TNX Or No TNX?

Posted by Paul B | November 20, 2007 .

Did you see what I did there (thanks or no thanks….get it….I’ll get my coat)?

Following on from John Chow’s startling revelation that the only way of making any real money online is to attract visitors and have them view ads that are targeted to what they are looking for this seems like a great time to write about my experiences with TNX, yet another way of getting those all valuable eye balls in front of your ads. By the way John is completely right, targeted ads in front of visitors is all it takes to make a living online (as if getting visitors is that easy).

So What Is TNX?

In short TNX is a link brokerage service, they allow you to both buy links on other webpage’s and sell links on your own. This is not a new format and for a long time it has been one of the best ways of securing one way links for many websites that struggle to grow natural links. It’s probably no secret that a lot of the link sellers are blogs with a lot of the link buyers being businesses. Where TNX differs from many of the other services is that it’s possible to get a lot of links for your buck (10,000 PR0 links for only $11 a month, surely the next best thing to free links). I’m not really bothered in selling links, in terms of my own websites I don’t think I would earn a lot with TNX so my experience is entirely limited to using TNX to buy links and getting those visitors in front of my ads.

Getting Started
To give TNX a fair chance I deposited $50 into my account, this was enough to buy 60,000 TNX points. Whilst still a small amount in link buying terms TNX implies they’ll deliver more for your dollar so I thought this was a nice amount. Once your points are safely in the system (you can also earn points by selling links) you can they go about creating an advertising campaign, this is where things can get a little confusing. In order to get your campaign up and running the first screen allows you to select a category (they recommend selecting 5-7 of the 17 available options), GEO targeting (English all the way for me), the number of Yahoo Back Links for the page you want your link on, the page ranks you want to target and finally how many points you’d like to spend. There is no way of softening this, this page is bloody complicated to use. As you change your target PR, Yahoo links and categories then the number of links your chosen points can buy will change. The other confusion comes later along because the amount of points you specify here is a guide only and doesn’t actually affect your link buying at all. At a later stage you have to specify the number of links you want for each category, TBL, PR combination (with no real indication of how much this is going to cost in terms of dollars). If your looking for thousands of links across lots of categories this can take some setting up, luckily for me I was only targeting one category, with 2 sections of YBL and a couple of PR’s.

Setting Your Links
So once you’ve got your campaign settings sorted it’s on to actually creating your links. TNX like you to create a minimum of 10 unique link texts. A great tip here is to use the import facility (I spent 30 minutes creating my links the first time only for them to be refused for a typo). If I would have used the import then I could have quickly just changed the text file and re-imported. TNX sets a 65 character limit for the length of your text (this is for link text and does NOT include your anchor html) which is quite generous in terms of getting plain text before and after the link. Make sure to target some of your links to deep pages as well, mix it up a bit. You can of course use more than the minimum 10 links.

Once you’ve got your links done you can now select how many links you want for each category/language/YBL/PR combination. I kept life simple order in groups of 10. Once you’ve completed that then it’s just a case of waiting for your campaign to be approved and for links to be assigned. To give you some idea I ordered a total of 60 links 48 of which were fulfilled at a cost of 35088 points a month. A bit of quick maths works out at about $29 for the month. Considering 13 of those links were on well targeted PR3 (with 1500+ Yahoo back links) pages that’s amazing value for money, I seriously doubt whether you could find that sort of link buying power elsewhere.

Do They Work?
This is the thing, did my links either improve search ranking or provide direct referral visitors? The truth is that yes they did refer traffic and my search rankings did improve after 2 weeks of using the links. I can’t say for sure if those links provided the extra search benefit but it would be hard to argue against them (They all look fine in Google’s Webmaster Tools). Perhaps even more importantly to us make money onliners the extra income from the target website more than paid for the cost of buying those links. Whilst the traffic wasn’t huge (more because of my target niche) several hundred people made there way over and stuck around for more than 2 minutes and viewed several pages. What I liked most about my TNX links was that they all seemed well positioned above the fold, this really helps when it comes to getting those visitors.

When it comes to link buying I’d recommend TNX, if you’ve got large sites with thousands of pages then I’m sure they’d be a great place to sell links as well. Whilst it’s true that the actually campaign isn’t the easiest thing in the world to setup once you get there it is worth it. They also run an affiliate program that I’ve just joined and will be writing about if and when it proves to be any good. All in all I’m happy.

Social Sharing: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.