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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.

These services will all pay you to post reviews on your blog, along with a couple of more obscure services.

Payperpost.com

The mother of them all. PPP has the most advertisers available.

ReviewMe.com

ReviewMe is catching up to PPP and also offers the option for advertisers to contact you directly.

SponsoredReviews.com

Sponsored Reviews is the opposite of PPP and ReviewMe. Advertisers post opportunities and bloggers can bid on the assignments for the lowest price.

Smorty.com

I posted my own review of Smorty a week ago. Seems to have more options for smaller blogs.

PayU2Blog.com

Blogitive.com

Blogsvertise.com

LoudLaunch.com

BlogToProfit.com

BloggingAds.com

Money4Blogs

BloggerWave.com

MyLot

MyLot pays you to post on their own site, contribute to discussions and the such.
DayTipper
DayTipper pays you to post tips on their website.

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.

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

Subscribe2 is a Wordpress plugin that you can use to keep users up-to-date on new posts by sending them email every time you publish a new post, weekly or monthly updated: as Chris pointed out there is no monthly notification option. Email subscription seems like cavemen technology against the glorious wonder that is RSS feeds, but still, many people just don’t like RSS enough to use it.

Subscribe2 was relatively easy to install and configure, although it does require editing a file after uploading to configure the page the subscription will appear on. Configuring how email is delivered is easy using the plugin’s options page and comes with several different tags you can use in your outgoing mails. The plugin also supports automatically subscribing users that post a comment based on the email they submitted, although i find that a rather sneaky way to get people’s address.

Overall the Subscribe2 plugin is a solid way to keep readers updated via email and works with minimum hassle. And for that matter, don’t forget to subscribe to the Serverdome.org mailing list to get updates via email, which is quite glorious really.
Subscribe2 Wordpress plugin

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

From both a Search Engine Optimization and a usability point of view, everyone agrees that displaying similar entries with each blog post helps. Internal links help search engines crawl and categorize your site, and readers will spend more time if they can quickly discover content similar to what they are reading.

To that end i added Wasabi’s Related Entries plugin to posts. Installing the plugin was a breeze, i copied the related-posts.php file into my plugins directory, activated the plugin from the admin panel and from there clicked on a link to set up the database table that holds the related links information.

Modifying plugin options like the amount of related posts to appear on each page and the HTML output is all done using the plugin’s configuration page in your admin panel. To have the plugin actually display in the post pages i opened the single.php file from my template and pasted the plugin code <?php related_posts(); ?>, and some tinkering with CSS to give it it’s own box.

Overall, Wasabi’s Related Entries is a very useful plugin for any kind of blog, and can help both your blog’s SEO and your page views.

Blogrush is a traffic generation widget that is getting publicity on blogs right now. After you install the widget on your blog, the blogrush service tracks your posts and displays them on blogs that also have the widget installed, while posts from relevant blogs appear on your site. The widget displays post titles with a larger font than the site name, if you’re expecting to drive traffic with this tool it’s even more important to optimize your titles for this. Right now, one of the links on it is “Fast updates #02″, which tells me nothing about the actual post.

Getting the widget to run was easy enough, after i signed up i got a piece of javascript code that i pasted on my wordpress template, and the blogrush service handles displaying the widget.

Blogrush will display a link to a post on your blog every time your own site displays the widget, so the more traffic you have the more use you’ll be getting from it. I hope they change the widget to something more adword-like soon, the design is bound to clash with many blog color schemes.