Studio Rockstar

Text Link Ads has recently become one of my top money makers. In previous times, I was only making around $100 or so a month — but I’ve increased these earnings to around $300 per month off one site. While TLA does a good job of trying to help it’s customers succeed — they don’t necessarily spell out how you might be able to increase your earnings with them. Here are some tips I’ve collected that have helped me get this far.

Link Worth Formula

Before we get started, it would be a good idea to cover exactly how TLA calculates the worth of your link. Note that this is a different number from what you will earn. I don’t know the exact formula, but I do know the variables in the formula:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Number of ad spots available
• Site Wide / One Page

There are some other rumored factors, and factors that don’t actually end up changing your worth that much:

• Technorati Rank
• Number of pages link will appear on
• Demand (how often is there an empty spot?)

So, at the end of the day, to have the highest link worth, you need a site with high PageRank, high Alexa Rank and a site-wide link, and few ad spots available.

Submit Late

Don’t be so quick to submit your site to TLA. While it can be extremely tempting — if you are at a PR3 or PR4, I would most certainly not recommend submitting your site to TLA. The reason for this is how links are sold in TLA.

Let’s say if you submit now, your link worth will be $20/mo. If an advertiser buys a spot for a year and a half, the total cost will be $20/mo for the entire 18 months. This means, that if in 6 months your links are worth $150/mo, you will still only be earning $10/mo (50% of $20). If you had waited 6 months to submit, you would have made $65 ($150/2 = $75 - $10 = $65) more in that 6th month. This would have made up for the entire 6 months previous of making $10/mo.

This may be a little confusing to grasp at first — but think it through, and you’ll see why it’s actually worth it to wait it out and submit later on in a site’s life.

Hold back on those ad spots

It can be real tempting to jack up the number of available spots when signing up for TLA. Most people think — if I can sell one link at $20/mo — why not sell 10 links for $200/mo! Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Adding more links devalues each individual link. That means that if you have 10 spots — your link worth may be 50% of what it is for 4 spots. The advantage to having less ad spots is how much easier it is to fill them. Instead of having to sell 10 spots — you only have to sell 4. Additionally, I’ve found that advertisers like it when there’s less links on the page (gives their links more worth).

My recommendation is 4 spots. It may hurt at first — but once you start making some decent cash, it’s going to be worth it.

Add a link to your package

This is one of the most successful tweaks I’ve done to sell more links. Let’s be honest: TLA’s search sucks. If you want to find a specific site, you can’t. So help out your advertisers and add a quick sentence below your links that says something like: Support sitename by purchasing a link today.

Matt Brett does a good job of this. Small and simple — but highly effective.

Leverage your network

The highest factor in link worth from my experience has been PageRank. So leverage your network and link your sites together. Once you start sharing the PageRank around — you’ll be able to multiply your earnings across sites. I did this for a while (until I sold off a few sites), and it was a huge success. One of my sites that I hadn’t updated in over a year was still bringing in $75/mo for me. Not bad off 500 uniques a month! This was all possible because I network my sites together.

Anything else?

Do you have some other tips to share for increasing your TLA earnings? Please share them! I’d love to hear how you guys are leveraging this great system.