text-links-ads.com, does anyone use TLA? Any advice?

[Clinton]

3Six complained here about TLA - the text link brokering company.

Since then, I've had the same experience. Their automated system send emails saying they can't find a link on my site when it's plainly there. It's OK if it happens once in a while, but it happens with regular monotony. When an advertiser stops an ad and you remove it, that should be the end of the story, right? TLA will send out an email months later saying they can't find the link and they're suspending all payments for the page till you rectify it. It takes ages and several emails back and forth before it's resolved. That takes time I don't really wanting to be wasting to fix somebody else's faults.

Sometimes a multiple error problem is easier solved over the phone. But TLA are too important to talk with you. They earn several thousand a month from my account, but neither Brock nor Drew will give me a call or give me a number I can call them on.

Anyone else here use TLA? Do you have these problems with them, or is it just some of us?

[hooperman]

I've just started using them, though I've not sold anything yet. I've had 2 buyers with completely unrelated sites so I just rejected them.

[benitez17]

I use them, and I have found that they are the best of a number of poor options. I haven't had the problems that you mentioned with missing links that aren't really missing (though I have had that experience at other brokers), but I haven't had much luck selling links through them.

[Shawn]

I've been using them for several years, and the income has gone from ~$10/mo to over $150/mo on average. It works well for sites where Adsense isn't very accurate or desired, and you get to choose the sites/pages where the links appear.

I have experienced the "link missing" emails on several occasions, usually on low volume pages where the ads are supposed to appear. If the pages aren't displayed on a "regular enough" basis, then you get those link missing messages. Ensure that the page volume is sufficiently large *year round* before attempting to place an ad in the TLA market in order to avoid the problems. If your page is seasonal (such as one of our tax-related articles with TLA ads) then you're likely to get those messages the entire rest of the year.

TLA doesn't really pay huge amounts, at least, not for single or few links. It's one of those services that does better if you diversify your pages and content, and then on some sites you need to make sure that you ONLY add specific pages from the site OTHER THAN the home page in order to increase the potential for adding links. If you add the home page as a placement, they'll give you crap about adding a specific subpage of the same domain, which is a major PITA if your homepage isn't the best of the content pages for the TLA placements.

[DomainMagnate]

I had TLA on one site and it was making over $500/month for a while, but now the revenue dropped significantly.
Generally even though they take 50% you still get more for your links than if you were selling directly on the forums, that is unless you can try to sell directly to the link buyers.

[Clinton]

Hi Shawn, welcome to experienced-people.net

That was an interesting observation you made. I've never connected the "link missing" emails with volume of visitors to the page, but you may be right. That's a pretty dumb system if it flags an error and claims a link is missing when the link is very much there. That must cause a lot of confusion with webmasters, waste them a lot of time responding to the fake error messages and impose on the TLA customer services unnecessarily.

Oh, wait, they don't have customer services. I don't know about anyone else but my experience has been that they don't bother too much with replying to emails.

[Shawn]

Thanks, Clinton.

When I first signed up a few years ago the code they provided had several security holes in it, so I wrote them about it, providing corrected code that also added caching ability to it (that actually worked), in order to reduce the load on their servers and increase the reliability of my own servers. They didn't respond, but about a month later they changed their code snippets. The security fixes were in, the caching was out. Oh well. I still used the caching version on my own sites. When I started getting the "missing code" errors, I changed the caching for those specific pages to cache for a minute instead of an hour or day. It fixes the problem, but only because the pages are polled by search engines at least daily, so the remote query is executed every day regardless, satisfying their server issues.

In the time I've used them, TLA has been responsible for effectively shutting off my sites at least 3 times. Their servers stopped responding, causing my sites to fail to load because they were dependent on the remote request completing. Once I figured out what exactly was causing it, I changed the code to timeout after 5 seconds - if their server can't reply by then, it's their problem.

I have to say, though, that as far as my time goes, TLA is one of the easiest systems to implement on pages you don't want to have to futz with. And once the code is in place, long-term ad placements more than make up for the short-term time investment. I only use TLA on ~5 pages, but the revenue from those pages in some months is more than over 50 of my other **sites** with Adsense combined. Still, for the *other* sites, where content is very dynamic and can't really be predicted far in advance, Adsense has been good to me. The only reason I haven't added TLA to other pages is that I haven't made the time.

One other thing... TLA is a perfect example of "perceived" value. The people that bid and place ads on TLA are real human beings that might just want to have a link from sites in a given niche. While TLA actually prices the links out, it's not based on the bidding system in Adsense. So while you might only get only cents from Adsense because Google has already determined that your page has no Adsense value, TLA may still pay off.

[Clinton]

I have to say, though, that as far as my time goes, TLA is one of the easiest systems to implement on pages you don't want to have to futz with. And once the code is in place, long-term ad placements more than make up for the short-term time investment.

I don't know about their code as I use only the hard links. I don't trust the code. You were able to find security holes in it and fix them. I don't have the tech knowledge to find the holes much less fix them, and I don't want to go learn how to work around their servers going faulty and causing my own site to become completely unusable. So I opted instead for the option of posting links manually. When an advertiser wants a link, TLA sends me the details and I upload the link to the page.

The problem is that they constantly make errors and claim links are not live when they are. Then they won't talk about it on the phone - they want a detailed email explaining the problem. When you send the email they completely ignore it and keep sending out reminders that the problem wasn't sorted. They make me want to pull my hair out.

Sorry to keep moaning about TLA but my advice to any one considering them - don't!

[DomainMagnate]

I also use the hard code, for some reason the code didnt work on my wp blog. So I just update every few months whenever anything changes.

[Kay]

I bought a site from someone else. It was running AdSense and TLAs. (Good site, BTW, so I've no gripes about that.) A few months later Google dropped it from PR4 to PR0. Needless to say, the TLA income nose-dived. I removed the TLA and apologised to the great god Google. People have argued with me that Google doesn't penalise TLAs but I believe they do, and for that reason I've never used TLAs since.