I'm not a big fan of buying links from link brokers, but I don't mind carefully selecting a high quality website to buy links from if I think that the ensuing deluge of visitors will be targeted (i.e. I need to be sure that when they arrive, they are actually interested in my content). But how do you find the perfect website to buy links from?

Enter Google Ad Planner.

The Google Ad  Planner tool is a gem. Using it, we will be able to target with laser precision prospective websites to advertise on!

When you access the Ad Planner Tool, it's in Search by site view. What we're going to do is find out which other sites our current visitors frequent in addition to our own sites. To do this we need to focus on our audience, so click on the Search by audience tab.

The search by audience view contains a dizzying array of selection criteria that you can adjust. In a nutshell we will describe the characteristics of our intended audience (i.e. visitors to our site), and the tool will tell us which sites they frequent. We can then buy advertising on those sites and steal their traffic! This ought to be illegal.

Some of the variables available for selection hold no interest for us, so let's just focus on the ones that do. Suppose that we are an internet marketer and we run a making money online site. I'll list the criteria that we could use to find other making money online sites we could approach to buy advertising.

• Geography - we don't need to touch this as we are not selling a physical product. We do need to narrow down our search to include only English speaking visitors, but that is handled by:
• Language - set this to English (or the language that your site uses).
• Demographics - we can use this to select, for example, males aged between 18 and 24 who earn $25,000 - $49,999. However, using such stereotypes won't work for us here. Our audience could be male or female, be aged 15 or 80 and could have any kind of salary (or none at all). Walk away from the demographics button!
• Sites visited - now this is where the magic starts working. What other sites do you think our money-crazed audience visits? Let's enter the following in the input box and then click OK:
  • johnchow.com
  • johncow.com
  • entrepreneurs-journey.com
  • shoemoney.com
• Keywords searched - If you want to fine tune your selection, you can enter things like "making money online", "work at home business", "make money on internet" or any other phrase you think visitors might search for to get to your site. We should be OK with the criteria we've entered, though, so we'll leave this criterion.

A list of sites that match your criteria is displayed, and each time you change a selection, the list updates in realtime. However, the default sequence isn't useful to us. We need to sequence the list by Comp Index, so click on that column heading. The list now presents the "best" matches at the top. Just look at some of the goodies here:

The Ad Planner Tool provides a lot of information about each site, such as reach, unique visitors/pageviews per month and also the advert specifications that are available to you. You can use this information to determine which sites to advertise on. We'll explore all this information in more detail in a later article. For example, we'll answer such questions as where does the Google Ad Planner data come from? Stay tuned for that.

I don't know about you, but I feel like a voyeur when I look at this list. This list gives us sneaky information about the surfing behaviour of our visitors. But how do we turn our sordid voyeuristic tendencies into cash? Answer: by advertising on those high profile sites we found.

There are two ways we can advertise on these sites:

1. By emailing those site owners with requests to buy some advertising. The Ad Planner Tool makes it easy for us to get in touch by providing contact links right there in the tool. If you click on the link for the website, you'll reach a profile page for that website. On that page there should be a link to their advertising page.
2. By using Adwords to advertise specifically on their site.

I prefer the first option as you have more control over the advertising deal you make.

I've used this method of finding targeted advertising space already for another of my sites (not this one) with great success.To get you salivating, here are the specs for the link I managed to bag:

• The niche of the site is perfectly aligned with mine.
• I'm advertising on only one page and that page gets a very high volume of traffic. Note that "site" traffic levels are pretty much irrelevant when you are buying advertising on just one page. If possible, you should get the traffic statistics for the page you're advertising on.
• The advertising page has PR7.
• I was able to use the anchor text I chose - i.e. the text that will help me the most in the search engines.
• The link does not have rel="nofollow" on it.
• There are very few outgoing links on that page.
• Yearly cost: $240.

This advertising represents a good investment for my site, because not only will it give my site direct exposure to a receptive audience, but it will help it rank in the search engines too.