I had one student recently tell me they were contacted by someone about purchasing the right to post their link on her homepage. She wanted to know if this was a good idea and if so, how much she should charge.

Well the fact that someone wants to advertise on your site and pay you money is definitely not a bad thing. However, instead of a yearly fee or a quarterly fee, I would charge them monthly. Now, when you are thinking about how much you should charge, I’ll tell you what I would do to narrow that down if I wanted to advertise on someone else’s site.

The very first thing I would do is evaluate what I’m willing to pay. I wouldn’t approach the site for this information, instead I would consult my Google toolbar (if you don’t have one you can install one easily from Google). I would go to the website and I would look at the page rank on the Google toolbar. If the page rank was a page rank of 5, I would be willing to pay the number of the page rank multiplied by 10, plus or minus 10. So I would pay between $40 to $60 a month to advertise on a page with a rank of 5. That would be what I would be expecting to pay you.

Let’s say the page rank is 3, I would be willing to pay $20 to $40 a month. So, you can see how I do it. I multiply the number of the page rank by ten and plus or minus ten from the total. That’s going to be a good way for you to establish the range. However, if you can get anywhere higher than that, you’re doing really good in my opinion. That’s a good way to evaluate what most people out there charge for that.

The one thing you should remember is that if you put too many links on your site it’s not going to be good. You cannot have more than 20 links coming off your website. So, if you’re going to put one, two, or five, and your sell space is five people and then you don’t have any more links except going to your own site, then it’s perfectly fine. When you think about that, if you had a page rank of five and you’re charging $50 a month and you’ve got five people, 5 times 50, that’s 250 dollars a month just by having a website up. I mean, you can’t go wrong there. That’s 250 times 12, so that’s going to bring you in three thousand extra bucks a year, just by having links on your website.

So is it a good idea? Well, if you feel that you want to make money that way, I don’t think there’s any problem with it. Just follow my pricing example and you shouldn’t have any problems establishing your rates.