{"id":137,"date":"2007-10-25T07:20:47","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T12:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/25\/text-link-ads-needs-improvement\/"},"modified":"2009-08-14T15:07:57","modified_gmt":"2009-08-14T20:07:57","slug":"text-link-ads-needs-improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/25\/text-link-ads-needs-improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Text Link Ads Needs Improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been trying to get <a title=\"Text Link Advertising Company\" href=\"http:\/\/www.text-link-ads.com\">Text Link Ads<\/a> working on my site on-and-off for the past few days now and I&#8217;m ashamed to admit that it hasn&#8217;t gone well.  Why ashamed?  Well it seems so easy when I watch blogging pros like Darren Rowse of <a title=\"Blog Monetization Advocate\" href=\"http:\/\/www.problogger.net\/\">ProBlogger.net<\/a> and Aaron Brazzell from <a title=\"Blogging Network\" href=\"http:\/\/www.b5media.com\">B5 Media<\/a> describe their TLA experience in a <a title=\"Text Link Ads Endorsement on YouTube\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0Vt-5oEWK0E\">video<\/a> on the <a title=\"Video Featured on Text Link Ads Publisher Page\" href=\"http:\/\/www.text-link-ads.com\/r\/publishers\">TLA Publishers front page<\/a>.  And the TLA site itself looks so simple that a toddler should be able to use it&#8230; yet I keep failing.  Damn You Public Education!<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s some background<!--more-->&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have previously implemented Google AdSense on this blog with a fair amount of success (hopefully this lends some credibility to the theory that I&#8217;m smarter than the aforementioned toddler).<\/li>\n<li>In the past I had read that TLA could provide relevant ads and extra income without being too intrusive.  That seemed like a good idea to me so I decided to dip my toe into the TLA water by placing one ad on a <a title=\"Pixelwit Basic Dynamic Page Flip Demo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/flip\/PageFlip.html\">PageFlip page<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>After signing up, I discovered that TLA&#8217;s ad-serving technology requires the page displaying the ad to be parsed by PHP or some other server side script.  This was a stumbling block because the page I wanted to publish ads on was static HTML.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Text Link Ads Frequently Asked Questions\" href=\"http:\/\/www.text-link-ads.com\/faq.php#pub\">TLA&#8217;s FAQ<\/a> suggests overcoming this hurdle by modifying the &#8220;.htaccess&#8221; file so the server would parse all HTML files as PHP which in turn would execute their ad code.  That might have worked but it just didn&#8217;t seem safe (maybe I&#8217;m paranoid) so I put TLA on the back burner thinking I might try it again in the future.<\/li>\n<li>A few days later I was ready to try an alternative approach, rather than testing Text Link Ads on a static HTML page, I thought I&#8217;d take the plunge and install TLA ads on my blog. And this is where the trouble begins&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I followed TLA&#8217;s <strong>extremely sparse<\/strong> directions and installed their code on my site.  Unfortunately their ads only showed up on my front page and my site&#8217;s other content was not getting indexed (meaning advertisers couldn&#8217;t sell ads on individual blog posts).  I searched the TLA site for possible solutions only to find the FAQ which recommends contacting their Tech Support department.  So I sent an e-mail to TLA Tech Support&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have a WordPress blog and want to sell ads on individual pages or posts.  Could you please show me step by step instructions?<\/p>\n<p>My main site address &#8220;www.pixelwit.com&#8221; automatically redirects to &#8220;www.pixelwit.com\/blog&#8221;.  Which address do I need to use?<\/p>\n<p>I think I need to delete the &#8220;https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/flip\/PageFlip.html&#8221;  domain, how do I do so?<\/p>\n<p>Right now the &#8220;pageFlip&#8221; domain has a series of blog posts listed but the main &#8220;pixelwit.com&#8221; domain has no listings.  How do I change this?<\/p>\n<p>I have downloaded and installed the WordPress plugin but once activated there is no sign of it, it shows up in the plugins list of the WordPress Admin panel as &#8220;activated&#8221; but there are no options for it or extra buttons in the panel where one writes posts.  What does the plugin do?  Is it a Widget for my side-bar?<\/p>\n<p>Can a sidebar widget be used to display individual ads on a per-post basis.<\/p>\n<p>After submitting a domain I see that it gets associated with a uniquely named XML file.  Am I supposed to do something with this XML file?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s all for now.  \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And TLA&#8217;s response was&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sean, since you have a WordPress blog we automatically scan all of your posts and put them into our inventory.<\/p>\n<p>Brock<br \/>\nChief Operating Officer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hey, did you happen to notice Brock didn&#8217;t even bother to answer one single question I asked?  Well I did, so I replied&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Could you please answer my questions.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This must have pissed off Chief Operating Officer Brock because I was then passed up the chain of command to Product Manager Jonathan.  Here&#8217;s what he had to say&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Everything looks right, but you still need to go in and install our ad code to your site so the Post Level Ads process properly.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So what Jonathan is essentially saying here is that if I want to install TLA ads on my site so that Post Level Ads process properly, I &#8220;need to go in and install our ad code to your site so the Post Level Ads process properly&#8221;.  Wow, that&#8217;s helpful.  At least now a person with more authority is giving me vague answers and choosing to ignore my questions.  So I try again&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And how do I &#8220;install our ad code to your site so the Post Level Ads process properly&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>I have already uploaded the &#8220;tla_123456.php&#8221; file to my &#8220;wp-content\/plugins\/&#8221; folder.<\/p>\n<p>I have gone to the Plugins section my WordPress administration panel and activated the &#8220;Text Link Ads&#8221; plugin.<\/p>\n<p>I have added the line &#8220;&lt;?php tla_ads(); ?&gt;&#8221; to my &#8220;sidebar.php&#8221; file.<\/p>\n<p>At &#8220;Install Ad Code: Step #2&#8221; I am asked &#8220;Do you plan on using our sidebar widget?&#8221;  I said &#8220;yes&#8221; but I don&#8217;t see a Text Link Ads widget in the Widgets section of my WordPress Admin panel after installing the plugin.  Is it called something else?  Do I need to download it from somewhere else?<\/p>\n<p>If you do not have time to personally respond to all of my questions, can you please send a link to the relevant information ?<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And of course Jonathan addressed all my questions and solved my problem&#8230; NAH, just kidding, here&#8217;s what he had to say&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s likely the case that you downloaded the plugin before you activated Post Level Ads.  So what you need to do is re-install the plugin to your site so it&#8217;s using the proper ad code.<\/p>\n<p>As far as the widget goes, if your theme and\/or WordPress install is widget-ready, it should appear just as it describes.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Notice Jonathan has continued to ignore my questions.  Most importantly he fails to tell me that the TLA Widget is displayed in the WordPress Widget Admin section as &#8220;Related Links&#8221; rather than &#8220;Text Link Ads&#8221; so the widget continues to blend in amongst my <a title=\"A Long List of WordPress Plugins\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/wordpress-plugin-recommendation-june\/\">many other widgets<\/a> like &#8220;Related Posts&#8221; and &#8220;Links&#8221; without being noticed.  He also states that the widget &#8220;should appear just as it describes&#8221; which isn&#8217;t saying anything since there is NO description of the widget&#8217;s appearance or function on the TLA site.  All they say is that they have a widget and it&#8217;s easy to use.  Anyway, I follow Jonathan&#8217;s directions without any success so I write to him again&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI have tried everything.<\/p>\n<p>I have:<br \/>\nDeactivated the plugin<br \/>\nDeleted the plugin<br \/>\nRe-downloaded the plugin<br \/>\nReinstalled the plugin<br \/>\nReactivated the plugin<\/p>\n<p>A plugin called &#8220;Related Links&#8221; appears in the Widgets panel.  I assume this is the &#8220;TEXT LINK ADS&#8221; widget?  If so, it has been active for about a day and I still don&#8217;t see any of my blog posts or pages listed in my &#8220;Edit Your Listings&#8221; >> &#8220;Manage Posts&#8221; section.<\/p>\n<p>Can someone PLEASE give me simple step-by-step directions to implement TLA on individual pages of my WordPress blog.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To which Jonathan gave his most brilliant response to date&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s odd, but for some sites it just doesn&#8217;t want to work.  Other sites it works without any issues at all.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve already provided you the instructions, but I&#8217;m not sure why it&#8217;s not caching your posts, sorry.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sometimes it doesn&#8217;t <strong>want<\/strong> to work?  Are you serious?  Yes indeed, the seemingly sentient TLA system has decided it doesn&#8217;t like me or my site and no longer &#8220;wants&#8221; to work properly.  The matter is now out of Jonathan&#8217;s hands because he has done everything in his power to help.  He&#8217;s ignored all my questions and failed to provide any detailed instructions, what else could he possibly do?  Although Jonathan may have given up, I wasn&#8217;t ready to throw in the towel just yet so I sent another e-mail to Tech Support hoping somebody else might be able to help me&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIs there ANY way to get my account set up so advertisers can place ads on individual pages?<\/p>\n<p>E-mail address:<br \/>\nxxxxxxxxxx@pixelwit.com<\/p>\n<p>Site URL:<br \/>\nhttps:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog<\/p>\n<p>I am currently displaying ads with your service.<\/p>\n<p>Going to the TLA &#8220;Submit Site&#8221; page and attempting to re-submit &#8220;https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog&#8221; returns an error stating, &#8220;This domain has been previously submitted to our publisher program and has not been approved yet.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Could this be why my blog posts are not getting indexed?<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Although I sent the above e-mail to the general TLA Tech Support address, my correspondence was routed directly to Jonathan.  Once again he skimmed over everything I said, continued to ignore me and once again admitted defeat&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI&#8217;ve checked it and everything looks right.  Sorry, there&#8217;s nothing else I can think of to try.  This just happens from time to time to a site.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Okay.  I&#8217;m done.  I&#8217;ve already spent WAY more time on this than expected and the whole process is serving only to raise my frustration level&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThen can you please delete my account as this is not the service I signed up for.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To which Jonathan replied&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>You have ads sold already, are you sure you would like me to close your account?<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe Jonathan thought everything was going along rather smoothly, after all, I&#8217;d already sold one ad.  So I had to set the record straight&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1) I know my site CAN be indexed because it was indexed when I tried to setup ads on just one page &#8220;https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/flip\/PageFlip.html&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>2) Nothing on my blog has changed since that time so I know the problem is on your end.<\/p>\n<p>3)As currently setup I only have 1\/50 the revenue potential I would have if I could place ads on individual pages.  Again, this is not the service I signed up for.<\/p>\n<p>4) Nobody seems interested in trying to work with me to fix the problem.  It&#8217;s been said that the TLA system &#8220;just doesn&#8217;t WANT to work&#8221; with my site, but I get the feeling it&#8217;s Tech Support who doesn&#8217;t want to work with me to fix the problem.<\/p>\n<p>5) I&#8217;m well aware that I currently have ads placed on my site.  Perhaps a loss in revenue (albeit a small one) will convince your company that this is something which needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n<p>6) I&#8217;m hoping I&#8217;ll be able to come back at a later date when the system works as advertised.  Perhaps clearing all of my information from the TLA site will remove whatever obstacle is not allowing my site to be indexed.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And here is what Jonathan had to say&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nSean, there is one thing I could try.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t realize that your posts had already been indexed in an older listing.<\/p>\n<p>What I can do is this&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>remove the advertiser<br \/>\nremove the current listing<br \/>\nre-enable the old listing and you can install the plugin for that listing<\/p>\n<p>how does that sound to you?  I want to get this working as much as you do<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He didn&#8217;t realize my posts had already been indexed?  Apparently Jonathan never read the first e-mail I sent to TLA Tech Support where I say, &#8220;Right now the &#8216;pageFlip&#8217; domain has a series of blog posts listed but the main &#8216;pixelwit.com&#8217; domain has no listings.&#8221;  Oh well, at least there&#8217;s a chance this thing may work after all, so I give it a try&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That sounds fine but PLEASE do me one favor.<\/p>\n<p>Tell me which options I need to choose when setting up my site as I find the descriptions (or tips) to be rather ambiguous at times.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Once again I BEG for some clear details.  And as usual Jonathan fails to come through&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nSean,<\/p>\n<p>Ok great.  Go ahead and remove ALL ad code from your site, including the tables in your database.<\/p>\n<p>Then go ahead and download the new ad code and install it to your site please.<\/p>\n<p>After the package is generated for your site, you can go and edit the details and what not.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks Sean!<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I used PHPAdmin to find and delete (drop) the two WP_TLA tables in my WordPress database, downloaded and installed the code,  and then went about &#8220;editing the details and whatnot&#8221; so TLA would work the way I wanted&#8230; guessing every step of the way.  And do you know what happened?  That&#8217;s right, NOTHING.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI followed your limited instructions as best as I can.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Test Link Ad&#8221; is only appearing on the front page of my blog even though I have chosen to run ads &#8220;sitewide&#8221;.  Is this what is supposed to happen?<\/p>\n<p>Is there a particular reason there are no detailed instructions for this procedure?  Do you really enjoy my e-mail correspondence that much?<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To which Jonathan replied&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nHmm I looked at the listing and it&#8217;s set to sitewide.  Are you using the widget or anything special to place the code on your site?<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan<br \/>\nProduct Manager<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Gee, I guess the fact that I asked about the TLA widget no fewer than 6 times during our correspondence has caused Jonathan to suspect I just may be trying to use the damn thing.  So I resignedly state&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I am using the widget.<\/p>\n<p>-Sean<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that&#8217;s where we currently stand.  It&#8217;s been over a day and I haven&#8217;t heard a word from Jonathan.  An advertiser wants to place a link on my site but since I can&#8217;t get this thing set up in a satisfactory manor I&#8217;m probably going to drop the <a title=\"Text Link Advertising Company\" href=\"http:\/\/www.text-link-ads.com\">Text Link Ads<\/a> service  entirely.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some questions for you&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Have you had success setting up TLA on your WordPress blog?<\/li>\n<li>Have you had similar problems?<\/li>\n<li>Do you know an alternative solution?<\/li>\n<li>How can this form of &#8220;<em>Tech Support<\/em>&#8221; possibly be better than a simple list of instructions?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>UPDATE<\/strong>:<a title=\"Text Link Ads Makes a Few Improvements\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/text-link-ads-marginally-improved\/\">Text Link Ads Marginally Improved<br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An in-depth review of Text Link Ads detailing shortcomings in their product as well as their horrible customer support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[52,18,40,20],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-development","tag-review","tag-text-link-ads","tag-widget","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pixelwit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}