Free Money for Bloggers? Yes! But Invest it.

I just received a very interesting email from the Text Link Ads people. After the recent “merger” with Auction Ads, they are offering $25 to Text Link Ads account holders who sign up to Auction Ads. That’s $25 dollars, essentially for free. I’d recommend doing this right not, and then following the steps below to turn this $25 dollars into more, and really squeeze the most benefit out of this free starter fund.

1. Firstly, sign up with Text Link Ads. Using this link will get you two things. Firstly, $100 to buy links that point to your own site, for free. Secondly, you can sell space on your own site to make money back.
2. The next step is to place the Text Link Ads code on your site, this is easy and they provide plugins and suchlike for most of the popular platforms. This will allow you to sell links on your site. The amount per link may be reasonably small at first, but as your site grows, so will your profits. Text Link Ads calculates the worth of your site based on Traffic (Alexa Rank) and Page Rank. Increasing either will push the worth of your links up. So lets work on doing that.
3. By singing up to Text Link Ads using the link above, your account will be credited with $100 for you to spend on buying links. So do it. Research the sites carefully and really think about the text you want to use in your link. If you play this right you can increase both your page rank and Alexa rank, therefore boosting the worth of your own links. If you were thinking about ways to promote your site, Text Link Ads may or may not be the best place to do it, but this is free, so take advantage of it. This isn’t going to cost you anything.
4. The next step is to sign up with Auction Ads. This will gain you $25 to spend however you like. You could go and buy a pint -OR- you could reinvest this free money back into your blog. There are a couple of options available to you here, Google Adwords for example. The best approach for this sort of money through, is probably StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has the ability to turn a small advertising budget into a lot of traffic, providing your content is good enough. Pro Blogger has covered the use of StumbleUpon for advertising previously. Whether you use Auction Ads or not is irrelevant, you’ll still get the $25. Don’t you just love commitment free advertising!
5. Step 5 is to roll around in a pile of all the money you’ve just made. Job Done.

I just wanted to reiterate something important about Text Link Ads. You get to choose the ads they put on your site, so if you don’t like a site, you don’t have to approve the link. If you set up automatic approval, they promise not to include spam links, or anything which may be considered unsavory or inappropriate. They also appear to have fairly strict criteria to getting accepted, especially if you have a low page rank or alexa rank. If this applies to you, don’t despair. You may get an email stating that your site has not been accepted, if you do just contact the Text Link Ads team and plead your case. For example, your blog may be new or sit in a small niche. Explain this and in the vast majority of cases they will accept you.   It also appears that all these offers are limited, and I believe the Auction Ads bonus ends in October, so hurry.

*Warning – This post is riddled with affiliate links. They aren’t bad things and I actually use all the services linked to.