Great. You've done all of the groundwork, building, developing, and providing content for your new website. You've partnered up with several other websites in your market niche, the search engines are spidering your pages, and you're attracting more and more visitors every day. You're monetizing your site with pay-per-click advertisements, banners, or maybe affiliate ads, but you're still thinking that there is more money to be made from your efforts.

Well, text links on your website can supply you with some additional income to help pay for your costs, and put a little extra into your bank account.

Many businesses are striving to get to the same level (or higher) than your website (in search engine rankings, competitive sales, visitors), and their approach may be to purchase advertising from strong authoritative websites. Prominent links from relevant websites (that is, websites in the same topic or category) can help drive extra traffic to websites (no kidding), because the search engines place some trust in the value of the link if it comes from a website in the same market. These are often called "good neighbourhoods".

In order to preserve the credibility and integrity of your own website, it is important for you to avoid "bad neighbourhoods", that is to say, websites that would not fit appropriately with the content of your website. Some businesses might wish to negotiate links to content that is not relevant, such as adult, gambling, alcohol, or pharmacy-related information. Although ultimately, it

Selling text links is just another stream of revenue for your website, and offering prominent text links on your website is a legitimate source of advertising income.

There are several ways to approach text link advertising for your website. There are many webmaster forums that are populated with website owners, webmasters, and advertising brokers that are looking for strong websites with which to do business. Mostly, they will ask for a homepage or a sitewide (all of your pages on your website) link, accompanied with a few keywords that will help represent their website. The keywords play an important part in how the search engines may see the value of that link.

Text links can be sold in any fashion to clients, based on their specific needs. Often, these will be in the form of campaigns, advertising plans that will run for a certainly length of time. Depending on the client's budget or need, they may ask for a monthly, quarterly, six-month, or annual term. It is up to you and client to negotiate the appropriate price or value of the link for the length of time it will be posted on your website.

There are many factors that buyers will use to evaluate the value of your website. Many can instantly recognize a quality website by its content and design, but buyers are also looking to see that the search engines recognize your worth as well, in the form of search engine results. Clients will also look at the age of your website to see how consistent your site is, and how long you intend to be around. A client isn't going to throw you money if your website isn't going to be around next week.

Clients may also be looking for a measurement of the value of your website in the form of Google's Pagerank (PR). Many clients place a higher value (and will pay a higher price) on websites that have higher PR. It is their belief that the PR is an indicator of strength and that it will directly influence their own search engine results. However, it would be wise to note that selling links for PR is not necessary the best way to approach selling, as there is some question as to the integrity of these sales. But, the final decision rests with you, the seller. The bottom line for most businesses, is driving traffic to a website, so that business can sell more goods or services.

If you decide to try out selling text links, be sure to do all the research you can (such as this article), and visit a couple of webmaster forums, such as Digital Point, Site Point, or The V7N Network.