Text Link Ads (TLA) and Linkworth are two companies that act as the middlemen in the world of selling links. If you have a quality site, a reasonable amount of traffic and a good Google Page Rank (PR) then there are people out there who want to pay you to put a link on your site. How do these people find you? Well they can either hunt you down on their own and email you (very time consuming) or they can do things the easy way by signing up to one of these programs and browsing through member sites to see if they can find a good match.
Text Link Ads
I had a hard time setting this up because all of my sites were built ages ago with good ol’ HTML and TLA won’t run on .htm or .html pages. So I had to figure out how to convert my sites to PHP which was a bit tricky since I didn’t even know what PHP was! But once things are up and running you don’t have to do a thing except approve or deny ads. Or if you change the settings you don’t even need to do that. The main problem I have with TLA is that they set the price without any input from you and then take 50% of the link price.
It can also be pretty difficult to get accepted into this program. I submitted my Living in London site to TLA about 6 months ago and it was rejected. Granted, 6 months ago the site was complete poop and barely got any traffic. Now that I’ve overhauled it though it’s my top performing site as far as traffic goes and is in an area that I think would attract lots of advertisers. TLA say they review sites that have previously been rejected each month but I have yet to hear anything from them. It’s very frustrating since I’m not allowed to resubmit my site – they just tell me to wait… and wait… and wait…
I would advise you to make very sure your site is up to scratch before submitting it to TLA . I’m not sure what their minimum requirements are but based on my experience I would aim for at least 100 visitors per month and PR4 before submitting to try to avoid getting stuck in the no man’s land that my London site seems to be in at the moment.
TLA also run an affiliate program that I’ve just signed up to as I’m writing this post. They pay $25 for each approved sign up so if you’re thinking of joining TLA why not use my link to earn me a few bucks. Or you’ll often see the image to the right on people’s sites. If you click on it and sign up then they’ll earn $25. So if you’re planning on registering with TLA, head to your favourite blog, click on that image and the author will get a commission. Affiliate sales in action!
Linkworth
Linkworth gives you more control since you can set your own price, put your link anywhere, and they only take 30% of the link price. Rather than placing PHP code like TLA, you can add the link to your HTML code meaning you can put it anywhere and format it however you like. It’s more flexible but it also means that it’s more hands on and you can’t automate the process as with TLA.
I’ve had a couple problems with Linkworth when advertisers’ creditcards were declined and I didn’t receive payment when I was supposed to. Linkworth didn’t let me know so I had these ads up for free for several weeks which is pretty poor on their part. Keep an eye on payments to make sure you’re getting what you’re owed and if you notice a missing payment contact Linkworth to see what their story is.
Text Link Ads and Linkworth Earnings
TLA have managed to sell 9 out of the 10 slots on Travoholic.com and 1 slot on Working Holiday Info. The prices have been pretty low at $12-15, meaning I only get $6-7.50 a month per link sale. That’s much lower than I was expecting but it feels like money for nothing since once things are set up I just wait for the money to roll in. I’m not sure if TLA ever raise their prices or what so as my sites grow, if the prices stay the same I will probably abandon TLA in favour of private link sales.
Linkworth started off great and I was earning $35/month straight off the bat from January 2007. In May I earned $56 but all of my advertisers have since jumped ship for reasons unknown. I’m wondering if Linkworth is losing advertisers as they head over to Text Link Ads or maybe they just don’t like my site anymore. *sob* I’ve lowered my price a bit but so far nobody’s biting.
So in summary, both of these programs are great ways to get started monotising your websites. Linkworth offers more flexibility but TLA is automated and once you get accepted and add the code there’s not much else to do. There’s no reason not to participate in both programs to try to fill up all your ad space.
Both programs take pretty hefty cuts though so if you have the time and a good, well targeted site then I’d suggest you try to sell links privately. More on that in the next post!
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