I was thrilled when I saw that DragonBlogger.com listed as a PageRank 4 from Google on Friday of last month. This is the highest PR that this blog had ever achieved and my efforts at building backlinks and expanding the sites appeared to be helping. It also helped that I switched blog themes and cut the number of outbound links on my homepage by 30% to reduce PageRank loss which was probably a big factor contributing to my depressed pagerank. According to some online tools I have used my PageRank should be a 6 but is artificially depressed probably due to having disclaimer and sponsored posts on my site.
Whether you like or care about blog PageRank or not, one thing is certain PageRank is still a very key metric that advertisers look for. My offers for paid backlinks have increased as well as guest article requests since my blog became a PR4, as a PR4 I am able to increase my pricing for costs of such services to make it appropriate to the value of the PR increase. I do look at what other PR4 blogs are charging as a framework on what to decide for my own pricing, backlinks benefit advertisers more when they are long term, so typically you want to look at 6 month and 1 year pricing packages rather than month by month if you do decide to allow sponsored links on your homepage. If you have sub pages that are high in pagerank, you can profit off of these as well by selling permanent backlinks from them.
Banner ads which typically are not as interested in pagerank but more in pageviews, # of impressions and clicks are a completely different pricing metric than selling backlinks. You can have a blog with a very low amount of traffic but a high pagerank and still monetize to make some decent earnings from flowing the PR juice from your site to an advertiser or sponsor’s site.
Note: Google frowns on selling backlinks and it is possible to lose your pagerank if you do so irresponsibly, you can’t declare selling backlinks anywhere, this is sure to get you downgraded and you have to make sure you only link to other related niche or sites that aren’t “high risk”. No gambling, prescription drugs or adult sites linking out from your blog or you will suffer in the SEO and SERP department for sure. However, if you are a technology blog and sell a backlink to another technology or gadget site, chances are your pagerank will remain unaffected unless you are having too many outbound links on the same post/page.
I know many sites that are really big about selling backlinks and several bloggers who make hundreds of dollars per month just from selling links, behind affiliate sales I think backlink sales are among one of the most profitable ways to monetize your blog.
And now that DragonBlogger.com is a PR4 I only have 2 link slots left on my homepage that I am offering to advertisers or sponsors, if you are interested use my contact form. I charge far less than other PR4 blogs in the same niche, and I can tell by looking at what people are charging on Digital Points forums as well as other sites.
-Dragon Blogger