If you say “paid” links too loudly in a room at a marketing conference you are almost guaranteed to get some of the looks! You know the one’s! Where they look at you with a shocked look on their face because you dared to mention what some to consider a grey or black hat link building strategy in a day where Google has made it clear that their goal is to devalue any type of link building activity under the guise of eliminating spam!
What most fail to admit is that there are plenty of ways to get legitimate paid links. In fact, I just purchased one today. 🙂 And I did it without crossing the line into any grey or black hat strategies! How?
Professional Associations and Memberships.
When you join a professional organization you are asked to pay a yearly fee and as part of your membership you are usually listed in their online members directory… with a link back to your site! This is an easy way to build up some ethical and legitimate high quality links to your site.
Two examples of professional associations are the BBB and the Chamber of Commerce.
Other examples of ethical paid links are sponsorships. For example if someone is having a fundraiser and you promise to support them for $10 per mile they bike… and there is a website listing the donors.. technically that would be a paid link as well.. yet an ethical paid link.
You can find opportunities for sponsorships by searching for “sponsor + 2011” and our keyword or city. You want to search for the word “sponsor” plus an earlier year because you want your sponsorship link to last and if they have left up the links to their sponsors for the previous years, they will most likely leave up the link to your site for years to come as well.
What do you think? Can you think of any other ways to find ethical paid high quality links?