If you've been around for as long as I have, you'd know that paid links are bad. They're exactly what they suggest - you pay people to put a link to your site. That link is given a pagerank value & priced accordingly. You price a link, send an offer to a blogger, tell them to put a link with certain keywords attached, and pay the cash. Sounds great? Well no, because Google comes down hard on paid links, dropping the pagerank of people who offer them, and destroying the SERPS of those who buy them.

There is a way of getting one way links from bloggers for little money, hell even for free, without annoying the great Google god, and I do it all the time.

Sponsorship.

Look at my blog, on the sidebar, I have 6 125 x 125 ads. They rotate between my ads & third party ads. Any third party ads are simply people who have won competitions that I've sponsored. I do sell the ads at $10/month, but I've only ever sold one. The rest are all people who have won competitions.

Have a look around for bloggers who are offering competitions. Often in return for a prize (and it can be anything, advertising, e-books, cash, gifts & services) will write a small line bio about you - with follow links (an example which I did sponsor is here).

If you keep offering & delivering on your prizes, you will get people coming to you asking for sponsorship of their competition. Great! More stuff to give away, more linkbacks, more traffic & more tweets. All good stuff.

So think about what you can offer the community in terms of sponsorship. A great place to look for competition are blog forums (such as this one, Bloggeries & Problogger.com - the last is paid but I SERIOUSLY recommend it for networking with other bloggers!).

* please note, I do sell paid links on sites I don't care about search engine placement, so it's a case of do as I say, not as I do.

Prior to changing my domain around, I actually was selling five links on my blog through text-link-ads. I was bringing about $250'ish a month from 3 blogs in total. Unfortunately it dropped drastically once I changed the domain (which was removed from TLA due to low Alexa and no PR on it) so that income dropped by about $150 . It was NICE having money coming in that I didn't have to do anything to earn it.

I've been meaning to try to come up with clever ways to keep visitors in but right now my focus on posting at forums (and just keeping my few links in a sig) has definitely worked out. Also helps to comment everrrywhere to get your name recognized by other people who in turn might enjoy what you have to say and link you on their site or at least subscribe.

I do recommend commenting, but not to build links. It's a bit all over the place, some people will give links, some won't.

But it's GREAT at getting your name out