A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

So you’ve started a blog and you’re starting to get some decent traffic from the original content you’ve been creating. You organic SEO campaign is paying off and driving a reasonable amount of traffic to your blog every day. You’ve been submitting your blog to high quality blog directories and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Searchles. You’ve added Entrecard and MyBlogLog widgets to your sidebar and have become active in each of those respective communities. Everything is going better than planned, or is it ?

When you started your blog, it seemed the traffic bursts were the de facto and it was easy to get short term spikes by utilizing clever linkbait or posting a well written, informative article. However, once things have leveled off and you’ve noticed traffic has not been surging past typical bursts, what do you do for your traffic to boost to the next level?

It’s simple, if you’re blog’s scenario is relatively close to what is described above, there’s no way around it but it’s time for you to start using advertising campaigns to generate not only traffic but to increase brand marketing. Running an online advertising campaign can be a daunting task, especially if you’ve never done it before or have no experience in convential advetising. There are many components that factor into running a successful advertising or marketing campaign but for the sake of discussion, I will only focus on online advertising companies that offer the greatest amount of exposure for the least amount of money.

Most bloggers are not operating with deep pockets, so being thrifty with your advertising dollars is essential in order to spread your budget around and get the most bang for your buck. Below I’ll share with you my own personal experiences for how to maximize your advertising budget. Even if it is only $20-$50 per month, there are still some great sources that will appeal to even the thriftiest amongst us.

1.) PerformancingAds - (http://www.performancingads.com/)

PerformancingAds is a fantastic advertising medium for those operating on a limited budget. Using the service you will be able to find effective, influential blogs and highly targeted audiences to advertise. Advertisers can make easy and secure payments with PayPal with all major credit cards accepted. I have used the PerformancingAds network to promote this blog and I can honestly say that for my meager $100 per month budget dedicated specifically to PA listed sites, the return is uncomparable to any other advertising program I’ve ever been involved with in the past. The best part is that you’re not paying for clicks, you’re paying to occupy space so click-fraud is irrelevant.

2.) AdToll - (http://www.adtoll.com/)

AdToll has been a relative sleeper in the online advertising community but recently they have become one of my favorite sources for finding high quality advertising for a superb price. AdToll makes your advertising effort easy, convenient and effective. You have the option of fixed price Sponsored Ads or Cost-Per-Click (CPC) based Run of Network Ads. Advertisers can browse the growing site directory and find a particular site you want to advertise on, view the rate card then proceed to make a booking. Click the button below to go to the site directory. Payments are made by Paypal which means all major credit cards accepted.

3.) Project Wonderful - (http://www.projectwonderful.com)

Project Wonderful is an online advertising broker with an innovative model that brings fairness, transparency, and profitability to the advertising process. Although I’m still pretty pissed with their slacker staff for rejecting my blog from their publisher program, I’ve stuck with them only for the purpose of purchasing ultra cheap advertising on some fantastic up and coming blogs for literally pennies per day. Even though they are quite anal retentive about approving quality publishers and tend to allow blogs that wouldn’t be approved in other networks, I do find they live up to their motto : Find advertising opportunities at the price you like.

While there are numerous avenues for advertising a blog on the internet, the three companies I’ve listed above as your best bet to find inexpensive advertising on newer blogs. A distinct advantage of advertising on up and coming blogs is that you’re getting in while they’re cheap and you can never be sure when one of them might make it to the front page of Digg or some other social media site and turn you multitudes of traffic for pennies on the dollar.

         

9 Comments Permalink

Like many other Adsense publishers, I’ve been seeing a serious drop in Adsense earnings over the last few months so I decided to give Chitika another shot using their Chitika Premium ads to alternate ad space with Google Adsense. If you are unfamiliar with Chitika Premium ads and you get a significant amount of US based organic traffic from search engines, you might want to consider utilizing the Chitika service because the ads are displayed based the search terms from which US visitors arrive at your site. For example, if somebody does a Google search for the term “Best Affiliate Programs” and arrives at my blog, the Chitika Premium ads will show relevant ads for those terms. If a suitable ad matching the search terms isn’t found, Chitika will load an alternate url which you can specify during the ad setup to display another ad network such as Adsense or Pepperjam Network.

My strategy is to use the Chitika premium ads first and as an alternate (backup) I use Adsense. Oddly enough my Adsense earnings have stayed the same but now I have the Chitika revenue in addition to the Adsense. I’ve been experimenting with this for about two months and for the first time this week, Chitika is out performing Adsense but the combined income has my earnings almost doubled from when I was running Adsense exclusively. Although the Chitika ads only show to US visitors who arrived at my site from organic search, the impressions are minimal but the number of click-thrus are greater than Adsense and the eCPM and CPC is far better than Adsense. Additionally, alternating two or more ad networks can certainly increase clicks because repeat visitors are likely to tune out ads that look the same but mixing it up a bit definitely causes visitors to take a second look.

If you would like to try the experiment for yourself but are unsure how to setup the alternating ads, here’s a step by step guide to setting up Chitika Premium as a wrapper to Adsense.

1.) Create a Google Adsense ad block for your site and copy the code into an empty, new file named alt_chitika.php and save the file to your server.

2.) Login to your Chitika account and click “Get code”. You will see the Chitika | Premium option and click “Get Code” to create a new block of Chitika code for your site.

3.) In the “Optional Settings” box, type the url to the Adsense file you created in step 1 into the “Alternate Url” textbox.

4.) Insert the Chitika code into your website where you want to display the ads.

That’s it. Now your ad zone is setup to display Chitika ads to any US based visitors who arrive at your site as a result of search engine traffic. Any other visitors will be shown the Google Adsense code as an alternate. For most bloggers, you won’t see a significant decrease in your Adsense impressions or earnings but you will see that you now have two revenue streams.

If you are not using Adsense, you can still use Chitika to serve your main ads while using any other ad network to serve the alternate ads by following the steps above. If you’re already alternating ad networks using custom code, you can simply use the custom code url as your alternate url in the Chitika Premium setup.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave comments on this article or forum discussions : Affiliate Networks and Affiliate Programs.

If you are not a Chitika publisher, Click here to signup or click the banner below.

         

23 Comments Permalink

When I logged into my Wordpress dashboard today I was greeted by the following message :

New Message from OIOpublisher! All registered users are now invited to the OIOpublisher 2.0 beta program! You can download the beta version by clicking here, pressing the “download” button and then choosing the beta option. Note that you’ll be required to login. This is a beta version and whilst it has been thoroughly tested, it cannot yet be considered 100% stable. We welcome those who wish to contribute their feedback and bug reports, but if you do not want to experiment with a potentially unstable version, please ignore this alert. Remember that 2.0 includes the ability to install it as a standalone script and will also provide you with 3rd party script integration instructions when in standalone mode. If planning to upgrade from an earlier version, make sure you save a backup copy of both your database and the old plugin files first.

  For those of you who are unfamiliar with OIOpublisher, it’s a direct ad sales plugin for Wordpress that enables publishers such as myself to sell advertising space directly to interested parties and keep 100% of the revenue. I’m using it here on the sidebar of this blog to manage advertising purchases because it automates the Paypal process and keeps track of when ads expire without having to do it all manually.

  Compared to solutions such as ProjectWonderful and PerformancingAds, which also enable bloggers to sell ad space for a split of the advertising revenue, OIOpublisher is a hands down slam dunk. Although OIOpublisher is not free and there is a $37 licensing fee, in my opinon all I have to do is sell two $25 ads and I’m already in profit after purchasing the plugin. With ProjectWonderful or PerformancingAds, a publisher expecting to sell hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of advertising would be paying up to 10 times the licensing cost of OIOpublisher in the long run using one of those split-revenue platforms.

Stay tuned for a thorough review of the OIOpublisher 2.0 Beta version I will be publishing later in the day.

In the meantime, if you want to get started using OIOpublisher, Get OIOpublisher Now!!

         

3 Comments Permalink

I received the following email early this morning…

RE: Important Legal Notice Regarding Commission Junction’s Affiliate Network If you joined or were a member of the affiliate marketing networks operated by ValueClick, Inc., Commission Junction, Inc. and/or Be Free (collectively, “Defendants”), between April 20, 2003 and the present, you may be a class member in Settlement Recovery Center et al. v. ValueClick, Inc. et al., No. 2:07-cv-02638-FMC-CTx, a lawsuit which is pending in the Central District of California. The Settlement Notice informs you of the Court’s certification of a class for settlement purposes; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement or object to the settlement. The proposed settlement will resolve claims that Defendants failed to adequately monitor Commission Junction’s Network for the use by third parties of software that does not comply with Commission Junction’s (“CJ”) Publisher Code of Conduct and that is intended to steal or divert commissions from publishers on CJ’s network (“Non-compliant Software”), failed to adequately monitor or prevent third parties from engaging in the theft or “hijacking” of commissions from Advertisers and Publishers on CJ’s Network, and failed to make sufficient disclosures regarding the existence of Non-compliant Software and commission theft, resulting in losses to both advertisers and publishers on the CJ Network. The proposed settlement will provide a monetary recovery to eligible class members. For class members that currently maintain an account on the CJ Network will receive payment through payments or credits deposited or applied to their CJ accounts; eligible class members that no longer have accounts on the Commission Junction Network will receive a check for an equal amount. If you are a member of the class, your legal rights are affected by whether you act or do not act. You should review the Settlement Notice as soon as possible as there are several important deadlines that you must meet to take certain actions in connection with this proposed settlement. In particular, the deadline for filing an objection or excluding yourself from the proposed settlement is September 30, 2008. For further information, please refer to the Settlement Notice. For a copy of the Settlement Notice, click on the link, or visit the case website at www.CJSettlement.com

I followed the link in the email and found what appears to be a class action lawsuit against ValueClick and Commission Junction regarding commissions that had been hijacked between 2003-2008.

Has anybody else received this email ?

         

16 Comments Permalink