BankonThat.com

Okay, I’m sure most of you are familiar with TLA. If you aren’t, TLA stands for TextLinksAds which is an advertising company well known for their large selection of purchasable text links and their free $100 in links offer open to anyone that you should see plastered on most money making blogs/sites.

About five months ago I took advantage of this offer and got my free $100 in text links. At the time they also had a 20% off deal going on and after reviewing my advertising budget I decided to give them a try (as I heard such great things about TLA) so I started up my $x,xxx/month budget. I had evil intentions initially (according to the big G) as I was hoping to move a PR5 site into the PR6 range. The PR juice is what I wanted and the click over traffic was just a bonus. I knew this going in as placement for most TLA ads aren’t prime spots, but lower on the page and often smaller in font.

I requested a proposal from TLA and they drew me up a list of 36 sites to advertise on. I accepted their proposal as well as selected some larger sites with enough PR to push me into the PR6 range no problem.

The FIRST problem I noticed about 2 months into using TLA. I was showing another web developer some of the sites I was advertising on that I thought were really impressive sites. I was kind of confused when I could no longer locate my own ads on this one site in particular. Waited a few days, contacted TLA, and a week later I’m told ads on this particular site haven’t been showing up for almost a month. They give me a few links on smaller sites and we call it even. A week later I noticed I got billed again for the site my ad is no longer on so I canceled the ad and ended up getting an email from TLA (within hours!) asking why I was canceling ads. After explaining the issue and showing previous emails where I was told that ad was being replaced, I got to wait almost a week again to hear from them apologizing and refunding me for that particular ad. They seemed more concerned with maintaining my ad budget then dealing thoroughly with support tickets. Thats the SECOND problem.

So time goes by and Im seeing a small boost in Search Engine traffic and hardly any click over traffic from the ads (expected). I have high hopes of getting to the PR6 oasis, my alexa is rising and PR predictors are saying this could be it… Let me use a scenario to describe what happens next. SO, I just got my favorite kind of ice-cream from the TLA ice-cream truck and I turn around from the truck having just paid for it and BAM! This fairly large scruffy looking guy in a wife beater carrying a poodle and wearing a black tshirt with a giant G logo on it smacks my ice-cream out of my hand and tells me not to be evil. As I stare down at the melting ice-cream on the sidewalk he slaps a badge onto my shirt that states “PR4″ after prompty ripping off my former “PR5″ badge.

Google Trends results for ‘pagerank’ and ‘page rank’
(Credit: Google Trends & News.com)

What happens next is a month or so goes by. TLA emails me every other day to tell me ” Unfortunately, we can no longer maintain on or more of your links.” At this point I’m happy to see they have stepped up their monitoring of ads to ensure they are indeed active. When they spot an inactive ad they give you the chance of refunding or choosing a personally picked ad replacement of equal value. My guess is the increase of publishers jumping ship is partly due to the Google crackdown on paid text links. Its a big no-no and can potentially get you taken out of the Google search engine.

A few days ago I canceled all my ads with TLA (through their one-at-a-time-cancellation-system). It was a good run but I think I just started advertising at the wrong time. In my future posts I’m sure you will come to see how I have a knack for getting into things a bit late, when they are winding down.

The site I was buying advertising for was one of my small myspace resource sites. A few of the big myspace resource site owners Ive noticed are still using TLA as they’ve always done. It might be working out for them but it definitely didnt have any worthwhile results for me. Link exchanges and simple guerrilla marketing efforts (all free but time consuming) proves to have better results than long term Text Link purchases.

TLA is worth a shot for at least the free $100 in links if you haven’t heard of them or haven’t used them as of yet. Just keep in mind you will most likely just be getting the free traffic from your links, and not any PR juice from the big G. Using up that free $100 in text links is just some quick free traffic.

Once my canceled ads run out of time, I think I will try TLA out on the publisher side of the fence and see if I cant bank on that.