold articles written by different kind of authors and are usually called article directories. These authors give their articles for free distribution in exchange for the recognition and 1-2 backlinks to their website which is usually put in their Bio box at the end of each article.

Most webmasters are not good at copywriting
The article directories in order to include the articles, require that the articles have some proper syntax and should be nicely written. Most webmasters are not famous for their writing skills hence the need for copywriters for article writing. The better an article that you can write the easier is to be accepted in the article directories. Thus if you are a freelance writer and you can't seem to land any gigs in any of the "find a freelancer" places you can try posting at the webmaster forums content writing sections.

Add value to your service; Distribute the articles
You can additionally distribute the articles to article directories for an extra fee. The more directories you submit to the more you can ask for because the more links the webmaster could get. The way this variation of article writing works is pretty simple. You write an article for a topic related to your customer's website and you use links to that site in your author's Bio box when you distribute it.

A few article directories you can start with

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com
Amazines.com
SearchGuild.com
ArticleSphere.com
BusinessKnowHow.com
PromotionWorld.com
ArticlesFactory.com
ExcellentGuide.com/article
ContentDesk.com
ArticleCube.com
AfroArticles.com
ArticleBiz.com
www.articlesrevenue.com
articles-heaven.com

Or you can search the internet for more article directories.

I am warning you though, distributing articles can be a pretty time consuming task. You could certainly get article submitter software that could help you get it done faster.

Automated article distribution
It recently came to my attention the online service of Article Marketer. A writer can use this service to distribute any number of articles to more than 10000 possible publishers affiliated with Article Marketer. The advantage is that you don't have to do the distribution yourself. You only write the article choose appropriate categories insert your Bio details and the distribution is automatically handled by the system. On top of that article marketer's human editors are checking your syntax, grammar and clarity of your articles before they get distributed and allow you to correct your mistakes.

The service has a free option that promises to distribute the articles to about 20% of those publishers. I am currently using the free service to find out how effective their distribution is and I will probably be reporting the results soon.

If you are a copywriter, article writer, press release writer I encourage you to post your service website in the comments since I am sure your services might be needed in the future from visitors to my site (and me probably)

LAZYSEO.com: Automatic Directory Submission That Works!

Another scam !!

Well this is not exactly a scam but a case of a service that does not deserve the price of $19.95/month that it sells for; it does not even deserve 1penny if you ask me ...

The person behind the service though is a big scum ... let me explain.

I first encountered that service in may of 2007 on the v7 forums and it sounded like an interesting deal. I would pay $20 a month and then I would automatically submit all my sites and my client's sites to more than 300 directories with a push of a button. This part is true; you can actually submit as many sites to all the directories included. The problem lies in the fact that the service does not have very detailed categories for the user to choose from ... it only has top level categories and very few secondary/sub categories. Minor problem you might say but, apparently it was not minor at all. If you ever submitted to any directory you would know that the top most reason submissions get rejected is submitting in the wrong category. As a result of this non detailed automatic submission I received 300 or so emails rejecting my submission ...

Well to clear things up, nothing so far was/is a scam, lazyseo.com is just a worthless service.

The scam lies in what followed my failed submission ... (stick around for the finale)

Once I discovered that the system was not worth anything I decided to at least send a support request so maybe the tech people could actually include a more detailed category structure and have some luck with any subsequent submissions. 2 or 3 support requests and a few PMs (personal messages) on the V7 went unanswered !!! Such a newbie I was, I forgot to actually cancel the service through the paypal interface before the beginning of the next billing cycle so I was actually charged twice for the receipt of those 600 rejection emails ( I submitted 2 sites altogether)

As soon as the 2nd subscription took effect on the beggining of the new billing cycle I realized how dumb I was ... I called up paypal and explained that it was only a few minutes that the subscription had been in effect and that I did not intend to use that service ... but I only ended up spending some more money on that phone call ... (paypal customer service could not help me)

I finally decided to contact the person that I actually paid my $40 to. Katherine Keleher. I did verify that indeed this was the person the domain was registered too.

Katherine Keleher
4 Seafare
Laguna Niguel, California 92677
United States
gobulldogs@cox.net

I send an email explaining that I had only used the service twice (for just 2 sites the whole month) and that I did not intend to use it anymore and that I thought that I deserved as a refund the whole second month + at least 1/2 of the first month's fees. Two emails were needed in order to get her attention (Katherine). On the second email she answered that she did understand my position and promised that she would issue a refund on the transaction as soon as the system allowed her too. Bullshit!! I confirmed with a paypal representative over email, that no such kind of restriction existed on the system in general. In the end she could have issued a payment to my account if she indeed wanted to refund my money.

You got to live and learn. Be warned.

Directory submission service scam

Sometimes I don't have the time to do my own submissions but this time I was just lured by the fact that 1500 submissions to free directories would only cost me $20 ; This $20 would save me lots of time so I could focus on other stuff that I had neglected recently ... the deal was spotted on DP and there was no way I would miss it.

The story
The thread was created by TheZer0Group and was new (5-10 posts), so I thought to myself that the guy is a new kid on the block so he is offering this nice deal in order to get some customers that will leave a good comment on the thread. So without wasting any time I send the money and the details of my submission. The thread started to gather some questions from potential buyers but the answers coming to think about it did seem professional answers but I did not suspect anything at the time.

The story continues with one day passing and no sign of any submission emails from any free directory. I usually setup email filters on gmail for each submission that I do so I can easily spot the progress at any time; and so I did for this project. The next day I send the guy a reminder PM that I did not see anything and he confirmed that my submission order was next in line ... actually an hour later I did receive about 7-8 email confirmations refering to the submission in question ... so this together with the fact in the thread it was mentioned that the orders will not be done all at one shot help me rest assured that everything was going OK.

Next day I did not receive any email confirmations so I decided to send him a second reminder that read that if he did not intend to do any more submissions he should refund my money. Without answering my PM he probably did a few submissions more, since later on I did receive a few confirmations of submission. I was assured again that maybe I had mistaken the guy for a fake.

The following two days I did not see any confirmation action in my email and I send a couple of reminders by PM to theZeroGroup ... but I was too busy running other choirs to notice that I did not receive any answer. The fifth day though, I was sure that there was not going to be any more submissions and that I had probably lost $20.

I posted a message on the thread asking if other customers had there orders completed and people started slowly realizing that this was a scam.

Disputing the service on Paypal
My immediate reaction was to start a dispute on paypal and see if I could get a refund from that scum of a person. On the paypal dispute form mentioned that the service was incomplete and chose the category to be services, and added as reference the thread in DP and mentioned that I did try to get in contact with this person but without any success ...

A few minutes later I did receive what seems like an automated response

Our investigation into your claim is complete. As stated in our User Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a refund.

So no refund for quality of goods received, that is what a bad service amounts to.

The moral of the story
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is (as ishan mentioned on the thread). One more thing I learned from this is paypal does protect the seller of services and we should be aware of this when paying for services through paypal.

I should close this by saying that the details of this person (as paypal has them recorded) are:

Name: William Jones (unverified)
Email: williamindia @ safe-mail.net
I doubt that he uses this email in general and I doubt that this is his name. But who knows maybe someone knows a little something about this person ... or maybe he tries to pull this off again under the same personal details ...

DirectoryCritic an excellent service

Directory Critic is a website where one can find free and paid web directories rated by people who have submitted to them so anyone can take advantage and submit their own websites to the best directories (or directory submission services could use them to build their lists)

Why should we care ?
I was browsing on one of my favorite webmasters forums lately and I noticed a thread that was advertising an 8000 free directory list giveaway. Since its free I thought I might as well give it a try. The number of the directories was by itself a big plus (8000). When I finally imported the list to my favorite submission program I discovers that withing the first 120 "entries" I tried to submit only 10 where really directories, most had vanished, other had changed to paid only, and others had become adult content sites. Not only that, but the ones I finally managed to submit did not send an email confirming the submission ...

Today I had the urge to submit to a few more directories but I would not try the long list of crap which I had already erased BTW, instead I copied the first 200 free directories from the directorycritic site and started submiting ... I submitted about 50 in a matter of 30 minutes; all were free and to my pleasent surpise almost all send an email confirmation back. I actually had one accepting the submission and listing my website in a matter of 15 minutes .... wow

Thanking directory critic and LinksInn
After such a good service I received; I decided that I needed to give something back to the directory critic and to in particular to the LinksInn web directory that was so fast in accepting my website. I actually went to give them a rating.

In my opinion the rating was unnecessarily long process which made me wonder if I would ever rate a directory again. I am not ungreatful at this great service, I am just wishfully thinking what if the details of my submission (name, email, url submitted, url where my site is listed) where sort of automated and just the actuall rating was available to us ? Lots more people I assume would go through the process of actually submitting a rating and in turn the service provided by directory critic would be of a bigger value.

Thanks directory critic

Get a free PR4 link

I just discovered the next milliondollarhomepage.com ?

Nah just kidding!
But for all of us that have always wanted to put a pixel ad on MDHP we can settle for a pixel ad on pixel ad site.


Why would you want to put your link there ?

• Its a free link
• it only takes a minute
  
• Can actually change the image or the link or the title at any time
  
• you a get a PR4 link
  

it not bad for a free link
enjoy

Directory submission software review, Website Submitter

On a previous post about creating your own submission service I briefly talked about submission software such as IBP Arelis and submiteaze that could help get the job done faster and create reports of submissions.

I recently received the codes and passwords to the website submitter software from the company that owns it and I gave it a try. It was very nice gesture and I thank them for it. This is a brief review in my sort usage of it but keep in mind that its not a paid review.

What does a directory submission program supposed to do ?
Have a database of free or reciprocal directories that the owner can easily cycle through and with a press of a few buttons fill in the directory forms and submit his/her websites.

This program's specific features and strong points are:

• takes you directly to the submit page of each directory if possible
• It has a database of more than 3000+ directories included
  
• Can add your own directories to the database
  
• Can report a bad directory directly to the developer
  
• Ability to choose directories to submit by PR or subject from a easily filtered database
• live PR of directory displayed when submitting
• automatic picking of category (not always succeful)
• works with javascript enchanced submit forms
• works with all the directory scripts I have tried (phpld, indexscript, indexu etc)
  

If you want to see the website submitter features as the the owner company describes them.

Some of the areas the program would need some improvement sorted by importance:

• Better matching of the category, even specifying more than one keyword and upon finding more than one matches the user gets notified to chose among the different matches
  
• Need more than two status choices (submitted, failed) I propose adding "don't want to submit"
• Ability to change attributes of any directory in the database, like the option to select a few and mark them submitted (in case one has submit to them manually)
  
• automatic picking of category is not always correct, search is looking for the word specified on the setting of each project, but stops searching when a match is found (a second match usually exists and might be more appropriate)
• Already filled out forms should not be changed on reload of submit form (in case of a mistake form reloads and at times some fields are changed by the software)
• incorporate shortcuts for freequently done tasks (i.e. let enter act as a form submitter)
  
• make a loading indicator more visible (the text on the bottom statusbar is not noticeable)
  
• ability to add labels on directories, our directories and the included directories and search with those labels
  

Overall it is a very nice software, recomended for anyone that is doing this kind of work on a day to day basis, saving them a lot of time.

But don't take my word for it; just try it. Download the trial version install it, watch the this video for an introduction and judge for yourself.

PR0 to PR4 in 4 easy weeks

I know lots of webmasters and SEO gurus that say that PR (google pageRank - the little green bar on the google toolbar) is not worth that much but everyone is using it as a measure.

Webmasters refuse to exchange links with you if they think your PR is inferior to their website's PR. Lots of programs (reviewme.com ...) could reject your site because of low PR, some directory owners display the list of sites ordered with PR.

So ... here is some simple steps you can follow to get your sites PR higher than it is and maybe get some extra traffic while you are at it.

1. Post your link in forums using signatures and/or places that allow website reviews, put the site url in the signature with your target keywords for titles
2. Submit to free and/or paid directories (in general the younger the directory the easier would be to get accept it in it)
3. If you have other sites put sitewide links pointing to your new website. If sites are totally unrelated subject, put the links in the footer with small letter (the link still counts).
4. Put your link anywhere you can, without becoming a spammer (everyone hates spammers)
5. Find some high PR sites and pay for a link if you have to. There is lots of projects on the internet that accept donations as low as $50 and they put your link in a high PR page. For example moddle donations page has a PR of 6 http://moodle.org/donations/.
6. Using your link in comment posts. This won't necessarily increase your PR but it could give you a few visitors if nothing else.
   

I established my tag cloud world experts network in December of 2006 and in less than a month following these rules I succeeded getting its PR from 0 to 4 and that is the reason I am writing this post.

For the record world experts net has been almost abandoned, unfortunatelly due to lots of things in my head and currently looking for ways to rebuild it into something new.


So no matter what some say, PR is in our lives and its worth something. I can describe it better with a metaphor, you don't need an Armani Suit but if you wear one people look at you differently. But, PR by itself is not going to get any money for your site, but having it will help get some extra attention, or better deals.

Start your own directory submission service

Google's algorithm is structured in such a way that it sees links from website A to website B as a vote from owner of site A about the content of site B. The more votes one site gets the better rank it can get on the search engine results. This has created a need for websites to get as many links as possible from as many websites as possible.

I am not claiming that the algorithm is so simple that links alone can help you rank better but experience has shown that they do help. Of course the quality of the site that links to you makes a difference but definetelly in the general sense the more backlinks one can have the better it is.

One can get links naturally, because people like the content of the site and link to it or it can get "unatural" links. Link exchanges, link sales or website reviews can be considered "unatural" ways of getting back links but I have not heard of any cases where google has actually penalized a site for link exchanging (even though google is officially against link sales).

Another "unatural" way to get backlinks that is also beneficial is submitting your site to link directories. The directories organize the content in categories by topic or by country (or both) and accept suggestions of inclusions in to their pages.

Depending on the age and "value" of the directory a link can be submitted for free or cost from a few hundred bucks to even $299. Now remember google is officially against buying/selling links but the directories are actually claiming that the payment is for the speed up of the submission acceptance, and the truth of the matter is Yahoo is doing it as well with its yahoo directory so it can not be that bad.

Another form of payment a directory can request is a backlink, a link exchange in other words, "I give you a link you give me a link" sort of deal.

Well what does this have to do with any business of ours ?
Webmasters want links and some of them don't have time to waste on submissions to directories and such places. Directory submission services have been all over the forums lately with prices that very competitive. $40 for submission to 1000 directories was the last that I saw.

I know it takes time to submit to 1000 directories!! Then how the hell do they do it 1000 for only $40 ?

Well, I figured some of the services do use cheap labor; data entry people - from countries that have minimum wage less than $10/day - that given half of it will bow down in front of you in appreciation.

Well mind you there are programs that can help "semi-automate" the process. Such programs are IBP and ARELIS ($299) and submiteaze ($99) that will let you insert once the link of the site and title the owner wants to submit it by and will let you go through a list of directories and with the click of a few links and minimal data entry will have the site submitted.

These programs contain enough directories to get you started will let you include manually any other directory. Remember the sites that you will probably want to include in your services are directories that don't need backlinks - since backlinks are automatically checked and you will need access to the websites server (in order to put backlinks). A good way to find the so called "free" or "non-reciprocal" directories is a search on the webmasters forums or by visiting the directory critic website.

Sell links

Who wants to buy links ?
Google likes sites that have many good links pointing to them (backlnks). Each link counts like a vote to the site that are pointing to. The better the site that is linking the stronger the vote. Roughly speaking the more and relevant the backlinks the better position the site gets among the search engine results. This votes are somehow summed up in what is called the Google PageRank. The PageRank is the little green bar that displays for every page when you have the google toolbar on your browser, the grade scale is from 0 to 10. If you want to know more about the pagerank visit Matt Cutt's blog (one of the chief engineers at google)

Therefore people want as many links to their websites as they can possibly get. Sometimes they are even willing to pay for them.

For this reason most webmaster forums have setup subforums for link development - where people give and get advice on how to build their backlinks - and also sections where people can post their link exchange and link sale offers. A good starting point would be the notorious digitalpoint forums or any webmaster forum that has such subforums.

For more advanced link traders there are places like Text Link Ads that have a network of advertisers that want to get backlinks, and publishers that (in this scenario) are website owners offering backlinks for money. A publisher is registering to be accepted to the program and makes know the websites that he is willing to sell backlinks on. If an advertisers happens to like the website and thinks the price is fair then there is a match and the text link exchange program gets a cut of the deal.

Most link exchange programs will look for a good pagerank, decent traffic (proven with alexa statistics) and relevance of the site to be included in their publishers network.

Luckily for amateurs like me there are places that don't have so strict acceptance rules, like buy sell text link ads and the iwebtool link market (the latter does not charge for any link exchange).

So if you have a site that has built some decent backlinks and pagerank you can sell your links to interested parties.

Links

Some related sites about internet making money opportunities

Dosh Dosh make money online blog
Online oppurtunity A Review of Ways to Make Money Online
Cashback shopping

Other interesting Links
Internet How

Own an internet directory

There is a whole lot of fuss, the last few years, about getting backlinks (links pointing) to your site. Its been argued time and time again in the webmaster forums that it helps a lot in the visibility of your site to have many and if possible to have links from quality sites. It would be even better to have links from sites that are similar in theme to yours.

The belief is that the more links you have pointing to your site, the better the position you get when one is searching for content (keywords) that is similar to what you have on your site. This belief does not seem to be far from the truth actually (nobody really knows the truth apart from the search engine engineers themselves).

Well this belief alone has led to the spawning of internet directories. The directories are not really a new kind of website - yahoo started out as an internet directory - its just that after the acceptance of backlinks as a value added to a website there is a rush of people to start their own web directories.

The web directories serve as a purpose to categorize the content of the web. In essence they put links from their web directory pointing to other websites but each link is put into its appropriate category/page. For example some directories have the "Regional" page which has links to pages such as "US" "Italy" "Germanay" and clicking lets say on "US" would take you to another page with links to websites related to US (could also have further categorization).

Web directories usually start out as free for all (FFA) to add a link (maybe in exchange for a backlink), and as they become popular they start charging the sites that want to be listed in them. For example the Yahoo Directory charges $299 a year for any site to be included in it (but lets non profit organizations to be included for free). Some directories can also have free links for all but have payed premium placement on top of the categories some of the popular ones are alive directory, site-sift, aviva directory, jayde but a could probably list another 2000 that are not that popular.

So how do you build one ?
Setting it up is probably the easiest to do, there is a bunch of scripts out, some free (indexscript, site sift listings ... ) and some charge a small fee (php Link Directory, eSyndicat ...). Setting it involves 1)getting a server to host it and 2)getting a domain name 3) installing/and configuring the script to the server. Later on when your directory becomes popular you create a paypal account and configure the script so that people are charged for inclusion.

Building it is only half of the trouble, the rest (if not more) of the trouble goes into marketing it so that it becomes popular. That is a whole different subject that I will probably write something about next time.