Experience with Text Link Ads?

[ses5909]

Does anyone have any experience with Text Link Ads? I have considered trying them out.

[dojo]

I would recommend them hands down. I don't care they take 50% of my money since I make quite enough to think about more revenue in the future. I am in the system for only 3-4 months but I already got a 160 USD check and now I will have a 180 USD check (I set the payment to 100+checks). I am waiting for the bank to give me my money. The check arrived so fast I didn't know what's there.I wait for the adsense check quite some time, but this one got to me in 3-4 days. And I live in the other side of the world :D

Absolutely pleased so far. Now I work on increasing PR and traffic on more sites and get the chance to enter some more into the program. It allows me now to think abut getting a paid IPB licence and maybe next month another one. I can think about spending some of the revenue into making my sites even better.

[ses5909]

Thanks for the great info! That is exactly what I was curious about. How many sites or blogs do you have them on and can you tell me what kind of traffic they receive? I know.. a lot of questions :D

[dojo]

http://www.martialartlinks.com
http://www.wtricks.com/forums/
http://www.womenonlyforums.com
http://www.lyricsandtalk.com
http://www.linksforwebdesign.com
http://www.talkingaboutmovies.com
http://www.morrowind.ro
http://www.lovingdoggies.com
http://www.dojo.ro/forum

This is the sites list. The best selling is womenonlyforums (imagine) and I have 9 of 10 spots filled. The ads are in the right column of the forums, that square table with 9 links. Not that intrusive if you want my opinion. Other sites sold 1-2 links and some didn't sell anything yet.

16 in total links sold and still 98 USD as we speak ... The sites are PR3 and PR4 and not a huge traffic since I wasn't able to promote that hard ..

If I would start getting my act together and promote as I should, I am sure we'd chat about some higher revenue ;)

[deronsizemore]

I would try them if i could. I understand that you need at least a PR of 4 to be accepted? I

[pbradish]

You either need to have a PR of 3 or 4 (I think?) or catch them at the right time. I was able to shoot the owner an email and he sent my PR0 through, lol.

[deronsizemore]

You either need to have a PR of 3 or 4 (I think?) or catch them at the right time. I was able to shoot the owner an email and he sent my PR0 through, lol.

Well darn. I guess it's worth a shot at applying then huh? Seems like a unprofessional business practice though. I mean have rules set where only PR 3 or 4 can be accepted, but every once in a while for the heck of it they will accept anyone. Just depends on the mood? Weird.

[rhyswynne]

I think it's PR3. If you're a half decent blog though PR4 is easy.

I would recommend Text Link Ads too. I make about $200 a month over 4 or 5 sites. 2 of them aren't even updated anymore but maintain a healthy pagerank.

[pbradish]

Well darn. I guess it's worth a shot at applying then huh? Seems like a unprofessional business practice though. I mean have rules set where only PR 3 or 4 can be accepted, but every once in a while for the heck of it they will accept anyone. Just depends on the mood? Weird.

Well, it's like the old saying...

"It's 85% about who you know and 15% about what you know."

I probably butchered that quote...

[deronsizemore]

I probably butchered that quote...

I know what ya meant...that's all that matters :D

[adalante]

I would highly recomend them, their plus point is that they have a marketplace for advertisers to find your blog quite easily.

I make a good amount of money from them and the affiliate program is great too - $25 per signup! :)

[edwarddowd]

I am having trouble getting a buyer for the links. Got any suggestions?

[TVs Worst Adverts]

I think that TLA is pretty good. I get a pretty decent income in comparison to the other ways I try to monetize my blog.

Their user documentation is rubbish though ;(

[ses5909]

I think that TLA is pretty good. I get a pretty decent income in comparison to the other ways I try to monetize my blog.

Their user documentation is rubbish though ;(

What other ways have you tried? I am completely inexperienced when it comes to monetization!

[TVs Worst Adverts]

What other ways have you tried? I am completely inexperienced when it comes to monetization!

I run Adsense which does OK but I'm not going to retire off it atm, Ses.

After 6 long months and 600 clicks I am just approaching my 1st $100...

I've also dabbled in PPP type systems... I prefer ReviewMe as I think the companies that choose to advertise through it are of a slightly higher quality that with PayPerPost (although that is purely anecdotal evidence and I have nothing to back it up with). But I struggle with the whole "selling out" issue when it comes to PPP...

I've run affiliates with Amazon too and struggle to get clicks let alone sales. This is undoubtedly down to my low visitor numbers on the sites I had the ads on. I decided that it's not the right time to run those programs.

This is all just my experience though. Maybe others with bigger readerships will be able to give a better picture of *what works*...

[BlogEx]

One thing to note though, even if they don't accept your site to sell links from, you can still participate in the affiliate program that pays out pretty well. John Chow (http://www.milliondollarwiki.com/john_chow) earned more money with the affiliate program than he did selling links.

[malique]

I'd recommend them.

TLA love high Alexa/Technorati sites, so if you have any that fits the bill, sign up and send and email to them.

I also tried emailing them to increase the price of advertising per month for one of my sites, and it works. Customer service has been top-notch so far.

Go for it :)

[SarahG]

I've used TLA for almost a year now. The PayPal payout is great plus you don't lose money to fees. The affiliate scheme has made me $150 too.

The only downside is the price of the link is determined by PR and Alexa. Both of which are a poor method of determining site worth. Our cheapest site on TLA's books (around $10 a link to the advertiser) gets 1000+ daily visitors!

[smittenbite]

I run Adsense which does OK but I'm not going to retire off it atm, Ses.

After 6 long months and 600 clicks I am just approaching my 1st $100...

I've also dabbled in PPP type systems... I prefer ReviewMe as I think the companies that choose to advertise through it are of a slightly higher quality that with PayPerPost (although that is purely anecdotal evidence and I have nothing to back it up with). But I struggle with the whole "selling out" issue when it comes to PPP...

I've run affiliates with Amazon too and struggle to get clicks let alone sales. This is undoubtedly down to my low visitor numbers on the sites I had the ads on. I decided that it's not the right time to run those programs.

This is all just my experience though. Maybe others with bigger readerships will be able to give a better picture of *what works*...

just wondering if you promote or do anything to market your blog or articles at all? you said 600 clicks to get you to 100 dollars after around 6 months, mine has been one month , i've got a little over 100 clicks, but im already almost 50% to my first payment. does it just get slower and slower or are we doing something differently ? i don't have any paid advertisement but i go out and look for people who ask questions on forums, yahoo answers, etc that my article answers (sometimes its hard since i don't want to seem spammy, so i gotta find one where my article and the question are matching up with high specificity) and i link them to it. that has probably brought in the most visitors so far. i also submit to thoof.com which has also brought on steady traffic. i stumbled one of my articles when i first started, and it JUST started to bring in traffic - so i guess a few people finally noticed it? haha i dont know.

just wanted to know what kind of stuff you do to promote ? right now i'm slowly increasing my traffic coming in from search engines, i find that people who come from search engines are more likely to click on ads than people who come from referrals =)

[SarahG]

AdSense click payments depends on the subject of the page and the quality of the content on the page. We have a site running that gets perhaps 1-3c a click, more on a very very lucky day. Another site I have can make $2-$3 easily off a click, but clicks on those sites are few and far between.

600 clicks to make $100 isn't too bad. That's an average of almost $17 a click. If it's taking a while when you have a good amount of daily visitors then you need to either think about the subject and/or the placement and design of the ads and determine whether adsense is perhaps wasted on the page/site.

This is one reason why TLA, or equivalent, is much better on sites that are quiet on the adsense front. With TLA you get paid regardless of whether anyone clicks the link or not. Sure, some advertisers may remove their links if they don't get many visitors or sales from your site but I've only found advertisers removed their links when a PR4 site of ours dropped to 2 after the update. They're buying your PR, not your visitors.

[smittenbite]

600 clicks to make $100 isn't too bad. That's an average of almost $17 a click. .

i think you mean 17 CENTS per click, right?

[SarahG]

Yeah, sorry :D

I'm a brit, what do you expect ;)

[Grandad]

I signed up with TLA at the end of June.

So far I have had a payment of $125 last month, with another $160 to come at the end of this month.

At least it pays for the blog :rolleyes:

[Boris]

TLA used to work very well for me on a few sites...but I got rid of them when google talked about penalising sites for selling links. Tread carefully! It works best on a low alexa / high PR site.

AdSense is easy, as long as you have lots of visitors. Impossible if you don't. Perhaps $3-10 per 1000 visitors is a reasonable average although it depends a lot on topic and ad placement.

Amazon is very difficult to make significant money with, however many visitors you have. Same with other affiliates unless your blog is very targetted to the product you are selling.

[kingjacob]

I've been run their inline and affiliate program for about a month and havent made anything yet but I've got a few clicks so hopefully a click will eventually convert.

[snookca]

I use TLA and have been quite pleased. I've basically got it on auto-pilot. They seem to increase the price automatically if I'm consistently selling out the 8 spots that I offer. I have a PR7 and an Alexa rank around 35,000 so that certainly helps. My revenue with TLA has increased month over month.

As to the Google penalization, TLA has recently redone their referral links to use tinyurl.com, likely in an attempt to circumvent this issue.

As for Google Ads, I found them poor performers. They had to be intrusive to be of any value.

I've also added Amazon but just to link up book reviews that I do. It's been pretty bad but I haven't promoted many books since I've set up the links. We'll see if that changes by the end of the year. If it doesn't, I'll probably just drop it.

Running my own ads has also worked out well, too.

[SarahG]

To avoid any potential Google penalisation I edit the TLA code to remove all of the inline styles from the list it creates for the links. Without this you have a clean unordered list, and there's no way that Google could know if you set it up by hand or you're selling links.

[dojo]

I earn so little from adsense that I just don't care if they like my TLA ads or not :D

PR7? God I hate you ;) Congratulations for this ;)

[SarahG]

I earn so little from adsense that I just don't care if they like my TLA ads or not :D

It's not the adsense that will necessarily be penalised by Google, but the rankings and PR of a site with paid for links on it.

So they say ;)

[Jeremy]

Actually, they wouldn't penalize your site's PR, but it would penalize the ability for that page to pass meaningful PR to the sites it links to, which in turn would hurt the people paying for links. So that doesn't mean if they see you selling text links that you'll drop from a PR6 to 4 or anything, but all of your links would not receive as much (or any?) PR passing through.

Of course, this has a long-term effect when it comes to internal linking, and over time it could very well mean that your site begins to drop in rank naturally.

[Simon]

I would definately recommend Text Link Ads. Signed up on the Thursday, approved by the next Monday, had first sale by Tuesday and first referral by Wednesday. it's probably also worth pointing out a couple of things. Firstly, you can play them to get $125 of free advertising for your blog by reading this article I wrote (http://www.oakinnovations.co.uk/blog/2007/09/07/free-money-for-bloggers-yes-but-invest-it/ <- shameless self=promotion!) and secondly, if they reject you just email them to say that either your site is new, or appeals to a non-tech savvy audience (hence no Alexa users) or it's in a new/small niche. 90% of the time, if you take the time out to personally request approval, they will, even if the auto system rejects you. People don't realise this and assume they're not good enough.

[doorlight]

I have a quick question because my eyes hurt now and there is a lot of info to read.

What is the maximum number of text link ads in a web page?

[ses5909]

You get to decide Laarni. So if you only want 4, you choose 4. Plus you can set it so you can approve every link.