Posted on Thursday 1st of February 2007 at 12:38 in Make Money Online

Advertising your website - part four - Text-Link-Ads

Welcome to part four of my series on advertising your website, this time I'm looking at how Text-Link-Ads can (or can't) help your cause. Apologies for the long delay between parts 3 and 4, the reason for this was that I was actually watching the results of a TLA campaign I was running.

The Experiment
To spend a sensible amount of money (around $100) on a advertising spot on an okay website. It's all well and good spending hundreds and getting on Torrentspy but I was looking at a placement on a middle of the road site. I chose TheBlogHeraldn, a site I wasn't familiar with but had an Alexa rank of 12,000 and I was promised a link on every page throughout the site - bonzer.

I worded the ad something like "Seopher - not another tech website" but I can't remember the exact phrasing. The reason for this was I wanted to see how a "normal" link would perform, offering "FREE something or other" would probably not offer accurate results.

The ad
It ran for a month and provided about as much traffic as a monkey blindly entering URLs into the address bar. I was receiving around 1-2 visitors a day, which you can equate do being roughly 50 visitors.

Some simple TLA maths
1 months, 30 days, 50 visitors, $100. 1 visitor = $2

That's all the maths needed to see that TLA can be an awful advertising medium. If you look at alternatives like StumbleUpon that can deliver a visitor for $0.05 then this experiment looks very bad indeed.

Why were Text-Link-Ads so bad?

The reason was lack of research, which must be a very common mistake in the TLA advertising world. Just because the site carried sufficient value statistically didn't mean it'd be of any use. There are some crucial factors to consider when purchasing TLAs.

1. Relevance
Advertising on a site which is within the same genre or niche as your own is a good idea, otherwise most users won't care.

2. Check the spot
WHERE is your ad going to be? How many others is it going to compete with? How many pages is it going to be on? If you're one of 2/3/4/5 links then you're Ok (like on this site *shameless plug*). On TheBlogHerald I was competing with like 30 other links and therefore no one would ever see my ad.

3. Can you not do it cheaper?
Maybe you should try talking to the site owner directly? You may be able to get better prices, better positioning and an actual relationship rather than just being "another" person who opted into their TLA program.

4. Wording
Another reason why my experiment received such poor attention was through the wording, it didn't stand out at all. It's hard to advertise a non-product oriented site in this way, because there's no single service I wished to shout about above all others, meaning the ad was the title of the site. No incentive to click = no click, simple as. So work out your title, give it an action such as "free" or "download" and you should see more activity.

5. Distrust Alexa sometimes
TLA weights a lot on a site's Alexa ranking and while this is a *reasonable* indication of traffic it's by no means accurate. A 30,000 visitor a day site can be ranked above a 300,000 visitor a day site. I know which I'd rather my ad was on. Have a look at the site, if you don't believe the price then don't buy it.

Conclusions

Make sure you get the right price, location and wording otherwise you're putting your money down the toilet. My experiment was shockingly unsuccesful, highlighting the need for finding the right combination.

The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion

 

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