John Chow just posted a guide to selling links and staying under the Google radar: http://www.johnchow.com/selling-links-in-a-google-controlled-internet/ Make Sure Links Are Related To Your Blog Upgrade To The Latest TLA Plugin Do Not Label The Links Remove Your Link To Text Link Ads Interesting stuff. I would add: - Tight editorial control - consider the payment for your links an editorial payment to check the site is useful to readers and to continue to check the site maintains standards each month.
Ya, another article on how to cheat the pagerank system. A real webmaster would earn his pagerank and SERPs the natural way and not pay for them.
Selling links has nothing to do with cheating page rank - it is the buying that allows people to raise their rankings. Selling text links is a legitimate form of advertising. The demand and price for text link ads is huge because Google's algorithm overly relies on text links. However, that is not the publishers fault.
We always get into this debate, if you do not use the ref="nofollow" tag in the links you sell you are violating the Google TOS, period. You keep trying to sugar coat it and beat around the bush. I personally sell no="follow" text links for traffic purposes and make just about the same as people selling text links in the long run, since I don't get paid monthly but daily.