Search Engine Journal has a good post on how to work out how much to charge for text ads on your blog. It comes at a perfect time for me as I’ve had a number of emails recently from webmasters asking how much I charge for links. The article suggests the following criteria might be helfpul to keep in mind as you consider how much to charge:
1. PageRank of Site (poor measurement, but probably still worthwhile)
2. PageRank of Page
3. Site Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (TLD)
4. Page Position in Top 50 Results for Primary Term (Page specific)
5. Number of External Links on Page
6. Site Flavor from Google (shows theme)
7. Date of Cached Snapshot of Page (shows spidering frequency)
8. Primary Topic of Page Extracted via Yahoo! API (Then conduct C-Index with target term)
9. Alexa Rank (again, poor measurement, but probably worthwhile)
10. External Links to Site (Using Yahoo! LinkDomain Search)
11. External Links to Page (Using Yahoo! Link Search)
12. Internal Links to Page vs. # of Internal Pages
13. Type of Link (customizable text, directory listing, banner/image, etc.)
14. Location of Link (content section, advertising section, navigation area, footer, etc.)
Read more at Text Link Pricing Criteria
For the novice, which includes myself, this still doesn’t really give him or her a good idea of how much to charge – just what characteristics are useful in pitching your site to advertisers. You might want to add a little note in there that the Search Engine Journal article intended to only address your site’s value with respect to search rankings (not clear in your opener) and nothing else. Cheers!