TNX.net – The Long Awaited TLA Slayer?
If you’re like me, you love to browse a forum or two late at night and see what latest gossip is going down. I myself frequent YGG, DP and a few other smaller guys to catch up on blogging chums and internet marketing gurus. If you have been watching on DigitalPoint though, you will have noticed that a text links company has started to flutter the hearts of website owners around the ‘sphere. Its name: TNX.net.
As I had already seen them out and about, I was pretty excited when Vladimir got in touch to see whether I could conjure up a review of his site. Unfortunately, I’ve been a little slow out of the blocks due to TNX’s extensive media and publicity campaign which is going excellently, but I thought I should tell you guys about it, in case you’ve been hiding under a shell for the past few weeks.
Firstly as a little disclaimer, Vladimir has allowed me to use referral links in this post so that I can earn 13.3% of any points that you guys earn or buy, for life! So, even more benefits all round – remember you can promote TNX too by signing up with the team.
Let’s start with a customary quote from the TNX website to see what they’re all about:
“TNX.net combines the benefits of Contextual Advertising, Text Link Brokers and Relevant Exchange of permanent non-reciprocal text links.”
As you can see from the above screenshot, simplicity is obviously very important to the TNX crew. From an aesthetical perspective, the design is inviting and fairly luring, which is important in increasing signups. I would say that the large clumps of text under the “Website Publishers” and “For Advertisers” headings are quite hard to digest and could do with some shortening/sweetening, like has been refined over at TLA. In fact, spelling and grammatical errors was one of the main things that I picked up on at TNX, and whilst no-one writes perfect copy, for a company, being prim and precise is important again for that all important conversion.
So we know that TNX helps us buy and sell links, but how does it actually work?
Here’s where the system becomes a tad complicated, so listen closely.
Let’s go from an advertiser’s perspective primarily
Advertisers are able to obtain links on other sites, which start off at 1 point per link. At the moment, the exchange rate is 1000 points per dollar, so instantly you can see that you’re getting a very good bang for your buck. The premise here, is that the more links that you can buy through TNX, the higher the potential rankings you can obtain for your chosen Keyword or Phrase.
Starting a campaign is very easy, just click on the button “Create New Campaign“. Here, you can name your Ad Campaign and most importantly, choose the types of sites you want your link to appear on. TNX measures the value of links through Yahoo Backlinks and PageRank primarily, so the higher the amount of backlinks and PageRank, the more points a link from that website will cost.
For further targeting, TNX allows you to select categories of sites that you want your link to appear on, and Geotargetting is also another great feature which allows better control of your ad positions. The site has more than 18,000,000 pages currently indexed, so chances are you will find sites which are specific to yours and which will give you the best SEO benefits.
A clever idea which TNX grasps, and which Everton at Connected Internet pointed out in his review, is that buying links on PR0 is encouraged and should be practised. Just because a site has a PageRank of 0, doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t rank them well. Remember, the Pagerank hasn’t been exported to the toolbar in yonks, so the sites in question may be about to receive a PR5-6, in which case you will have performed an excellent purchase.
Creating the ads themselves is another easy task. TNX encourages you to create a handful of creatives just in case others aren’t approved, and so that you can get links to different pages of your sites. In fact this theory is compulsory to your campaign’s approval - I guess TNX don’t want to get their advertisers killed on Google. Once your ads are created, simply send them off to get approved and the links will go live pretty much straight after. Description can be placed around the Anchor text too - another big pushup against TLA.
What’s In It For The Publishers?
Most of you guys are website owners and so want to know if there are any benefits to having TNX links on your site.
Firstly, there is a great deal of commission to be made in the Referral program, where Vladimir and his team are giving you 13.3% of the points that your referrals earn. This is a lifetime payment as well, so you should start promoting now, or maybe create a landing page.
In order to start earning, you need to submit your site - which needs to be hosted on servers which support PHP or Perl, and which needs to be already indexed in Google. This will include most people though - if you’re on Blogger, then I recommend you switch to Wordpress or your own hosted solution right away!
You can control how many links show up on your page, pretty much like TLA, except again there is more flexibility here. Viewing the links sold, earnings and the potential to convert points into cash also exist. If you want, you can use the points earnt in your advertising campaigns - this is a clever tactic used by TNX in order to generate the most profit for themselves. The current exchange rate is $0.66 per 1000 points.
Conclusion
As mentioned, TNX.net is only just starting to gain popularity and is becoming mainstream. Vladimir has spent a lot on private reviews on all types of blogs, and this has started to pay off for him especially in terms of Alexa rankings:
Keep up the great growth Vladimir, and I’m sure that (coupled with the problems TextLinkAds are having), TNX is going to have a nice battle with the current paid text links king. Good luck!
Thanks for the mention of my Google demise. Personally, I’m staying away from paid links, as it’s not how I make income through my site. I use my blog as an advert for my services.
Good luck to TNX though.
All the best.
Great review, I’ve got one coming up for TNX too
That’s nice, I was about to start using TLA but it seems that there is a new Sheriff in Town
No problem David and sorry to hear about it again - just seems like such a bummer. Yeah you’re both fortunate and unfortunate in that you don’t need to rely on Paid links for money and that you can get cash through design work. But at the same time, Google have slapped your rankings for those keywords that are getting you design work.
The good things about blogs though, is that your brand can never be pwned by Google - so as long as you keep blogging, you’ll continue to get design requests from your great reader base.
Cheers Matt - can’t wait to see yours!
@ Vincent: I’m not completely ruling out TLA. It’s just that quite a lot of sites rely on them, and it would be nice as always to diversify your income streams. It’s the same as relying on Google for all your traffic.
I just signed up but cannot figure out or get an answer from them…where do the links go? Do you set them up like regular text links (i.e. -sidebar, like TLA) or do they just get thrown throughout your site?
TNX sounds like it’s going to be big. It’s about time TLA had a competitor too, they’ve been running solo for way too long now.
So is TNX really selling “permanent” text links? As in, pay once and they last forever?
If so, that’s a huge benefit over TLA. I also think it makes the links much more relevant and less likely to be filtered by google. If a link is permanent, it obviously has much more meaning than a rented link.
I’ll have to take a look and see what they have…
Thanks for the overview,
- Mason Hipp
Hey David - there is an official forum here but it seems like the majority of the board is in Russian. If you login to your account, there is a link to Support > Live Support where you can ask questions. You setup the links pretty much like TLA, ie. you put the piece of code in your sidebar then after a few days (if you sell links), the will appear where you have placed the code. They don’t get thrown randomly about your site.
@ Mason: Yep I reckon they could be pretty big, and whilst TLA does have competitors like LinkWorth, they don’t seem to have as much publicity or market share as TLA.
The links aren’t permanent, it’s per month like with TLA. But the links seem a lot cheaper than at TLA with the equivalent PageRank. No problem with the overview. As always, do your research on anything, even TNX to make sure they are geared towards your advertising campaign.
Thanks adnan…they finally answered my questions after asking a few times. I am going to give them a shot and see how it goes. Thanks for the heads up!
Great to see a competitor for TLA, but won’t TNX run into the same problem of Google hunting down their paid links and instituting penalties? I think their 15% plan is brilliant… if their service doesn’t end up hurting SERP rankings for folks.
And to think I’d just signed up for TLA and what sounds like something better comes along! Thanks for the review, I’ll have a look at TNX now.
TNX definitely sounds like it’s worth diving into. I’ve been looking at TLA for quite some time now, but this might be even better! In the end, this kind of competition makes it interesting. Thanks for the review.
Awesome, glad you managed to get through David.
@ Dan - who knows. The better thing about TNX (in some ways) is that you and Google don’t know which sites you’re buying the links off, unlike at TLA where the URL isn’t listed but it’s easy to deduce where the links will be coming from. I think if Google really wanted to target TNX though, there would be no stopping them.
@ John - it’s perfectly reasonable to use both services. Both TLA and TNX can nicely supplement your income and is all part of the “diversify your income” strategy that many bloggers are taking.
@ Rob - no problems buddy and let us know how it goes!
Ive been on the waiting list for TLA for 7 months and it doest seem likei will be accepted into thenetwork. This looks like a superb replacement, enjoy what ever percentage i bring you when i sign up!
A
I’ve not tried TLA, TNX works, I can recommend it highly.
@mounted deer, I’ve tried TLA and it really does work but can be more beneficial depending on one’s niche. I’ll look into TNX. Thanks