two questions - - besides TLA, are there other services that act as brokers for selling links? - how do you normally go about selling links?
Yep, links sales is a good place. Besides making own announcements, you can also try finding advertisers & send them a private message. Like for example, go to that forum and do a search for "WTB pr5" (WTB=wanted to buy, PR5=if you have link with pagerank 5) or "WTB music" (if you have a music site, then you can find advertisers who want to buy links for a music site). 1) Find guy / get others to contact you 2) Include the forum thread URL in the private message (if you use PM, then it makes locating things a lot easier!) 3) Tell what kind of offer you'd have, give site details (you might wanna create a public page for site traffic details): traffic, uniques, alexa ranks, page ranks, backlinks, etc. 4) Ask nicely 5) Get payments, put links alive (or put links alive, and wait for payments - but don't wait for many days ) 6) Give iTrader ratings Then be honest & go for long-term partners (be sure to put usernames & email addresses in some safe place in case you need to sell links to them later). If you have a good offer and treat your customers nicely... they'll buy more also in the future.
Put the info in your signature. Then as you post in various places in the forum, people will see it and contact you.