Saturday, April 14, 2007
Text Link Ads Missing A Trick?
Cast your eyes round the blogosphere and people generally love Text-Link-Ads.com. It's an easy way for an advertiser to get their text link placed on some pretty decent sites, and it's a pretty easy way for site owners to add a new revenue stream to their sites.
I was thinking about adding some text link ads to his website so added it on to their inventory system. Then you need to add some code to your site to make the adverts appear, should an advertiser pick your site. They have a selection of web technologies from to generate the right code for your website, including ASP, ASP.net, PHP, Coldfusion, Wordpress, Blogger and more.
To use a Blogger blog, you need to be on the new Blogger system that was recently phased in. But in addition to that, you can't be using a heavily customised template because you lose the ability in Blogger to add Blogger widgets like the RSS widget, which is needed for the Text-Link-Ads.com system to work.
So in my case, it's a lot more difficult to become a publisher. There may be some workarounds but they involve a bit of messing about and maybe getting the web host to treat .html files as .php files.
It seems to me that the one option missing from TLA's list of web technologies is good old hand coded HTML
I update my site frequently so would have no trouble putting ads up within a reasonable Service Level Agreement timescale, and presumably some kind of bots could be used to automatically detect that the link was in place.
If there was option for me as a publisher to place the adverts by hand on my site, then that's whole load of extra site owners that could take part and add revenue to their sites.
[EDIT]
Ok, it turned out there an option in my hosting control panel to very easily treat .htm files as .php files and therefore implement the Text Link Ads system. I still think think there's an argument for allowing links to be added by hand though.
I was thinking about adding some text link ads to his website so added it on to their inventory system. Then you need to add some code to your site to make the adverts appear, should an advertiser pick your site. They have a selection of web technologies from to generate the right code for your website, including ASP, ASP.net, PHP, Coldfusion, Wordpress, Blogger and more.
To use a Blogger blog, you need to be on the new Blogger system that was recently phased in. But in addition to that, you can't be using a heavily customised template because you lose the ability in Blogger to add Blogger widgets like the RSS widget, which is needed for the Text-Link-Ads.com system to work.
So in my case, it's a lot more difficult to become a publisher. There may be some workarounds but they involve a bit of messing about and maybe getting the web host to treat .html files as .php files.
It seems to me that the one option missing from TLA's list of web technologies is good old hand coded HTML
I update my site frequently so would have no trouble putting ads up within a reasonable Service Level Agreement timescale, and presumably some kind of bots could be used to automatically detect that the link was in place.
If there was option for me as a publisher to place the adverts by hand on my site, then that's whole load of extra site owners that could take part and add revenue to their sites.
[EDIT]
Ok, it turned out there an option in my hosting control panel to very easily treat .htm files as .php files and therefore implement the Text Link Ads system. I still think think there's an argument for allowing links to be added by hand though.
Labels: advertising, text link ads
Permalink // posted by Rob @ 3:34 PM 
Comments:
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Personally all my pages are .shtml and I use Blogger for all my blogging needs. I use the text-link-ad code as a server-side include (.php on a .shtml page), but I suppose to do that you still need to be able to run php on your host and have a host that supports SSIs.
It must be fairly easy for people to manually add HTML link codes, they could send a bot out that checked the page twice a day just to be sure. I'm a big TLA fan - that's about the only need I have to check Page Rank at my sites is so I know where I can add new slots. :)
It must be fairly easy for people to manually add HTML link codes, they could send a bot out that checked the page twice a day just to be sure. I'm a big TLA fan - that's about the only need I have to check Page Rank at my sites is so I know where I can add new slots. :)
I suppose they may be concerned about losing control. Plus, some of the link checking tools I've seen on the web are very picky over the format. I like to use the TITLE tag in a hyperlink. Some bots don't like this and so they report that I don't have the correct link there, even though it is!
Thanks for the comments.
I could look at changing the pages to something like .shtml, it's just that everything has been .html until now so if I republished the entire blog with new file extensions, all my search engine indexed content would become broken links. Probably a way round that but I think they should be making it easy.
I guess you're right David, and their desire to retain control is part of it, but their system of controlling and checking is flawed anyway. I had some adverts published on someone's site. TLA's system obviously thought the links were fine. When I checked the site, the webmaster had used CSS to move the links off the page so they weren't visible to actual users.
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I could look at changing the pages to something like .shtml, it's just that everything has been .html until now so if I republished the entire blog with new file extensions, all my search engine indexed content would become broken links. Probably a way round that but I think they should be making it easy.
I guess you're right David, and their desire to retain control is part of it, but their system of controlling and checking is flawed anyway. I had some adverts published on someone's site. TLA's system obviously thought the links were fine. When I checked the site, the webmaster had used CSS to move the links off the page so they weren't visible to actual users.
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