As many of you know, I own and operate www.AdhocAds.com (along with a couple of programmers and an editor), a text link ad marketplace. The past couple of months have been a bit of a whirlwind as I've established myself with many SEO specialists to provide quality backlinks at reasonable rates. We now have over 300 pre-screened publishers in our marketplace. We keep statistics on each site allowing advertisers to search and sort on category, keyword, pr, alexa, google backlinks and age of domain. What I'm curious to know, is for those of you looking to purchase text link advertising, what more can I offer you? What would you like to see? Would you like me to gather more statistics on each site? If so, what measures are you looking for? Would you prefer a payment method other than paypal? Are you adverse to subscriptions? Would you like notification when sites you are advertising on have decreased PR? Would you like notification when new sites in your niche have been added to our marketplace? Now that we have established ourselves, we're looking to improve. I have the capital and the programmers to make the improvements, now all I need is more input form those that buy and sell text link advertisements.
First of all, tighten up the text on your site, there are numerous mistakes and misinformation. For example, sites don't have PR, pages do. It's a technicality but for those of us who know the difference it impacts on your credibility. Secondly, quality of a site is not described by its PR. That's false information. I'd review all the text on your site, there's information even on the homepage that's misleading. I appreciate that sitewides make you money. Promoting sitewides as an effective SEO tool means more money for you. But it is widely accepted by those in the know that sitewides on third party sites are mostly worthless. With respect how you can improve your service: 1. Guarantee advertisers that the links will be free of nofollow, meta blocks, robots blocks etc. And put tests in place to monitor your publishers for these violations. 2. Make links permanent. Charge a higher fee for making the introduction but allow advertisers and publishers to negotiate private deals for permanent, in-content links. Buying monthly links is a mug's game - the month you stop paying Google suddenly sees a massive withdrawal of links. Two problems there: First is that your ranking drop like a bomb. Second, you are giving away that those were all paid links because they all dropped together. Google doesn't like paid links and the last thing you want to do is put a list together of all the links you bought and send it to Google recorded delivery. I've explained in some detail what I feel are good links and what are bad links in this thread. Give your customers what's right for them rather than what makes you money and you'll have a more solid business.
Very well put together post, Foggy. Thanks for the input. If you don't mind, I'd like to respond to a few points you've brought up. I'll certainly go through all of the text again. Thanks for the heads up. I couldn't agree more. I'd say that in general, PR should be the result of the quality of the site. But it isn't always, and you shouldn't look at PR alone to determine the quality of a page becuase PR can persist long after the quality of a page has diminished. Actually, most, if not all, of the advertisements I deal with are for HOMEPAGE links. The homepage is where the traffic is at, and it's where the most PR usually is. I think you have to be a little more careful with homepage links, but I'd take good a homepage link over a deep link any day. Also, I think this is vastly overstated. I think that sitewide links are every bit as effective as a single page link. Believe me, I'd much prefer to sell link on individual pages. It would multiply my inventory by the number of pages that were on each site. Done! We already offer this guarantee, and we check for no-follow tags regularly. I do think it would be a good idea to promote this a little more, so thanks for the suggestion. I'm afraid this just isn't reasonable. At least not for homepage links. There are a very limited number of outbound links a publisher can put on their hompage, without being penalized. I don't think it's reasonable to expect permanent prices for these links. That being said, we're working on a way to offer exactly what you are looking for. It's called 'Pay Per Comment'. It provides you a way to search for pages within publishers sites that are relevent to your site, and that have the PR etc you are looking for, and then pay for the privilege of placing a do-follow comment on that page. comments will be limited to 1 link and 50 words. Pay Per Comment will cost a flat rate, permanent price, probably around the same price as 1 month on the homepage. I can see your concern here, but if you are looking for 'advertising', then you can expect to pay a monthly rate. Billboards cost a monthly rate. Magazine's cost a monthly rate. Banner Ads cost a monthly rate. So too, do text link advertisements. If you stop advertising using any of these other methods, then yes, you can expect your traffic to decrease proportionally. I couldn't agree more. By far, the majority of my customers ask for sitewide or homepage links, so I've been trying to cater to them. However, I am interested in helping fulfill your needs as well. I think our 'pay per comment' program would be a great fit for you, and I'd like to hear what you think about it.
I agree with Foggy on most things and specially on the permanent links idea. Most webmasters buy text links for SEO and not advertising, if I wanted to advertise I would be much better off with a banner than a text link on the side bar. When someone RENTS a link from you they are making a deal with the devil, as soon as they stop paying they'll automatically loose rankings and for that case it is much better option to spend their cash in PPC, at least you get immediate and more targeted traffic. (Yes it is more expensive but PPC provides a much better ROI in the LONG run than marrying a link). I would be willing of using yours and any other link broker if you could provide permanent text links. I understand that it isn't viable for home pages but I'd rather spend $1000 for 200 permanent in content links in secondary pages with lower PR than $1000 for 200 links in homepages that will disappear as soon as I stop paying. It would be great if I could search for specific words in your publisher's website and make an offer to buy that "word" permanently. You would only need a basic spider to crawl your publisher's websites and store all the words in a basic SQL Database with the URL and PR of the page. I'm sure thousands of webmasters have many keywords we all need in old posts that are indexed with some PR and wouldn't mind selling an in content link in a post they've written months ago. It is a simple theory where we would all win, the publisher is making money from a post they've probably forgotten and we get a permanent link for an affordable price as long as the site is online. Of course there is a risk that in the long run that the post with the link might disappear but if you want to be fair to your advertisers you would ban that publisher from selling links in the case he lets a website/post where I bought my link die.
I understand what you are asking for, I'm just not that sure it's going to be very realistic. It's going to be VERY difficult to convince publishers to sell links on any page with decent PR for a permanent price. Especially at the prices you're talking aobut. 200 links for $1000? That's $5 per link. I don't think you'll find many webmasters that would sell a link on a pr3 (for example) page for $5. Especially since most of them advertise their good pages for about that much per month. Also, you'd need to closely monitor the number of outbound links on any page. Once a page get more than, say 20 outbound links, the benifit is passes along to other site is greatly reduced. That means that each page has a finite number of links that can be sold. The bottom line is that something like this would hinge upon the publishers. Without enough publishers, there wouldn't be enough inventory. And as long as there are tons of advertisers out there that are willing to pay monthly for text link ads, you're not going to find many publishers willing to sell links on good pages for that cheap. There has to be a happy compromise, though. I imagine that if the price was right, we could find publishers. I'm willing to take a closer look, and see what I can come up with if you guys are willing to continue to provide feedback.
Also, I wanted to point out that banner advertising is usually much, MUCH more expensive than text link advertising. Usually around 4 times as much. Just some food for thought.
I understand the costs and the $1000 was a simple example. The bottom line is that in the long run if we purchase links from any link renter we would loose the entire investment as soon as we decide to stop paying. Renting links is an extremely "fragile" and unstable optimization based on a recurring investment. At least that is MY PERSONAL OPINION. Advertising is for "immediate" direct traffic, selling links is for SEO not traffic. If you decide to offer permanent in content links count me in.
selectsplat, I'm glad you took the feedback in the spirit it was intended. I would disagree with you on homepage links. It's more important to get a link from a page that has relevance, to get a link with the the right anchor, to get it in the right spot (not under a banner that says "Sponsored Links") etc. And the homepage is a poor provider of such links. Further, homepage links are generally in a footer or other clearly demarkated space which is a clear sign to Google that it's a paid link. I think chasing homepage links blindly is plain dumb. Remove that emphasis on homepage and your main reason for not selling permanent links vanishes. You asked me what I want. I want permanent, relevant, incontent links on internal pages. Now if all your other customers are dumb enough to be chasing homepage links in the footer then you've got an opportunity here to cater for people like me and seosapien without affecting your current sales! You'll also find that people like us are generally big spenders. While we may not pay monthly we can generate you more money overall because a) you're getting $0 of that business now and b) people like me spend huge amounts per month. Don't get hung up on the rates quoted by seosapien. In fact, don't even get involved in the rates. Take your money for finding the right pages for the keyword, doing some due diligence on the seller's page and introducing them to each buyer. And, yes, sponsored posts would be a good addition though there are a lot of companies already offering that.
Again, outstanding feedback, Foggy. I truly appreciate when advertisers come forward and tell me what they need, so that I can better cater to them. You'll be happy to know that I have decided to make an attempt at putting together a way to offer what you are looking for. I've started by asking my programming team to develop a spider that will crawl a given domain, collect all internal links, and cycle through them getting PR for each internal link, and store that information in our database. This seems to be going fairly well, and is much quicker than I anticipated. I've also started thinking about how I want to integrate this into AdhocAds. My preference is that I would like to allow publishers to offer either A.) homepage/sitewide links as a subscription rate, or B.) Deep links in content for a fixed rate, or both. My basic thought here is that I don't want to have to go out and solicit 1000's of publisehrs all over again. Instead I'll just let all of the publishers know that we're offering this new program, and ask them to opt in if they want to make more sales. There are, in my mind, several logistical obstacles to overcome. I'm hoping that with your innovative ideas, you might help me overcome some of these challenges. First of all, in regards to what seosapien said about looking for a word that's already on a website and 'buying' it. Is that truly what you want? It seems like that would severely limit the number of pages available to you, as there may be very relevent pages available that do not currently have your keyphrase. Also, I think I'd have to use google's API to pull that off. I can't possible store the text of every page of every publisher. And I'm not sure I can get results from google, then manipulate it, and present it, which is what I'd have to do. What if you searched for relevent deep pages by title and meta description, and meta keyword? Then I could list all deep pages with pr that were available. You could purchase your links, and the publisher would either embed your link in the existing content, or you could suggest a sentence or two of content to put on the page. This might be a little more cumbersome, however, I think it would give you many more opportunities, and it would be easier to deliver. Finally, what about pricing? I'm of a mind to allow publishers to provide their own price, however, I think I need to provide a range of prices to use as a guide. I think the price needs to be attractive enough to publishers for them to want to sell permanent deep links. I hate to use PR as the sole statistic to determine price, but as a guide, I'm thinking approximate prices would be something like pr1 = $5, pr2=$7, pr3$12, pr4=$20, pr5=$30 ? Thoughts?
Sponsored comments is what I was thinking. You find a depp URl that already has PR, and you pay for the privilege of being able to post a comment with a DO FOLLOW link it it. There are lots or pay per post sites out there, but all of them that I know of are to pay for a brand new post, that will not have PR for some time, if ever. This thought is to pay for a comment on a post that already has PR.
Cool. Send them an email saying, "We've created yet another way for you to make more money without affecting your current ad income" Nope. I'll take the word, yes, but I'll also take derivative words and terms, synonyms, or even a "click here" anchor if the page is otherwise very focused on the subject matter of my destination. Think symantic match!. If that's difficult to automate, perhaps advertisers can provide you the URIs of pages they wish to advertise and you could find some way to extract a list of keyterms (using Google Groups, Adwords Keyword Tool, WebComp Analyst... or something else) for each page. That's a value add service that you could charge for. Note that this type of linking is time consuming for both advertiser and publisher. The advertiser has to asssess the page, choose the term or create a sentence that fits seemlessly (and doesn't look like a paid link). The publisher needs to evaluate that and manually add it to his page. But I find it works for me. When I find a good site I usually take 5-15 such links (so it's worthwhile for the publisher). And I am not alone. As the owner of several very high quality PR6 and PR7 sites I often get contacted by the more clued up SEO companies looking for exactly the type of links we're talking about here. I may even put you in touch with some of them if you come up with something good Hmm. If the homepage of the site has a PR1+ I am usually happy to pay for internal links even if they are PR0 pages provided they tick all the other boxes of relevance etc. (You seem to be excluding PR0 pages such as new blog posts). Perhaps go by the PR of the homepage and how many clicks are required to reach the internal page in question. I've often paid $5 or more for PR0 internal pages. I'd pay a lot more than that for PR0 internal pages on top domains like ibm.com, adobe.com etc., but even other quality sites that are outstanding in that they have a lot of quality content that is unique to them/lots of traffic/lots of IBLs/many years established/other signs of reputation.
That will take me a bit to digest. I like many of your suggestions, but I'm having trouble coming up with a way to provide everything you're asking for. The biggest thing I need to determine is if I should try to figure out a way to utilize google's API, or if I should cache every single page of every single publisher I have that opts into this program. If you're saying that I have to include even all of the PR0s, and I already have over 1000 publishers, then I don't think that caching all pages is going to be possible. A very rough estimate tells me that I'd need about 300gb of space to do that. Not out of the realm of possibility, I suppose, but certainly a much heavier database than I ever anticipated. Then again, using google's API, but limiting it to only sites that are opted into our new program might provide poor search performance. Not to mention that we may be blurring the lines a little when it comes to Google's terms and conditions. If it were just deep pages with PR, I think I could cache it all. But I think I'd have to use google's API if I need all pages.
If it were my business I'd be inclined to rely less on a third party API if I can do it in-house. That way I'm not too reliant on a third party service that could change terms on me. Do you need to cache whole pages? Why do you need images or design? Surely just the main page text should do. Also, if you strip out pages that are dups, that don't pass copyscape, that have nofollow, that aren't within 3 clicks from the homepage, that have robots.txt block, that have meta noindex, that may trim it down a bit. Alternatively, you could store just key terms relevant to each page rather than the whole page. But if it's too difficult then just start with pages that have +ve PR. You can add the PR0s later if there's demand. Just as an indicator, I could buy $3,000-$4,000 of PR0 links every month if I have an easy way to do so.
Do we want pr n/a? Also, when you say 'that have nofollow', do you mean if a link on the page has no follow you don't want that page? Also, doesn't copyscape cost $0.05 per search. That would cost me a bundle if I search through 30,000 pages.
I believe that your main customer base would be suspicious of pages with nofollow links on them. I wasn't aware of copyscape costs. But $0.05 per page is half a cent per page per link if 10 links are sold. You could have the publisher declare the originality of his page when he submits it. Then if it fails copyscape you could "demote" that publisher, reduce his earnings or give him a warning. I find it really worthless to buy links on pages that are just copies of material from article directories or elsewhere. That's a major negative for me and reduces the quality of the page to near zero (even if it does have PR!). Alternatively, you could offer buyers a paid option: give them all the pages that qualify and then offer to do a copyscape check for them across the list if they pay $0.0x per page.
The problem there is that we were discussing ways to trim down all of the URLs that I need to cache. Since you've asked for PR0s to be included, after applying all of the other filters, using a very rough estimate, we've got it narrowed down to about 100 pages on average per site. With about 1000 publishers, that would be about 100,000 pages I need to cache (text only). That's alot, but not outside the realm of possibility. I'd probably need a small upgrade to our production server just to make sure we hand room to grow. If I want to use copyscape to narrow that number down further, at $0.05 per page, that's $5,000, up front, out of pocket. That's currently outside my budget. So the short of it is that we can add a copyscape check to our service, but we probably would not be able to use it as a filter to reduce the number of pages returned by a search. Somehow, the copyright search would have to be paid for by the advertiser, before the search could occur. I like your alternative suggestion, where we offer to copyscape the URLs for them for a price, but I hate to make them go through a checkout twice, once to copyscape and once to purchase the links. I'm having trouble coming up with a way to streamline the use of copyscape at the moment. Also, my programmers are still waiting to hear whether or not to include pages that currently have a PR of N/A. We're hoping not.
I'd buy PR0 but, of course, I don't speak for your entire advertiser base. If the cost of copyscape is so high you really need to put more pressure on publishers to declare the truth at submission. Recalcitrant publishers should then be blackmarked and you could stop copyscaping their pages. Charging advertisers: You could charge them only once up front. This is one way it could work. 1. Advertiser provides key terms or destination page 2. You work out how many potential links you've got for him 3. You provide advertiser with the summary: 16xPR4 pages, 25xPR3 pages.... 178xPR0 pages 4. Customer can then order 178 x PR0 pages and ticks a box if wants the list cleaned of dup content (at $0.02x178=$3.56) 5. Customer pays 6. You run the copyscape and present customer with list of 78 clean pages and 100 dup pages 7. The next time someone wants any of those 178 pages you already know which ones are clean but you still charge $0.02 per page for copyscape cleaning.
I think that's headed inthe right direction, but I'm still not sure it fits together logistically very well. What is keeps the advertiser from using the copyscape feature on 178 pages and then not purchasing anything? In my experience, I'll get a conversion from an advertiser after they have found sites that match their criteria less than 25% of the time. That means I'd be paying for copyscape pages an awful lot when the advertiser doesn't pay for anything. It also leave the copyscape feature open to abuse. I'm all for finding a way to integrate a copyscape check, but I think I've got to find a way to do it so that I'm not paying for each search up front. I'm more than willing to do it on a guaranteed sale.