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Have You Heard of TNX - Text Link Revolution?

January 11, 2008 | Author: Dave | Filed under: SEO and Marketing

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by Dave “Inhibitor” Hughes author of Lagorama

Sooner or later, most bloggers and website owners look for a way to monetize their site, and there are many options to choose from. TNX.net is one of those options, but how does it work, how well does it work, and what are the pluses and minuses of using it?

The System

First, we’ll look at exactly what TNX is. From their website:

[QUOTE]TNX.net combines the benefits of Contextual Advertising, Text Link Brokers and Relevant Exchange of permanent non-reciprocal text links. [/QUOTE]

What the service amounts to is a way to sell links to other sites on your site, giving the link buyer the advantage of traffic from your site, and an increase in their Google Page Rank (PR) based on the PR of your site. Their system is fairly straight-forward…when you sign up, it calculates an estimate of how much per month you can earn from selling links on your site. In fact, you can do this before you sign up for the service, as their “Income Calculator” is right there on the TNX home page. Simply enter the domain name of your site, choose your site’s category and number of pages, and then manually assign how many pages you have with a PR0, PR1, PR2, etc. It then calculates your monthly profit for you, based in large part on your PR.As an example, I put HomeBizBlogger in, and also selected that the site has 45 PR0 pages and 5 PR1 pages. (These are just for example.) Selling four links per page, it calculates the total monthly profit to be $4.43. However, changing the PR estimates to 25 PR0 pages, 5 PR1 pages and 20 PR3 pages, it jumps to $64.13 in monthly earnings. So PR is definitely a factor in determining how much you make with TNX, which is interesting…I’ll explain why later. Another statistic that helps define how much you can earn from TNX is the number of pages on your site…obviously, the more pages you have available to sell links on, the more you’ll make.

Features

The system has some very nice features, including the ability to screen the links that will appear on your site, approving ones you find a good fit, and declining those you don’t want. The ads can be placed on some or all of the pages on your website or blog, and are not of the “flashy” variety of ads…they are, indeed, simple text links. And as is the case with other ad programs (like Google’s Adsense), it’s easy to implement on your site…just paste the code in the appropriate place on your site and it does the rest.

Requirements

There are requirements to join TNX (as there are with most advertising programs for your website), including having at least 30 pages and appearing in “a major catalog”, with DMOZ being mentioned as an example. However, there is no minimum amount of traffic or PR that your site must have to be accepted. Also, TNX takes a 12.5% commission on any links sold on your site, which is deducted from your payout.

Payouts and Benefits

The payouts are not in actually money, but “points” on the site, which you can use to purchase links from other website owners, sell to other members or even sell back to TNX. The money you generate from selling your points is paid out via PayPal, usually within 72 hours. I have found no mention of TNX not paying out when points are sold, so that doesn’t seem to be an issue, and of course purchasing links on other sites with them is no problem. But why would you want to purchase links on other sites with your points instead of cashing out? From their “How it Works” page:

[QUOTE]TNX.net allows publishers to sell links from each page on their website, and for advertisers it allows to buy millions of links from other sites in few clicks. TNX is a convenient tool that allows publishers and advertisers to save time, efforts and money: in just a few minutes you can have thousands of links from hundreds of high quality relevant sites linking to yours.
[/QUOTE]

Aside from the obvious benefit of increased traffic, this is also aimed at increasing your Google PR with their system, as is shown by their page “Google PR“, where they actually spell out how many pages of a certain PR you need links on to increase your PR to your target number.

[QUOTE]For example, to get PR of 7 you need at least 3 links from PR 8 or half a thousand links from PR 5. With correct relinking (the correct system of links to internal pages and main page within a site) you can get the results you need much faster. [/QUOTE]

As your PR goes up, so does the amount of profit you make from your links sold through TNX. However, there is one potential snag with their system.

The Potential Problem

Late last year, Google cracked down on websites selling text links that passed page rank, lowering their PR as a result and, in some cases, dropping their PR to zero due to using services similar to this and other link brokers. Will TNX cause the same problem for you? There’s no way to know at the moment, but with Google continuing their text link crackdown, it’s my opinion that sooner or later, member sites of TNX may see a PR reduction, despite TNX’s claim that this will not happen. Matt Cutts of Google has discussed this quite a bit on his blog, and after being forwarded an email a text-link seller had sent out advising sites that hosted their links to avoid putting words like “Sponsors” or “Advertisers” next to the links. Matt’s response was this:

[QUOTE]The email later suggests “to use unique locations for ad links like within content.” At the point where people are recommending ways to make paid links less detectable (e.g. by removing any labels or indication that the links are sold), I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future. [/QUOTE]

This was in 2005, well before Google did indeed start taking action. But does TNX fall afoul of this? They say they are not a link exchange or ad broker. Here’s the relevant passage from Google’s own quality guidelines:

[QUOTE]Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. [/QUOTE]

So yes, I believe that this could at some point affect your PR negatively. Since quite a bit of value is placed on PR, does this mean you should steer clear of TNX?

That depends on what the goals are for your site.

The Recommendation

There are several lines of thought about PR, including the opinion that PR is an outdated, inaccurate method of determining the value of a website or blog. These people believe that the most important thing you can use to place a value on your site is traffic, which is a hard position to argue with since, without traffic, your site has no value.

If this is your opinion, then TNX is a good option to look at for your site. Keep in mind that to date, users of TNX have not had their PR penalized as a result of using the service, but that is subject to change in the future.

I wouldn’t recommend TNX to someone who finds PageRank to be important in the valuation of their site, but if that doesn’t concern you, it appears to be a very good system, and a very effective way to build residual . If you do decide to give it a try, however, you can post your TNX ID in this thread on the forums at DigitalPoint and receive 5000 bonus credits to your account.

Just make sure you head into things with your eyes wide open when entering any program of this nature.

Dave has written a few bloggeries for us at HomeBizBlogger and as a result we’re making him an official contributor. Stay tuned for discussions on many more of the web’s most popular advertising programs in the weeks to come.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 and is filed under SEO and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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