TNX.net: Innovative Way Of Trading Text Links

More and more, selling text links became a viable alternative to contextual advertising. At least for sites with lots of loyal readers who perceive contextual ads as a symbol of low quality, text link ads can be a compromise solution to keep the audience happy and yet make some money in exchange of your work. The trend once set, trading links services appeared, offering their members priviledges and attractive affiliate programs.

I’ve been approached by one of the newest links broker, TNX.net, to review their services. So I joined the network, and these are my first impressions.

Differences between TNX.net and other similar programs:

• the points system: links are traded for points. Currently, 1000 TNX points =$1.2 and it is “increasing every week by at least 2%” (according to TNX.net website)
• flexibility: the points earned by selling links on your site, or from the refferal program can be used to buy links on other sites.
• low links price: for example, you can buy PR5 links at the price of $3/month, which is lower than I’ve seen so far in other programs (and lower than I ever thought I’d accept for any of my PR5 pages); however, this is the minimum price; the maximum price can be 20 times higher, according to the number of Yahoo backlinks.

Buying Links With TNX.net

Advertisers will enjoy an attractive offer, but they won’t be able to choose the sites the want to advertise on. The choice is done by the number of backlinks (according to Yahoo), by website category and by geo targeting.

These are the minimum monthly link prices, per month:

PR 0 = 1 TNX-Point = $0.002
PR 1 = 50 TNX = $0.06
PR 2 = 100 TNX = $0.12
PR 3 = 200 TNX =$0.24
PR 4 = 500 TNX =$0.6
PR 5 = 1,000 TNX = $1.2
PR 6 = 2,500 TNX = $3
PR 7 = 5,000 TNX = $6

As you can see, it is easy for webmasters to quickly set up impressive link campaigns at low costs. It took me about 10 minutes to set up a small campaign with the 2000 bonus TNX points I got for joining the program, according to this thread in DigitalPoint forums. I ordered a big bunch of PR0 and PR1 links. If I was to spend time to find all those blogs and to leave comments on the do-follow ones, it would have taken me several days. If I like the outcome, I’ll go for bigger fish next month.

Selling Links With TNX.net

The good news is that you can sell links at individual post level (this works on any sites and you can sell up to 4 ads on every page. At Text Link Ads you can sell only 1 ad and it works only on WordPress sites). There are some entry barriers for a site to be accepted, not so high as in other cases, but still:

• number of visitors: at the present time there are no restrictions!
• PR: It is preferable to have pages on the site with PR at least 1.
• domain: preferred are second level domains with paid hosting registered over 6 months ago
• site selection by search engines: at least once per month
• number of pages: at least 30 (with regular ranking)
• presence in a major catalogue, DMOZ: preferred
• PHP: a must

I don’t believe there will be too many people who will get rich from TNX.net, but one can see it as an easy, convenient way of exchanging one-way links. Not to mention that if you have a talent in building affiliate networks, you can earn a passive income from your referrals, via the affiliate program:

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 (this option will work after paypal payments will be automated).

Joining TNX.net is free and very easy to do, as you are not required to activate your account. However, submitted sites’ approval is not done instantly. This can be a sign of quality of the sites in the network (as nobody wants to place their links in bad neighborhoods).

Where’s the money?

You can redeem your points from TNX.net at the price of $0.62 per 1000 points, or you can sell them to other members for any price you wish. It will be interesting to see a new virtual currency developing.

If you are not afraid of the big bad g….woolf, you are invited to give it a try!