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I spent some money advertising another blog i run on the tnx.net ads network. I ordered a small number of PR1 and PR2, as well as a larger number of PR0 link pointing to a specific post that i wanted to promote. My only goal was to pass some PR juice to the page and see how TNX works on the advertiser’s point of view, and not to drive traffic to the page. Generally, i wasn’t that impressed.

The other blog is travel related and TNX has a travel section to point ads to, so that was a natural choice. I ordered about 100 PR0, 3 PR1 and 3 PR2 link. Granted, getting traffic on a general travel info site is a feat in the travel sector with all the heavyweights fighting for Google’s attention, but this is a fairly limited niche site. The campaigns took a couple of days to activate and start displaying on sites, and the results where underwhelming to say the least.

From the PR0 pages that the ads appeared on, a rough estimate would be that 95% are not even tracked by Google, or in the supplemental index. The rest of the pages with PR1 and PR2 proved to be a disappointment as well, picking up dead forum posts and abandoned pages. Another bad sign was a couple of sites i discovered that never even displayed the ads, i doubt TNX actually checks the pages their ads appear on to make sure everyone plays fair.

Overall i was disappointed by the performance of the ads, some lousy links are to be expected when you target low PageRank sites, but 95% of unranked pages helps very little.

Seems like IZEA, the company behind PayPerPost, will be using their own devised RealRank to value blogs from now, instead of PageRank. On the IZEA blog they posted a getting started with RealRank article which explains the basics. The RealRank system is supposed to compete directly with Google PageRank for valuing blogs for advertising purposes. Today they took the next step and announced that they have moved blog valuation in PayPerPost (their most succesful service) into the RealRank system.

The RealRank system values blogs on three areas:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day

One of the downsides is that you pretty much give up your statistics to IZEA as the RR system requires you to install a plugin to actually get a rank, and the plugin sends data about your visitors back to IZEA. How big of a splash IZEA will make remains to be seen, it depends on how many bloggers and webmasters will adopt the new system.

Notice the ads on the sidebar? These are courtesy of tnx.net, a link selling service (somewhat) similar to TLA. TNX has the same process as most link brokers, you install a widget or piece of code into your website, and they sell that space on your site to advertisers as text link ads. TNX is different to other link brokers in a few ways, and one of the main reasons is the way the distribute the ads.

How TNX shows ads

The best way to see how ads are placed on your site is to see it from the advertiser’s point of view: Advertisers buy ad spots in the form of “points”. One point equals one link in a PR0 page, with higher PR costing more points. This means that having many pages, and most of them having an actual PR (more than zero), the more points you earn. The ads are semi-randomly distributed across several websites, based on PR and backlink popularity filters the advertisers use.

What’s with the points deal?

Yes this is weird. The TNX “points” that advertisers buy are are “paid” to bloggers depending on the PR of the page the ads appears on. After you have enough points you exchange them for money (paid through PayPal). For example a PR3 link will learn you about $2.3, and you can sell a maximum of 4 links per page. Having many pages with PageRank 0 or no PR at all (new pages) doesn’t pay that well since you need about 50 PR 0 pages to match the earnings of a single PageRank 1 page.

It took about a week for ads to start appearing on this site, (3 days for approval and 4 days for the ads to roll in), and TNX has already sold ads about 1/3rd of the total ad spots i specified.

Final thoughts

TNX seems like a decent alternative to TLA and similar services. The point system can take a while to get used to for people that want an install-and-forget solution, and their focus on PageRank will certainly keep some bloggers outside of their system. The way ads are randomly distributed through the network helps smaller publishers get into the link selling game. TNX also has an income calculator on their main page that you can use to get a rough number on how much links would sell for on your site.

Pixel real estate on blogs has become a hot commodity. If you’re going to sell ad space on your site directly to advertisers or through a link broker service, knowing how important each part of your site is to advertisers means that you can negotiate better prices and better deals.

Bellow is a basic website blueprint with the most important areas highlighted, and the options you can have for each website area.

Why give so much weight to RSS subscribers?

RSS has emerged as an amazing technology to keep readers updated without having to check your site for updates. Subscribers are generaly less than viewers but RSS ads have the advantage of being highly targeted to their niche. Both TLA and Google (feedburner) are putting a lot of weight in RSS.

How did i research this?

A combination of different tools as well as experience with ad placement. Text Link Ads has an automated calculator you can use to get some rough numbers on how much link ads on your blog will fetch based on position. Shoemoney has an ad placement blueprint with prices. Even Google has their say on the best spot for ad placement is.

If you’ve been living under a particularly large rock on the internet the last few days there’s a chance you might not have noticed a lot of the big name blogs getting hit by a visible (toolbar) PageRank penalty. Problogger went from PR6 to PR4, SearchEngineJournal went from PR7 to PR4 and the list goes on an on. Most people are still trying to figure out if Google decided to beat text link selling to oblivion, punish bloggers for extensive linking inside blog networks or some kind of PR normalization for blogs (probably a combination of all three).

If this is indeed a Google issue with bloggers selling links then most of the text link selling services are about to be hit by a big wave of advertisers pulling their campaigns from the sites. Most of these advertisers will substitute their marketing efforts another way, and most will eventually move to paid reviews services, which come in context of relevant text and keywords and will keep Google from penalizing blogs. This might not mean bigger paychecks for bloggers (at least not unless some other big names in the post reviews business show up), but there will most likely be a surge in review offers after the smoke clears on the PR penalties front.

There’s still a lot of ground to cover on this, and there’s no real conclusion to make unless either Google comes clean on the reasons for manually changing PR, or at least a new full Pagerank update starts.

MediaWhiz, the company that runs TextLinkAds, rolled out the beta version of their new ShoppingAds program. I got an invite to check out the beta version yesterday, although i suspect most TLA publishers got the same email. So far the program looks like a decent alternative to Auctionads, especially now that many people report their profits dwindling.

I didn’t feel like putting up CPC ads on Serverdome again after AdSense so i persuaded a buddy that runs audioworkbench.com to replace his non performing AuctionAds widget with ShoppingAds to check out how the whole thing works, and get an early look on this new tool.

The creation tool is fairly straightforward, you click on a “Get Code” link, input some keywords and customize the look of your ad block, (most layouts are similar to adsense blocks) and you get a code fragment you paste in your template to display the ads. You can customize how the ads display (background, border color and the such), and gette ad code and get a live preview of the ad on the fly.

ShoppingAds only send payments monthly via PayPal right now, with a $50 minimum for payments.

The products that ShoppingAds display have been a little irrelevant this far, even showed some plasma TV ads on an audio engineering blog, but with TLA’s background I’m certain they will work out the few problems before the official launch. If you’d like to see the ads in action just take a look at Audio Workbench, below AdSense.

ShoppingAds.com

Smorty is a new service for bloggers looking to make money reviewing products and services. Smorty is not as popular as the top players in the area, like ReviewMe and PayPerPost, which can be both a good and a bad thing. One of the first things i noticed after signing up is that it took about 5 hours to approve my blog. To compare, PayPerPost has a blog i submitted about a week ago still on the “review” phase.

The couple of days that I’ve signed up for the service i received a total of 4 offers from advertisers, one was to review the service itself, one for an online casino and a couple for reviewing online shopping carts. Apart for the offer to review Smorty, the rest where only loosely related on the subject. (if you count the online casino as “a make money on line” thing, heh)

The number of offers for reviews did surprise me. Four offers in a couple of days is not too bad and if i had a general blog i could have easily make $24 this week with a few 150 word posts, and this is considering this blog hasn’t even received a pagerank update from Google yet. Offers range from $6 for low end blogs and go up to $100 for the top reviews, although expect the top reviews to be grabbed pretty fast after they are posted.

Smorty Pros:
Can be a better choice for smaller bloggers looking to get paid to blog and review products.
Payment once a week
No limit to how many blogs you can use
Fast blog approval

Smorty Cons:
Some irrelevant review offers
Does not have the amount of advertisers the big names have

Easily advertise on your blog with the AdSense Deluxe Wordpress plugin

AdSense Deluxe is a quick and dirty Wordpress plugin to help you insert Google AdSense (or similar ad services) code into your posts. The plugin is very easy to use, you create “blocks” which are basically little boxes with the ad code in, and each one gets associated with a snippet that you paste in your posts or templates. What’s great with AdSense Deluxe is that you can customize how each ad block will display, for example you can have different ads on the main page and different ad blocks on the archives page.

To see the plugin in action, just click this post’s title to get to the individual post page. You’ll see the ad block displayed there and in RSS feeds but not on the main page. (quick note update - the ad on this post is the only one that will appear on Serverdome RSS feeds and is there for the review’s shake, i don’t include ads with my feeds). This takes about two mouse clicks to do with AdSense Deluxe and is handled through the plugin’s options page.

Installing the plugin takes a total of five minutes to upload the file into your plugins directory, enable the plugin from the WP administration and paste your AdSense code to the default block. If you’re looking for an easy and customizable way to include ads to your blog this plugin is highly recommended.

AdSense Deluxe Wordpress plugin

Why advertise on a blog?

Besides that its the hip “web 2″ thing to do, advertising on a blog has other posssiblities. Bloggers have relationships with their readers that no banner ad will ever manage and the buzz that a well done review will raise is better than all the banner ads in the world. Most bloggers will be gracious enough to get an ad deal that will be more receptive to write a positive review for you.

Will i be penalized by Google for advertising on blogs?

It depends. There was a lot of talk lately about Google penalizing paid link ads. A link for “premium flower arranging services” on a make money blogging site will stand out as a paid link for Google’s crawlers. Make the linking organic, not just a bunch of links on different niche sites on one day. Reviews have practicly zero chance of being penalized.

What to do with $100 USD a month

PR - search positioning: Buy permanent links from decent PR blogs directly from the bloggers themselves. Just look at some of the less prominent bloggers in your niche (not the ones charging thousands of dollars a month for ads), the guys with decent, but not top pagerank and traffic, and contact them directly to buy a text link on their web site. After a couple of months move to ‘review my service’ type of links. For one month, spend 80% of your budget on one, relatively high cost review with keyword links to your site. Since you will not be getting so many links, always watch your keywords for the best combinations.

Traffic: Target the same high rank/less than prominent bloggers again, but this time buy reviews of your product/service. A few months later see who drove the most traffic to your site and buy sidebar/banner ads from him. Devote a month’s budget to a StumbleUpon campaign, but not the first month. Backlinks will benefit you for more than the month they are posted, while SU is a one-off traffic surge with very little backlinking. You’re looking at generating talk about you and your products, not direct traffic.

What to do with $300 USD a month or more

PR - search positioning: Buy more permanent links from similar pages. Spread these links between each month, some from blog main pages, some links from specific posts. Make them look as organic as possible to avoid being penalized by Google. Don’t just buy 10 links on the first day, then sit back and do nothing for the rest of the month. After you have some permanent main page links move to ‘in context’ links with the best possible keywords.

Traffic: Buy more reviews at blogs with higher visibility. Search for sites with high number of comments per post. On the first couple of months, spend $100 or more on a Stumbleupon campaign and focus on keeping that SU traffic as returning visitors.

Pros to advertising your service or product on a blog:

It’s better than banner ads and traditional web advertising
It’s cheaper than web and print ads
It’s more engaging that traditional advertising techniques

Cons to advertising on a blog

It might backfire if your product is bad.
You can’t control the output. If a blogger decides to bash your product, you can’t stop him.

Some final thoughts:

Never stop adjusting.
Like everything else, there’s no golden rule that will always work with everyone. Keep moving ads around and getting reviews from different bloggers.

Contact bloggers directly. Or don’t
People are strange when you’re a stranger. If you have a small business or service you want to promote it might be better to contact bloggers directly to find out what they think about what you’re selling. Big corporations are better off keeping it formal and sticking with TLA and similar services.

Haggle for position
If you’re buying a banner ad, haggle for position of the ad. Just ask the blogger to move the ad on a more prominent place on the page. If buying a review, haggle about how much the review will stay on the main page of the blog.

Focus on people, not sales
When advertising on a blog, keep in mind that it’s the blogger that is pushing your product and his readers that are listening. It’s a world of difference away from a newspaper ad or a banner on a website. You will have very little control on what the blogger says and what is audience will listen. If what you are selling is a bad product, even if the review is positive the readers -will- make sure that it is heard when they did not like it.

Resources for advertisers

ReviewMe.com - Browse a marketplace of bloggers willing to review services and products
Text Links Ads - Buy links on blogs or specific blog posts
SponsoredReviews.com
Text Link Brokers

Commenting and linking on blogs that do not use the ‘nofollow’ attribute on comments will help your site because that link will pass a bit of the original page’s Google Pagerank back to you, slightly raising your own PR. External links from comments and trackbacks where originally blocked from leaking Pagerank by adding the Google “nofollow” tag on comment links to discourage spammers (did that ever work? Doubtful). All these bloggers removed the limitation on comment links to pass PR to encourage commenting, and reward comments with a bit of PR juice.

Courtney Tuttle’s D-list

I followed the list to get some PR juice on some other domains i own and noticed not all the sites still have comments intact, so make sure the site owner didn’t switch back to nofollow links after getting on the list. Overall, this is not the most direct way to get high PR links, buying links from already established domains will help your PR better. Separate posts generally have little pagerank to share, but as they build up and get older, the PR they will provide will make a difference.