Relatively new on the scene is TNX.net and it has been receiving a lot of positive (and paid) exposure amongst the “make money online” sites recently. As I’m always on the look out for new money making schemes, I was interested to check them out and see how much money you can actually make with them.

TNX.net is a system very similar to Text Link Ads that enables you to buy and sell links on other websites. The obvious benefits to buying links is that you’ll receive exposure on other sites and probably experience a nice increase in traffic too. Not only that, but until Google finishes sorting out their algorithm changes, having a lot of links to your site can increase your search engine rankings too.

If you’re planning on selling links there’s really only one benefit – money!!

The main difference between TNX.net and Text Link Ads is that instead of buying sitewide links, on TNX.net you’ll only buy links on pages and you can’t choose the site. There’s quite a few other differences too….

A system based on points

TNX.net is a little different to other systems in that it revolves around earning, using and selling points rather than cash.

I found the explanations on the site to be quite unclear but from what I can gather, when you display the links on your site you earn points that can be used to purchase links on other sites or sold back to TNX.net for cash.

Alternatively, you can simply buy points to be used for link purchases or sell the points that you’ve earned to other TNX.net members.

Selling links isn’t a money maker

Joining TNX.net is dead easy and signing up literally takes just seconds. While that can be nice sometimes, it does also mean that everybody is accepted which makes me question how credible their member base is.

However, when you go to submit your site it’s a different story as their requirements are quite strict. They prefer that sites that meet these requirements:

• At least PR1
• Have paid hosting registered over 6 months ago
• Have over 30 pages
• PHP installed
• Presence in a major directory like DMOZ

TNX.net also want your links to be placed near the top of the page in noticeable positions and they’ll look at your site’s theme, navigation ease, content and even how you promote it before they’ll accept you. I’ve had job interviews that were less strict!

If you’re accepted, you can place the TNX.net code on your site and they’ll start selling links on it. They’ll take a 12.5% commission on all sales which I guess is linked to the value of a point on the site. Remember, you’ll be paid in points – not cash.

How much money will you make from your points? Well, they don’t say exactly but from the advertising page, they said that $23 will get buy you about 20 PR5 links. That means a link on one of your PR5 pages will be sold for around $1.15 and after they take the commission that leaves you with $1 worth of points. That doesn’t really seem worth the effort. But they do say that it’s the minimum price.

After playing around with their income calculator, I found that the profit you can earn varies a lot depending on the category that your site is in. However, even in the competitive financial category, a link on one of your PR5 pages will only earn you a little over $2. And a PR7 link will earn you just $7.50:

Great for advertisers, but if you sell a link on a PR7 page for $7.50 you’re missing out on a lot of cash. Even with the 50% commission that Text Link Ads takes, you’d still make more through them - and you’d have the benefit of dealing with a trusted marketplace.

Advertise with Google bombs and PR7 links

Obviously the deal is sweeter for advertisers!

They claim that for $23 you get 20 links on PR5 pages or around 4 links on PR7 pages. That’s damn cheap and they also claim that for the same price you can get twenty thousand links on PR0 pages. Twenty thousand links could definitely make one killer Google bomb and works out to just $0.001 per link!

When setting up your ad campaign you can choose by category, PageRank, the amount of Yahoo backlinks and location. Personally, I’d focus almost entirely on PageRank and go for one of those six dollar PR7 links. That’s got to be the cheapest online!

Setting up a campaign can be quite complicated though as you are forced to provide 10 different ad versions and your campaign must be approved before it goes live. Still, for a six dollar PR7 link, it could be worth it!

The name of the game here appears to buying links in bulk. With TNX.net, you can buy tens of thousands of links to your site with a single campaign. But do you really get them all? Matt Jones used some free points and ordered 1080 links but after a week only 80 of those had been activated. Eighty links is nice – but he ordered over a thousand. If he’d paid for them, I’m sure he’d be angry.

They have an affiliate program too

TNX.net has a pretty cool affiliate program where you earn 10% of points that your referrals earn for life. You can use these points to purchase links on other sites or sell them back to TNX.net for $0.61 per 1000 points. There also seems to be some sort of interest scheme where that $0.61 value will grow at 2% every week.

TNX.net also has the option where you can sell your points to other TNX.net users for a negotiated price. However, as the difference between buying and selling is just $0.60 per 1000 points, I doubt there is much profit to be made from the arbitrage. Furthermore, the site lacks a community to enable you to actually get in touch with other TNX.net members.

If you want to get a free 2000 points though, post your TNX ID on this thread on Digital Point Forums and they’ll hook you up.

The numbers don’t add up

For a start the six dollar PR7 links just seem a bit unbelievable to me. Other areas of the site advertised them for around $11 but that’s still way too cheap. When something seems too good to be true – there’s a good chance it isn’t.

Links on PR7 pages elsewhere start at a minimum of around $20 so if those links really exist, I tend to doubt that they’d be on a page that you’d want a link from anyway.

Buying 20,000 links seems like a good deal too and I heard of one webmaster who reported benefits after buying one of these packages. However, the way Google is slamming bombers these days, I wouldn’t have the courage to point these links to any of my own sites.

I have feeling that if Google saw that you suddenly had 20,000 new links pointing to your site you’d be out of the index in a matter of seconds.

The deciding factor for me in judging TNX.net was the fact that you can buy 20,000 links on PR0 pages for $23. The $0.001 per link value means that if I sold a link on every post on CashQuests.com I wouldn’t even make a dollar. Even monthly PR4 links sell for cents.

That doesn’t make selling links through TNX.net or promoting it’s affiliate program a money maker in my opinion.

I’m not even going to mention how confusing the site is. It’s not just the poor English, but a real case of a complicated system. The site definitely needs a professional makeover.

Am I the only one not recommending them?

I searched high and low for some unbiased reviews of TNX.net but all that I found were paid posts that obviously served to promote the affiliate program and earn the webmaster points. I could have done the same but the fact is that I’d only use the points to test out whether those cheap PR7 links are real or not as I wouldn’t use my money to fund the test.

TNX.net claims that their big advantage is that you’re buying links on posts rather than sitewide links. However, you can do the same thing on Text Link Ads and the system is a whole lot easier there. Text Link Ads also has the added benefit that you can choose what sites you’re getting links on so that you’re not linked to by any undesirable sites.

It’s also pretty obvious that you’ll make a lot more money by selling links on your pages through the Text Link Ads post level ads system.

Nearly every review that I’ve read of TNX.net recommends them as a viable alternative to TLA but I really can’t see what that is based on. A year ago, I probably would have recommended buying links through TNX.net due to the sheer number of links that they claim you can buy, but these days Google bombs tend cause more harm than traffic. Use them at your own risk.

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