Exploring the TNX.net Text Link Marketplace

I know what you’re thinking, “Not another block of ads I have to add to my mile long sidebar!”

Well, here’s some advice before we get started: Delete.

How on earth can you tell what’s working with that obnoxious clutter jacketing your blog? Delete until you have one to three left. There. Now we can begin.

TNX.net is a text link marketplace for web publishers and advertisers. It was recommended to me by a fellow blogger and since then I’ve been hearing about it everywhere. I wasn’t surprised when Vladimir approached me to ask if I would stomp a bit on his pride and joy and write about my experience. It seems the marketing team is spreading this service like wild fire. Lets see if they’ve built a strong enough foundation.

What’s in it for the Advertisers?

Advertisers are able to purchase links on other sites by utilizing the TNX points system. At the time of this writing, the exchange rate is 1,000 points per $1.50, with discounts beginning at the $50 mark.

You then choose where your links will show up by selecting sites based on:

• Category
• Geo-location
• Yahoo Backlinks
• Google Page Rank

The handy-dandy calculator will quicky tell you how many links you get based on the amount of points you want to spend and the parameters you chose. The site currently has 30,853,392 pages indexed so the chances of finding related sites to yours that provide great SEO benefits are pretty high. For those of you afraid of the big bad Google, there is a Digital Point thread on making paid links look natural for Google and how to rank N1 in Google for highly competitive keywords.

Once all of that is done, you simply fill in your “key phrase” which becomes the link to your site and surround that with whatever text you’d like.

Simple enough.

What’s in it for the Publishers?

For all you WordPress users out there, TNX offers a widgetized plugin to simplify the process of adding links to your blog.

There are three ways to monetize and make TNX work for you:

1. Sell other members your points for whatever price you’d like.
2. Sell TNX back the points you’ve earned at $0.75 per 1,000 points.
3. Join the affiliate program and:

“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).”

All funds are sent through PayPal.

Wrapping it all up

This is a great alternative to using TLA and the point system makes it much more appealing to advertisers and publishers alike. I’ll have to wait it out a bit to see how well it works in the long term, for Google keyword ranking, but so far it looks to be a very promising service.

There are currently 47,048 users and they provide stats on their daily growth which is pretty neat. As of today, the daily growth is 0.28%.

Special Offer

“Join TNX today and get 2,000 points on your account absolutely free of charge as our “Thanks” (tnx. ;o)) for testing out the system (for 2000 points you can buy up to 2,000 links for 1 month! It is suggested to choose all regions in the “Geo-targeting” field). In case you join TNX as a webmaster and your website gets approved (sites without PR>0 pages or sites not indexed by Google, expired domains are not accepted) we will fund your account with 5,000 TNX-Points absolutely free of charge!”

Once you sign up all you have to do is enter your TNX ID into this forum thread and they’ll send on over the free points.

Anyone using TNX? What are your experiences?