5 Tips to get more TLA Ad Placements

As my way of thanking all my readers who signed up under my TLA Referral account, I’d like to share these 5 tips on how to get the most out of your Text Link Ads. These tips are more focused to those who have not had a single TLA ad placement since they signed up. There could be several reasons why no one has ordered a link ad on your site/blog so we’ll try to tackle all of them here.

• Target the Right Link Advertisers. Every advertiser will have to start somewhere to find your blog in TLA. Most of them will do two things — browse the category listings and do a keyword search. Make sure your blog is placed under the right TLA Category. With the thousands and thousands of TLA Publishers out there, it will be hard to find you unless you’re listed on the right category. If for the longest time you haven’t had an ad placement, maybe it’s time to switch to another more popular category.
• Be Generic but more Specific. In order for your blog to be under the advertiser’s radar, you’ll have to describe your blog accurately and put in the right keywords. Putting the right keywords will make you more visible — make them generic but a bit specific. So instead of listing the following keywords for you blog (e.g. Philippines, Pinoy, Filipino, Blog, Blogging) you might want to change them to these — Asia, Education, News, Media, Technology. Likewise, you need to title your blog accordingly. Instead of following your blog’s usual byline (e.g. Personal Blog of Juan de la Cruz), you may want to try a more generic one like “Review & Resource Site on Asian Entertainment”.
• Show some Stats. Your blog will be competing with hundreds and even thousands of other blogs so it would be wise to show more value to the advertiser offhand. TLA displays the Alexa Rank and Link Popularity Rank by default but you may want to include you blog’s traffic stats and feed subscriber count within the description field. Not only do they get the SEO benefit, they’ll also more likely to get foot traffic since they know how much visitors your blog gets.
• Keywords, keywords, keywords. Experiment on the targeted keywords you use for the ad marketplace. Put as many as you can. You can start by using your own blog’s category list and work from there. Sometimes, inflections and synonyms (or related words) can make a huge difference — say “blogs” instead of “blog or blogging” or instead of “travels”, try “hotels” or “plane tickets”.
• Pump back some Link Juice. Since selling links basically reduces your blog’s PR juice, you need to get some back. Otherwise, you will either lose some Google juice or a downgraded PageRank which will eventually affect your blog’s market price.

There are other minors factors that I think is worth noting is the number of pages the link ad will be placed on. You have the option to put it only on your homepage or on all the pages. It will affect the price and the over-all worth of the ad placement. Having the link ad on all the pages will surely increase the link price (good for you but might turn off the advertiser) and though a single link on the frontpage will be lower (and could attract more advertisers), it also means you’re bleeding less PR-passing juice.