Chitika are usually one of my top 3 money makers. Previously , they haven’t converted well on information based sites, kind of like this one. This could hopefully be about to change with their new Interactive Premium Ad units.

The units look like traditional text based ads but have a relevent image to the left of the ad text, giving your visitors graphical information as well as getting their attention (a bit like the old trick some publishers with manually did Adsense until Google forbade it). The image to the right is how the unit would/could look on Self Made Minds, I had to use an image rather than the unit for reasons I’ll explain later.

Presently the unit will only show to your US traffic and even then it’s described as behavioural so will only show to “some” of your US visitors. From our tests and observations it looks like one of the key factors to whether the ads are shown is based on the referrer, primarily is the visitor from a search engine, if so show the ad and base the ad content on the keywords used to find the page. This leads to highly targeted ads which should result in a higher than normal CTR and eCPM.

I’ve only been testing these for a couple of weeks but performance so far has been an improvement. I’d recommend at least giving them a test (especially if you have a none product based site that performed badly in the past) and make sure you specify a default ad (instructions here) to monetise the rest of your traffic.

One of Anybody can apply to Chitika and if you’re already with them, the new ads in the Get Code section.

I stumbled across an ingenious way to make money from a site last week and it’s something I plan to possibly try out and put into practice when I get a chance, if you already know about it then I apologise but it did seem rather a sneaky and clever way to generate income while on the face of it looking after your visitors interests so worth sharing.

It goes like this, you run a free classifieds website letting buyers and sellers list their ‘for sale’ and ‘wanted’ adverts in a niche, be it fish, dogs, birds, cars, music or whatever! It’s a free service and you want to keep it clean and user friendly but you also want to monetise the traffic without plastering Adsense everywhere!

The solution
You protect the privacy of your advertisers, aww bless
When people place adverts for unwanted goods or pets they have bred they may be wary about giving out their phone number, fear not, your classifieds site operates privacy protection so that their phone number is not actually displayed on the site, instead an 07096 number is displayed (in the UK), this number forwards calls on to the advertisers real phone number and costs £0.50 per minute generating shared revenue for the website owner.

The result
The website is clean, user friendly and free to use, more than that as detailed in the privacy policy all private numbers are hidden and a forwarding number is used to protect the users from spammers and canvassers obtaining their number. The website owner is on a revenue share, as long as the cost element of the phone call is NOT EXTORTIONATE and clearly stated, I think it’s a great way to monetise a service you can offer, generating income from premium phone numbers is not new and older than the internet but it seems to me a nice way of bringing them both together, indeed if you could find a well established high traffic classifieds website you could remove existing advertising and implement this and give a better user experience and make a good income from it buying it cheap on a multiple of it’s present income. Win win.

This post is not meant to be a scientific experiment, I know there are major other reasons for the two sites I mention not being equal but it does demonstrate to some extent a few of the cliches you hear a lot, if your thinking of putting up a low/zero maintenance information website you have a couple of options.

• Scrape content
• Pay a content writer
• Pay someone who really knows what they are talking about

I have never bothered with scraping content and republishing it, purely because I have always felt the short term gains are just that, I prefer something that has a better chance of lasting longer, so that leaves two other options, both of which I have done. (more…)

I’m still having a crazy Christmas season here, I have another week of long days and will then be taking my daughter and a couple of close friends to Lapland for a Winter break (I can’t wait). One of the affiliates I’ve been pushing big time this season is Amazon and they are now (normally) my forth highest daily earner (after Adsense, Chitika and Commission Junction). What impresses me most about Amazon is their conversion rate which for me currently stands at over 9% and looking at their site I can see why, I reckon many on-line retailers could learn a lot from from Amazon.

(more…)

So far this month I’ve had 15 record days, in terms of both profit and traffic. I’m hoping for this to continue until just before Christmas so as you can imagine I’m a tad on the busy side looking for new things to promote and ways to make the most of the traffic I already have.

This next tip is really really simple, so simple in fact that it’s easily overlooked (well it was by me anyway). At the moment people are in buying mode so make it easy and obvious for them, one thing I did was add the following button to some of my affiliate pages:

It’s a hack of one of the buttons found on Amazon (which even my limited graphical skills could do). So far the results look really good with conversions on the pages involved 50 - 100% up (how much of that can be put down to it being a day closer to Christmas I’m not sure).

So it’s a short post today, but if it’s suitable for your site could prove to be a very profitable one.

This is a fantastic time of year for Christmas product related sites and it’s where the work you’ve done throughout the year can really reap rewards. Over the last 2 weeks I’ve seen all income streams increase between 50 and 250%, which makes checking stats every morning a very exciting time. Each day I’m looking for and pushing new affiliate products to my existing visitors and feed subscribers and I’m checking stats for pages that are getting bit of traffic to see if there are any related products I can push there.

The Clickbank product I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has now generated just over $600 in commissions, which considering I just added an extra paragragh and affiliate link to an existing page is a pretty nice return IMO. However by my own daftness I’ve managed to lose in the region of $5,000 over the last 6 weeks or so by giving away my traffic.
(more…)

I’ve received an email from Mika of Kontera about an offer they have on for new publishers, where if you get 50,000 impressions in you your first month you’ll receive a $25 bonus.

Kontera provide those in-text adverts that normally appear as double underlined links, they are pay per click but I’ve heard some larger publishers have been able to negotiate fixed CPM deals. I have used Kontera in the past and still do on one of my sites, however I found I got a better return with a similar service offered by Chitika. I would quite like to trial Kontera again on my gadget blog however they changed their TOS a while ago to include an exclusivity clause: (more…)

My Adsense has been down the last month but with a domain leased and some new one’s to get ready for next year I am still reasonably happy with how things are at the moment. What I have managed to do seeing as things have been a bit quieter is do some general housekeeping and it pays dividends.

For someone like myself that does actual real product sales and sells a service there are a few things you can implement that can greatly increase your userbase and overall income.

Thankfully my wife has been more efficient & proficient than I at housekeeping she has agreed to help and help manage the online version too

1/ For my online product sales I get the user to add the products to their basket and this is recorded in the database, they then add their own details which are stored/saved long before they get to make payment. (more…)

I’m a fan of Chitika and I reviewed them back in July. Since then I’ve been invited to participate in their new Premium Publisher Program, they are due to do a press release about it today and asked me to write up my opinions, so here goes. I’ve checked with Ryan my rep there and I’m allowed to share ALL statistics so expect a few detailed screen shots.

The requirements to become a premium publisher aren’t too high, if you’re earning $10+ per day on a quality site you’re going to be pretty close to qualifying, though I think the current group of premium publishers (DPB, GPS Review, I4U) will be earning a lot more than that. Being a Premium Publisher you get a slightly different control panel when you first log in but that’s mainly cosmetic and just tells you about the benefits. The real changes come with how you can make more money. (more…)

Last week I got round to one of those jobs that I’ve wanted to do for a while and that’s making my affiliate links a bit more visitor friendly and readable. I’ve mentioned before how I automatically convert links to sites that I have a relationship with to their corresponding affiliate links, I’ve now taken this a stage further and have created a Word Press plug-in to make it easy to add new affiliates as I find them.

The way the plug-in works is it searches for the domain of merchants that I have an affiliate program with adjusts it accordingly, for example http://www.thinkgeek.com/ would be converted on the fly to the equivalent affiliate link of :
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/se121lnwtnvACIJCEHEACBEGHEDF?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F&sid=cg-http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinkgeek.com%2Fgeektoys%2Fgames%2F7eaa%2F/geektoys/games/7eaa/

As you can see the affiliate link is pretty darn ugly and to the (slighty) trained eye it is obviously an affiliate link which does put some people (especially tech savvy webmasters) off clicking it.
(more…)