In July, I blogged a bit about Text Link Ads (affil link), yet another way to earn revenue from your website. The best part is that it is compatible with contextual ads such as Google Adsense. Reports have been that sites that don’t necessarily do well with contextual advertising sometimes do very well TLA ads.

I didn’t want to write another article about TLA until I’d had a chance to try it out myself. And I have, for about a month. Of the six sites I submitted to TLA, five were accepted, but only one has sold ads to sponsors. In fact, that one sold out its entire inventory of 10 ads for September. (Sorry, but for reasons I can’t get into, I will not reveal which site. But you might be able to find it for yourself.)

So let’s have a look at the situation. My site-wide ad inventory for TLA is 10 ads, at a current price of US$60. So the site in question is earning $600/month, minus the 50% commission that TLA takes. Now while you might think that this is really high, Rex over at Bloggerskills says that 50/50 is fairly normal. (Note that this is not the case if you are being represented by an agent for some skill.) He says it’s worth it, and I have to agree. Because it’s $300/month in revenue that I would not otherwise have had. Adsense on that site has only earned me a few dollars since I put it on. Affiliate programs, though, might boost the monthly gross revenue to between $1000-2000. But it will require a lot of effort, in terms of writing, to promote the programs.

On the other hand, I could develop other sites for topics which might draw a lot of sponsors but not necessarily a lot of contextual ad revenue, and the effort would probably be equal. Once the TLA ads are sold, the sponsors are likely to stay on board. It’s a question of finding the right topics and then promoting them properly with good content and link building.

There’s also the TLA referral program. I’ve only had one sign up, but it’ll give me an extra $25. Most of my sites are in fact low-volume in traffic, with the exception of the above-mentioned site, because the bulk of my week is spent writing/ blogging for clients. If you want to get technical, the sites I write for (mine and clients) get total daily pageviews in the 8,000-12,000 range. But my sites don’t enjoy much of that traffic. (So I’m going to spend some time soon to build them up a bit; though my clients have to be first priority.)

Now I don’t want to pretend I know the formula for success with TLA ads. However, as I gain more experience with them on my other sites, which are all covering different topics, I’ll write about them here.