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Hello everyone! Recently I have been participating in my own small war here on Big Ben Patton’s Place. I am quite sure most of you will be familiar with this as you have, or are in the middle of one yourself. Let’s give this pain in my side a name. Monetization. Starting out you just do not have the time to place single ads and without a high PR by googley eyes your not going to earn. This makes the returns for the work in even smaller. While googley eyes offers one facet of the monetization game it is not wise to bet it all on one horse. Hedge your bets is a good motto folks. This is where TNX.net comes in to help. TNX (pronounced “thanks” as in text/SMS-speak).

My quest starts with the ever so popular search engine and searching for a text link, webmaster, and advertising setup which would be handled by one entity completely in house. I was not familiar with TNX.net at the time so I decided to see what was cooking. As a webmaster I cared how the system would be setup and implemented; as well as, how the ads would come to be on my site. According to the informative FAQ this is what I was able to deduct from it all:

• You’ll be able to sell links on every page of your website, instead of just the main page.

• Automatically sell links to thousands of advertisers. Receive payouts every month in advance, via Pay Pal, Check, Wire, or any other applicable payment method.

• Easy code installation using “copy-paste” method.

• The price for each link is calculated automatically. It mostly depends on Google Page Rank (PR) of each page, website category, link popularity, and number of outbound links.

• TNX commission is just 12.5% from each party involved in transaction.
  Our system is Secure and Confidential: No public list of users. All sales are automated.

As you can see from the list at this point this system should be easy enough to install and roll out. The next question is simply weather or not the advertisers side of this was going to be as nice to me. Lets take a look:

• Improve your site ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Live.com and more.

• Automatically place millions of non-reciprocal links to your site.

• Your links will be placed on relevant pages (You will be able to choose it’s quantity and quality).

• Receive well-targeted traffic from relevant sites.

• Prices of links are the lowest on the market. For as low as $11 a month you may et up to 10,000 static links to you website.

• Convenient interface which will help you promote thousands of your keywords and pages without a hassle.

• SEO specialists and consultants get discounts up to 50%.

It seems that TNX.net is at the very least competitive on the advertising side of things as well.

At this point I was thinking to myself how TNX.net distinguishes itself from other like genre ad companies. The answer as far as I can see is that they are going to take better care of you than the others by helping you to your target audience much more reliably and with greater speed. Thats the theory at least. And with a bid system you will definitely have some fun.

Lets take a look at the number of participants in this service to get a good idea of what we will have to work with. Current System Stats as of the writing of this review:

52,891 users.
2,3148,251 links in the system.
3,173 links created in the last hour.
27,036,034 pages indexed by TNX.net.

Not to shabby by any standards. We should definitely be able to participate here weather we are a pr0+ site at this point. That is a nice fact for those just starting out and looking to put the ad spaces to work.

The main advantage of the system for web masters is that they are able to sell links on every page of their websites, instead of just the main page. It could be up to ten times more profitable than selling site wide links. The webmaster can even choose their advertisers themselves, placing only links that are relevant to every page of their sites. This is exciting as some networks do not allow you to do anything except place the ad where you want.

The main advantage for advertisers is the price of links (It is very reasonable!) and the ability to promote hundreds of keywords with just few clicks. Everyone loves simple, yet effective solutions and as far as I can tell these guys got this part of the game right on.

I decided at this point that I would see how much of all this hoopla about traffic and participants was real. According to Alexa.com: Highest reach was around 180million and the lowest reach was around 90million. Tnx.net has an Alexa rating of 10, 897. Which leads me to believe that this network is decently used as the earlier stats had indicated.

Lets keep this train on the tracks. Now most of the other ad related sites I have visited also offer an affiliate program. Well TNX.net is no exception. This is what I was able to gather up about tnx’s:

• Seven years of experience in development of on line partner programs, and many ideal partner programs.

• Forget about the ref-links hated by so many! New technologies made them optional.

• Forget about minimal payments – they don’t have such things in their partner program.

• When you bring a new webmaster to the system, you will receive 13.3% of all “TNX-points”, he/she will earn in the future. EXAMPLE: When you refer a webmaster to TNX and an advertiser pays 100 TNX-points for a link on your referral’s website, your referral (webmaster) gets 75 points and you get 10 points which is 13.3% of his income.

The rules are straight forward and absolutely simple – No bans, No possible overcharges, No restrictions. Thats rather outstanding but lets move to the steak and potatoes of it all. You can join TNX.net’s affiliate program here.

What can a partner do with earned “TNX-points”? There are several options:

• Use them to advertise his or her own website to improve traffic and search engine rating.

• Accumulate “TNX-points” on the account and observe how they grow in value as the system becomes more efficient due to increasing number of participating websites.

• Sell “TNX-points” to the system , or send them to another participant of the TNX network, who will use it to promote his/her projects. Each participant has the right to transfer its “TNX-points” to any other participant (without commission) and set his own price.

Some very nice options here and so far seems like this system is going to work nicely. TNX.net also offers a free tool to make paid links look NATURAL for Google. This basically means no more being penalized for having them. This does a couple of things for you, but the most important of which is boost your PR.

One interesting aspect of the link points is that the exchange rate is not a constant. According to TNX, the cost of points raises 2% each week which seems dependent upon the amount of publishers and popularity of the service. So essentially, by establishing points in the infancy of TNX, those points would be worth more in the future.. which means worth more links.

As for the nitty gritty of getting this on your blog it is going to be different for different types of blogging platforms. For me obviously I am concerned with how easy this will be in wordpress 2.5. I happened upon step by step walk though by The Bontb Blog. I wont cover the intricacies of the install but I will just say that you can either use a coveted widget, or insert some php. Easy enough.

Digital Point Forums and Tnx.net are hosting a limited time offer as well to sweeten the deal: TNX-Points Giveaway: Join the TNX today and get 2,000 points on your account absolutely free of charge as our “Thanks” (tnx.) for testing out the system (for 2000 points you can buy up to 2,000 links for 1 month! It is suggested to choose all regions in the “Geo-targeting” field). In case you join the TNX as a webmaster and your website gets approved (sites without PR>0 pages or sites not indexed by Google, expired domains are not accepted) we will fund your account with 5,000 TNX-Points absolutely free of charge.

I believe overall that TNX.net has done a wonderful job on a well thought out service that actually has a checks and balance system. The only negative some folks may see is that they use a points system versus a straight up cash system. Some may not enjoy the dashboard as it feels homespun. All things considered though no ad service is perfect and this one at worse is still a viable option for monetizing your site. It is easy enough for a novice to handle and robust enough for veterans of the industry to appreciate. I highly recommend that you stop by now if your having any trouble with your current ad-networks as you will not be disappointed. I have implemented this service into my sidebar with great ease. At the time of the article though I had not been indexed by TNX so no ads were appearing.

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