History of TLA

A question I have answered a few times is “how did Text Link Ads get started?”. From the start here we go…

Bricks To Clicks. I got involved in internet marketing in 2001 helping my family business which specialized in buying and selling antique bricks. At the time pay per click advertising was very young. I was able to quickly and cheaply get exposure for our reclaimed brick business across the major search engines. That traffic helped turn what was a local business into a national business shipping these unique bricks coast to coast. Today Gavin Historical Bricks ships hundreds of thousands of bricks around the country for restoration jobs as well as new construction looking for an old world looks and saves millions of pounds of landfill every year with its recycling model. I learned a lot about business from my Dad who is a brilliant business man and a lot about online marketing in the early days from the brick business. Growing this business online really opened my eyes to the power of internet marketing and the positive effects it can have on business.

I loved the brick business but was really attracted to the internet marketing aspect. The idea of doing what we did for the brick business for other small businesses made a lot of sense to me. I teamed up with my college roommate, Bill Fish, and we started a two man shop doing pay per click management in 2002. We thought we could target companies similar to Historical Bricks, so armed with a supplier database book of some 5,000 prospective clients in the restoration market we were off to help small businesses expand their business and make some money for ourselves at the same time. Thinking too small at the time and not realizing that once you know search marketing there is no reason to limit your client base we launched our business naming it MarketingThePast.com (btw you got to love playing with Archive.org!) Pay per click management was definitely in its early days and we had classic tools as BidRank running on all night on our computers to adjust bids. We generally charged on a percentage of spend basis for ppc mangement and we picked up a number of clients including our first client ever which sold antique pool tables. The funny part about our first client is I sold it face to face on a sales call to this local business. Luckily search terms were relatively cheap at the time and we were able to bid for a number of ppc and search marketing related terms and we were able to pick up a decent number of clients without going door to door.

PPC to SEO. We quickly learned that ppc clients wanted help with their search engine optimization. We re-branded into Positioned1.com and began offering both ppc and seo services. Search engine optimization was a different animal but one we wrapped our heads around quickly as we learned it was all about the links! Link popularity (a measure of the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website) was king then just as it is now. We observed a number of websites that were ranking #1 in the search engines were out purchasing links on other high quality websites. It was a growing practice but a very fragmented marketplace. This presented an opportunity.

TLA is born. Our first crack at this market was in early 2003. We continued to operate under our Positioned1.com name and got an exclusive deal with a company that was a large provider of technology to student newspapers. We took a chance signing a guaranteed deal with this group of newspapers and got busy selling the ad space to our current clients and got on the phone with anyone that was buying these type of ads on other sites. The product worked great and we quickly settled on doing business as Text-Link-Ads.com Here is the 2003 version of TLA in all it’s glory:

Growing the business through technology and great people. Business started to grow rapidly as we expanded our publisher program. Publisher networks continued to come on board throughout 2004 and 2005. We brought on some great people to help grow the business that are still with us today (thanks Brock, Jay, Drew and Stevo!) We were managing the various publisher programs in all sorts of ways: emailing spreadsheets in, FTP access to this network, custom application to get into that one, etc, etc. This was not a scalable approach. Fortunately we teamed up with Barry Schwartz’s company, RustyBrick, (special thanks to Matt and Justin who built the system from scratch and are still working on it today) and started building real technology to automate many of the business tasks we were performing by hand. It took us a full year to release what we called our “independent publisher network” which we first opened the doors to in early 2006. This technology allowed smaller publishers to come in and grab our ad code in a self serve environment. Our publisher count took off and this really was the catalyst for growth moving forward.

Midwest to NYC. With the independent publisher network in full swing in 2006 we were able to bring on thousands of niche websites into our program and the advertisers followed this demand. The business grew fast and in November of 2006 we were fortunate enough to be acquired by MediaWhiz. At the time we had an office in Iowa City, Iowa (my hometown) and in Cincinnati, OH (where we founded TLA) and we packed our bags and moved out to NYC to join the MediaWhiz team.

We have added great people to our team since and continue to improve our core TLA business as well as leverage our great publisher base to launch new ways for publishers to make money. MediaWhiz has been a great place to work and we are working hard to provide great products to advertisers and publishers alike and we have some really cool products coming down the pipeline. It has been a fun ride in online marketing so far and it is just beginning.