Link Bait Me

A few months ago, I found a new way to monetize my sites with a small footprint and almost no effort on my part. The site is TNX.net. They found their success in Russia, first, and then launched the US-friendly version right before I found the site. With over 50,000 users, they’ve sold over 22 million links on 32 million pages with a current sales rate of almost 5,000 links per day. Although the fill rate could be improved, the numbers are still pretty impressive.

How it works
The concept is pretty simple. You sign up and then add sites. Each site must be accepted and then links can be sold. This is the key part. They automatically place the links for you. For those of us with a lot of sites and no time to run around selling links, this is wonderful. I can add a site and pretty much walk away. Points accrue in your account until you decided to use them for your own link campaign or cash them out. Alternatively, you can find your own buyer and negotiate a better rate, but that falls into that “effort” area I want to stay out of. When you cash out, you simply provide your paypal address and wait for the money. The minimum is $5, but I like to wait for at least $20.

Who needs page rank?
In the past year, there’s been a lot of discussion about page rank and its importance to those of us trying to make a living weaving web sites and monetizing them. Some stand firm in their belief that page rank is useless, while others feel it is still important to obtain a high page rank. While I’m part of the latter group, I still recognized very quickly that TNX.net enables a web site owner to sell links on pages with low page rank or none at all. One prime example is a forum site I run. Every post is a page of its own, so they’ve indexed over 2,000 pages on that site and have about 1,000 links sold currently. I’m still looking to fill the other 7,000 links, but I’ll get paid for the 1,000 sold. Almost all of the pages are PR0 and earn 7.5 (this can vary) points per month. They won’t buy me a new Ferrari, but it’s more than those PR0 pages made before TNX.

Page Rank can help
I’m sure you’re wondering what happens when you have a site filled with PR1 pages. Suddenly, your earning potential goes way up. On one of my sites, I’m earning around 1,400 PPM (Points Per Month) per PR1 page. That’s based on 4 links on the page at about 350 PPM each. The same site has a few PR2 pages earning about 2,800 PPM and at least one PR3 page earning 5,600 PPM. I imagine a PR 4 page would earn 11,200 PPM, a PR5 22,400 PPM, a PR6 44,800 PPM and a PR 7 89,600 PPM. This is what I find most interesting, because I have a site that is expected to hit PR7 on the next update and at the current rate, that’s about $70/month for some text links I can throw at the bottom of the page. And remember, I don’t have to sell them.

My lazy strategy
I have a simple strategy for turning TNX.net into my own little revenue machine. Build sites that grow on their own (like forums) and add the TNX code. When I say “grow on their own”, I’m talking about page numbers, not visitors. You still have to do some leg work to get traffic. A site that grows itself is good for a number of reasons. Namely, the more pages you have indexed in Google, the more Google traffic you should get, potentially. This same theory can apply to TNX. The more pages they index from your site, the more links you have to sell. The more links you sell, the more points (eventually cash) you can earn. Keep in mind that TNX indexes pages that actually get viewed. Start up a site that displays images or youtube videos or something. Display each item on its own page to increase your page count and cross-link by tags or keywords for maximum indexing. A couple dozen sites like that with 5,000 pages each becomes a grat earning network.

The strong points
The best thing about TNX for me is that I don’t have to do much with it. I add my site, include my code, and wait. Then I just cash out once in a while and look at my numbers. For you, the best thing may be the ability to go through every single link, removing those that you don’t like, or looking through all the numbers. Either way, try it out for a month and make your own decision.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 1:01 am and is filed under Other SEO, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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