10 Reasons Why Text Link Ads Is Better Program Than Google Adsense
August 10th, 2006 by Juuso HietalahtiPosted in Business, Make Money Online
Google Adsense is perhaps the largest advertising program in the net, but it won’t beat Text Link Ads in efficiency - especially if your have a low-traffic site.
[1] - No pay-per-click
With Google adsense you usually need to get people to click your ads… but with Text Link Ads you just need to get advertisers to run text links on your site - whether they are clicked or not, you are making money.
[2] - Text link ads blend in, Google Ads can be ugly
You get full control on how links appear on your site. It’s totally up to you to make them any color, any font theme - present them any way you like. With google ads you’re stick with pre-set fonts, and pre-set coloring objects (such as the border color).
[3] $25 excellent referral fee
Anytime somebody gets accepted to Text link ads using your link, you earn money. If they don’t sell a single ad space, even then you get the $25 referral fee. With google adsense you first have to wait and hope that your referrals will display the ads long enough for you to get the referral fee. It’s painfully slow compared to Text Link ads.
[4] No difficult contracts, no cheating, no picky policies
Google has extremely difficult policies where you can get banned for clicking your own ads (even when you’d really want to see the site behind the ad!). With Text Link Ads, you can visit the links as many times you want… without need to worry about policies.
[5] - Paypal payments
This is propably one of the best advantages Text Link Ads have: paypal payments. If you use google ads… they will get you checks. That’s propably okay if you are from US. But if you are from a country where checks are not used regurarly, it will be difficult to actually cash the checks! It cost me $20 to cash $100 check in Finland, and I needed to check 4 different banks before I found one that accepted checks (Thanks Nordea bank!). And checks are painfully slow to cash… it first took couple of weeks to check to arrive in Finland (after some paperwork) and then it took 2-3 weeks before I saw the money on my bank account. And you know what - they said that if the check bounces, I would need to pay $40-$50 fee for the bank. So I’m definitely using PayPal whenever possible. There you can transfer money easily, and it costs much less (in Finland) to get the money.
[6] - Ad blockers won’t work against Text Link Ads
As the ads are read from a file and printed using technology such as PHP, the links cannot be blocked same way as you can block Google Ads.
[7] - No stupid JavaScript
Don’t get me wrong, JavaScript is okay - but not in ads! Google’s JavaScript won’t appear in syndicated blogs (this blog for example is syndicated in several places). There’s also many people (my stats some day showed 11% having JS disabled) who won’t use JavaScript thus making your ads not to be displayed for them. Text Link Ad referrals (and links also if you want) on the other hand can be displayed on the RSS and syndicated feeds. That means if I show referral link, and somebody clicks the link on syndicated blog… I can make money. With Google Adsense I can’t
[8] - No display limitations
Google AdSense has limitations on how many and what type of ads you can display on your site. There’s no such thing with Text Link Ads. You can display the links once or 1000 times if you wish. That’s up to you.
[9] - Text Link Ads are good for low-traffic sites
Google Adsense is greatly dependant on website traffic, Text Link Ads is not. Even small sites (with targeted readers) can make nice money using the program.
[10] - Bottom line: Text Link Ads make more money
It all boils down to the revenue. Text link ads have made me almost $400 in 40 days, when Google Adsense has brought me about $40 in same time. That’s 10 times better income for Text Link Ads compared to Google.
If you are ready to try the program, go to Text Link Ads, sign-up and start making money. Do this especially if your Google Adsense is not working for you. You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
August 10th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
It sounds great and I’ve looked into it but isn’t it a sort or pyramid scheme? Also I still not clear on how you get the $25. Does the other person decide they want a link specifcally on your site then?
August 10th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
“Text link ads have made me almost $400 in 40 days, when Google Adsense has brought me about $40 in same time.”
I would be very interested in how much of that money came from referrals, vs. how much came from actual ads. You’ve been plugging your referral link a couple of times now - not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if most of your TextAds revenue does come from referrals, then I agree it’s similar to a pyramid scheme and that skews any comparison to other services such as AdSense. Again, please don’t take this as critique, but this sort of information would certainly be a factor in any decision to switch away from Google (which transfers money to me via bank, btw., not checks).
August 10th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Two questions:
1. Where can I see a textlink add on this blog? I may be blind ;-) but I don’t see any…
2. Paypal; when you get money transfered to your account there, how do you cash these, or can you transfer them to your regular bank account?
August 10th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
I noticed Text-Link-Ads talks about Alexa rankings. That bothers me. There are a lot of people who think Alexa is spyware. Just type in “alexa spyware” into Google and look at all the hits. Whether Alexa really is or isn’t spyware isn’t the issue - the issue is that there is a public perception that Alexa is spyware.
That said, I would definitely NOT recommend using Text-Link-Ads on any site with your company’s name associated with it (or your personal name if your personal name is strongly associated with your company). Yeah, you might make a little money, but the damage you could do to your reputation could cost you far more sales than you will make from Text-Link-Ads. People will avoid downloading your games if they perceive an association between your company and Alexa.
While you may not even be using Alexa directly, if you are even using the data that Alexa provides (either directly or indirectly), that can be enough to turn off a lot of potential customers.
August 10th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
We get it, we sign up and you make money. Geez. I thought this blog was about making games - not for milking your audience for referrals.
August 10th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I have to disagree. Text link ads is a linking scheme, mainly set up to fool search engines into thinking you have better link popularity than you really do. Google has also threatened that any site with paid text links without nofollow will probably suffer a penalty. Also take a look at the source for their homepage. I dont know if they\’ve removed it, but a few weeks ago there dozens of hidden links on it, again to fool the SE\’s.
August 10th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
I’m sorry, but almost every second article in this blog is about Text Link Ads. It was much more entertaining, when it was a blog about game production, not about “making $$$ fast”. Please don’t get this wrong, I really like most of your articles, but your blog is really loosing quality…
August 10th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Juuso,
You seem to be reading a lot of Steve Pavlina, which is a self help, motivational blog. Of course, it is your blog, and you can write about anything you want, but the name is Game Producer. Your posts about game sales and great interviews with game producers are the main reasons I subscribe. No offense, but all of these 7-10 quick answers to making money from your blog have little to do with being a game producer.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
GarageGames, Make It Big In Games Blog
August 11th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
I agree with garry and “reader”. I’d rather read only 2 articles the week instead of an article every day when the half of them is crap. And there have been already a lot of stupid articles here.
When I bookmarked this page some months ago (about January) I found almost every article worth reading. And very interesting. Are the times over?
August 12th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
oops, looks like I started an avalanch! ;-)
August 13th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Yes yes, its MUCH better. Still you use Adsense on your own site, now isnt that strange? Maybe if you want to come off trustworthy, you should practice what you preaches?
August 13th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
I agree with a lot of the above comments. You talk about building up trust and faith in your audience but you don’t seem to be following it up with content. Your articles were very good, which is why I started visiting this blog regularly. But now they all seem to be about making money, making money, and making money. The quality of the articles has gone down and it seems like you are trying to make more money off of your readers than actually inform them with some of your better articles.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Thanks folks for your opinions. I’ve made a long post where I’ve answered your concerns.
Check it out: here
August 15th, 2006 at 11:27 am
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August 23rd, 2006 at 1:45 am
[...] There are a lot of blogs using and praising Text Link Ads. But I have experienced some cons of their system. First of all, they seem to be picky about which sites they accept. They didn’t accept my Speeltijd website, although it has more visitors than this blog. And secondly, they choose the price for the links on your site, and you can not directly influence it. [...]
September 2nd, 2006 at 4:50 am
[...] Original post by Juuso Hietalahti and software by Elliott Back [...]
May 8th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Great Info, I own a social networking site called http://www.ezluv.com : My question is there any way to get around TLA’s Page Rank requirement of 3?
Thanks,
Ahmad
May 8th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Ahmad, I suppose not… so you just need to keep promoting your site.