Guide towards Text Link Ads – Use its full potential!
Quite a lot of people have heard about the company ‘Text Link Ads‘, who offer various ways to make money with your weblog, site or forum. Of course the most known feature is their offering of , just like their name suggests, text links containing promotional links to the websites of publishers.
The only things you’ve got to do in order to ’start the cash flow’ are to download their plugin for your CMS or blog or use their demo code and wait for the publishers to come to you. Just like in almost every market on the web your payments are based on the ranking of your website as well as the amount of links placed as well as the location of the links.
Even though it might look like a super and easily way to make money when you’ve seen the amazing income numbers some bloggers have, the truth might be more of the opposite. There are no exact numbers available on the TLA site, but I think there are several thousands of websites listed; you’ll have to do something smart in order to get the attention of the few publishers!
One of the (evil) ways to grab some attention is to make it look on your website like you’ve already sold various spots. You can do so in various ways, but the easiest way is to alter the code used by the TLA plugin a little. To do so you’ll need a small bit of PHP knowledge, but it shouldn’t be too hard.
Open up your tla_*.php file, which contains the Wordpress plugin (should also work for the other ones!) and look around line 539 for the line that says “function outputHtmlAds()“, this is the function that will handle the output of the ad content on your webpage.
In order to make sure the function will always output the links you’ve added I’d recommend you to replace the following lines (around line 545-551):
if( count($this->ads) > 0 ){
echo "\n<ul style=\"overflow: hidden; padding: 0; width: 100%; list-style: none; margin: 0;\">\n";
foreach($this->ads as $ads) {
echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%;\"><span style=\"margin: 0; padding: 3px; width: 100%; display: block;\">".$ads->before_text." <a href=\"".$ads->url."\">".$ads->text."</a> ".$ads->after_text."</span></li>\n";
}
echo "</ul>";
}
With the following piece of artwork;
echo "\n<ul style=\"overflow: hidden; padding: 0; width: 100%; list-style: none; margin: 0;\">\n";
echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%;\"><span style=\"margin: 0; padding: 3px; width: 100%; display: block;\"><a href=\"http://leftblank.nl\" title="The ultimate title!">Left Blank</a></span></li>\n";
if( count($this->ads) > 0 ){
foreach($this->ads as $ads) {
echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%;\"><span style=\"margin: 0; padding: 3px; width: 100%; display: block;\">".$ads->before_text." <a href=\"".$ads->url."\">".$ads->text."</a> ".$ads->after_text."</span></li>\n";
}
}
echo "</ul>";
As you can see now, the second line of the ‘new’ code contains a link to this fabulous website. You can copy or erase that line and replace it with a bunch of links of your choice, I’d recommend to use referral links as well as using a “rel=”nofollow”” on them to make sure you wont be handing out link love where you don’t want to do so. Of course this is on your own risk, not everyone might appreciate this kind of linkage, though it does the job pretty well. Besides that, it even looks more professional than having an empty ‘advertising’ box on your website and eventually it might also return you some value.
If you’re really looking into making the TLA thing fully automatic you can also apply a little additional tweaking to hide your own links if the amount of paid links comes above a certain value. You can do so by wrapping an if statement around your own echo’d links. For example, I use the following statement to hide the PayPerPost affiliate link when more than 5 paid links are displayed, that way the list wont become too long:
if( count($this->ads) < 5 ){
echo "<li style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; display: inline; float: left; clear: none; width: 100%;\"><span style=\"margin: 0; padding: 3px; width: 100%; display: block;\"><a href=\"http://tinyurl.com/2flhw5\" title=\"Make money blogging with PayPerPost - it's simple and free!\">Make money blogging</a></li>\n";
}
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve found this article useful in some way, and if you did, please link back to this article or my website – thanks in advance!
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