Contextual advertising has become one of the most lucrative monetization vehicles available to bloggers and affiliate publishers. Our own blogs and sites have done particularly well with contextual ad links.

As publishers, here are the factors we consider when evaluating a contextual (text link) ad or affiliate program:

• Is it easy to sign up?
• Is the program available for any site or only a specific blog platform?
• Is it easy to install the code or plug-in?
• Can we combine ads with other ad brokers like AdSense?
• Does the company sell enough ads to actually place ads on your niche site?
• Is the limit before payments low enough to realize profits quickly?
• Do they pay reliably?

The publisher registration form at www.tnx.net/register.php was a snap to fill in… only five fields. I like that! TNX guarantees to review your site within 3 days.

The ads display on any page you place the code on. For blogs, just pop it in the footer. For HTML sites, just place the code on any page you wish ads to be sold on. The more pages, the more real estate you have to offer and the more ads you can sell. The price of each ad sold is based upon the page’s search engine rating. With TNX, you’re in charge of which pages the ads appear on.

TNX.net has no problem with you combining ad brokers. Even if some context ad brokers do have a problem with combining contextual ads from different systems, you can still ad TNX’s code because the ads appear as standard text links. Nobody can stop you from placing direct links in your pages.

TNX pays by a point system instead of PayPal/cheque. You can accumulate points and watch them grow, sell them back to TNX or another TNX member or buy links for advertising your own site.

There is a cost, by way of a 12.5% commission TNX charges to both advertiser and publisher.

If you have a PageRank above zero, you should give TNX.net a try. They have a handy income calculator on the site you can use to determine how well you could do with TNX.

Check out the forum post at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=477444 for more information.

We plan to try TNX on one of our other websites (www.whitewolfdesign.com) and will update this article from time to time. If you have used TNX we welcome your comments.

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