www.affiliateconfession.com

There’s still 1 week and 1 day to go in my latest blog contest and the pot just got sweeter courtesy of Bloggeries.com sponsoring a free blog review for the winner. The reviews normally cost $25, but they have generously donated a free one for the contest. Your in-depth review will be posted on a PR 4 blog and you will get at least 2 links back to your site within the review. So if you want a shot at a free blog review, you have to enter the contest.

Bloggeries also has a blogging forum I just recently discovered through EntreCard and boy, what a find it is. I find it amazing that as much as I travel the net, I still manage to come across very popular sites that I didn’t even know existed. The forums at Bloggeries as of the writing of this post contains more than 3,100 threads and more than 15,000 posts, so you know it didn’t just get going yesterday. I can’t believe I didn’t find Bloggeries a lot earlier than I did.

You will find tons of interesting topics on the forums such as making money with your blog, marketing ideas, blogging guides where webmaster Rob selects the best bloggeries (blog posts) from members blogs to discuss, themes and blog templates, podcasting, StumbleUpon advice and reciprocal stumbles and lots more. When you become a member in good standing you can also get some additional benefits from the forums such as being able to show off and post about your own blog. You get these privileges as well as being able to request a blog review after 10 posts and after 25 posts you can actually earn money from Bloggeries. They are a revenue sharing forum and you can earn Adsense income from the threads you start once you get to this level.

What I like most about Bloggeries is the way everything is laid out, the color scheme and forum’s ease of use. I also like a feature you don’t see on too many forums and I’m surprised more people don’t use it.  When you set up your profile you can enter the rss feed to your blog and every time you post in the forum, your latest blog post title shows up next to your name. Between 25 and 30% of the members don’t use this feature and I can’t understand why. If you have a catchy title on your latest blog post, you will definitely get traffic to your blog if you have this feature enabled. I click on someone’s link probably once or twice for every 20 posts I read and I’m sure others do a well.

If you haven’t had a good look around the Bloggeries Forums, now is the time to check it out, contribute and learn.

And don’t forget the free review they’re sponsoring for the winner of my latest blog contest.

Alan

Tags: blog contest, bloggeries, blog review, forums, revenue sharing

You’ve probably seen this little 125 x 125 banner almost everywhere as have I. The banner belongs to TNX.net a system that facilitates the buying and selling of text links on your blog or web site.

For webmasters, they have gone beyond just selling 1 set of links for sitewide display or only selling links on the home page, you can sell different links (up to a total of 4 at a time) on every single page of your site. It has a great advantage for bloggers or if you use a template for your site in that all you have to do is install code in your sidebar or template once and their system takes care of determining what links go on what pages.

And if you need to get links back to your site, there are great advantages to using TNX. First, the links are non-reciprocal, meaning you don’t have to do the silly my-link-for-your-link type of schemes with their system. Secondly, you can get hundreds or even thousands of one way links from relevant sites in several different categories and do it for much less than other text link brokers.

To protect the integrity of their system with search engines you can’t choose or see the exact web site your text links will appear on until after you have placed your advertising campaign. But if after placing a campaign you see a site that doesn’t fit in with how you want to advertise, you can just delete it and have points credited back to you. You also don’t have to worry about advertising on pages that aren’t indexed or don’t have visitors because the TNX system won’t place advertising on any page until it meets those criteria.

Now I keep using the term points because that’s how TNX is run rather than dealing directly with paying cash for specific advertising. You can buy points, earn points through their affiliate program or earn points by selling links on your sites. You then spend those points to to buy your advertising or if you are an affiliate, you can trade points for cash or use them for advertising.

Advertising With TNX

When I first joined up, I found figuring out the whole advertising process a little cumbersome and I think their help balloons could be better managed as they tend to close up too soon after clicking the little question marks next to specific functions. You have to keep clicking on the question marks to finish reading the pop-up help boxes. Even though the advertising process could initially be easier to grasp, once I found this little gem below that shows you how much it costs to get x number of links, it all started to come together for me.

This tool is at the bottom of the advertising interface and shows you approximately how many links you will get back to your site by the criteria you have chosen via the overall advertising interface.

Making Money With TNX

As I mentioned earlier, there are 2 ways to make money with TNX. You can either put their code on your web site and sell links to advertisers or you can make money with their affiliate program.

If you decide to sell links you can’t use a free hosted web site and your host must support php (you shouldn’t be hosting with a company if they don’t). Their system completely hides the code from search engines and all your visitors and search bots see is real text links with real PR juice going to real websites.

They even have a handy little tool that you can use as a webmaster to figure out how much money you can make with your site. Obviously the higher PR your site has and the more pages you have with a high PR on them, the more money you are going to make.

When you log in as a member of TNX you will see an interface like the one to the left where you can choose to do any of the operations available through the system. For Webmasters you can get the code to put on your site, add a new site to place the code on and sell points to other TNX users. As an Advertiser you can create new campaigns, check your stats and check your balance of points.  As an Affiliate you can see how many referrals you have and pick up banners and your affiliate link to place on your web sites.

And if this is all a bit confusing to you, TNX is offering 2,000 points for a limited time to all new sign-ups so you can test out their system before you spend any of your own money. And if you join as a Webmaster and put the TNX code on your site you can get 5,000 points to start your own advertising. Read more about getting your free points here. Even after you spend your initial points, buying more points is relatively inexpensive allowing you to get incoming links to your sites for much less than their competitors. For example, you can get 17,000+ points for $25 and 40,000+ points for only $50. With 40,000 points you can get around 62 PR1 and 2 links or 6 PR4 and 5 links for a month.

Also, don’t think for a minute a good strategy would be to buy thousands of high PR links into your site all at once. That would be a sure sign to Google your site is up to something. TNX offers great advice on their forum at DigitalPoint that tells you how to use their system to have your site rise in the SE rankings and get on top.

Lots of people are using TNX as I found out when I logged in for the first time. As of Sunday when I wrote this post there were more than 41,000 users, 31 million links in the system and 20 million pages indexed by their system. Sounds like it’s pretty popular to me.

Just to let you know, I had been looking at TNX, but never signed up. They approached me to do a review of their system. However, I did receive my 2,000 free points in about 24 hours from notifying TNX so I’m ready to start advertising. I’ll let you know how it goes.

You can sign up for TNX here.

Alan

Tags: tnx, text links, make money, inbound links, search engines