Text-Link-Ads Review – A Monetization Solution For Small Business Bloggers?

This is a sponsored review containing affiliate links. I’ve been using Text-Link-Ads on this blog for a while as a means to monetize it. Far and away Text-Link-Ads is the best method to make money from a blog like this, focused on small business marketing and branding. The people behind the company contacted me through the ReviewMe.com site and requested a review, and I since I have a good history with Text-Link-Ads I decided to oblige.

Bear in mind this isn’t an article about marketing or branding a business, rather a service that other bloggers may consider as a monetization method to use on their blogs. The small business niche can often be hard to monetize given the nature of the audience, so if you blog about small business or similar topics you might consider testing Text-Link-Ads yourself.

If nothing else this article will serve as a fantastic example of an online business model that generates revenue as a “middleman” service using a many-to-many system, which is ideal and affords the owners near-unlimited potential for growth and scale without significant increase in infrastructure costs. You may also find the ReviewMe model interesting because it is also many-to-many and is owned by the team behind Text-Link-Ads. Two great small businesses concepts that created unique ways to make money online and satisfy the needs of two types of users – publishers and advertisers – using the new darlings of the web media world – blogs.

How It Works

Text-Link-Ads acts as a brokering service between website owners, in particular blogs, and advertisers wishing to increase traffic by purchasing text links from other sites. Text-Link-Ads accepts blogs through an online application form, categorizes and ranks each site accepted into the program and based on things like traffic, PageRank, AlexaRank, RSS subscribers and other variables, determines how much a link costs.

The blog owners can choose where to place the links on their site, with “hotspots” returning more money. You can use the Text-Link-Ads calculator to see how much a link is worth on your site depending on where you put it and whether you chose to offer a homepage only link or a site-wide link on all pages.

Advertisers then browse an online catalogue of sites they can buy from, including data on all the metrics used to evaluate each site as I mentioned above, and purchase as many links as they like.

Text-Link-Ads takes a cut from the purchase price and gives the rest to the blog owner. The online system handles all the transactions, although there is a human-approval process on new applications.

My Results

I was one of the first bloggers offered an account at Text-Link-Ads, which I eagerly accepted hoping it might return some results on this blog because previously it had been hard to monetize the traffic. The first owner of Small Business Branding, Michael Pollock, had trouble making more than $100 per month using things like Google AdSense, which performed terribly on this site.

Text-Link-Ads sold out of my ad inventory within about a week and since then month after month I rarely have any link positions available (I chose to make 10 link positions available – the maximum amount you can offer). The result is a steady $200+ USD each and every month since I installed the links.

That’s not a huge amount but it was more than double what the site made from AdSense. I also tested other money making methods, some of which I still use today, but Text-Link-Ads has been by far the most consistent and best of all, I don’t have to do anything once it’s set up. I get automatic Paypal payments each month and I don’t have to work at all to sell the links – Text-Link-Ads does all the selling for me.

Bad Points?

The only real issue I have with Text-Link-Ads is that sometimes the advertisers who buy links seem to be a little off topic to what we write about hear at Small Business Branding. I’m not sure how good their results are but most keep renewing so they must receive some value from their purchase.

I have no issues wholeheartedly recommending Text-Link-Ads to you provided you are prepared to see links going away from your site and of course you have intentions to make money from your blog.

Click here to learn more about the service…