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Make Money from Your Blog with Text Link Ads
May 17th, 2007 by Matt Huggins
In the last part of the Make Money from Your Blog series, I covered the ins and outs of Yahoo! Publisher Network. Today’s contribution to the series covers Text Link Ads.
What is Text Link Ads?
Text Link Ads, or TLA, is an advertising program that differs from the three contextual advertising programs — Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and Kontera ContentLink — that were previously reviewed here. Instead of offering contextual links, TLA provides advertisers the opportunity to purchase links directly on publisher’s websites at a flat monthly fee. In turn, the publisher earns 50% of what each advertiser pays for a link. The below screen shot is an example from the TLA website that demonstrates how the links could appear on a blog.
What are the benefits of using TLA?
TLA is not like many of the other advertising opportunities. Its unique structure makes it an excellent compliment to other advertising methods already in place on your website.
In addition to the homepage and site-level advertising opportunity, TLA recently unveiled a post-level advertising option. This enables publishers to monetize individual posts. Post-level links cost advertisers less than site-level links, thus earning publishers less per link, but they present an additional means of monetization that would otherwise be unavailable.
Finally, TLA offers Feedvertising, which enabled publishers to append advertising to their RSS feeds. The opportunity is similar to the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN); however, it is much less restrictive as blogs are not required to have the same level as popularity to join the TLA program as is required for joining FAN.
Are there any drawbacks from using TLA?
The primary drawback of using TLA is that you’re losing out on 50% of what advertisers pay for a link, as it instantly goes to the service never to be seen by the publisher. While this is a significant loss of potential earnings, many users consider it worthwhile, as without TLA they wouldn’t have that source of revenue in the first place.
This significant loss of income has encouraged plug-ins to work around the need for TLA, the most recent of which is WP Text Ads for WordPress. While this does resolve the issue of not giving up a large chunk of potential income, it does make it much more difficult for advertisers to find your blog since TLA also provides a means by which advertisers can locate blogs that meet the criteria they’re seeking.
So how do I get started?
As a publisher, simply define your preferred number of links to be sold and where on the page the links will be displayed. It is also necessary to specify whether links being sold will be displayed site-wide or only on the homepage. Depending on the configuration of each of these settings in concordance with your website’s Blog Juice — a combined measurement of your Technorati rank, Alexa rank, Bloglines rank, and number of inbound links — your price per link will vary. In order to determine what this value will be, TLA offers a very handy Link Calculator tool, as can be seen in the screen shot below.
How do I track my earnings?
The TLA Account Home includes a “Money Earned” reporting interface that allows a publisher to see how much each approved blog has earned during the course of a month. Unlike other reporting interfaces, all earnings can’t be viewed by selecting a date range. Instead, one month at a time must be selected for analysis. Included in a month’s report is the breakdown of earnings from each of the three sources: Web, RSS, and individual posts. Reports can also be download as an Excel XLS or CSV file.
If you don’t want to miss a program review as my Make Money from Your Blog series continues, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed! Otherwise, check back daily for updates.
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May 17th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Wow, that is a solid review. I purchase links through TLA and have just applied to list my blog their as well. I love their service and they even sent me a snail-mail letter when I purchased my first link from them.
May 17th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Thanks for the feedback. Good luck with being accepted into the program! One thing I forgot to mention in the review is that if you are not accepted right away, they re-review sites monthly for acceptance.
May 17th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
I just wanted to add a note that I just came across a new competitor for TextLinkAds called Blogitive Directory Network, which just opened its doors on May 9th. While TLA offers 50% of earnings to publishers, Blogitive is offering 85% of earnings. It will be interesting to see how things fair for the new company.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:42 am
TLA is a great little addition to any blog. Even though they take a little more than 50% of the earnings from a sale, you don’t have to do any of the work promoting your blog (although neither do they really anymore).
I’ve added it to almost all of my blogs in my blog network and would suggest anyone else do so as soon as possible (I think they’re still selective about who they let in).
Nice little recap post BTW.
Aloha,
Erik
May 18th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Thanks for the info Eric. I agree that they are definitely better to include than to seclude. TLA nicely compliments the other advertising opportunities available, and since they have very little competition as of this point, publishers don’t have many other convenient options.
May 24th, 2007 at 12:06 am
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July 22nd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Thanks for sharing your comments, about the different services. I recently started my own text link ad service called Panizon, so it’s good to hear comments about the other services.
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August 5th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Another similar program is Etology. I’ve been using this service for a few months now and so far I’m quite happy with the results. I haven’t had a chance to advertise with this system yet, but as a publisher I love the freedom to sell ad space based on my own prices. Check out this review that I wrote for more info.