How To Be Happy
And Get What You Want
Wow, it’s been a few years since I’ve played with TLA (text link ads the company) and it looks like a lot has happened during that time.
I’m having a hard time figuring out if TLA (Text Link Ads) is worth the trouble or not anymore. But I’m starting to think that TLA as an online income source is like eating the chicken and getting rid of all chances of eggs in the future.
It’s a confusing topic and hard to get some solid info on. You read about big bloggers like John Chow suggesting TLA as a source of income for your blog yet they do not use it themselves (at least that I can see).
I don’t know if this is so they can get the affiliate commission on sign ups or if using TLA actually IS a legitimate online income strategy that won’t kill your blogs growth in it’s tracks.
There is an interesting article on Johntp’s blog about how google dropped pagerank for some big name bloggers that were selling Text Link Ads. John Chow and Entrepreneurs-Journey.com included apparently. The proof to back this up is pretty weak though as several other blogs that were selling TLA never got the back of the hand Biznitch slap.
So was it just a google dance? A little shimmy shimmy? With a slide shuffle and a running man?
The thing about the bigger bloggers is that once they are big, they directly sell their links instead of using a broker so you can’t really tell if the lack of Text Link Ads or things like google adsense is from an SEO/google decision or a simple case of cutting out the middle man now that they have the marketplace eyes and can get the full Monty on their ads.
I had TLA on a couple of my blogs a few years ago and made a couple of hundred from them… then my visits via google took a nose dive. I’m not saying they are related occurrences, but they happened at the same time.
The JtPratt blog has an interesting article about TLA being dead. It’s looking that way to me when you cannot get listed in google for your own domain name.
Now I’m considering if maybe TLA on a new blog might jump start some revenue without killing the growth. It’s a tuff call and for a blogger that gets a lot of google love, it’s a big decision. Actually, in writing this post I’m now realizing that a couple of bucks from TLA now means nothing if it will kill the future of my blog and what I want to say to you guys and potential readers in the future.
It’s fine if you have such a strong readership that google traffic means nothing to you and you can “fight the good fight” against big brother. For me however, I like my free traffic and don’t really want to piss off google.
What say you old dog?
