How To Invest In Text Link Ads

Posted on 16. Jun, 2007 by Adam in SEO & Rank

Text Link Ads Logo

Investing, investing, investing. Today, it seems like we’re forever putting our money into shares, stocks, bonds, websites, cars and even fine pieces of art looking to make a return on the cash we’ve paid up. It seems like such easy money – especially by buying shares in internet companies, which seem to be gaining worth by the minute. For us webpreneurs, web flipping has become the new fashion – buying them on the cheap, doing them up and selling them for a healthy profit.

However, I’ve always wondered why the same kind of investment strategy can’t be applied to advertising. Obviously, things like private/direct advertising packages are subject to pricing changes based on the demand of the spaces from consumers and spenders, and Cost-Per-Click methods like Adsense have already been thought of and done with methods such as arbitrage.

The thinkers on the internet, people like Shoemoney, have managed to capitalize on certain loopholes by using Adwords to throw money and unique visitors at a landing page in order to get them to signup to a more lucrative service or affiliate program. But in recent months, Google has started to penalize these gurus by charging a ridiculously high amount per click for those who have pages with poor content.

So are there any other loopholes, or mere clever strategies that we can adopt as advertisers? Well, the answer to this question would have been yes, had Google not put their foot down on the whole issue of selling text links. I first heard about the new contact form from Stu, whereby anyone can report another website that publishes and sells linkspace without adding a “no follow” tag or without specifying the outgoing links in a robots.txt file.

There’s bound to be a massive uproar about this as publishers start to be reported by those jealous folk not earning as much as they do. Just because Google owns the net, doesn’t mean that they have to start acting like massive, arrogant toshes – keeping their users happy should be the name of the game. I wonder what TLA’s reaction will be to this.

Anyway, back to the investing. When I first started using Text Link Ads to manage my link portfolio in the right sidebar, I was initially very glad to get my first 2 advertisers signup immediately; MerchantEquip and CreditCardSearchEngine. This was back in December 2006, and those 2 are still with me today. There are other advertisers who have also been with me for quite a bit, but these 2 were my founding members, and made me $32.86 along with a feed ad, in my first month of operation.

Back then in December, I had around 100 RSS Subscribers and was getting 3000 pageviews a month. MerchantEquip bought a Text Link for $17.50 and an RSS ad for $25.

Now, I have around 500 RSS Subscribers and am getting 15,000 pageviews a month. A Text Link on this site is now worth $40 (but I’m sold out for now), and an RSS ad is worth $50.

More importantly though, Merchant Equip continue to pay $37.50 in total per month instead of the updated price of $90! Therefore, the value of their advertising spaces has shot up by 140% – a magical return on their investment in only a 7 month period.

You might say to me that this isn’t actually a proper investment as you’re not getting any money back – but M.E. have managed to save $52.50 a month in expenses compared to if they started their ad campaign on Blogtrepreneur today. Another argument against this method, is that you’re unable to change your campaign and advert after a few months – these ads are permanent, and can only be changed if an advertiser cancels his/her package and rebooks a slot.

But, if you definitely have a direction where you’re going (and for this, I recommend that you sit down and write a plan of what you want to achieve with your site), then the rewards could be plentiful:

You could save a lot of money, which could be usefully spent on other aspects of your business – for example upgrading your hosting to a heavier solution once your site has become more popular and trafficked, and/or buying equipment, domain names and software.
You could have a lot of targeted readers staring at your ads through RSS Readers, improving your clickthrough rate.
As the site you’re advertising on becomes more popular itself, you’ll be able to reap the Search Engine rewards, due to the fact that you’ve specified targeted, keyword anchor texts. Also as Pagerank grows, this should filter through to your own site, helping your SERP’s and increasing organic traffic.

Unfortunately, all this is very hypothetical, but there’s no guarantee over how well your ads will perform, or how long the site you’re advertising on will continue to function. If the site shows no growth, and you’ve spent $17.50 in return for a trickle of visitors, this in itself will be money wasted and will be likely to leave a sour taste in your mouth. Then again, investing wouldn’t be fun and so lucrative if returns were guaranteed.

So, how do you go about choosing and investing wisely in Text Link Ads? Here are a few guidelines:

1) Checkout the “New Text Link Ads” page over at the TLA site. This is a list of all the recently added sites to the main database. Often these sites will be new blogs which have recently passed the PR4 expectations limit that the company set on new publishers.

2) Hover your mouse over the “Reveal” text to read up more about the specific blog. URL’s aren’t given, as otherwise advertisers could jump the middle man (aka. TextLinkAds the company). Check on the Alexa Rank, Number of pages, Link Popularity and Number of Links Sold. The main idea is to find a new site with a low Alexa Rank (if possible under 100,000), a high number of pages, a high link popularity (as this will give your link more weight in Search Engines), and a low Number of Links Sold in order to make your link stand out at the top of the list.

3) Using the Title and Description given on the page, open up Google and search for the Title and/or keywords mentioned. You should be able to find the site easily unless the description is vague and open-ended. By taking a look at the site itself, you can see where your link will be placed. You can also get a feel for the author (if it’s a blog), and to judge potential.

Side note: This judging of potential is very important. If Merchant Equip had not seen the potential behind Blogtrepreneur as a top Entrepreneur Blog, then they wouldn’t have given much return on their advertising investment. Take a look at the number of comments if the site in question is a blog to see how strong and faithful the community is. Try even emailing the owner to see how quickly he responds, and whether he seems determined and helpful in the reply. Often, you can judge a book by its cover, and online its no different. A bog-standard template shows laziness – a custom logo should be a key criteria. I remember I got a mate to design me a logo for my standard WP Template, just so I would stand out a little.

4) Then finally, purchase your link for as long as you want to risk. The longer you can afford to do so, the better. But another vital thing here is to keep reviewing the blog that your advert is on. If you can see things starting to go dry, then stop and move on. It’s better to cut your losses rather than to keep on throwing money at a dead cause.

I don’t claim to be an expert at this, and in fact I’m not. I’ve never advertised with Text Link Ads, publishing is the only thing I’ve done with the company. So as a little disclaimer, I’m not responsible for any money and time you may lose in this process. You gotta admit though, it does seem very cool. Again, there are disadvantages and problems abound. What if the site flops? What if you want to change your keywords? What if you want to change domains? That’s where the forward planning comes in – at least you’ll have a certain path to follow. Sure, no-one ever knows where things will end up, but you can have a good idea of where you’re headed.

So there we have it – sure it’s not a new revelation, but I’m sure it has slipped the minds of numbers of internet marketers and would-be advertisers looking to get the most bang for their buck. I would like to test out the system myself to see the true potential, so who knows, you may just see a Case Study next! If you try this, please tell me how it goes, as we would all love to see the results.

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25 Responses to “How To Invest In Text Link Ads”

Andy

16. Jun, 2007

Wow, this post explains text link ads really well.

Thanks!

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Randall Cornett

17. Jun, 2007

Dude, what a great post. I’m a big user of TLA, and this post is perfect.

I’m relativley new to the blogging scene, and your blog. I just recently stumbled on your blog. Anyways, I’m trying my hardest to make my blog successful and market myself. So if you don’t mind dropping by http://www.randlife.com and just check some things out. I’ve subscribed to your feed, hopefully you will do the same. Keep up the great work! I’m going to be coming back alot!

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Wallace

17. Jun, 2007

you must to google the site before you place a textlink ad,
TLA is tricky that no show the url that different with Reviewme.

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Terra

17. Jun, 2007

I am not so familiar with text link ads, so this was very very useful to me! great post!

Reply to this comment
Wallace

17. Jun, 2007

Hey,Randall,
just take a look your blog,
well design and layout,
it looks great and i already bookmark it. : )

Reply to this comment
Randall Cornett

17. Jun, 2007

Thanks a lot wallace, do you have another form of messaging, I would like to chat a little more with you.

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Stephen Welton

17. Jun, 2007

Great pointers. I have been held back a bit in encouraging direct link advertising in light of the google announcement. I am certainly not going to be going to Google to point fingers at anyone.

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Dave Starr --- Mr. GPS

17. Jun, 2007

This is going to be an interesting issue for a while still to come. I see a lot of the “big boys” in blogging and ecommerce sites just starting to wake up and come out with opinions on this.

I am of the feeling that a person should be able to buy links to his/her site, just as they can buy things like premium hosting sevice, pro designers, etc. I can also see Google’s point, though, because the entire reason for Google in the first place (there were plenty good search engines before Google) was to “contextually rank” pages … and paid links certainly distort the page rank algorithm.

But I have lost a _lot_ of confidence in Google with this “rat out your buddy” methodology. It’s unfair, because it will be arbitrarily based on other’s opinions, it’s labor intensive … how will they deal with the assumed flood of reports, and for a company who has demonstrated the automation skills of Google for the past few years, it’s downright _dumb_. If Google can’t reliably find the links they don’t want used in the process by themselves, with their own skills, then they are a lot dumber than I thought they were.

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Dave Starr --- Mr. GPS

17. Jun, 2007

You really started a theme in this post thta you might want to devlop further, Adnan. Is an “investment” that gives an astounding rate of return but avoids cost rather than pays money directly, actually an investment.

I assert thta it is … for example, many people ignore the fact they could make ~30% p.a., tax free, just by paying down their credit card balances or paying their mortgages off early. But others may have a different view.

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Wallace

18. Jun, 2007

hey,Randall,
you can contact me through the contact of my site.

Reply to this comment
adnan

18. Jun, 2007

Hey guys – thanks for dropping by and great comments as usual – this article managed to get lightly stumbled so thanks for those of you that gave it the thumbs up!

Andy, Randall, Terra and Wallace, thanks for popping by and giving feedback.

@ Stephen: Yeah you’re right. Google is making us turn against our buddies, and trying to make us foes instead of uniting the web.

@ Dave – once again I love hearing your opinions! I hadn’t thought about that actually. Surely Google must be clever enough to spot whether the site in question has installed the TLA WP Plugin for example and whether it has used the specific PHP code to call the TLA Ad functions. It would seem silly if they owned the net, and yet couldn’t distinguish between normal sidebar links and paid ones.

And you’re right about the management side of things. But I’m sure that they’ll go with the completely automated approach again like they use with Adsense – the support isn’t too bad for that, so hopefully they’ll be able to follow that through for this reporting of paid links.

To be honest, I don’t know nearly enough about the investment field to give a sound next post expressing my points of view. But I definitely am of the way of thinking that money saved is money earnt as it were. It might sound stupid, but being alert about your outgoing income will yield much bigger and better returns in terms of what you’ll be able to spend as a result.

And Wallace and Randall – nice to see that this site is causing some people to meet – gives me great pleasure knowing that I’ve helped to connect other webpreneurs ;)

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Shawn

18. Jun, 2007

interesting stuff, especially the bit about Google.

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sarahG

19. Jun, 2007

Surely Google must be clever enough to spot whether the site in question has installed the TLA WP Plugin for example and whether it has used the specific PHP code to call the TLA Ad functions.

How? The WP plugin simply outputs a list. Unless you leave the naff CSS in the link (which I tend to remove) then there’s no way of telling if the links are paid for or simply a list of favourite links. The PHP code cannot be read by Google so again, it’s simply the list output by the TLA PHP code which again, can be altered to display a plain unordered list.

I link to sites I like, they don’t always link back. Doesn’t mean the final site has paid for a link on my site.

What gets me is how will Google decide. You could report one of my sites, how can Google make that decision to penalise sites if they can’t be 100% certain. Of course, as always, there’s no right to anything with Google but I think it’s a pretty poor idea. If a TLA is relevant to the site it’s on then what’s the harm? I’ve refused some TLAs on certain sites as they’re completely irrelevant and whilst making money is nice, I still care about what my visitors see and think.

Nice article by the way ;)

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adnan

20. Jun, 2007

Thanks Shawn.

@ Sarah – my complete defunct knowledge of coding has been exposed! Thanks for correcting me – I didn’t realise about the PHP, although I should have, seeing as I look at “Page > View Source” and never see any PHP there!

But can Google not crawl the WordPress Plugins folder which will have the TLA Plugin installed?

Yeah certainty is an issue and one which webmasters will be arguing if they get banned over such an issue. And thanks ;)

Reply to this comment
sarahG

20. Jun, 2007

Googlebot sees what you see via the browser / view source, so go to your plugins folder and see what you can see. For a start off you could (and in theory should) block your plugins folder and admin folder from bots in the robots.txt file. Afterall, you don’t want these crawled!

I would guess that only a human would be able to look into the plugins folder and see the TLA plugin. Plus, just because it’s in there doesn’t mean it’s
a: activated
b: has any links purchased

I have a site up for TLAs but it has yet to get any. In the space for the links for the TLAs I have other external links which would stay even if I sold any.

I would guess, the only way you could be sure is when the ads are headed ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Our Sponsors’ etc. But even then, you don’t know what the link owner has done to be put there, afterall they’re talking about purchasing links, not offering say free web space which I’d call someone sponsoring your site.

It’s just not black and white science, a bit too grey for my liking.

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ijustgotblogged

22. Jun, 2007

Thanks for the insight on text link ads, now if I can just get them to approve my sight.

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adnan

22. Jun, 2007

Lol no problem Ijustgotblogger – Patrick Gavin (the owner) and the team generally only seem to accept PR4+ blogs – but hang in there and you’ll get through with time.

Sarah – Ah right yeah – valid points, and you’re right, its a shady business for Google to be dabbling in, although they have to do something in order to get the best page rankings. Once again thanks for sharing your knowledge – I love learning from ya! ;)

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Kay

23. Jun, 2007

thanks for the tip!

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Andy

01. Jul, 2007

Sweet, i might sign up with text link ads when i have more rss subscribers!

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sarahG

01. Jul, 2007

Andy, if you have a decent PR (4+) then sign up now. Don’t worry about visitors or subscribers. The PR is what gets you in and that plus the Alexa is what determines the worth of your site.

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Flimjo

13. Mar, 2008

You have a very good handle on this stuff. Thanks for this very helpful information.

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Puneet

09. May, 2008

I had tried tnx for text link ads .. but now i do not prefer to go with paid links strictly … as i have seen many sites drop in se

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BuSy

14. May, 2008

Thanks for the details of TextLinkAds. I started a referral link recently.

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House Signs

08. Sep, 2008

Wow, thanks for the tips on text links ads, I am going to have a look at them now.

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How To Invest In Text Link Ads

25 Responses to “How To Invest In Text Link Ads”

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