Earn Income from Your Site with Text Link Ads

The following is a paid review. Please note: my time is being paid for but my opinions are my own.

Text Links Ads (TLA) is one of many ways you can make money from your site. The idea is that you provide some space on your site for the text ads, install some code provided by TLA and they do the actual selling and placement of ads on your site.

What Works Well

The whole concept of selling space for text link ads is a good one. Unlike graphical ads, it’s unobtrusive and there’s little or no management required once you’re set up. That’s probably why there are now so many players in this marketplace.

TLA, however, has established itself as one of the bigger names in this space, which is good from a publisher standpoint as they are likely to attract more advertisers and you are more likely to actually sell that ad space on your site.

Of course, that also means that you have more competition, and so if you have a site that is not especially popular, you are probably either a) not going to sell many ads on your site, or b) not make much money from those ads that you do sell due to TLA’s pricing algorithm (which is based on popularity).

What Doesn’t Work Well (For Me)

The problem I have with TLA is that I’ve never been able to get it working on my site (which is why I use AdBrite instead — not that I’ve been able to sell one damn ad through them, but that’s another story).

Although many sites clearly have been able to get TLA going with considerable success, for some reason, I have not.

The problem, I think, lies in the way that my site is set up and the way that TLA requires you to install its ad code. Or, it might be just that I’m technically incompetent.

Unlike the majority of its competitors, which just require you to copy and paste in a line of JavaScript, TLA requires you to upload an XML file (and set its permissions so that it is writable) as well as adding multiple lines of code to your page template.

If you’re not running your site on PHP or ASP then you might encounter some difficulties getting set up. I am running Movable Type but not on PHP and I keep getting a rebuild error message whenever I try to get the code working.

I’m sure it’s just user error, but be warned if you are not particularly technically-inclined. I wish TLA would switch to the line-of-Javascript method, but I’m sure (?) they have good reasons for doing it as they do.