Could someone with good experience in selling text-links suggest what one can charge for a direct, non-rotational, sitewide text-link on a website with the following characteristics: Subject: General online media with focus on general news subjects (main stories, social, commerce, technology, etc), entertainment content (movie reviews, celebrity galleries) Years online: 8 years Format: All pages are static HTML pages Domain: .COM Indexed pages: Google 1,330, MSN 12,600, Yahoo! 3,197 Organic traffic: 80,000 unique visitors monthly (not hits) Link Popularity: almost 10,000 PageRank:: PR 6 (1) - homepage jumps between 6 and 7 PR 5 (~50) PR 3 (mid 100s) PR 2 (high 100s) PR 1-0 (in 1000s) Keywords: Solid on few major keywords in search engines. Some rank higher than Yahoo! pages Total pages the text-link will be on is: 1800+ Thank you for any pricing direction you can give. I have seen a lot of links for sale, but they are either on blogs or other sites with low quality or syndicated content.
It would also depend on link placement, whether it will get clicks. I would say your range is $50-$75 a month, up to 20 links. You could go less links and higher price.
Thank you for your responses! Not sure what an outbound link is? The number of sites I already link to as clients like these text-links? Maybe a couple. I have 2 banners on each page and the area for these new Sponsored Links. I have some solid partners I link exchange with, but those links are concentrated on a coupld of separate pages (not sitewide) and there are no more than 50 links on those pages (combined). Link placement is pre-footer because links are visibly integrated into the content part of the page. InfoWorld is a good example of where my links are located on my site (of course not as many though): http://www.infoworld.com/index.html I am also considering limiting the number of links to 8. Yes, it will get clicks (not forced, but targeted leads). The 2 banners that run Google Ads generate 40 clicks daily on average, so I assume each link can get up to 50-100 clicks a month depending on product/service advertised. That's just a blind prediction. Does this change the pricing?
With so few estimated clicks I think the PR would be the most important factor in determining price. At PR6 perhaps $35-$50 a month at PR7 $50-??, Google is cracking down on text links on higher PR sites and PR7 would be considered that, so if you don't use no follow you may be in danger of having your PR penalized. I would make sure to only sell relevant links and do so discreetly.
Thank you for the great advice, jg123. I will make sure to consider all the angles of text-link selling as you mentioned a couple I wasn't even aware of.
There is no easy way to value a link - PR is one of the worth - the PR in the tool bar is out of date and inaccurate
Don't get all caught up on edu links and etc. Reason edu links are talked about so highly is because generally they come from good sources, but just because its .edu don't make it special. Now links from older websites is always a a++, but just focus on quality links. Such as contextual links, or links from high quality websites. Personally I would recommended you buy a hand full of contextual links before you go renting links out because contextual links are permanent, so your have value to come for ages...