Today I will write about Kontera’s ContenLink ad publishing network and how it may help you in monetizing your blog. I thought it was time to continue my “series” about blog monetization methods that I began in December 2007. Back then it presented three different money makers called WidgetBucks, Bidvertiser and Fair Ads Network.

Kontera provides a full-featured advertising network that offers in-text advertising, another attractive method for making money from your blog (and also your regular website’s) content. It’s really simple, you place a short code snippet in your blog’s template (they even offer an automatic tool for Blogger.com blogs) where you want those ads to appear. Whenever a page of your blog gets loaded, the code parses your content for particular keywords that different advertisers bid on and it highlights them just like a regular hyperlink. When your site visitors click on one of those links, you’ll make money. You may see such links while looking at my posts here on this blog, they are double underlined.

I’ve implemented Kontera’s ContentLink technology some days ago after I got accepted in their publisher network. I use their very own Wordpress plugin to make my life a little easier with integrating Kontera on my blog. So far I made $1.77 in four days with an average CTR (Click-Through Rate) of around 2.50%. The average click price is at $0.30, but I must admit that I only have stats for those four days!

It seems that this ad publishing solution does work real good for content sites, so far that’s the highest CTR I’ve ever seen from all those advertising networks that I tested here on my blog. To give you an example, my CTR on Speedyads is at 0.20%!

Kontera pays at a Net 30 basis, meaning they pay you 30 days after a month’s end. In order to get paid you have to reach $100 as the minimum payout limit. Payments are made via Paypal, Check and even international bank transfer.

Kontera’s ContentLink looks very promising and I’ll leave it on my blog for some more weeks to get some better and more realistic statistics. Right now I’m very happy with their network, earnings are quite good so far and I’m really surprised to see such a high click-through rate, which is a good sign for making good money. As always, revenues also highly depend on your blog’s or website’s traffic, the more the better.

Bye,
Querblogger

You probably have heard about Entrecard? No? No problem, let me tell you more!

You may know that advertising your blog or website is a crucial task in order to succeed with your online business. Sure, it would also work without any advertising, but it would also take a much longer time to make your blog/website more popular. So, it should be one of your first goals to drive traffic to your site, the more the better. More traffic will bring you more revenue, be it from affiliate marketing, contextual ads or referral programs. But the traffic is even better if it´s free!

So, recently I came across Entrecard, a nice site that offers free advertising for your site. I´ve seen it on many blogs lately, even on those from famous bloggers like Darren Rowse or John Chow.

Entrecard lets you exchange 125×125 banner ads for free. The whole story is based on dropping your entrecards on blogs you like, think about it as giving your own business card to other people. In order to drop a card, the blog you´re about to visit must have a widget installed. There you can click to drop your own card. You then get one Entrecard credit for each drop which you could use for advertising your own blog or website.

Advertising your own site is easy. The first thing you´ll need is a 125×125 image banner representing your blog or website, you could also use only a simple text link ad, but that isn´t too effective I think. If you have earned enough credits from dropping your Entrecards on different blogs out there on the web, you can use that balance to advertise on other sites. After an advertising request is approved, your banner ad will show up in a widget (have a look at the left side bar to see what I mean) for the period of one day.

Other people can also advertise on your blog. The cost for advertising is based on the average Entrecard drops your site gets, multiplied by two. For example, if an average of 100 cards were dropped at your site each day, it would cost 200 credits to advertise on your site for one day.

You can even spend your earned Entrecard credits in a shop. There are many offers from many Entrecard users. You can find many things to choose from. For example you could let digg or stumble your blog from other people after paying them some Entrecard credits. Or you could hire someone to design your own Entrecard. There are many possibilities, check it out by yourself!

So far Entrecard is bringing me an extra 30 unique visitors to my blog each day and it´s growing from day to day. Really awesome in my opinion (hey it´s FREE advertising I really like the service, it´s relative easy to understand (look at their site to get a better understanding) and offers you great possibilities like advertising on John Chows blog for example!

I´ll soon start a little contest where you can win some good Entrecard credits. More info will follow by the weekend!

Bye,
Querblogger

After joining PayPerPlay and waiting for the new statistics, I´m now happy to announce my first earnings from NetAudioAds. It´s not much for the moment, but it looks promising.

PayPerPlay has promised to start serving audio ads on February 1st and in fact they did it, but most people didn´t recognize it because the statistics system was down. It seems they had faced some database problems and bugs in the counting algorithms, but now most of these problems are gone. So today, PayPerPlay started to serve the first 100,000 audio ads randomly distributed around all member´s websites. They try to start in phases to test the stability of their servers, this may take some weeks now before they go full throttle (consider the huge amount of daily ads they are trying to play, it´s millions over millions each day).

I was lucky and my blog received 3 of those 100,000 audio ads. Also my referrals websites (I´ve refered two people) got some ads. Now for your excitement, I made $0.02 (don´t stop reading now, they are still in beta!). Not much I know, but considering that only 15 ads were played, this looks very promising. At the moment I´ve generated 3,339 pageviews, if everytime an ad had been played, I would now have $4.45 (for around one month). Easy money if you ask me, you don´t have to do very much to earn this, only generate pageviews to your website and blog.

I hope the statistics system stabilizes within the next days and weeks and the NetAudioAds team starts serving more daily ads. For now I can only say it looks promising as a nice extra money maker with very low effort. Feel free to join NetAudioAds and start serving audio ads today (if you are within those lucke 100,000 each day).

Bye bye,
Querblogger

Warning! Before you read any further please note that Ucash.in seems to be a scam as reported by many of my fellow commentors here on TMME. It’s probably a good idea NOT to join Ucash.in right now until I can provide you with further details!

Some days ago I´ve written about Ucash.in, a new online service to monetize your links. Only one day after that post I got my first two referrals. The last days I´ve done some free advertising for getting some more referrals to this really nice service. Now I have already 5 people referred to Ucash.in and I hope there will come some more.

So let me tell you in short what I´ve done to advertise my Ucash.in referral link. The first service I used is a really good traffic exchange program called MagnifyTraffic.com. You surf other peoples websites and get a bonus, starting by 0.34 credits, for each site you visit. The credits you´ve earned can be used to promote your own site. The good thing about MagnifyTraffic (and the name suggests it already) is, that you can magnify your traffic rate. The more you click on others sites, the more bonuses you´ll get and therefore the more credits. Yesterday I was in a rush and clicked 500 links (yes I know I´m crazy). I started with 0.34 credits for each click, after some bonuses I got nearly one credit for each of my clicks.

The second service I used was AdsFlip. Some days ago I got a mail from iWebTool, they advertised this new advertising platform and offered me 1,000 advertising credits for joining them. So, I joined them and used my credits for advertising my referral link. The good thing is, everyday I´ll earn some new credits while showing an advertising banner on my blog (you may have seen it in my “sponsors” section). Btw, a nice service with targeted advertising possibilities, maybe I´ll write about them in more detail later on.

I hope I can refer some more people. At the moment I make only $0.01 per day from all the clicks generated on the monetized links. To get even more exposure to my referral links I created a new wiki about Ucash.in, you can find it at the OneEuroWiki!

Ciao,
Querblogger

Today I want to introduce a brand-new way for you to earn some extra income from your blog or website. No, it isn´t just another Pay-Per-Click program I´ll talk about, it´s Pay-Per-Play, short audio ads that will bring you money!

I´ve just discovered this new money making opportunity yesterday and I was very fascinated about it from the very first moment. I mean, the todays advertising market is totally over-saturated with textual advertisements (PPC) or banner ads, less and less people are really keeping an eye on it (some kind of ad “blindness” if you will). So why not use audio ads? It´s something new, something fresh in the online advertising market, that will likely attract many people (mainly because of that fact alone). Audio ads are easily rememberable, most times they are short and (probably the best thing) they don´t use any of your valuable space within your blog/website template.

So I came across a company called NetAudioAds, that actually wants to be THE big audio ads provider for the future. They even have temed up with a big search engine company (they can´t reveal their name yet), to help them grow their business without too many caveats.

This all sounds good and wonderful, but it gets even better! You, as a website or blog owner can become an audio ad publisher. All you have to do is to freely sign up for the NetAudioAds program and place a short piece of code in your sites template. Your site is now audio-ad-ready

From now on everytime someone visits your site, a 5 second audio ad will be played. This will only happen once per site, because otherwise it would be too annoying to your readers. Even if you place the ad code on different sites, the visitor will only be able to hear a sound clip every 3 minutes.

So, if the audio clip is played for at least 2 seconds, you will be paid 25% in commissions from what advertisers are willing to spend for an ad. And this works for EVERY single visitor to your site! It´s highly profitable, mainly because of the fact that the audio ad starts immediately after a visit to your site (and it even counts when your visitors have turned audio off ;). The expected amount of money you can generate will be in the range of $0.01 to $0.03 per single audio ad (notice, you´ll get “only” 25% of that amount). The real worth of each clip will be handled by a bidding system (like Google Adwords or Bidvertiser), which goes live on February 1st 2008.

NetAudioAds also offers a 2-tier affiliate program as long as they are in beta (only until the end of this month)! For each (first and second) referral you´ll get 5% of the spent advertising funds (notice, NOT 5% of your referral earnings). But be aware, you should join now before they go live by the first of February and close their affiliate program for a longer time!

All in all, NetAudioAds seems very profitable to me, mainly because I´ll be paid for (nearly) every single visitor to my blog, their weekly(!) payments via Paypal/Check and the possibility to earn even more with optional 30 second audio advertisements (to really annoy my readers hehe I´ll test it out! If you want to find out more, feel free to watch their introducing video or read their long (and informative) sales letter!

See you,
Querblogger

Welcome to my third article about monetizing your blog. In my last two posts I spoke about the Fair Ads Network and Bidvertiser. Today I want to tell you some things about a nice money making opportunity which I recently integrated into my own blog which is called WidgetBucks.

Unlike other ad networks like Google Adsense, the Fair Ads Network or Bidvertiser, where you place some pay-per-click ad blocks on your site, WidgetBucks goes a step further by providing you not only simple text links, but nice product pictures with prices, price trends and product ratings. If someone click on of those ads (or products) you´ll get paid, simple isn´t it?

You have the choice of what is shown within such a widget. You can either choose a product type by yourself (e.g. funny gadgets) or you can use their MerchSense technology which only shows products related to your site or blog content (e.g. it shows digital cameras if you write about them). If you want to see the widget in action, have a look at my blogs right side bar!

The integration into your blog is very easy. First you have to choose the widget´s layout, they offer different sizes and color schemes that fit best with your blog design. After that, you have to choose the products shown within the widget (or you can use their MerchSense technology). You can also set the time a single product is shown before the next one will appear (usually there are 10 products in each widget). After completing this, you get a piece of html code that you have to paste in your blog or website template (for Blogger.com users it´s even easier, all you have to do is clicking the “Blogger” button which places the widget directly in your blog template).

So, what will you earn from those widgets? Actually there isn´t a fixed price for a single click on one of the ads shown within the widget, but different WidgetBucks user report a CPM from around $3 to $6, which means for every thousand visitors you get, you´ll generate that amount of money. But notice, this is only an average value, if you write a detailed blog about a product, it´s likely that you can generate even more, because your visitors are more likely to click on one of the shown ads.

You can join WidgetBucks for free and you´ll even get a $25 signup bonus. Payouts are sent out via check or Paypal 45 days after reaching the $50 payout limit. They also offer a referral program where you´ll get 10% of your referral earnings for a 12 month period after they join under you.

For now I haven´t generated any money with WidgetBucks because my blog traffic is fairly low. But I think there´s a huge potential for blogs or website with higher visitor counts, especially for those sites that deal about different products that aslo show up in the widget.

See you!
Querblogger

After my last article about Fair Ads Network I´ll now speak about Bidvertiser, another Pay-per-click advertising system you can use to promote your blog or website and to make money from showing those advertisements.

The last days I was looking for more ways to monetize my blog or, in other words, to make a direct little income from my writings here. So far, the most time I´m involved with Get-Paid-To sites that make me some cents by clicking some ads or taking a free offer. But I thought it would be nice if I can generate some money directly from my blog content, so I´ve recently integrated an ad block from Bidvertiser in my left sidebar (I´m sure you´ll find it ;).

Bidvertiser is an advertising system on a pay-per-click basis just like Google Adsense or the before mentioned Fair Ads Network. So basically, as an ad publisher you´ll place an ad block on your site and if any of your visitors clicks on of those ads, you´ll get paid.

What distinguishs Bidvertiser from the other ad networks is their bidding system (hence the name). Advertisers can bid on ad placements within ad blocks shown on different blogs or websites. The more they bid, the more popular those ads will be shown and the more likely it is that somebody clicks on it.

The bidding system brings many advantages for both advertisers and ad publishers. Advertisers have a great influence on their ad placement and the success of their ad campaigns. Publishers will benefit from the highest paying ads that will show up on their sites. The Bidvertiser system is constantly optimizing your ad blocks, so that you´ll generate the most money from a single click (ranging from a single cent to many dollars). You can also choose from a huge number of different ad layouts ranging from banners and buttons to text links. You can even customize the color and style to blend those layouts into your blogor website design.

Bidvertiser will pay its publisher either via check or Paypal after reaching a $10 payout limit. They pay you each month. They also have a really nice referral system, you´ll make money from referring new advertisers AND new publishers to the Bidvertiser service as long as they spend money for advertising or generate it as a publisher.

So far I´ve generated no money with Bidvertiser, which doesn´t mean that it won´t work! It´s more the fact that I only have a small number of daily visitors and only a small percentage will even click on one of those ads . But I think after some time when my blog gets at least a bit more popular (and it really does, it only takes very long :), I´ll get some money from Bidvertiser.

There will be yet another article that deals about monetizing your blog in one of my next posts, so keep coming back!

Bye bye!
Querblogger

Today I want to talk about Fair Ads Network, a new contextual advertising program you can use to monetize your blog, make it more popular or even both!

Fair Ads Network, from now on I´ll just call it FAN (not only because I´m a fan too;), is a fairly new company trying to compete with big ad publisher programs like Google Adsense or the Yahoo Publishing Network. It was founded by Kevin Lam and Konstantin Boyandin, two guys with big online marketing experience and an iron will to reach their personal goals (I really like that).

Basically FAN is just like all the other publishing networks, you can use it to advertise your blog or to publish ads on your blog to make some money online. But there are some big differences to all the big advertising companies. First thing (the probably best in my opinion) is that you won´t get banned from their program, even if you click on your own ads. I won´t encourage anybody clicking their own ads, but from time to time it may happen that you accidentally click them. In this case you can feel lucky, because your click got tracked by FAN, they actually see who clicked the ad, if it was you, you won´t get paid (and you won´t get banned!).

Another big advantage is that the whole systems will “learn” the behavior of your blog or website visitors. This will help you as a publisher, because the system shows only those advertisings that fit best with your content and what your readers are looking for. It will also help advertisers, because they can feel save that their ad campaigns run only on those sites that actually have similar content and readers likely to click on those ads.

FAN is still in beta development now, but this doesn´t mean it isn´t working yet. I´ve integrated a single ad block in my blog and I can say that it works. I haven´t received too much money (only some cents), but as I said, I´ve only one ad block integrated so far. But you´ll be able to embed many more ad blocks in the future, ranging from text ads, link ads, banners and even rich media like videos. So far the team is still working on new features and optimizing the whole system.

You can also create different tracking channels (300 at the moment) for all your ad blocks, so you can see what performs good and where to make some modifications to the ad blocks size or color combinations. A really nice feature if you want to get the best revenues!

In general, FAN pays you 60% of what advertisers choose to pay for a single click. So if an advertisers chooses to pay $1.00 per click, you´ll get $0.60 (it´s only an example, you can earn even more if advertisers pay higher fees). You´ll receive your payments after reaching a $50 payout limit (they want to lower it to $25 if all works good) via Paypal, business check, e-Gold, e-Bullion or wire transfer. You can even use your balance to start your own ad campaign.

All in all, Fair Ads Network sounds like a really good program to monetize your blog (or website). I think the guys behind it take it really serious to make the best out of it, they really want to compete with the big names in this branch! I´ll keep you updated whenever new forms of advertising or new features are available. So far I can only recommend you to check it out, build your own opinion about FAN and gave it a try.

With best regards,
Querblogger

Today I´ll give you some information about a nice service called rssHugger that´ll help you in promoting your RSS feed for getting more visitors to your blog.

Yesterday my friend Midwest has already written a nice article about rssHugger, which remembered me to have a deeper look on this free service, because I´ve already heard about it some weeks ago but so far not realized how much it may help me in getting more visitors to my blog.

Basically rssHugger will help you getting more exposure to your blog or website. The whole thing works like a viral marketing campaign, everybody can submit their blog to a huge Feed directory, which is actively promoted from even those people that submit their blogs there. Sounds a bit confusing? No problem, I´ll tell you more.

You have to ways to submit your blog to the listings on rssHugger. The first one is the paid method, you pay $20 and your blog will stay in their directory for ten years (I think an affordable price). The second one is the free method, you write a short review on this service (like I do here and you won´t have to pay a single fee. If you consider that most people will choose the free method for getting their Feed listed, there will be a huge promotion for this feed directory from all those reviews posted on different blogs worldwide. And this is what I mean with “viral marketing”, there´s an overall positive feedback, the more reviews rssHugger gets, the more exposure your very own blog gets, because of increasing traffic rates and popularity of this site.

There are also some other benfits for adding your blog to this directory are. For example you can build better deep-links to your articles which will help you in getting better rankings in search results. You also have the possibilty to get a ranking in their Top 100 page (which resets to zero every month for you to have better chances). You can increase your ranking by sending visitors to your personal profile page on rssHugger, so it would be a good idea to place a link to it somewhere on your blog.

All in all, I can definitely recommend rssHuger, especially because it´s free (if you post a review on your blog) and your blog will be listed for at least ten years. So, hug your feed and submit it!

Best Regards,
Querblogger

Today I´ll speak about 2 online services that enable you to manage your different ad networks on your site or blog. Both services are free and will help you to maximize your ad revenues.

If you want to make money from your blog, it would be a good idea to place some advertisements on it. If one of your readers clicks on one of those ads, you´ll get revenues from some cents to even some dollars if you show profitable keywords. Besides Goolge Adsense, there are many different networks you can use to monetize your blog, be it Adbrite, AuctionAds, Yahoo Advertising etc…

You could place a whole bunch of different ads on your blog to make some money from it. But the time will come where you´ll get into trouble managing all those networks. You´ll also want to know what performs best on your site or blog and brings you the highest earnings. So here come 2 nice and free services that´ll do most of the (maybe) hard work involved with it.

1. ClickAider

Although ClickAider is still in its beta phase, it seems like a really good service to manage your ads. This service will track your visitors behavior while clicking different ads on your page. All you have to do to get started is creating a free acount and placing some lines of Javascript in your site/blog template, which is easy (even for for non-coders). From now on, their servers create statistics about the click behavior on your site, including informations from where the user who clicked came from or what the actual link/keyword was.

By far the best feature is that you can track more than just a single advertisement network at the same time. With help of the usage statistics you can really optimize your different ads. For example if you see that a particular ad block doesn´t work because it only generates some clicks per month, you could drop that block or exchange it with another block from a different ad networks that performs better, you´ll find all the information for the best performing ads in the statistics provided by ClickAider. You can also use those statistics in the case of a ban because of a supposed click fraud, you can see who actually clicked on your ads to make prove that it wasn´t your fault.

ClickAider is still in a beta phase, therefore it is also free for the moment. If they come out of the test phase, they may want you to pay for some of their services (although they promise to still offer some free services furthermore) , so join know as long as you can use the program for free. You can even have a look at a demo account they provide you to test all the features.

2. PubMatic

PubMatic is like ClickAider, but it goes a step further. Besides providing statistics on your ad clicks, the system also manages your ad layouts like color combinations or banner sizes. You have to place special ad tags in your site or blog that enables this service to track your ads. After placing these tags, the system begins to automatically optimize your advertisements (size, color…). They also offer you a single management interface to keep track on all your different networks like Google Adsense, ValueClick or Komli, you can also use a widget to show your statistics.

But it also has some drawbacks. The first thing is the amount of ad networks you can choose from, they offer much less networks than ClickAider for example and most of these networks are for websites or blogs that meet high quality guidlines (I won´t say we all have ugly and boring blogs, but most of us are far from the “perfect” page). The second thing is the ad layout management, so far a nice feature because the system “learns” what ad layout performs best on your site, but it´s more the time actually involved in this “learning” phase. For a well known blog with huge daily traffic it won´t be a problem, but as a “normal” blogger you would have to wait a long time, because the system needs some thousand pageviews to generate (or guess) the best ad layout.

PubMatic is in beta testing too, so they are free for the moment and may want you to pay for their service when they go live. If you want more information, have a look at this video, that shows you how PubMatic works.

In my opinion ClickAider would be the better choice from these two programs. It offers more ad networks (and especially those mainly used on blogs) and they also promise to keep some free services after coming out of their beta testing phase. Because I´m currently searching for nice ad networks to include in my blog, I´ll test out those programs more deeper soon. I´ll keep you informed!

So long!
Querblogger