When I first found the Text-Link-Ads website, I figured I had discovered a great resource for generating a few extra bucks from my websites every month. I signed up and added a few urls and descriptions to my account, but I remember having some rather basic questions I couldn’t get answered. Support was slow and the on site help section was pathetic, so I eventually lost interest and forgot all about them.
As a couple of my sites are getting a bit more traffic as of late, I decided to revisit Text-Link-Ads to try and make a go of it. I had been gone long enough to forget what questions I didn’t get answered, so why not throw salt on an old wound. I updated my Alexa rank, installed the Text-Link-Ads WordPress plugin, spruced up the descriptions, and I was ready to go.
The only problem I had was that one of my sites was listed as the root directory (www.mysite.com) and I was now offering text link ads at a subdirectory level (www.mysite.com/blog). Since there is no where that I could find to edit this in my account and no answers in the help section, I reached out to support.
I never heard back from support, and since I couldn’t change the url myself, I changed the description to state where all ads will be displayed. I figured anyone purchasing a link on a website is going to do the due diligence and at the very least read the description. You can probably tell where this is going already. 🙂
Within a few days I had sold my first text link ad so I excitedly watched for it to show up in the sidebar. It took nearly a day to show up, but that didn’t matter to me because I was just excited to be earning money. My cut would have been $8 for each week the link was displayed.
Seven days later I get an email from Text-Link-Ads saying that they cannot find the link and to let them know if it’s them or me. I responded to the individual that it was not me because the link was still up and I gave him the url and the location on the page where it could be found.
A few more days went by and I still had not heard back so I logged into my account and found that the website was no longer listed. I followed up with the individual who first contacted me (who had yet to respond to my first reply) and told him about it. He responded that for some reason it went missing and he asked me to put the link back so I get credit for the sale.
I told him that the link is still up like it’s been for over a week and again told him the location. He responded by saying…no, I need it to be at www.mysite.com like your account has listed. Clearly he didn’t read my first email since it contained the url.
I replied to him my frustrations with being unable to edit the url and not receiving help, and I also added that I’m sure the publisher knew the location of the url since it was in the description. Not to mention that this link has already been live on my site, the most popular part of my site, for over a week. I said to cancel the ad since I was not adding links to my homepage.
That was a bummer, but despite doing all I could to fix the problem before any ads were bought, it happened and it ended with making no money on the deal. Maybe the publisher knew and didn’t care, or maybe the publisher was just trying to game the system by getting free exposure and then complaining that the url was wrong.
I decided to resubmit the site (since it was still missing from my account anyway) with the correct url and start over. Within a few hours I got a response that my site was declined because it does not receive enough traffic. As I said before, this is the most popular part of my website so I know this is just not true. Automated or not, it’s still ridiculously inaccurate. I have another site that was accepted, yet it is less popular, has a larger Alexa rank, and receives less traffic than others getting denied.
Regardless of whatever the deal is I think I’m all set with Text-Link-Ads. There has to be another service out there that has their act together more than this place.