TNX.net text link ads

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 a website owner interested to know how much you could be making there is an income calculator on their homepage. You can enter your websites URL and a rough estimate of your pages PR and get your site's maximum revenue from selling TNX text ads.

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.

GamerClix ads review

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.

Make money selling text link ads

The reason why people buy links should be obvious by now to most of you. As a summary some buy links for the traffic it can bring to their site, some buy to increase their PageRank and some buy to make google see them associated with a frequently searched query phrase. If you want to read more on this please visit my post on selling links.

Some people that have been around for some time might have noticed the recent crackdown by Google on paid link publishers and advertisers. The internet community has divided itself in two camps because of this, one that is welcoming such actions from google and the other one that is calling them hypocrites. I am not here to point fingers at neither camp. The truth of the matter remains that links are still being sold and bought but not out in the open anymore.

If you have a site that has either good traffic or a nice PR then you can certainly find link buyers for it.

Depending on the traffic on your site, your PR or the theme (niche) of your site people might be willing to pay from $1 to a few hundreds dollars per month for a single link.

How do you find advertisers/sponsors for your blog ?
The easiest way that I have found is through the webmaster forums. Lots of people visit places like DP V7n and WMT on a daily basis to post their links offers or find such offers. In most forums you can find such deals in the "Buy Sell Trade" Business section.

For easier browsing the abbreviations used in the trade forums are WTB (=want to buy), WTS (=want to sell) and WTE (=want to exchange) so one can easily find niche specific offers using the appropriate abbreviations and the niche topic using the built in search (i.e. WTB travel).

Text link broker services
Finding your own advertisers is probably the most profitable way to sell links but it is time consuming. If you want to be free from the burden of finding advertisers for you sites there are professional services to do just that for you.


The way this usually works is:

• you submit your site for inclusion
  
• you copy and paste a code snippet in your sites pagess
• your site is evaluated to see if it is worth to display any text links
  
• after approval it is entered in a directory of publishers for prospective advertisers to see and purchase links
• when advertisers are interested you get a notification and approve their links which are automatically displayed on your site
• if you reach the minimum payout for the month you can withdraw your money with paypal or other means
  

This is just to give you an idea of the process. These steps are not always there, and each text link service will have their own step by step guide to set them up.

I have tried numerous text link brokers in the past, some have not accepted my sites, some have not delivered any advertisers and that is why its worth to try a few and see which ones are working for you.

The two automated link selling programs that I have used successfully in the past are Text Link Ads and Direct Link Ads.

What services have you successfully used ?

Sell links

Who wants to buy links ?
Google likes sites that have many good links pointing to them (backlnks). Each link counts like a vote to the site that are pointing to. The better the site that is linking the stronger the vote. Roughly speaking the more and relevant the backlinks the better position the site gets among the search engine results. This votes are somehow summed up in what is called the Google PageRank. The PageRank is the little green bar that displays for every page when you have the google toolbar on your browser, the grade scale is from 0 to 10. If you want to know more about the pagerank visit Matt Cutt's blog (one of the chief engineers at google)

Therefore people want as many links to their websites as they can possibly get. Sometimes they are even willing to pay for them.

For this reason most webmaster forums have setup subforums for link development - where people give and get advice on how to build their backlinks - and also sections where people can post their link exchange and link sale offers. A good starting point would be the notorious digitalpoint forums or any webmaster forum that has such subforums.

For more advanced link traders there are places like Text Link Ads that have a network of advertisers that want to get backlinks, and publishers that (in this scenario) are website owners offering backlinks for money. A publisher is registering to be accepted to the program and makes know the websites that he is willing to sell backlinks on. If an advertisers happens to like the website and thinks the price is fair then there is a match and the text link exchange program gets a cut of the deal.

Most link exchange programs will look for a good pagerank, decent traffic (proven with alexa statistics) and relevance of the site to be included in their publishers network.

Luckily for amateurs like me there are places that don't have so strict acceptance rules, like buy sell text link ads and the iwebtool link market (the latter does not charge for any link exchange).

So if you have a site that has built some decent backlinks and pagerank you can sell your links to interested parties.

Earn from adsense on earnticle.com

You don't have to have your own site or blog to make money from adsense.

Earnticle.com is a site that shares its adsense revenue with its authors. You just register with them and start writing articles and the ads are served 50% with your adsense id and 50% with earnticles' id. In other words you make roughly 50% of the ad revenue your articles generate.

The design is very pleasing to the eye and the blog machine behind it is wordpress. Thus you can expect that posting an article is as easy as it gets.

The articles on earnticle cover a wide variety of subjects from family and health to web development and SEO.

Although it does not have many authors/readers yet since its a brand new site, I expect it to get many more interested in writing and frequenting the site soon.

Get a blog

What is a blog ?
A blog or weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

Why get one ?
Well everybody has one (I just got mine) and some people make money on them, so why don't you just get yourself one. You can setup one for free with blogger or wordpress (the 2 most popular ones) and start putting your ideas down. You don't have to pay for hosting nor for a domain, its completely free.

How do you make money from a blog ?
Well the basic idea is simple, you write about your favorite topic and if you have some passion you get enough people to read your blog and hopefully click on the ads that are in your blog pages.

What ads ?
Most people have ads on their blogs (just look on the top and right side), so they can make a little money to support their passion which is writing about their favorite topic. Some people make decent money because they attract a big audience and a lot more people get to click on the ads.

How do you get money from ads ?
Well when people click on the ads the click is counted automatically from your ad provider and it is translated into a few cents (or a few bucks depending on the topic). When you reach a certain amount you can collect the money.

How do I get ads on my site ?
The most well know ad provider is google with their adsense program. This is a PPC (pay per click) program that means that you get paid only if someone clicks on your ads. They have wizards to help you setup the ads and give you instructions on how to include them on your pages, so it has become pretty easy to set up a blog to display ads.

Conclusion
So to round this up, find a topic, get a blog, and register with an ad provider. Chances are that you already have some sort of account with Google, probably gmail so just go to adsense and setup up your publisher's account. Then go to blogger (same as blogspot - part of the google services) and setup your blog. If you get into trouble post a comment here and I will try to help on the technical aspects.