Affiliate Programs

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You’ve probably all heard about Text Link Ads. If you haven’t let me do a quick explanation.

Text Link Ads sell companies text links on websites. They’re a link broker. They will buy text links off of Webmasters and sell them to advertisers.

If you’re a blog owner or Webmaster, you may be able to make money with them.

In this review of Text Link Ads, I’ll be review their program from the Advertiser side, as one who’s bought text links from them.

I’ve used Text Link Ads for one of my new websites and one for my local business’s.

TextLink Ads Link For Website #1

The first link I bought was for this new website I put up. I wanted to get it indexed quickly and get some traffic coming to the site without spending a fortune on it. I chose a site with a high “link popularity” in hopes of getting some PR link love from the big G. I also wanted the traffic!

The site I chose stated that my link would appear on something like 50,000 pages. The link cost me $50 a month.

It took several days, but my link finally showed up. I kept close tabs on that look through the Text Link Ads control panel as well as my own site. The Text Link Ads control panel will show you how many backlinks are present from the pages where your link is active.  They’ll list the 1st 100 sites with backlinks to your site and highlight the ones from the page/site where your link is located.

I was a little disappointed that they use Yahoo to keep track of their backlinks rather than Google. However, if you stop to think about it, you can understand why. Yahoo counts every link back to your site, Google only counts those it feels has value. (who determines if the site linking to your site has value?)

Over the month that my link was up, I received very little traffic from the site where my link was located. At the end of the month, Yahoo only showed something like 3 links back to my site. I wasn’t very impressed with my first attempt at buying text links.

Text Link Ads Link For Website #2

On my second try at buying text links, I chose to buy a link on a local TV station’s website (even though TextLink Ads said it was a newspaper). I know this website because you can’t open a newspaper, turn on the radio or TV without hearing about this TV stations Website. I decided to buy the link for my website of my local B&M business.

According to the Pop Up to the link on the TV Stations ad, my link was suppose to show up in their “Money” section on a page with a link popularity of 5/10. 

This link cost me $75 per month.

What I noticed after my link went live was that my link didn’t actually show up on the “Money” section page, my link showed up on article pages OFF OF THE “MONEY” page. Why should this matter? Simple, the “Money” page had a PR of 5 while the article pages off of the “Money” page had a PR of 0 or at best 2.

I went back to my Text Link Ads control panel and sure enough, it said my links would show up in the “Money” section and that the “Money” section had a “Link Popularity” of 5/10.

I emailed Text Link Ads and after two days of not hearing from them, I emailed them again. A few days later I received a reply.

In short, it said that my link was live and showing up on the article pages off of the “Money” section. (well duh! I already knew that). It also informed me that their “Link Popularity” does not correspond to a PR rank, although when you visit a page, the “Link Popularity” is the same most of the time as the PR.

In their defense, they did offer to refund my money for the time I had remaining. I declined and kept my link on the TV Stations website. I wanted local coverage for my local business!

I checked back after I received the response from Text Link Ads and the Pop Up for the TV Stations ad now says “Will appear on all story pages in the ”Money” section“. Nice of them to clarify that.

As for the backlinks, I honestly got a lot from those article pages. In the end, Yahoo counted something like 60+ links back to my site out of the top 100. However, none of those links on those pages showed up in Google.

The traffic from those links was minimal according to my stats. Since my B&M website already ranks at the top of Yahoo locally, I received no boost in the rankings.

Was it worth the $75? Yeah, this once it was. It was worth it in regards to the things it taught me, not the traffic or rankings it provided.

After Action Report - Things I Learned From Buying Links From TextLink Ads

• Don’t assume anything - I assumed Google would pick these text links up and reward me with PR Gold. It didn’t happen. In fact, I recieved only 1 backlink indexed in Google and that was for Website #1.
• Save everthing - I wished I had saved the pages when I purchased the link for Website #2 but I didn’t. My bad.
• Ask Questions before buying - See rule #1
• Define the reason for purchasing the links in the first place - Are you looking to get indexed in Google? Do you want to drive a specific target audience to your site? Are you hoping to increase your backlinks with a particular Search Engine, ie; Google, Yahoo, MSN? (some of those pages from the TV Stations website were picked up by MSN also)
• Research, research, research - I should have looked into the site where website #1 was placed. If I had, I’d known that it has pop ups and a bunch of other ads on their pages. When doing research, I like to use FireFox with the SEO Plugin. Makes doing SEO research a lot easier!

Some of the other things I learned that just because the Text Link Ad says you link will appear on 50,000 pages, don’t assume (see rule #1) that any Search Engine index those pages.

I’d like to know how Text Link Ads goes about determining its “Link Popularity”. What formula is used?

The text links you buy may likely end up at the bottom right of a page. About the worst spot they could appear at. These are also below the fold. That means people will have to scroll down and be looking over to the right to find them.  If you can’t figure out the site where your links will appear, then go there and see where the sponsored links are, then ASK! Now I know on some of the more expensive sites, ie; blogs, they may appear above the fold (ie; johnchow.com).

I also have to be honest and tell you that Text Link Ads recommends that you run the links for several months to see the benefits. From my experience with years of marketing my small businesses both online and offline, I can say that’s probably true.

Will I ever buy another Text Link Ad. Sure. But I will go into it knowing a lot more than I did before. I’ll be more careful to research the site my links appear on.

I plan on buying some links on a few of the blogs they have listed. These should produce some Google friendly links and hopefully some traffic. We’ll see.