Web Cash

Although Google Adsense is easy and convenient, it isn’t always the best choice for monetization. My click-through rate and eCPM is relatively low – but there are other methods to turn traffic into cash.

One method is to sell text link ads. A major ad group on this front is Text-Link-Ads. However, while I’m building up my pagerank, I decided to test out a different provider – TNX.

The site works a little differently from Text-Link-Ads. Instead of selling a block of ads, you get to select from a list of pre-approved links and add them to your site.

The way I have it set up, a cached list of links is generated on my server. A snippet of PHP then accesses the cache and inserts the individual links where I want them to go.

I can add up to four links on each individual page. They can be bunched up in a list or spread out a bit. It doesn’t seem to effect the payment where the links are placed – as long as they aren’t obfuscated and hidden (which is a violation of ToS).

How much can you make? Well, that waits to be seen.

TNX uses a points trading system. An advertiser offers to pay for a certain type of site – based on # of links and pagerank – and offers to pay a certain number of points. When you accept that publisher, you’re paid the points for one month. You can then either spend those points on your own advertisements or trade them in for cash.

Currently, the points are worth about $0.75 per 1000 points. When you look at your list of pages, it tells you how many points a link is worth. For my new site, which is still officially pagerank 0 and has about 350 Yahoo backlinks, the going rate is 3 points. Not a whole lot.

With about 120 pages of content, I could place approximately 1400 links on my site (at four links per page). That would yield about $1.00-$1.25 per month. Hmm… not a lot.

Of course, I realize my site’s page rank and stats haven’t climbed to the point that it will attract real advertising revenue. I added links to a few pages, just to check out the system, but I plan on waiting and seeing how the price changes as my backlinks increase.

In general, text link ads are a great way to add a steady stream of revenue. They’re more stable and predictable than AdSense – and they can be a boon if your site typically has a low click-through rate. I’ve seen people with successful sites earn $500+ per month with a block of text links.

I’ll post again in a few weeks to report on any changes with TNX. At the moment, I’m not terribly impressed with the potential – but it may improve drastically with pagerank and backlinks. Who knows.

Tags: ads, blog, earn, links