Every once in a while I plan to talk about services or affiliate related companies that I use to monetize this site or my other websites and blogs. One of the companies that I’ve been working with for at least the last 8 months is Text Link Ads.

Text Link Ads is a service that helps you monetize your site by helping you get advertisers to purchase link space – usually in your sites sidebar – for a week or a month at a time.

I know they base which sites are accepted by a mix of stats which include page rank, Alexa rank and I believe how many RSS subscribers the site has at the time of submission.

I went to test my theory. I’ve got two sites that haven’t been accepted yet so I resubmitted them and got the same results – well let you know when your site is accepted. Then I decided to try adding my husbands site Guitar Licks and it was accepted right away.

The only major difference between my husbands site that was accepted and the two of mine that are still waiting is that his has 8 more RSS subscribers … yet it’s a PR 3 and the site of mine that’s been waiting the longest (6 months) is a PR 4. I wrote to them to ask them to re-evaluate the two sites that I’ve had waiting for months manual. Hopefully they will do that for me because frankly I don’t see much difference in the stats of the site that was just accepted and the two that are waiting.

My advice is to not try to add a site until it’s at least a PR3, had a decent ALexa rank and hopefully at least 40 to 50 RSS subscribers.

BTW if anyone wants to subscribe to this sites RSS feed I’ll be happy to take a look at your site and return the favor.

Once you’ve added your site and it’s been accepted you must add a blank xml file to the root of that site. This is where any text ad info will be placed when Text Link Ads sells some links for your site.

Then you’ll be asked to set up how you’d like the links to appear once you have some. You can decide how many link spaces to sell. I think generally starting at 6 or 8 is good. You can also decide if you’d like the text links to be outlined in a box, if there should be a background color behind the text links and what the link color should be. I generally only use the text link color.

Oh there is a wordpress plugin that you can download and use on your site if you have a wordpress blog. I have a few blogs on the same domain. The plugin can only be activated for one site per domain.

Once you’ve set everything up properly and added the code that’s been created for your site to your sidebar you’ll see the words “Text Link Ad” in that space for approximately 6 hours. This will tell you that you did everything correctly.

After that there’s nothing else to do but sit back and wait for an advertiser to purchase a link on your site.

Some people have success almost right away, while others wait months before getting their first text link ad. Just keep working on your site, maintaining it’s current quality or improving it and I’m sure you’ll eventually get some links.

Advertisers might also be interested in purchasing Post links. These links are placed underneath a post. You can only use this feature with the wordpress plugin. I use the plugin on my main blog Tricia’s Musings and I’ve sold a number of post links.

You can approve or deny any text link or post link offers that are made. I believe you have three days to accept. If you don’t come to the TLA site and mark the offers as approved or denied I believe the links are automatically added.

I’ve never had a link offer that I’ve denied. They’ve all fit with the sites that they have been requested on.

I’ve done well with Text Link Ads. I make several hundred dollars each month with them and as I said I’ve still got sites to add (this is one of the sites waiting to be accepted) and empty link spaces to fill.

There’s certainly nothing to lose in trying the program.

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