As I said, my preference is for you to charge for the introduction rather than per ad. Charge to provide the list and then you don't have to worry if the advertiser buys links or not. You are used to charging per ad so you may need to think a bit out of the box here. Charge for a different kind of service - for the browsing through your database, for the value-add of filtering pages by the term/sorting on PR/doing the copyscape, for the provision of a list rather than per link, for making the introduction. Greybar PR is fine if it's on a site that otherwise has normal PR. A new page on a qualtiy, PR6 blog is not a bad thing in my eyes just because it's new. I'd buy it.
I'm all for thinking outside of the box. And I think that's an interesting approach. But I'm not sure that's realistic. That would mean that the advertiser would have to pay for the results before they got to see them. You're telling me that you'd be willing to pay $200 or so for a list of 178 pages that you have not seen yet, that have been filtered by the criteria you suggested, that are a semantic match to your search, and that many of which may not even pass copyscape? I find that hard to believe.
I'd pay. It's a question of trust. New advertisers won't trust you and will spend small amount like $20 to see what you come up with up. If they like they spend some more. Ultimately, the question you need to ask yourself is this: Are they getting what they want - the permanent, incontent links on highly targeted pages that have been pre-screened for them? If they are getting that then they'll pay. Again and again. And you'll have a competitive advantage. Those that don't think copyscape is an issue will go ahead and buy links on pages of dup content. Those that do mind will dip their toes. Serve them lists of 178 pages where every pages is a dup page then they won't be coming back to you. But it should take you long to know which pages are dups. You can then offer your more discerning buyers a list of guaranteed non-dupes. I've given you plenty of ideas... I'll let you take it from here. All the best and let me know how you fare.
I hear you. But I don't think it will be very convincing for new advertisers. I am serious about providing you with what you are looking for, but I don't think I'll get any advertisers to purchase a list of urls without seeing them first. And even if you did trust that I'm giving you pages that are targeted, I think you'd be kind of upset to pay $200 and then find that 1/4 of the urls didn't pass copyscape, antoher 1/4 you'd already purchase links on, and another 1/4 are for synonyms to your keyword that you don't really care for or for other reasons beyond my ability to detect programmatically in advance (perhaps they are a competitor of yours, perhaps they decline to place your links) . If it's ultimately the performance you're concerned with, then why wouldn't you rather pay a small fee for each link you actually placed, rather than paying for a bunch of urls you might or might not purchase from.
Selectsplat kudos to you for actually listening to all our ideas and trying to work them out. I'm sure that if you ever manage to offer permanent links many DP members will start working with you. Do you offer the option of purchasing yearly links? That could be an easier solution for you and paying an yearly price might be more appealing to us than a monthly rent.
Yes, for all of the sites in my inventory, I offer yearly pricing. yearly pricing is normally from 15%-30% off. Development has been started to add a yearly price option to the checkout. We're also in the process of converting all of the 'paypal subscription' options over to having your choice of paying by paypal subscription, or receiving a monthly invoice. Also, we'd like to begin to send notifications of major changes to advertisers. so, for example, if you have a monthly subscription on a site, and the PR drops, you'd get a notification that a site you are subscribed on has dropped in PR, so you might want to re-evaluate if you want to continue that subscription. These are few of the things we've been working on. However, at the moment, I've got everyone working on these permanent links, so it may be a while before much more progress is made on anything else, lol.
>>If it's ultimately the performance you're concerned with, then why wouldn't you rather pay a small fee for each link you actually placed I didn't say I wouldn't. But I wouldn't buy annual links like seosapien suggests.
Ok. We're getting there. Annual links are on the homepage/site wide side of things. This deep links program is probably going to be segregated. I envision that you'll search for your keyword, and we'll do a semantic match, and return both homepage/sitewide links, as well as deep pages (no more than 3 clicks) that match. Homepage/sitewide links will be on a subscription basis, while deep pages will be a one time charge. You'll have a radio button to turn off either of the two. By the way, both of you will be invited to the limited beta program. Our timetable has us going into beta on aug 14th, and going live by the end of the month. Already our spider has collected 45,000 urls from sites in our inventory form publishers that have agree to participate. Now we just have to apply filters to them and get the remainder cached.
Ok, we're making good progress on this effort. We are to the point where we need to decide if we want to let publishers set their own price for links, or if we should assign the price for them. I tend to believe that most publishers will have a tendency value their links on PR alone. But I don't think that's what advertisers want. I think advertiser's want links to be assigned value based on quality of a page. And quality of a page should probably be estimated using many different variables. So, my best option might be to assign each page a 'Quality Rank', and allow the publishers to set the price of a page within a range of values depending on the 'Quality Rank'. For example, a Quality Rank of 1 might only be worth $1-$3 for a link, while a Quality 5 might be worth $40-$60. In coming up with a quality rank, we've initially started out with the following variables. PR Alexa Google Backlinks Age of site Number of Outbound Links I'd love to include a copyscape in here, but until there's a free way to do so, or at least a cheaper option than copyscape, I don't think it will be feasible. Anyone have any feedback on this?
My main criteria is none of them. It's subject relevance. And I don't believe it's easy to assign value to this. My next criteria would be that it's in-content and not sidebar/footer. That's why my suggestion was to let publishers work price/placement out directly with advertisers. It would however be useful if you provided me all those homepage PR/linking page PR/backlinks/site age/OBL stats with every link opportunity you offered me and I could go do just the copyscape.
Relevance is certainly important, but I feel like we get pretty close to that with the keyword search. Sure, our engine might pull up a page that has the phrase 'SEO' and the page not actually have anything to do with SEO, but I think would probably be allowable. As far as allowing the advertiser to deal with the publisher directly, I don't think that possible while still giving the broker (me) their fair commission. I think fair compensation for my service should always be based upon a percentage of the sale. We will, however, be providing all of the stats you mention for every page we list. And you'll be able to filter and sort by all of those values as well, making it ever easier to find exactly what you are looking for. Unfortunately, response from publishers so far is not very encouraging. Two day ago, we sent emails to 20 publishers that we do regular business with, to let them know about this new possible stream of revenue for them, and to ask them if they would be willing to participate. Only 3 of them have agreed to give it a try. 6 of them have declined, stating that they could sell the same links at monthly subscription rates, or that they offer blogposts instead. I haven't heard back from the others. I'd LOVE to hear from some more publishers, and get their opinions on the matter.