Patrick Gavin is the founder of Text Link Ads. He is a search marketing expert and speaker at industry leading conferences including Search Engine Strategies and Webmasterworld Conferences. Visit the company blog here.

What is Text Link Ads and how did it get started?

We started in 2001 as pay per click management company for small businesses. PPC management led to search engine optimization clients who were always looking for ways to build more links back to their websites. So the idea of a text link ad that could drive traffic and help your natural search engine rankings was born out of our experiences around PPC and SEO work.

In 2003 we started working under the Text-Link-Ads.com name and did all processes “by hand.” We kept track of advertisers and publishers with spreadsheets, did manual updates, etc, etc. We were able to grow our business this way through 2004 and fortunately at the start of 2005 we started building a technology that would automate many of our processes. The biggest feature is a system that would allow small/mid sized publishers to serve text link ads through an automated process. This “independent publisher system” launched in February of 2006 and has been responsible for a huge spike in inventory for our marketplace. This new niche inventory has attracted niche advertisers that we did not reach before.

What is the current state of the company?

We have nine employees split between two offices. We have a Cincinnati, Ohio office and an Iowa City, Iowa office. We are a self funded business with no outside investors. Our TLA marketplace has grown to over 7,000 active publisher websites and a growing base of advertisers. Our core text link ads product is where our focus has been but we recently entered the RSS advertising market with our Feedvertising product. We are constantly on the lookout for ways to drive more value to both our publishers and advertisers through the addition of new products.

What is your typical day like?

The fun part of the job is that there is no typical day. For me personally I oversee most of the web development work. We are constantly improving our technology, adding requested features, building new products, etc. We get a lot of great feedback from our advertisers and publishers and then take that feedback and turn it into tasks for our developers. In addition to working with our development team I am in contact with many of our advertisers working to put together larger ad buys. Exploring new advertising and partnership options is also something I am always on the lookout for.

Outside the office it is a constant struggle to stay away from the laptop and Blackberry but I have a wife and one year old girl that keep me busy.