For those that haven’t heard yet, TNX is a new company that takes the Text Link Ads model to the next level, and allows you to buy links anonymously. With all the problems that Google has caused recently to webmasters that sold text link ads on their site, I feel like the TLA model needs a change. It’s way too easy to spot which sites use them to sell links, and a Google penalty might just be couple of months away. TNX.net on the other hand, uses a different model to intermediate the sale and buying of text links, and I think it may just work.
Right now they have almost 30,000 users and they sold more then 31 million links
I signed-up with them a few weeks ago, taking advantage of the free links offer they have on DigitalPoint, and created a campaign to test their service. My conclusion is that the service is very good, but there are a few tips that can help you get more bang from your buck.
How It Works
For both selling and buying of text links, the site uses points. You can either buy points from TNX or you can sell links on your site and use the points to buy links from others. All links have different values, depending on the PR of the page, number of backlinks of the site, the country and the category of the site (a link in a russian directory is cheaper then one from a real estate site). So a PR0 link can cost 1 TNX point, or it can cost 20, depending on these factors.
The best option in my opinion is to buy the points if you don’t have large sites to sell links on. For $20 you can buy ~20,000 points for example.
If I were to use the TNX code on this blog to get points, 4 text links/page and 100 pages, I would get 2400 points per month. The problem is the missing PR update, because all my pages show up as PR0, when I’m pretty convinced that I got at least a few PR4-5 pages.
This is the good part of the TNX system right now. While the PR might not be important when you try to rank for a certain keyword, you can use this service to get lots of PR0 links from your niche, at a cheap price.
Tips To Get The Most Out Of The System
From what I’ve seen, it’s best to choose links from sites that have at least 500 backlinks. Otherwise you might end up with links on automated blogs that steal content. Better yet, buy links from sites with at least 5000 backlinks to be sure.
You have the option to select the speed at which the links show up on the other sites and to delete links from sites that you don’t want in your campaign, so if you keep a close eye on this you should be getting quality links from the niche of your choice.
What You Can Get For 20,000 Points
Let’s say you’ve just invested $20 to buy $20,000 points from TNX, you have a travel blog and you want to rent some links from sites in your niche.
Click on the screenshot to see a larger version. Now, in this campaign I selected the website category Travel, because I want links from related sites. I checked boxes for sites with at least 5,000 backlinks, to get links from sites that aren’t new and to minimize the chances that I’ll get links from MFA blogs. Also selected english sites only and PR 0 links.
The end result in the bottom right corner is that with 10,000 points/month I can rent 789 links from travel sites and blogs. If you keep in mind that 10,000 points cost around $10-12, and that many of them are cheap only because the PR update is late, you’ll probably see the value of this service. With those $20 invested initially you pay those links for 2 months.
I think it’s a great way to boost the authority of a site in the niche where it’s operating. Just make sure you set up the campaign so you get quality PR 0 links. Also, review the sites where your links show up, and take them out of your campaign if you’re not satisfied.
They also have an affiliate program if you want to promote them. You get 13.3% of all the points earned by the referred webmasters.
Disclaimer: this was a paid review, that reflected my honest opinion on TNX, after testing the system.
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