One of the great events in 2007 is the full activation of PayPal in other countries including the Philippines. And one of the consequent perks of this event is that you can join advertising networks which are additional sources of online income. One such network I just discovered is Backlinks.

What is BackLinks?

According to its home page,

In this regard, BackLinks is similar to the to the service Text Link Ads, the aim of which is to increase your Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) ranking by increasing the number of pages which link to your web site.

Backlinks is for Online Advertisers and Publishers

So if you're an advertiser, and you want to increase traffic to your site, you may want to Buy Text links.

And if you're a publisher, e.g. a blogger or website owner, you may want to add to your online income and Sell text links on your site.

If you are a publisher, you will be paid according to the PageRank of your home page:

PageRank (PR) 1 homepage $.50 , subpage $.50
PageRank (PR) 2 homepage $1 , subpage $1
PageRank (PR) 3 homepage $2 , subpage $2
PageRank (PR) 4 homepage $3 , subpage $1.50
PageRank (PR) 5 homepage $4.50 , subpage $3.50
PageRank (PR) 6 homepage $12.50 , subpage $10
PageRank (PR) 7 homepage $30 , subpage $25
PageRank (PR) 8 homepage $75 , subpage $50

Backlinks Affiliate Program

Backlinks also has an affiliate program. You will be paid $100 for each advertiser that you refer who buys at least $50 in text links. Alternatively, you will be paid $25 for each publisher that sells at least 1 text link.

Once registered, you can find in your Backlinks Control Panel ready-made affiliate codes for link and banner referrals.

Initial Impressions

I found joining Backlinks to be straightforward. You have three options to join:

1. Trade Text Links
2. Sell Text Links
3. Buy Text Links

Since I have my own sites and wanted to add another online income stream, I chose Sell Text Links. Registration is fairly easy with a few input fields including Name, Username, Password, and PayPal e-mail (so you can get your payment).

Once register, if you want to add link pages, there's an option to add a single page or to add multiple pages. I tried first single pages, and then multiple pages.

With the single page option you just choose a page to include in their directory including the category where it will be listed, and also the categories of links you want to be sold on your site. Once you add the code to your site (there are options for php, asp, perl -- I choose php since my site is a Drupal site) and then activate your submitted link page (there's a 'Validate Web Page' link for activation), and you're done.

With the multiple pages option, Backlinks crawls your site in real time and comes up with pages from which you can choose. I made the mistake of choosing adding 50 pages so 50 pages were added to my web pages to sell. The problem was that I found out that there was no easy way of deleting multiple pages simultaneously if you wanted to remove them. So I am now deleting the links one by one. The curious thing is that they put an option to edit multiple pages, but there was no delete button. This is one issue that Backlinks needs to address immediately to improve their service.

Otherwise, Backlinks seems one of the easy ways to make money online. I'll update this post once I've sold links in my sites.