This form of advertising used to be very popular a few years ago and is usually managed through an advertising platform. It works in a similar way to banner advertising except the text within your content will be linked to 3rd party websites - this is usually determined by the link anchor text.

For example, if you mention the phrase 'sports equipment', then the in-text advertising platform will associate this with a sports equipment website and a link will be made. Some popular in-text advertising platforms are MediaWhizz SEO, Text Link Brokers and Linkworth.

On top of going through a third party platform, you can sell text links independently.

This could be by reaching out to related companies within your niche to see if they would be interested, and can be in the form of in-article text links, footer links or sidebar links.

Advantages: If you're using a third party advertising platform then it literally takes a few minutes to set all of it up. Once you're set up you've got a completely automated monetization system running on your website which has virtually no maintenance requirements.

Also, if you're publishing large volumes of content, you can end up making a good return from this method, plus you will be able to easily implement other monetization strategies to run alongside it.

Disadvantages: Doing things like this can often get you in a lot of hot water with Google. Most of the in-text advertising platforms (as mentioned above) actually place dofollow links from your website, therefore manipulating search rankings - you can see why Google might get a little annoyed.

Alongside this, you can damage user experience a lot. If your articles are full of irrelevant commercial links that are taking your users away from your website then it's not only going to cheapen your content, but will also reduce the amount of pageviews that you're capturing.