Everyone knows how hard it can be to exchange links in this day and age. I myself get at least half a dozen link exchange requests a week. A lot of bloggers and website owners are careful today about linking out, simply because they are better informed now than they were 3 - 4 years ago. As a result text link advertising networks have skyrocketed their profits.

TNX, as in “thanks” from SMS/IM lingo, is a new service that aims to help website owners sell links and link buyers to buy links on relevant sites.

The Publisher Side

Selling links on your blog or website through a third party is pretty much the same process across most link networks, you sign up, install code and wait for advertisers to buy links from you. TNX doesn’t differ much in this regard. Upon signing up you are asked to install the code on your website, insert your website/blog and then wait for sales to start taking place.

One thing I did notice was the overtly optimistic view of TNX in selling your links. I think the main reason why they say that is because your inventory of pages is not specifically chosen by an advertiser rather it is evenly distributed among you and other sites within your category.

So if you categorize yourself in “Hi-Tech, Mobile” and have “X” number of pages in your inventory you will get an even distribution of link purchases as others in your category. The payout depends on your Yahoo Backlinks and Google PR, you can sell a maximum of 4 links per page. If you have 500 single post pages in your blog, you can sell 4 X 500 = 2000 links in total. Now all you need to wait for is 2000 advertisers to buy links in your category. Which might not happen as quick as you would like it too. The plus side is that you can delete or deny any ads that you do not want appearing on your pages.

I have to warn you though that the site is confusing to use and just not structured well enough. Plus the fact that the money that you many potentially earn will be far less then if you sold links through TLA. The only plus side I see with TNX is that you might have a higher chance of selling links faster than with TLA.

The Advertiser Side

Advertisers can set up campaigns to start their link advertising. The first step is to select the category you want to purchase links in, then you select the score of Yahoo Backlinks and Google PR along with geo-targeting by language. In the next step you are asked to insert your links and proceed to order the number of links you want based on the Backlinks and PR of sites.

Frankly as an advertiser I would be attracted by the sheer volume of text links that I can place, but the effort to do so might turn me off. I would probably do it the first time around to get a feel for what value I will get out of it, but if it doesn’t provide what I expect then I think TNX needs to overhaul the user experience on their site. It isn’t bad, just not simple enough.

Buying many links in such a short period of time, as TNX suggests, might also hurt your site/blog in the long run with search engines.

Point System and Affiliate Program

TNX also features an affiliate program that provides an opportunity for publishers to earn TNX points by referring people to use TNX’s service. You can also get 5,000 points by entering your ID in this digitial point forum thread. I think this snippet from their site explains very well what the point system is all about -

What can you do with 20,000 TNX-Points?
In case website characteristics are not important (Yahoo Backlinks [YB] below 500, category “Leisue, Humor…”, geo-targeting: UA&RU), then you can buy a month (in case spots are available) of static links to your site:

- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites

The reason I put that snippet up there is because the whole point system was so confusing to me, I just didn’t want to be bothered with it anymore.

So, if you are looking at getting some cheap, even FREE, links pointing to your site within a relatively short period of time have a look at TNX - the new text link advertising player in town. I’ll stay out of this one though.
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About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.