One question we get frequently from publishers is, “Why haven’t I sold any links?” With this question in mind, we set out to examine stats for all of our publishers to examine differences between successful and unsuccessful publishers.

Below are stats for 2 different publishers, each with about the same number of sites added.

stats

Looking at these figures several issues stand out.

The site inventory for the first publisher looks to be mostly newer with lower page rank and moz rank metrics. Despite the lower quality, this publisher is charging 25% more for their links than the other publisher.

The other publisher’s sites are on average 5.5 years older, have better page rank and better moz rank, and have lower prices to boot.

The first publisher has sold barely any links, but the second publisher has sold an average of 6 links per site, generating over $12,000 gross monthly!

Clearly, the data shows advertisers are more interested in older sites.

As a publisher, let’s approach this from a business perspective. You can purchase dropped domains for $7-10 each that may still have some page rank, but the Whois will show the domain as being recently registered. Maybe you can sell these links at a lower price point of $0.50 to $1 each, but I’m just not sure there’s a market here given the above data.

You’d be better off buying fewer aged PR3 domains for $25-30 each. (Pro tip: use a service like RegisterCompass to help filter domain auctions). If you can sell an average of 6 links per site and get $3 per link, you would break even on your investment in as little as 2-3 months.

Let’s extrapolate that. Let’s say you acquire 100 domains at a cost of $30 each, for a total investment of $3,000. If you sell an average of 6 links per site at $3 each, you would generate $1,800 per month gross. Scale as necessary.

You would of course incur some expense namely with hosting, (we’ve had good luck with SEOWebHosting.net, sorry about the shameless affiliate link!) and over time you’ll have sites get deindexed, but the overall rate of return looks very attractive compared to most investments.