Described as “A fancy tip jar for your blog!”, ScratchBack is a great monetizing widget for any blog or website. Best to the user, it’s free to throw onto your blog and free to customize if you have the right skills and a copy of Photoshop.

A Jim Kukral joint, ScratchBack is essentially a paid blogroll. You set the amount that you want to charge for each link. Anyone interested in their link showing on your website can click the widget to purchase the link and enter in the URL and anchor text for the widget link. The administrator can either set the links to moderate what shows up or just let everything come through. There’s a great deal of flexibility with how much you want to moderate the links or how much you want to be hands off.

Since I’ve just thrown it up as a test, I’ve taken the initial hands off approach. I’m allowing any link and only charging $1. Other more veteran users, like Shawn Collins at Affiliate Tip, have found a lot of click spam and raised the level of moderation and price to weed out some of the less savory links. It’s a great tool as an advertiser as well because you can get some great links on high traffic blogs for extremely reasonable prices.

As most of the tools I suggest, there’s no downside to giving it a try. Definitely check it out and if it doesn’t work for you, no harm done. But I have to say that in just the two weeks or so I’ve had it up I’ve had some decent luck with it. Show some love at www.ScratchBack.com.