I got a private Plurk message with a question which is a winner? Content or Backlinks? Often that I see people argue on this subject. Some say Content is King, and others say without backlinks (Marketing) content is worthless.

I have done SEO for all of my sites either by myself, or with help from other experts. Now when you are making a website, you would think how will I attract visitors to my website? Now I will give you a sample scenario answer that you will get:

SEO Expert 1: You need keyword rich content to attract your users to your website. With time, you should rank high in search engines.

SEO Expert 2: You need high backlinks counts, so you rank high in search engines. Adapt a powerful link-building strategy and start your website.

Syed Balkhi: Both of you are wrong. You need keyword rich content and along with the content you need powerful link-building strategy. Read on the post to see why?

The goal of every webmaster is to have their website ranked among the top if not at the top for their competitve keywords. A smart seo technique is to gain backlinks, but sometimes gaining backlinks is too expensive. TNX.net has made gaining backlinks a peice of cake (easy and inexpensive). Along with gaining backlinks by advertising, publishers can use TNX to sell their links and make profit. If thats not enough, they have also added an affiliate program which offers some great deals that I will discuss in my post.

TNX for Publishers

I think TNX is best for publishers. Why? Because it have 52353 users. With private ads you might not get as much exposure as you can get with TNX. There are 22854502 links in the TNX system. You can get much more advertisers then you ever imagined through direct sales. You can automatically sells link to thousands of advertisers. It is very easy to install the codes, I checked that out. Their system is secure and credible. TNX pays when you request a payout via paypal, checks, Wire, or “any other payment method”. I definately don’t know what they mean by any other payment method. Unlike other companies, TNX charge commission as well. It is not as bad but it is still 12.5% from each party involved in the transaction. I was going to say that TNX is good for publishers because new website owners want to get exposure to advertisers, but TNX is based on Pagerank! Which means I can’t sell links on Balkhis through TNX because I have a Pagerank 0. Another downside of this program is heavy reliance on Pagerank for everything. Even the prices are generated automatically which mostly depends on Google Pagerank, link popularity, website category, and number of outbound links. Which completely eliminates a new site to sell links. The only reason I would use the system is to get more exposure for my site, but apparently the system requires a website that is build and established. My question in the review is why should the established websites even join the system when they are already popular and can get direct sales. Specially as I mentioned before the wordpress plugin that lets you do it all automatically. I checked out the system interface which was very easy to use therefore I don’t see a user with a Pr 5 site having issues with selling links. I think this program is more beneficial to the webmasters with a site in the range of PR 1 - 3 because those sites are the ones that usually need exposure. Ofcourse excluding John Chow, and after the whole PR thing going on with google I dont even think if it is the best way to determine the quality of a website.

TNX for advertisers

TNX will gain you tons of backlinks for a reasonable price. I was reading the homepage, It says get upto 10,000 static backlinks for only $11. Which is a pretty decent deal. Another cool deal they have is getting 5000 backlinks for free! Check it out here. If you like the offer then join TNX now. With such high quality/quantity backlinks, I am sure you can hit the top of Google in SERPs, but I don’t know for how long because google is going crazy about Paid links. But apparently TNX has its own SEO theories. They have made a tool that generates keywords for advertisers which makes their link look natural rather than paid. Read more about the tool here.

Affiliate program at TNX

TNX pays a high margin to their advertisers. TNX is based on points therefore you get 25 points out of every 100 that your referred advertiser has spent. You can use these points to advertise your own site, sell it to the network, or sell to any individual for your own set price. Join TNX now.

Above are the basic that you need to know about TNX which you could’ve found on their website as well. Now I was asked to review TNX and it is time for me to tell you what I think. Overall layout of this site is decent. Since it is such a big company, I think it could’ve spent some more on their designing aspect to get a more web 2.0 type look. I mentioned above in the publisher section that I don’t like their system so reliant on the value of Pagerank. Specially the fact that they don’t allow PR 0 site as stated here eventhough their own site is PR 0.

Due to the recent storm in the Google world, TNX was also one of the victims of Google raid. TNX doesn’t rank for its own name in Google, and have a PR of 0. Although I see that the owner mentioned that he has banned Google from their robot.txt. (Here). I don’t think the ban of their site will impact your site for selling your links on their site, but there can be a serious issue if you abuse this service.

Hint Hint the owner himself mentioned a few tricks. I believe that post was written before TNX was penaltised. I don’t know the owner personally, but I believe they build their links too quickly to face the wrath of Google. Should you use this service? If you qualify then sure go ahead. Do I guarantee that you will get good results…. Almost impossible to guarantee with any service. But as far as I can see even though the system was shooked by Google, they are doing pretty good. Their alexa is 10,897 and they have tons of members which means you will definately get exposure.

Do me a favor if you join, Join through my referral :p I can earn a few bucks.

How easy do you think it is to get backlinks? Fairly easy for bloggers. I remember writing in my post for starting a blog that you need to evaluate your competitors. Well, while you are evaluating them and reading their blog posts to get the general idea what does the audience like feel free to leave a comment. I mean you read the post, so might as well get a backlink from their blog by giving them a constructive and thoughtful comment.

Why is commenting on your competitor’s blog important?

You both have the same targetted audience. For instance if you are targetting webmasters, and you come to my blog and see that I am targetting webmasters as well you can check out some of my posts. While you were checking the post and you read them feel free to comment. This goes with any type of niche with any type of blog. Just make sure your comment is thoughtful. You are trying to get some of your competitors audience to your website. You can advertise on their websites as well, but this is another useful way. This is killing two birds with one stone as you were going to analyze their blog and see what they were doing anyways, and all you are doing is taking that extra minute and writing some comments. I can guarantee you, if you do one comment on few blogs each day, and if the blog is provoding top commentators link all over. Imagine how many backlinks you can get. Hence why one of the main things that attract commentators is that top commentator plugin.

Now especially if you are new………..[Read the full post]

While we know that Google is cracking down on Paid links as they have penaltise multiple popular sites along with lowering the Pagerank of many sites. This actions send a message that we need to stop (Obvious Paid Linking), and go toward more of genuine links. Now my definition of genuine links is organic link which was linked because you had something interesting on your website. How the heck will you get something interesting? The process of getting links through the interesting topic of your website for free is called Link-baiting. This idea has been around for quiet some time, but it still works.

Not only just that, they will link to your website on other places such as Online Communities (Forums), their websites, blogs, etc. How will Google respond to that? or any other search engine? Their actions will be somewhat liks this:

User’s site link to yours because of good content -> Search Engine says user’s website is suggesting that your website is quality so they increase your authority -> This automated authority change in their database automatically changes the SERPs -> which leads in you ranking higher than you usually did.

Also this genuine linking directly increases your pagerank because more quality backlinks determines the pagerank of your website.

Now i hope that i have clarified what link-baiting is and how effective it is if used wisely. Now from here on i will explain how to use link-baiting to get genuine links.

Watch the video if you don’t want to read the rest on the full page