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

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.

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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!!

         

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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 ?

         

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