If you manage your own blog or small web site, you know that growing your viewership is painstaking and results are likely to be minimal for all the effort. You’ve probably heard the  adage that if you produce interesting content, others will find you and will organically link to your site from theirs and eventually your its popularity shoots up. Maybe that was enough 10 years ago, but not now, unless a major web site touts yours. There’s about 44 billion web pages in Google’s index alone, so getting found is no small feat, never mind what bs seo “experts” claim. So how can your labor of love make any money?

It’s not evil to want to make a bit of money, even if it only covers the hosting costs. There’s referral programs you can join, but if they only pay for conversions, where your referral actually buys something, your chances are nearly nil. There’s some programs that pay you a few pennies per unique click, but again, if you don’t have the traffic, it will take some time before you get something out of it (most set a minimum accumulated commission before they pay out). Referral programs are better than nothing, so by all means use those that are most likely to yield results.

Selling banner ad space is virtually impossible unless your monthly visits are in the tens of thousands. What is left is actually the kind of stuff that makes Google cringe: paid text links and paid posts.Whether you join some kind of program or someone comes to you (it happened to me repeatedly), you’ll stand the chance to collect a small fee for minimum effort. The problem is that these advertisers, although offering something that’s relevant to your web site’s topic, aren’t looking for return traffic but rather contextual back links, their goal being to improve their position in major search engine results.

In the case of a paid post, they’ll either ask you to place their own article with a contextual link embedded, or let you write your own with the aforementioned link in it. Using theirs is a sure fire way to get flack because it’ll obviously be somebody else’s writing, while writing your own, if the topic is germane to your web site, is not that dark a proposition, though what you write might be slanted in favor of the advertiser rather than an objective critique — they usually reserve the right to request changes. They’ll probably offer a one time fee, which, if you think about it, is a rip-off considering it constitutes a permanent advertisement. Simple paid contextual links, typically earn you a monthly fee, and you can remove the link if you or the advertiser cancel the arrangement.

Google, the God whose decisions can make or break web sites, frowns upon both paid links and paid posts. They hate paid posts with a passion, but as sophisticated as their detection methods may be, I don’t think they’re penalizing web sites who have them because of the difficulty in determining if the link is organic or not. As for paid links, which tend to be found in blog rolls, they’re easier to identify, and in this case I have an inkling that they do beget a Pagerank penalty.

Truthfully, a paid post is a bit more insiduous because you’re writing a biased article, but in the case of a paid link, why is that any worse than a paid banner if what is being offered is related to the web site it’s on and isn’t a scam? If they want to penalize the advertisers who engage in anything that tries to influence their positioning in search results, fine, but is it fair to also discredit small web sites who only have this as a source of income? Sorry, I can’t see this as worse than some major web sites, such as weather.com, that are chock full of spammy banner ads!

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