Online Money Dot.com

Following up on the post I did a few days ago about making money selling links, its time for another program that allows you to make money selling link, this time TNX.

I have seen advertisements for TNX on some of the major blogs, and have also signed-up with them to test the service, and write this post.

You can use TNX to make money selling links, or to receive some SEO benefits (and a few visitors) from buying links. The biggest benefit TNX offers in relation to some other link selling companies is that they only charges a 25% commission compared to the 50% of other companies.

Their approval process is kind of strange, where you first need to put some code on your site. To avoid the same mistake I did, make sure you paste the code where you want the sold links to appear. In my first attempt I pasted the code on my “header” and before I knew it I had links right at the top of my blog In the case of a blog I would recommend you paste the code somewhere at the bottom of your “single.php” file. Once this is done you can submit your blog to TNX.

Approval by TNX takes about 2 to 3 days, followed by a period of several days during which your posts are indexed by TNX. It is only after this is done that they can start selling links on your blog. Links are sold individually on a post by post basis, and you can sell 1, 2, or more links per post. The links look natural to avoid detection by Google, and the anchor text is chosen from within regular “sentences” written by the buyer of the links. Usually the link buyer will use different sentences and different anchor text so as to make the links look as natural as possible. As the sellers of the links we have the option of rejecting them.

One (very) different thing about TNX compared to other link selling services is that the links are brought and sold using points rather then money. You can than sell your points in exchange for money to TNX, or to other members via the TNX or DigitalPoints forums. The transfer of points between members seems rather easy. I haven´t yet made up my mind as to the whole points system, but thats what we have to work with.

Right now the value of your points also rises about 2% every week, but I haven´t yet figured out the implications of this, or for how long it could in theory last. Roughly speaking, in the current scenario, if I earn $100 (or its equivalent in points this month), then will they be worth $200 one year from now?! If you wish to buy points there is a $10 minimum purchase. There is also a $5 minimum payment, all done via Paypal.

The value of the links is based on the number of Yahoo backlinks, as well as Google PageRank. With this in mind you can easily see that the main purpose of buying links here is for SEO benefits. To get better bang for your buck in terms of SEO you can also pick the categories of the sites where your links will be showing up. This way you can buy links in sites that are more related to yours.

I want to point out that the value for the links is per post and per month, and depends on the PageRank of that particular post. What surprised me most was how easily they sell links on your blog, one post at a time, even on PageRank 0 pages. The problem is that you don´t earn much money if you don´t have PageRank, but a link on a PageRank 4 post can earn you a nice sum, but paid in points. Considering you can sell several links per post, and that a blog can have many posts, this could add up.

TNX also has an affiliate program where they pay you 13.3% of the points earned by someone you refer. This is a lifetime payment, and you can use these points to buy links, sell them to TNX, or to another member as mentioned previously.

Although the whole point system seems kind of confusing, especially at first, the concept is very interesting, and from what I have read, the links are much harder to detect than the ones sold using Text Link Ads. As is always the case with the buying and selling of links, you should move with caution.

For those of you that want to sign-up, and once you get accepted, you can go to the TNX forum and ask for some free points to try out the system.