Text Link Ads and Blog Monetization

Part of the attraction of setting out to your own domain is the opportunity it affords one to fully customize the look of the blog, and hence maximize the chances of making money off it. As regular visitors might note, this blog is not big on the monetizing front. Yet.


Ever since I moved to my domain, I have seen the multitude of opportunities that present itself before me from a financial point of view. But I am still holding back on that due to the obvious lack of traffic or page rank that a new blog like mine can boast. I have been doing a bit of reading around and have come to realize, that for small time blogs like this, Google's Adsense can best earn someone mere pennies a day. Not that I am underestimating the power of Adsense, as it presents most bloggers with the most realistic chance of monetizing their blog, but the cash for low traffic volumes is just not sustainable. Thankfully, with all the PageRank madness that drives site owners these days, there are other options too.

One such option is Text Link Ads. I am sure most of you might have read enough about it, but here are my thoughts on its scope. Once signed up as a publisher, Text link ads allow site owners and bloggers post certain links on their site as ads. These ads are not very different in look from the other links on your sidebar and hence help drive traffic to those advertisers. The clickable banner below, however, is a part of another interesting aspect of Text Link Ads (explained later on in this post).



The best part of the deal is that, one gets paid a flat rate for a link per month which is usually fairly decent and good enough to pay for your web hosting (and if you are on Blogger, it's extra money!). For those college students in India, who are on blogger, it's enough for at least two weeks of canteen food! I'm sure some Roorkee guys are listening. Now where is the catch, you say? Well, it is one thing to be signed up on Text Link Ads. It is a different thing to be accepted by them as a publisher, from which one can actually start making steady money. Now there is no official way of knowing exactly how one can be accepted by TLA as a publisher. One rule of thumb that seems to work for a lot of people is having at least a Page Rank of 3 for your site. A PR of 4 almost certainly guarantees one to be accepted as a publisher. One site that can helps you estimate your page rank is this.

Now what can you do if you don't get accepted as a publisher. Not to worry, as of today, my newly formed blog still has a PR of zero despite having reasonable amount of incoming links. Text Link ads have an affiliate program that pays $25 for every user you refer, provided he either gets accepted as a publisher or as an advertiser. All you need to do is to either link through the referral code they provide on your profile or through the clickable ad banners that you see in my side bar and below my posts. You see, there may be plenty of users having higher page ranks and traffic who might not have heard of it before, but they now do through your site referral. (Oh yes, you could definitely sign up right now by either clicking here or on my sidebar.) Text link ads of course, work best for focused blogs, although once you get accepted it all depends on how much the advertisers are willing to pay you. So if you have a niche blog or site that focuses on technology or music or entertainment, you might get higher rates. Although all that depends on many other factors and even the average general purpose/personal blogs can have good income once accepted as a publisher. Point is, it's a real chance of making genuinely decent income from your blog, which is basically unrelated to how many times people click on your ads.

So if you actually found this informative and are interested to try it out, go ahead and sign up for TLA. (I know, I am bad at marketing. But I sure did my bit of research on blog monetization. So you would be nice if you would help me earn my bucks too :) )