I’ve been meaning to give TNX the once over for a while. I’ve played around a little with test link buying and know the importance of links that look natural. Plus I like checking out the twists companies can put on advertising. There has been an explosion of ad networks lately.

How TNX works

The unit of currency is TNX-points. These can be purchased or earned by selling ads on your site. The system is unified, which means you can be a publisher and advertiser at the same time.

Okay, an easier to understand explanation. TNX works like the casino. You buy tokens to get in and can cash them out when you leave. While the tokens are in the system you can buy advertising wherever you want. Any any credits you make from selling links go into your account to sell back to TNX or use to buy advertising.

The amount of points you get paid for a link from your site depends upon the Pagerank of the specific page it is on. This is not a site wide link system. You can choose ads for each page on your web site and each page can have different links.

The unified system is a great way to move traffic from a highly ranked site that makes you no money to a lower ranked site that makes you money. Sell text link ads on the no-money site and use those points to buy ads for the site you want to boost.

For this service, they take 12.5% which is a really low percentage.

Signing up at TNX.net as A Publisher

Then I added a site and waited a couple of days to get it approved but once it was, link sales started taking off. You can block ads, delete them or ban an advertiser from adding any more test links to your site. Everything is ultimately under your control, up to the amount of links you will list on each page, starting at one link per page.

The code is either php or perl, so you need to have a site which is on your own host.

The credits are paid in advance, so removing your site from the system takes a little time, if you want to do that. They don’t recommend just removing the code as that can get your site banned.

Buying Links Through TNX

You can choose links across a range of site categories and Pagerank and they are very affordable because you are not paying for site wide links. You pay for a link from a page at a time.

They even have link generator that creates varying anchor text for your links, details here. It is sort of confusing at first, but after a little playing around with it you can generate a whole lists of text ads. This makes the links look more natural to Google.

You start out choosing categories, the Pagerank of pages you want links from and the amount of money you are willing to pay each month. From there you choose how many links you want from each category. You do not see the actual links. Then your ad is sent to moderation. This is as far as I got in this process and will have to investigate it further.

Pagerank Adjusting

Does anyone remember when everyone was trying to set up tree way linking schemes? Well, TNX takes that a little further by turning links into credits. Therefore the credit from adding someone’s link to one of your pages gives you a way of putting a link on anyone else’s site.

Theoretically, you could use the ranking of lower profit high ranking sites to build the rank of sites you have monetized more effectively. Using the credits earned from one site to boost another.

The TNX Affiliate Program

You earn a hefty 13.3% lifetime commissions on other site owners that you sign. These are paid as credits which can be cashed out or used to advertise one of your own sites. Details at TNX.

Some TNX Resources

How to Rank Number 1 in Google With TNX

Links as Editorial Endorsements

Signup and Get 5000 Free Links

Other TNX Reviews

Blogtrepreneur

The Blog Herald

Search Engine Journal

Sign Up

You can sign up here (affiliate link).

I couldn’t resist the "Oh, My". Sorry about that.

I want to write more reviews here. The issue right now seems to be that I’m a cheapskate. But a weird kind of cheapskate. I have spent anywhere from $2000 to $4000 a month in the last year on Adwords. I only recently started investigating ads of the text link variety, but I had to keep it under a budget of $50. See what I mean by weird. Next month I am kicking it up a notch though. Well, I’m seeing the results from those ads and I’m really not afraid of Google finding out when it comes down to it. If you only knew what  has available…, but I am sworn to secrecy. You have to sign up and buy regular text ads first. But you can get $100 off your first purchase of over $120 worth of text link ads. And there will be a review, but I am not quite sure how to it yet, with all the secrecy.

Ok, back to the title. Seth Godin wrote a book a while back called "Unleashing the Idea Virus". You may have heard of it and if haven’t yet, wake up. He spoke of trusted sneezers and promiscuous sneezers. I hope to be a trusted sneezer. That’s why I have totally dumped the idea of any pay-per-post type monetization. It just won’t work for me. That is the ultimate example of a promiscuous sneezer. Pay me and I will sneeze for you.

Last month, I made about $50 in commissions from Zen to Done. I purchased the book. I read the book. I use the book. I don’t tell you to buy everything under the sun, because I do this on a shoestring, other that the Adwords. It would be wrong of me to recommend things that I have not used. And that is trusted sneezing. If you have read my posts for a while, you know if I find something free and something you have to pay for and they both do the same thing, I will recommend the free one. And it doesn’t matter what the commission is.

But I don’t buy many things until I need them. When I met my wife, my entertainment center was an iguana cage that I put a towel over. It worked, damn it. To me, need has a definite definition. You need air, food, sleep, water and really when it comes down to it, you don’t need shelter if you live in the right place. No, I’m joking, sort of.

But when it comes to product reviews, this becomes an issue. I need to pry open my wallet.

I do make money from affiliate marketing, but take an SEO approach currently. I write articles but not reviews. Then I match articles to products. This is on my other sites. So it’s more of a passive approach.

I started to question whether paid ads or banners creates the impression of promiscuous sneezing. But I will try it for a while. I have checked the income reports of a lot of blogs and affiliate sales and private ad sales top the list. I haven’t had a single sale I can track to a banner here. Clicks, but not a sale. I have to figure this is because there are a lot of bigger bloggers using the same banners. The chances that someone coming here read one of those bloggers and saw the ads there is pretty high. So putting up the same 125X125 ads that everyone else has might be just a waste of blog space.

But with Scratchback and Project Wonderful, I do have the option to be paid upfront and approve or unapprove at will. I will see how that goes. And the next traffic update will be an income update also. Not much income, but I think I am close to a breakthrough here.

Who are your trusted sneezers? Who do you think sneezes too much to trust all the time? I can name a few, including one big one. Does Agloco ring any bells?