Overview
There are many different programs you can use to buy or sell links, but the new service on the Internet is TNX.net. They are heralding themselves as the place to buy links and want to become the premiere text link marketplace.
They have a fair bit of competition though, with the popular Text-Link-Ads and other such services pushing their products on consumers.
They also have what will now be an uphill battle, with Google, and most likely other search engines starting to penalize sites that buy and sell text link advertisements as a way to game search engine rankings.
Advertising is the key to getting your message out into the marketplace, and selling advertising makes it easier to devote more time to your blog but is TNX.net a company you should be considering?
What Others Have Said
There have been many posts around the web on TNX.net, and so if nothing else, the service has gotten the buzz of the blogosphere behind it, showing that there is a need for another service such as this.
Here are just a few articles that have mentioned TNX.net:
My Thoughts
I have been a long time Text Link Ads customer, and that is because it was a fast way to make what I considered a fair amount of revenue for the work and time that I had put into my site, and even today, despite all the search engine issues, I highly recommend their product. Can TNX come close to replacing TLA? I am not sure, but I do think that competition breeds invention and will hopefully just give us bloggers another way to monetize our sites.
The Good
Taking a page from Microsoft’s Live Marketplace and other similar systems, TNX uses points, which can lead to a huge disconnect between the amount you are paying and the value of the money you have put into the system. It can be much easier to part with points than with dollars. I think this was a smart move, and not only for TNX, but also for bloggers looking to use this system to monetize their blog. Getting people to part with money can be quite difficult. Hopefully, they won’t realize how much money they are parting with when it’s in point form.
The design is relatively simple, but effective. I would have gone with something even more professional looking, as their competitors have spent a fair bit of time and money tweaking their designs and coming late to the game usually means you have to step beyond your competitors, especially in appearance. I still put this in the good section, because the site is quite usable, and not unpleasant to look at.
The system seems to be rather easy to use, and allows you to focus your link buying on certain sites, by a variety of quality indicators. This can mean that sites with lower rankings might not sell well on this site, or make much money when they do sell links, but it makes it easier as an advertiser to hit powerful sites where your link will be shown to a large audience.
Affiliate Program
If you love to be part of an affiliate program, and are good at getting people to sign up below you, TNX has you covered there as well.
When you refer webmasters to TNX.net, you get 13.3% (as long as your account is active) of all TNX-points that are generated by their websites. In addition, you will receive 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser.
That can grow to be a large amount of advertising for your blog, or a fair bit of cash in your pocket. Nothing wrong with that, especially since the program continues as long as your account is active. Over time, that can be a fairly nice revenue stream.
My Concerns
Of course, as with any of these programs, you have to do your due diligence and research these companies to death. TNX.net hasn’t been around very long, and so the search engine implications are not yet truly known, but its competitors are having a rough time dealing with Google.
This could mean that by advertising, or selling advertising, on your blog, that eventually you will be manually penalized by Google and if they are a major traffic source for your blog, you could be trading traffic and Google PageRank, a factor in many advertising programs valuation systems, for a few bucks from links.
Conclusion
Whether you check out TNX.net or not, buying and selling text links is here to stay, and TNX is a quickly growing marketplace, and for people looking to monetize their blogs, it is worth checking out if TNX suits your needs.
Originally posted on October 19, 2007 @ 8:38 pm