Text Link Ads Review – Monetizing your Blog by Selling Links

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There are different ways to monetize a site, selling text links is definitely near the top of the list. Doing a couple quick searches on Google reveals hundreds of companies and networks vying for your confidence and business. Which, if any of these networks is the best? Are any of them any good?

In this article we will discuss one of the popular networks to buy and sell text links either to improve rankings or monetize a site. The network we will be reviewing today is Text Link Ads. We will look into the pros and cons of using this service and whether it is a viable alternative to contextual advertising such as Adsense. In this article I am going to mainly talk about the publisher side of the program for two main reasons. First, I don’t buy text link ads, any links you see pointing at my blogs are  natural. So for me to go in-depth into the advertising part of the program, I would really have to try it out which I honestly have not. So in that light, that is why I am basically reviewing the publisher side only. The second reason is that this is a blog teaching webmasters how to make money online, not how to rank a website or acquire links. If you want to learn SEO then goto 1st Search Engine Rankings

So with that introduction here is the Text Link Ads Review.

I have been a publisher at Text Link Ads for something like 3 years now. When I registered I was approved within 24 hours, I believe it was closer to a few hours. I hear that sites now take longer to approve but I have not confirmed this as of yet. If you have a nice site with lots of quality content, have a decent Alexa rank then you will be approved within a short period of time. I am also told that if you are disapproved your application will resurface every month, so if your site improves it will probably eventually get in. Just don’t keep resubmitting, wait till you are approved… if it evers happens. In the meantime install Google ads or something to monetize your site.

How it Works
Text Link Ads is down-right simple, you are able to do most of the customization yourself, you decide where the ads will appear on your site, how many ads you wish to sell and whether they will be Sitewide or single page links. Different positions, called hot spots, will bring in more money. While placing ads in lower quality positions will result in lower link values.

Links are sold monthly and are set at a fixed rate so you don’t have to worry about the price being lowered, instead it usually rises with time, as your site improves. There are two main factors which decide the value of a link on your site, they are PageRank and Alexa rank… both of which can be false indicators of a good site but that is what they go by.  So the better your Alexa rank and the higher your Google PR score the more links will be worth on your site. TLA also factors in feed subscriber numbers, I am not sure how much of a role this factor plays, I assume if you have little traffic and a large subscriber base it will raise red flags. So don’t waste time trying to fake a FeedBurner count, I doubt it will help.

TLA had a cool tool called the Text Link Ads Calculator but it has been down for some time and no indicator is given of when it will be available again. (Please inform me if you notice the tool return) – this tool was useful for getting an idea of how much money could be made off a site of monetized using Text Link Ads.

One thing that puts TLA ahead of its competitors IMO is that you can choose to approve all ads yourself. Some popular text link ads sites review offers for you and approve ads without consulting you. With TLA you can choose to have TLA approve all ads or you can do this manually. This is very important to me…

TLA offers you the ability to sell regular text links or use a WordPress or Blogger plugin which lets you sell links inline in your posts. This means the advertiser selects a specific anchor text, if that keyword is found in your article it is linked to the advertisers site… you get paid for these links. From my experience they average $1-5 apiece. Not a killing profit but they are harder to recognize as ads and help promote a cleaner site overall.

How Much Can I Make?
Thats really why your here afterall, isn’t it? In 2006 when I originally signed up I sold an ad for $25 within a short period of time, I don’t recall how long it was but it was within days. This was not bad at all considering the site had a PR2 and was newer so didn’t have a outlandish Alexa rank either.

You also have to factor in that a $25 sale turns into $12.50 since TLA takes 50% of the earnings, this seems like a lot but you pay for the service they provide. You can alternately search for sites to sell links to but this is a slow process especially if your new to the link buying/selling game. So I recommend you start out with a company like TLA and then move away from shore only after you feel comfortable wading in the safe waters.

Since BoldMoney.com is a new site without an Alexa rating it would be hard to sell a link via TLA so I will update you on that when I get an Alexa traffic rating. But for now I am basing my estimates on what I have made on my other sites.

The earnings really are dependant wholly on how many links you sell, your PR and your Alexa rank. With a high PR and decent Alexa rank you should be able to make $50 a link(after 50% TLA fee) per link… this averages out to about $500/month. This is decent money for many webmasters who slave away at their blogs only to make a few dollars a month from Google Adsense. An excellent site may be able to make nearly $1000/month of TLA but I haven’t been able to get close to that using the Text Link Ads program. There is a guy who has claimed to make $3000+ per month of TLA on one site alone, I find this very hard to believe for one simple reason, you can sell upto 10 links on a site, this would mean that this guy would be getting an average of $300 per link, that is without the 50% TLA commission. So factoring that in the advertisers would be paying $600 per link on his site. Its not impossible to sell links at these prices, but they are usually for top industry and authority sites. So it is highly unlikely that 10 authority sites all are using TLA to buy links from his side. The story just seems a little incredible from my standpoint.

So I would say for the average webmaster they can register and start making anywhere from $50-100 from their blog or website. Not enough to quit your job over but for those of you who have been working hard on your websites and blogs and earning little to nothing for it, this will atleast help compensate your time. It will also greatly increase your sites value. If you increase your revenue to $150/month, at 18 months revenue should now be worth anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000 factoring income only.

If you read my previous article on Flipping Websites at DigitalPoint you might choose this as an option for monetizing the sites you flip. There are always sites with lots of traffic and little revenue which would be perfect for Text Link Ads.

This can actually be an alternative to Affiliate ads or Google Adsense for sites which are hard to monetize. Whether you run a site in a bad niche or just can’t seem to find viable monetization methods, many times a program like TLA will be the best option for you. As long as you have the traffic selling links is quite easy to do on these sites.

Pros of Text Link Ads
-A fast way to monetize a website or blog which already has decent traffic and a PR.
-TLA gives you the option of how you sell your links,  whether you approve all links manually yourself or let TLA do it.
-Placement of ads is upto you
-Choice of text ads on your blog or inline ads.

Cons of Text Link Ads
-I have found that TLA sometimes sells links that are not related to my sites… for instance a health related ad on a webmaster related blog is a little out of place. This is a little discouraging to me. Not all links are like this but some are, TLA definitely needs to look  into this. If I was an Advertiser I would quit based on this one fact alone.
-Acceptance Delay. I have heard some webmasters say it took a couple months to get accepted. Whilemy app was approved within a short period of time it appears to take longer now days.
-Not a viable option for new bloggers. Since this service relies heavily on Alexa rank and Google PageRank you won’t be able to sell links if your a new blogger. Even if you can prove you have high traffic, until it translates into a higher Alexa rank you will have to find another option for monetizing your site.

So my conclusion is this, if you have a Google PageRank of 2 or higher and a decent Alexa rank then try out Text Link Ads and see how much you make, give it atleast 2-3 months before you make a decision. If however you have a newer site without PR or high Alexa rank(higher is worse)  then you probably shouldn’t waste time with TLA. Wait till you build up some traffic and get a PageRank score.

NOTE: This review was written for the purpose of presenting an unbiased opinion of Text Link Ads services, while we do use Affiliate links we do NOT alter our opinions based on these links. We provide an accurate opinion in our reviews whether it will negatively influence our affiliate revenue or not.

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