Interview with Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads – http://www.text-link-ads.com

[Mike] Patrick, thank you for taking the time to provide our readers with an insight into the background and operation of Text Link Ads. You are the President and co founder of TLA, a pay per click management system that you founded and have been operating since 2003. Your introduction to the world of SEO marketing was in 2000 when you helped develop your reclaimed brick and stone business online – this lead to your understanding of the importance of backlinks which progressed into the concept for TLA. Needless to say TLA is quite a jump from reclaimed brick and stone, did you ever think your SEO knowledge would progress so quickly and was the concept of TLA something you conceived when you realised the importance of backlinks or did it take some time and a lot of thought and planning for the text link ads concept to become fully developed?

[Patrick] It definitely took time to evolve. We started up as a pure PPC management shop in 2001 and once we started offering PPC services these same clients were interested in SEO. We found that the secret to SEO was finding ways to get links to our clients sites and came across the practice of purchasing links. At the time there was not a central marketplace bringing together advertisers and publishers who were interested in buying and selling static html links so we evolved into Text-Link-Ads.com in 2003. We started off by doing everything by hand and then took our processes and built a custom technology around them which allowed for the business to really take off.

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