Looking for additional ways to monetize your websites/ weblogs? Consider the Text Link Ads network. I’ve been reading good things about around the blogosphere about TLA, so I decided to check them out.

Text Link Ads network is compatible with contextual advertising such as Google Adsense or YPN (Yahoo! Publisher’s Network), so TLA will not violate those network’s TOS (Terms of Service).

Text Link Ads offer two ways to monetize your website:

(1) Affiliate banners + buttons
(2) Text links/ ads

The first type promotes Text Link Ads, and pays out US$25 for each successful referral. By successful, I mean either that a visitor signs up to purchase link ads or becomes a TLA publisher. I could be wrong, but that’s probably one of the highest payouts that involve very few eligibility conditions. This method of monetization is recommended if you have a site that has anything to do with earning money from a website/ weblog.

The second method of monetization offers flat-rate monthly non-context sensitive text-only link ads to advertisers. Ads are purchased by advertisers on a monthly basis. Earnings depend on several factors:

(1) Where you place the ad block on your webpage;
(2) whether you sell blocks on just one page or your entire site; and
(3) how many text link ads you sell per block. (You can set the # of ads in your member’s control panel after you signup. You can also choose to accept advertisers automatically or to be part of the acceptance process.)

They have a handy link calculator, to determine approximate monthly earnings based on your ad configuration. Payment is monthly, by check or Paypal. If you choose check, you need to reach US$25 in a month, or payment gets rolled over to the next month. If you choose Paypal, there is no monthly minimum.

Payout is 50/50 on each ad sold for your site, which sounds high compared to other ad networks. However, because of the strategy used for Text Link Ads, lower-traffic sites that have trouble monetizing with contextual ad programs report making much more money with TLA.

The signup process is easy and relatively automatic: fill out a form with your personal information (for payment purposes) to become a member. Then you add submite your site for review, providing its URL, site name, a brief description, and a list of keywords relevant to the site. (You can submit multiple sites.)

If your site’s link strength is above a certain threshold, you get accepted immediately. I’m assuming they have some sort of program to check sites, because I tried adding 4 Wordpress-based sites at around 3:30 am this morning (Sunday), and 3 of the 4 sites were automatically accepted. In other words, I doubt a human being was checking my site at that time, but I could be wrong. For sites not accepted, they also do a manual review if you email them afterwards.

From my respective Wordpress “dashboards”, I checked the number of incoming links to each of my four weblogs submitted. The site not accepted did not have as many incoming links as the others. Fair enough; that’s sort of equivalent to premium ad networks like Azoogle who accept a site if they pass a certain threshold of monthly pageviews.

Once your site or sites have been accepted, you grab a piece of PHP code the control panel generates for you and add it to your pages. You also have to place an empty .XML file on each of your accepted sites. (More details about this process in the near future.) After this, TLA starts offering your site to advertisers. There’s no guarantee that you will sell your entire quota of ads each month; however, if you have fairly focused set of topics, your chances increase.

I’ll report on my TLA experience in a couple of months, after I’ve tested Text Link Ads on this site and a couple of others, and have an idea of eanrings possibilities.

Keep in mind that you can also buy Text-Link Ads to advertise yourself on other sites as well as build up your backlinks. I’ll discuss this in more detail in the future.

Text-Link Ads was cofounded by Patrick Gavin, who cowrites Link Building Blog with Andy Hagans. The latter blog focuses on organic strategies for building links to your websites, thus getting higher rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

More info: Text-Link Ads (affiliate link).