Internet Gangsters

A little update on my text-link-ads.com experiment. I guess I should have read the emails they were sending me a little more carefully before I started to write them off as not being able to sell ads for my site, but I received an email today saying that the site I setup was approved at that ads should start appearing on my site soon. They have set the price at $15/mo for the site I sent them, which is totally fine by me. Everyone always wants more, but you have to start somewhere. Now if I would have done this a few months ago when the site was really hot I’m sure I would have made more money, but oh well you live and learn. So this is good news, I’ll keep everyone updated on whether or not anyone decides to buy an ad on the site.

On a side note, I tried to get my forum approved by the site and they denied me right out of the box. They didn’t even say “yes, until further approval” it was just flat out “nope” and they review sites every Monday and would look at it again… riiight, we’ll see about that. The forum gets more hits than the site that got approved and I would place the links as the 2nd post of every thread page so I don’t understand the problem, but we’ll see, maybe they will approve it at a later date.

So at this point I’m going to have to recommend text-link-ads , but we’ll see how the actual sales go.

One of the keys to getting your website higher on the search engine results is to have a lot of other sites linking back to you, but how are you supposed to get links without paying a lot of money? Submit your site to free directories, that’s how. Directories are sites that basically just have a ton of categories full of links, just like the yellow pages in a phone book. Yahoo has one of the best directories, but it’s not free to get your site entered and they usually won’t accept sites that are straight up affiliate sites. If you have some cash, there are a bunch of good paying directory sites that you can find out there, but this post is about the FREE directories out there that will accept your site no matter what. Yes these directories probably will not get you too many hits from people actually clicking your link in them, but what they will do is give you one-way links that the search engines will see, and this is key.

Search engine ranking is determined by a lot of different factors; keywords, links in, popularity, etc. So once you’ve made sure your site is up to par with it’s keywords and all the SEO you can do on your own, it’s time to move on to building links that point to your site and the easiest way to do this is free directories. Link Rain has an incredible list of over 500 free directories that you can submit your site to. Link Rain itself is a directory that you must pay to get into and is for legitimate sites. So you can always go that route as well and pay them to get your site listed, or you can go down this list and start adding your site to a few directories everyday.

By doing this the search engines will see more and more links in to your site and it will help you move up higher on the results pages for whatever keywords you are trying to get higher with. Also, make sure when you submit to these directories, your titles and descriptions contain the keyword you are working towards. For example, if you have a site that sells purple dildos and you want to rank higher when someone searches for “purple dildos” or “adult fun toys” then you want to make sure that you put those words in your description that you submit to the directories. And if you can put it in the link and title as well. Anywhere you put those keywords is going to help. But don’t write a description that talks about “leather and lace” if you’re not trying to help your search results for those terms, it’s pretty common sense.

For you lazy people out there, there is another option. You can pay someone else to submit your site to hundreds of free directories for fairly cheap. Check out places like Digital Point to find someone who will do this for you. But the one thing is, don’t expect to see instant results. You won’t start seeing an influx of traffic until the search engines have had time to crawl all those directories, so expect to wait a few months before you start seeing more search engine traffic generated from these new inbound links. Remember, nobody got rich overnight (other than winning the lottery) so making money on the internet will take some time and effort, don’t expect instant riches. But just think, every link you build back to your page could bring 5 more people, so in the time it takes to build 10 links you could have brought 50 more people to your site over time.

So I decided to venture into the world of text-link-ads where you put a piece of code on your site and they sell links for you and then display them and in turn you get paid for the links. It seems like a good concept and the site is pretty slick and easy to use. This is my first time using them so I figured I’d start documenting my experience.

The site I am putting it on is a site that was getting about 30,000 unique hits for the past few months. It no longer gets that many hits due to it being a fan site about a movie and the movie as since come out. I still receive roughly 3,000 unique hits a day of people that are just now finding the site, so it still does very well. I have placed the code in the upper left corner of the content area of the page in the left sidebar so we’ll see how it does. The code was installed yesterday and nothing has appeared yet, although they say this is normal and that I should start seeing paid links within a week. So all we can do now is wait and I will keep you posted on what sort of results I see with this new program.

Click Here To Join Text-link-ads yourself and try it out, let us know your results.