TNX - not as good as advertised

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

Date: 2008-06-27 23:39:17 Name: Giorgos Kontopoulos Message: that don't exist !!! This is ridiculous I just checked today for the first time and most of the links Even your system concludes "not found" Almost 90% of the links are "NOT FOUND" EVEN when I go and check and there are no links there !! What I conclude is that for 3 months now I am paying for NON existent links I demand this issue be resolved, And I demand half of the link sales (at least) to be credited back to my account I am seriously thinking of refunding the money and leaving from this network Seriously disappointed Giorgos Kontopoulos

Date: 2008-06-28 03:59:24 Name: Alex Message: Dear Giorgos, You are more than welcome to delete any link that has a "Not found" status and get a full refund of points spent to cover its cost. It does not matter when the link is deleted, as long as it has a "Not found"status, you are entitled to a full refund of your points. >>I am seriously thinking of refunding the money and leaving from this network I think you just need to ask more questions so you have better understanding of the TNX network. In case you decide to get a refund and leave, please re-open this ticket. Regards, Alex.

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 ?

Earn money as a freelance link builder

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.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.

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.