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I have talked about TNX before in what it seemed like a praise of them. Its been six months already since I first tried them out and I have used them extensively all this period and I have drawn some conclusions which I would like to share with you guys.
The system in theory is pretty effective but in practice it has many pitfalls. First of all for those that don't know TNX let me just say its an easy way to get one way backlinks to your site. Of course there is a price to pay for this. You create your ad campaign, you choose what types of sites you want it appearing on and then you can potentially get thousands of backlinks withing days. So far so good.
In my experiments with TNX this my conclusions:
Not clear backlink benefits
I have tried to get links from relevant sites (chose themes/categories specific to my site's theme) in order to get the maximum benefit. After trying it for 6 months its still not clear to me if there were ANY benefits with ANY of the ad campaigns that I did. I am not drawing a definite conclusion here since this was not a controlled experiment and I was actually trying to get cheap links from PR0 pages. Thus, other people might have actually got good results with TNX and high PR links.
Google can probably detect irrelevant links
I have also tried selling links through this system. I tried this with one site on which I had it on for about 2 months. The links that were appearing on the ad spaces were more often than not irrelevant (not same category as my site). Google probably took notice of those links and penalized my site with PR drop from 4 to 0. But that had also a snowball effect on the money that I was getting for each link sold on the site. PR4 links were worth more than the PR0 links. Thus I decided to stop selling links using TNX. Another side effect of this drop was the unwillingness of other webmasters of exchanging links with me (because of the PR0).
If the system would not allow links to irrelevant sites than this probably would have been avoided and maybe this is something that the developers of TNX should take into consideration for their next update.
You could be charged for links dropped
I recently was doing a back check on some of the links that I "gained" 3 months ago and discovered that most of them were reported "by the system" as "NOT FOUND". After a brief discussion with the support of TNX I realized that EVERYONE has to manually visit each campaign and DELETE the links that are reported "NOT FOUND". Here is the part of the relevant discussion.
Why am I being charged for links
This is clearly something that the system ought to be able to do on its own. It would be a full time job otherwise if one had anything more than 1000 links with TNX, and had to continuously check if the links that were acquired automatically HAD to be CHECKED manually for their EXISTENCE.
Those are the major reasons that have convinced me that TNX was no more for me.
Have you guys had any experience with TNX ? What did you think of the system ?? Any successes ?
It is probably apparent to most of us by now that link building is an essential part of improving your search engine position and consequently the traffic search engines send to a site. There are numerous free link building techniques but one of the most beneficial is link exchanges. You find sites that are relevant to your site's theme/subject and exchange links with them. Those links have the potential of sending targeted traffic but are also valued by the search engines (including Google) more than other links because of their relevancy factor.
Link exchanges are time consuming.
A successful link exchange includes finding a relevant site to your theme making the necessary contact with the site's owner or webmaster (usually via email) and communicating the willingness for an exchange and then placing the actual link and making sure that the relevant site places a link to your site. Not all contacts result in link exchanges because not all site owners understand or care for the benefits of such exchanges. Thus the process become
Why Link exchange freelancers ?
There are lots of SEO companies and web consultants that offer link exchanges as part of their SEO services. They either have personnel specializing in link exchanges or they outsource some or all link exchanges to freelance link builders. If you have not thought about it before, anyone can become a link builder and do link exchanges.
What can you expect ?
What is expected of you is to have a good command of the English language (preferred language of communication) and be able to write an enticing sentence and get relevant sites to exchange links with you. Having some experience on why and how linking works will help a great deal to find the relevant sites or you could otherwise be exchanging links with sites that google would not find valuable and the companies are not willing to pay for. Most SEO companies will have a minimum requirement of the potential link partner's site to have at least PageRank of 2 on homepage and that the page where the link is to be placed to be crawled at least once a month (can be determined by the Cache date of the page).
3 way link exchanges
Most clients needing SEO services will not be willing to place links on their sites and essentially they want 1 way links. Most SEO companies overcome this limitation by offering links to potential link exchanging sites from their directories. This essentially makes the whole process a 3 way link exchange. A link building freelancer will have access to those directories and place the links there; links to the sites that have confirmed willingness to exchange links that is.
How much can you earn ?
Different companies are charging their clients different prices depending on their experience and niche of client, but anywhere from $0.50 - $10 is probably about right per successful relevant link. The closest the theme/subject to the client's site, the better the PR of the homepage or the link page or the better the crawl rate of the link page can drive the price to the high end of the range.
Its sounds easy !!!
And it is in theory but if you are not at ease with searching for relevant/similar sites or sending lots of email communications and receiving only a fraction of answers it can make this an overwhelming task.
If you are looking for ways to make a buck, hope you find this useful.
PS1.
I am also in need of a link building freelancer/partner
I am also offering web and seo services to my clients and I am in need of someone willing to take over this part of link building. My customer's list does not allow me to offer too much money per link for this service but, I am willing to work with an inexperienced person and teach him the ins and outs of successful link exchanging. Only requirement is that this person has a good command of the English language. Serious offers please send me an email (I am sure you can find it here or on geoland.org) or post here and I will be notified of the post.
PS2.
I know its been some time since the last time I wrote something for this blog but I usually do write about stuff that I find interesting and I didn't find any recently.
TNX is a new text link ads broker/network that has been gaining momentum lately. On the surface it looks like most of the text link systems but deep inside its quite different.
Any website owner with at least some pages with higher PR than 0 can register as a publisher. Upon registering you should include the TNX code into your site's template and let the system crawl your pages (which could take up to a week) and then you are ready to sell text links. TNX does not serve sitewide links. Instead each page can have up to 4 unique links from advertisers.
Advantages over other similar systems
- Individual page links are sold and this means more money for the publisher and greater text link benefit for the advertiser.
- The advertisers select pages based on their theme/subject and value of PR and not based on the actual URL. The system does not allow the advertisers to know the actual site that their links are placed on and this helps prevent fraud (i.e. google paid links reporting etc)
- The publisher has the opportunity to approve or disapprove advertisers on each and every page (up to 4 links per page)
- The advertisers have at their disposal a wizard that can help them easily create many different text links with slightly different anchor texts.
- There is a referral program in place that can help a user earn more money.
- As of 01/04/2008 there are 39 125 Registerd Users with a daily growth of +0.28%, and there are 31 201 403 text link ads sold so far
If you are an advertiser you can try the system for free. Register here and get your free 5000 TNX points by posting on this thread.
I have been experimenting lately with different sources of revenue for my online games site and I have come to install the GamerClix ads above each individual game (i.e. above pac man).
The system is very flexible and easy in setting up and running. Anyone who has used adsense in the past would find it a breeze to work with. You can use the system's "code wizard" to choose from a variety of standard industry ad formats and change the colors to match your site style and end up with the javascript code that you can "copy and paste" into your html template. This makes it a perfect candidate for an adsense alternative but, not quite. GamerClix is still in its infancy. Not too many advertisers have signed up and as a consequence the same ads are shown over and over. On top of that I have experienced that the few clicks that my ads received have resulted in no revenue which is quite puzzling but, its only been a week that the ads are running so I am willing to give it one more week to see how it goes.
In my opinion the only disadvantage is the luck of advertisers. The GamerClix team should probably set an affiliate program (which is lucking right now) in place and entice the users to refer others to the system in order to get a critical mass of active advertisers and publishers.
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