We have just launched the Wordpress Shopping ECommerce Themes Pack from Creative Theme Design for under $30 for 5 Top Shopping Webstores Themes. Along with 5 Top Shopping Themes, we also give away 3 popular ebooks that would help anyone expand their online marketing business!

If you are a prolific blogger or an online affiliate marketer, this could be a very profitable offer for you. You can Buy the Shopping Themes Pack & get each theme for less than $5 (thats a 50% discount right away).

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Join Our Team of Affiliates & Help Other Bloggers achieve their dreams of making money from their blogs & websites. You could also be helping online retailers & small business owners get the right Wordpress Themes for their online retail businesses.

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The reason probably is quite simple – Craigslist is overshadowed by Facebook, Twitter etc. And the second reason is probably the fact that there is absolutely no advertising about Craigslist – it hardly shows up in any of the Social Media news. It’s rarely that we get to hear from Craig Newmark about the immensity of his website.

Click Here to Read the Interview of Craig Newmark of Craigslist & Dan Zarrella.

Craigslist, under its CEO Jim Buckmaster, now spreads over 700 cities internationally. And as Craig mentions in the interview, the real strength of the site comes from people’s willingness to come back to it for their daily need & the fact that the site has expanded more by word-of-mouth than by any advertising.

Is Craigslist in your Viral Marketing plan?

Have you tried using this plain & simple looking website in anyway to promote your business? Though apparently, this site is more transactional in nature & not many tools (automated or manual) exist that can directly help your business.

Can Craigslist be Your Viral Marketing Channel?

If you have not thought about using Craigslist as a successful viral marketing tool for your affiliate business, here are a few tips that can excite your about Craigslist:

1. Using the Page Rank – The CL Blog has a Google Page Rank of 6 & allows comments & ping backs

2. Craigslist Search – More people are searching Craigslist than Facebook – click here to read the published report that there is 12% increase in Craigslist Search

3. Craigslist Spread & Readership – Readers in over 700 cities in 70 countries read Craigslist – click here to read how Craigslist has expanded

4. Craigslist Popularity – Craigslist gets more than 50 million unique visitors every month from US alone & total monthly page views exceed 20 billion – click here to read the Compete report on Craigslist

5. Craigslist Free Features – Most of the features of Craigslist necessary for affiliate marketing can be used free of cost although you can still opt for paid ads & job ads

6. Craigslist Forums – More than 100 topical forums are available to market your business on Craigslist – most of these forums are localized so you can actually target specific cities in your campaigns

7. Craigslist Connect – Craigslist forums lets people connect with each other – you can create new customers & generate leads easily with Craigslist

8. Craigslist Word of Mouth Promotions – as Craign Newmark said in his interview, the main reason behind the growth of the site is by to word of mouth promotions by its users. This is still the most trusted method of promotion & creates a strong engagement with the reader (customer) from the very beginning

There are more factors that should interest you to take a deeper look in using Craigslist to market your Affiliate Business virally. The design of Craigslist is very simple & you need to create a free user account to be able to start viral marketing & promoting your business at either low or absolutely no cost.

Although the report is more on how the YouTube homepage can serve as a platform to drive brand engagements through advertisements, there are a few points that we can pick up for our small businesses & individual business blogs.

How can Small Business & Bloggers use Videos & YouTube to Drive Brand Identity & Customer Engagement

The main idea behind the case study is to show:

• how homepage videos & media on Social Media sites can drive brand identity
• what ad formats work best to drive branding initiatives
• whether ad performances vary from one type of industry to another

There are several performance metrics in the study, however here are some of the key points that I think can help individual bloggers & small businesses.

• plan branding activities so that you increase your blog earnings
• use social media effectively to maintain an online identity & communicate your brand messages
• videos help to increase customer engagement
• choose the right ad formats when you advertise your brand
• choose the cost effective advertisers (Click Here to Read about some of the Best Advertisers for Small Business)

Share with us how you engage your customers & readers.

Advertising with traditional contextual advertisers have usually given us low returns when compared to our experiment with Twitter advertising. They usually varied from 5% to about 20% in most cases. Publishers are also affected by stricter (and often erroneous) click forensics – Harsh Click Forensics Affecting Publisher Incomes – Are you Affected in your CPC Earnings from Blogs Websites?

Advertising with BidVertiser – has typically given us better ROI. They varied from 20% to about 30% & the higher returns are for 2 reasons. They offer flexible & custom ad formats for publishers. These different format shapes of ad blocks allow publishers to place ads in ways that the standard IAB formats cannot work.

Moreover, Bidvertiser gives you $20 of ad credit in FREE clicks when you sign up.

Advertising with Adbrite has also been good. Typical returns with Adbrite ads had been from 10% – 25% in many cases, though the conversion rates with them had been comparatively less.

I would guess that the click through rates are higher because they allow publishers to put as many ads on any single page as the publishers want, increasing visibility. At the same time, the conversions are lowers because too many ads could be clouting the reader’s focus.

Our Advertising with Google Adwords had been on the poorer side. Click through rates had been low, around 5% or less & the conversion rates even lower. Of course, we had experimented with fixed price bids only with all the three.

Refer to earlier posts on how, as a publisher, we have been affected by poor returns from Google Adsense:

1. Adsense Revenue 2009 Continue to Drop – Balancing with Adsense Like Ads

2. Ineffective Google Ads Leads to Low Clicks Low Earnings – Google Adsense Alternatives

3. Major Problems with Google Adsense – Drastic Drop in Adsense Clicks & Earnings

4. Google Adsense Problems – Google Adsense Alternatives for Blogs

Looking to Social Media & Twitter for Better Advertising ROI.

We signed up with a new advertiser account with 3 popular Twitter advertising networks:

A. Magpie Network (also called the Be A Magpie network) – you can set you price, choose from the options of paying per tweet, or paying per view or paying per click & drive readers directly onto the campaign pages.

• Click Here to Advertise with Magpie.

B. Twittads Twitter advertising network – its a Social Media Affinity Network that connects Advertisers and Twitter users. Advertisers can reach internet users & mobile users at the same time.

• Click Here to Advertise with Twittads.

C. Sponsored Tweets for Direct Marketing Campaigns on Twitter – lets you set your own price & pays out on either views, clicks or conversions.

• Click Here to Advertise with Sponsored Tweets.

We have had successful targeting in our campaigns for a retail website (Top Discount Center). We found a few things that indicate to the effectiveness of advertising on Twitter:

1. Twitter Advertising is very quick – you set the message (or let the publisher create his / her message) in less than 140 characters & set your price. The Twitter advertising network selects the prospective publishers & sends them an offer & also takes care of approving the right one.

2. Twitter advertising is extremely targeted – the publishers are selected based on several criteria you provide. It could include the number of followers, the intensity of activities of the publisher’s Twitter account, the category (technology, shopping, family etc). This makes the tweets very effective.

3. Frequency of Tweets – depending on the performance of the tweets, you could decide to tweet your ad more than once, typically up to 3 times, increasing the potential of higher clicks.

In our tests, we got higher click through rates & a total ROI of over 600% in advertising on Twitter. Due to the better targeting, we have seen the conversion to click ratio to be higher than traditional advertising, almost as high as 45%.

You can sign up for free with Magpie Network , Twittads & Sponsored Tweets networks to begin your Twitter advertising campaigns now.

This is an absolute new system, so there isn’t much to write about how effective sponsored advertising tweets could be. They have been running sponsored tweets for a little over six months now and mostly in the areas of pay-per-click tweets.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

I have tried their beta system for over 2 months, mainly to experience how sponsored tweets work & if it could have a good potential of making money for the twitters. My choice had been the pay-per-click tweets & although I measured a large number of clicks, the earning had been less than $50.

Twitter has the potential to be a great marketing & branding channel, but I believe that marketers could beat this system to death. There has to be some control in how a sponsored advertising PPC system should work on Twitter. And we still don’t know how advertisers are measuring the validity of the clicks.

Click Here to Sign Up for Paid Sponsored Tweets.

As long as you have over 200 followers you are eligible to get sponsors. You set your own price and if the advertiser finds you credible enough, you will get an offer directly from the advertisers.

As for sharing the profit, you, as a tweeter, get to keep 50% and the system will retain another 50%. So if you are asking for $1.00 for a tweet, the sponsor has to pay out $2.00 to the marketing agency.

But then again, advertising on Twitter will get more complicated & competitive. So I would suggest that you register now & start experimenting. If nothing else, you would still get to learn how sponsored tweets work & if at all that could get you a handsome income in the future.

In addition to this, we have also made significant money from tweeting relevant ads & sponsored messages with these Twitter advertisers below. If you have a Twitter account, you can sign up for free with all & be on your way to making money from Twitter.

• Advertised Tweets – Click Here & Sign Up with Adly & Make Money tweeting messages on twitter
• Tweet Paid Ads – Click Here to Sign Up for Free with Twitter Ads & Make Money on Twitter
• Twitter Revenue – Click Here to Sign Up With Twitter Revenue & Make Money Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter is also a viral way to advertise. Read our experience on how we earned 600% advertising on Twitter here.

Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Probably the reason being they are still not sure how far Twitter would evolve & if they could make a revenue channel off these advertising tweets.

You can listen in to Biz by joining his 1,200,000+ followers on his Twitter.

Numerous advertisers are coming up with CPC Advertising for Twitter. Sponsored Tweets are already becoming common on twitter – much like any sponsorships, they pay the users a flat monthly fee to promote their company on Twitter.

I have not used Twitter for advertising yet (I have been making the mistake of ignoring Twitter & I have only been using it to re-post my blogs, mainly due to the lack of time!). I have heard from other marketers & bloggers that even though its easy to tweet ads on Twitter, the income is still very low.

As an example, someone with 5,000 active Twitter followers, a sponsored tweet is getting them slightly over $15 a day. That is peanut considering the fact that these are all 5,000 active followers. I would guess that marketers are still not sure of how to track the valid clicks.

For those who have been growing their followers list with the idea of affiliate marketing, Twitter could become a steady revenue earner. If not for people buying stuff right away, but definitely from CPC ads & sponsored ads.

You could follow me on Twitter for more such updates & articles & subscribe to my newsletter too.

Popular Money Making Tips on Pro Media Blog:

• Best Affiliate Programs for bloggers & online affiliate marketers
• Make Money from Blogs for a lot of tips on ways to monetize your blog
• Adsense Like Ads as Alternatives to Adsense to make money from blog ads
• Monetize all posts on your blog by Selling Text Links
• Best Chitika Shopping Ads for bloggers
• Top CPM CPA CPC Advertisers to make your choice on the various ad networks to choose from to monetize your blog
• More Shopping Ad Networks to monetize your blog
• 3 Places to Invest Money for Building a Business Blog
• Writing Paid Posts & Getting Paid to Review Products lists 6 of the best sponsored post networks
• Top Tools to Increase Blog Earning on all tools to maximize your blog revenue
• Tips to Monetize Images & Videos for all pictures on your blogs & especially if you run photo blogs

These are some of the popular posts on ProMediaBlog. My readers have found them useful & have wanted me to write more of these tips in the coming days. There are a lot more to come & I will again publish a similar summary next quarter.

This is only a few of some of the advertisers we have had great experience with. In various phases they have helped us achieve quite a few milestones.

• increase awareness about our websites & blogs within international blogging communities
• build buzz around our product launches for our product related sites
• general all round advertising
• increase sales
• increase website registrations & sign-ups
• increase our search engine ranking with effective advertising

We advertise year round as a part of our marketing strategy. our networks allow us to plan out an affordable annual ad budget & monitor our spends & ad effectiveness.

• How seriously do you plan your advertising?
• How frequently do you run campaigns?
• What percentage of your blog earning do you budget for advertising?

Our Google Adsense ad revenues have been affected negatively from March 2009. I reported out that there were severe drop in ad clicks-through-rates on all our sites. On further analysis I found out that Google was not serving contextually relevant ads.

What were the Problems With Google Adsense that Caused a drop in Adsense Revenue?

Problem 1 – Low Cost Per Click – due to a poor economy advertisers had cut down on their ad budgets. This in turn caused the cost per click to go down drastically. In some cased we noticed that the drop was as big as 90% (i.e. if each click were giving $100 earlier, now they were giving only $10)

Problem 2 – Irrelevant Ads – the Adsense revenue drop was mainly due to Ineffective Google Ads that had nothing to do with the content! And over 60% of the time Google were promoting its own products like Google Chrome or Picasa etc. These products are so common & so widely used that unless you are a newbie to the internet, these ads will not attract your attention.

What were the solutions?

Solution 1 – Replaced Google Adsense with Adsense like Ads - we balanced out income quickly by using other Adsense like Ads. The effect was almost instantaneous.We replaced Google Ads with other contextual ads.

Solution 2 – Improved Content – we looked deep into the contents & found out that there were many ways to make the content richer. We made changes to a large number of our posts & improved the content.

Solution 3 – Started Long Tail Selling – we signed up with a couple of new affiliate programs that are well known for their success in long tail products. In these products the commission per sale was less but there were high volume of sales that made up for our blog earnings.

Solution 4 – Miscellaneous Improvements – we also tuned our themes & made ad filters stronger to make the ads as relevant & contextual as possible. Using proper ad filters also eliminated common products from being advertised & hence increasing the click-through-rates.

Which Top 3 Advertisers Did Well in the Poor Economy?

• Ad Brite including Ads for Videos & Pictures
• Widget Bucks
• Chitika including Premium Ads & Search Ads

Which Affiliate Programs Provided the Products that are Selling Well in the Poor Economy?

• Never Blue Affiliate Programs for all new products & pricing
• Click Bank even though the lead time to make money was higher, the returns are fantastic

What has been your experience with Google Adsense in the first half of 2009?

How did you balance your revenues?

Which Advertisers were your Top Performing in the first half of 2009?

The challenges of email marketing are also too many. In my earlier post on Email Marketing Trends – Right Email Marketing for Blogging Business, I wrote about the technical & logistic challenges that need to be overcome.

I have worked with a lot of these email marketing agencies & have experimented with a lot of them. There are several good ones out there. But if asked to recommend a few, especially for new bloggers, my suggestions would be:

• iContact – Sign up today for a 15 day free trial. Try iContact now!
• Constant Contact – Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact make it easy to connect with your customers. Try it FREE for 60-Days.
• Sign Up with AWeber – the favorite email marketing system of all bloggers

You could sign up with any of them without thinking twice. They all offer:

• extremely affordable & flexible billing plans based on the volume of your subscribers – as your subscriber list grows (and you earn more money) you can pay out more to these agencies
• very customizable emails in professional layouts (templates)
• customizable responders
• customizable content – could be aggregation of your posts, or custom text or both
• you define the frequency of emails depending on your campaigns
• ability to run campaigns & measure the effectiveness
• no long term contracts
• so many other advantages

However, the most important factor is that they employ superior technology & constantly upgrade their technology so that they do not get filtered out as junk, or worse, get tagged as spam. They have higher deliverability (ability to reach the recipient’s Inbox without being filtered as spam or junk) rate in the industry & that is solely because of their technology & reputation.

As I had mentioned in my earlier article, changing email marketing agency in the middle of your program is a big risk. Although it is technically possible to move your subscriber list from one host to another, it results in loss of a lot of your confirmed subscribers.

So, while I give my recommendations because I have used them in my blogging business, I suggest that you do your research before you sign up with any of them.

BrightRoll believes that the new pricing models based on CPE & CPV will offer more efficiency, flexibility & value for money to the advertisers. BrightRoll handles large customers, who include Wal-Mart, Visa, Sony and Warner Brothers among others.

You can read the Yahoo report on BrightRoll Announces CPE, CPV and CPC ‘Performance Pricing’: Breakthrough Model for Online Video Advertising.

In the CPV model advertisers only pay if the viewer watches the entire clip to completion. CPV implies Cost Per Completed Video (CPV) where the cost is based on successful user-initiated video completion.

Advertisers have also been testing pricing models based on Cost Per Engagement” or CPE, under which they only pay when the viewer interacts somehow with the ad — playing a game, taking a poll, rolling over an ad unit for a specified amount of time, or taking a product tour. In short, Cost Per Engagement (CPE) implies the cost per each user-initiated video engagement or start.

• Ineffective Google Ads Leads to Low Clicks Low Earnings – Google Adsense Alternatives
• Major Problems with Google Adsense – Drastic Drop in Adsense Clicks & Earnings
• Google Adsense Problems – Google Adsense Alternatives for Blogs

Although Google continues to give very poor Adsense earnings, I have balanced it well with numerous other Google Adsense Alternatives to boost my online income.

A recent news in the Forbes talks about the improving scenarios in online advertising spends. The article reports that a Pubmatic study shows that online ad prices are on the rise. The report says that the prices of banners & ad boxes sold by third party ad networks increased by over 35% over the same period in 2008.

The reason for the decline in the ad prices in 2008? Quoting the article:

The explosion in popularity of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace was largely behind last year’s decline in ad prices. Those sites introduced vast new amounts of ad inventory into the digital marketing business, depressing prices for ads sold by nearly all types of publishers.

MySpace, Facebook and such other social sites are not going anywhere & some have firm plans to sell ads on their sites as well. Twitter also reported that they are also finalizing their plans & infrastructure to monetize the site.

Given that these social networking sites are the new hot spots for advertisers, will small online publishers & bloggers see an increase in their inventory prices too? Advertising agencies are also improving their technologies to match up web surfers with the right ads – Google has introduced a new technology in which Google uses the DoubleClick DART cookie on publisher websites displaying AdSense for content ads.

These will help agencies serve more relevant ads, not only to the context but also to align to the web surfer’s behavior. Although bloggers have not yet reported any major improvements in either the click-through-rates or the blog ad earning, these moves by the agencies seem to be in the right direction that will eventually help online publishers & bloggers.

I would like to hear your comments on this:

• have you seen growth or decline in your blog ad earnings in the first half of 2009?
• have you tried any of the alternatives to Google Adsense to increase your income?

Depending on what your blog marketing strategy is, here is a list of 11 Essential Blog Marketing Tool that you will find immensely helpful to grow your online blog business.

1. Professional Business Cards – this is one of the most essential marketing tools for anyone. Get professionally made business cards with your logo & catch phrase.

• Click Here to create MOO Business Cards, MiniCards and Postcards – Create unique Business Cards and Stickers to help your business stand out!
• Click Here to get discounted Business Cards from Overnight Prints

2. Web Based Custom Surveys from Blogs – create a lot of user interaction & get readers’ feedback through polls & visitor surveys. Get professional surveys customized to your blog done by Creating custom web-based surveys and get rapid results! Create custom web-based surveys and get rapid results!

• Click here to Sign up for custom marketing surveys for your blogs
• Click Here to Build your Business with Online Surveys from Constant Contact & FREE 60-Day Trial

3. Print Professional Brochures, Flyers & Marketing materials – You can create & distribute various marketing materials from time to time. Many bloggers use such material as promotional materials to keep in touch with potential clients & dedicated readers.

• Click here to create marketing brochures, flyers, newsletters & postcards
• Click Here to get discounted Brochures & marketing tools from Overnight Prints
• Click Here to Save up to 90% & get FREE Shipping on all Marketing Products

4. Create Large Marketing Posters – these are absolute essential marketing tools especially for marketing & blogging events. Pro Bloggers & network bloggers have their logos & messages printed in large formats for distribution at kiosks & stalls.

• Click Here to Print Your Photos, Logos & Messages Extra Large!

5. Design Professional Logo for Your Online Brand – a Logo is essential to create a unique brand identity. There are numerous sites & sevices that provide free logos, but none of them are unique. You need to employ professionals who can understand your themes, the specific audience & create a custom logo.

• Click Here to Design Custom Business Logo

6. Email Marketing Services for Blogs – email marketing is an essential tool to succeed in the business of blogging. It helps you to be in constant contact with your readers, subscribers & use your affiliate products to recommend sales to your email subscribers.

• Click Here to Sign up Today for a 15 Day Free Trial with Email & Subscription Marketing
• Click Here to Build your business with Email Marketing from Constant Contact & get FREE 60-Day Trial

These are some of the essential blog marketing tools that every professional blogger have used over time to build their own brand, market their blogging business on the internet as well as in various marketing forums & meets.

If you want to share any other technique & marketing tool that you have used for marketing your blogs, please share it with our readers here.

Many personal photo websites & photo blogs only show pictures without any text apart from the basics, like photo description, name of photographer etc.

Ad Brite specializes on photo blogs & photo websites. Ad Brite allows you to monetize images & pictures by showing ads on the pictures themselves.

Click Here to Sign Up with Ad Brite for Free & Earn from Your Pictures.

Here is an example of how the Ads work on Pictures.

These photo ads can be used on any & every picture on your own blog or photo website. Once you Sign Up for Image Ads, you will be given a piece of code. All you need to do is to use the given <code> in place of the <img> image tages for the images.

Along with that, it also lets you add your own watermark on the images automatically. You do not have to use any of the digital imaging software to add your logo, but the given <code> will let you add your own logo or watermark to copy protect your picture.

So if you have a photo blog, or have large number pictures on your website or blog, you can easily Monetize your Pictures & Images with Ad Brite.

I have used high paying CPM based banner ads on many of my websites & they have yielded better returns than click ads. The reason I differ with Dan’s statement is that in various situations bloggers can get more from banner ads than CPC based click ads.

• CPM based Banner ads are good if you are starting new, when you have a new website & you do not have as many visitors as you should have to give an acceptable earning from clicks. CPM based banner ads will still earn you a bare minimum to begin with.

• CPM based banner ads are often not contextual & hence if you are writing general topics with no specific focal points, CPM based banner ads are likely to give you better earnings than CPC based click ads. For example, if you are wiring stories, fiction, or something personal from your life, CPM based banner ads are better options than CPC based click ads.

• Many CPM based ad providers, like Ad Brite, provide you the option of setting your own price per thousand impressions. They provide you suggestions on what prices you could set for showing ads on your site, but you can set your own price which could be different from the suggested CPM price.

• Since CPM based ads are non contextual, most of the CPM based banner advertisers are non-exclusive. It means that you can sign up with as many advertisers you want & even have them  compete for a spot on your blog or website. This gives you the maximum income for your ad spot.

• If the number of daily impressions of your website is extremely high, say over 100,000 a day, a CPM based banner ad will surely earn you more ad revenue than CPC based click ads. Since every impression counts, your earning will be proportional to the number of unique visitors you get in a month for each of the CPM based banner ads.

Advertisers like Chitika are ahead of the advertising game. They have launched numerous ad formats to suit your blog theme design & website layouts. Moreover, their ad effectiveness, as Dan’s article also points out, is targeted towards the more focused search visitors.

• You can Click Here to Sign Up with Chitika.
• You can Click Here to Sign Up with Adbrite.

Read more on our recommendations of the best ad networks for new bloggers.

In this short performance review of blog advertising networks, we have evaluated the top 5 that we have used to advertise our blogs & websites.

The key features of all these ad networks that are essential for success to new bloggers are:

• free to sign up & start advertising in minutes – many offer promotional discounts for new advertisers
• strong reputed network of blogs & websites
• innovative advertising tools & techniques
• easy analytic reporting & fast payment
• supporting blogs & newsletters to help you perform better
• good ROI for advertising spent
• perfectly suitable for new & experienced bloggers

Before you begin advertising, we recommend that you chart out an expense plan spanning 6 months to 12 months. Advertising is a long drawn effort and you can see the benefits of advertising with a good reputed network only after a period of 12 months or more.

Read our articles on Google Adsense alternatives & all the ways to monetize blogs.

Very quickly we realized that Widget Bucks have started to earn us more money than most other shopping ad networks. Read the details on using Widget Bucks to make more money from blogs.
Click Here to Sign Up for Widget Bucks Ad Network & start making more money from blogs.

There are several reasons why we would recommend this blog ad network:

• extremely suitable for product advertising
• professional & eye-catching layout & display within all the IAB approved formats
• highly contextual product ads leading to high conversions
• very high CPM & CPC rates per ad
• international clicks are allowed which increases your chances of making more money from any visitor across the globe
• payment on time, every time
• easy to use reporting format to help you identify which all ads are making more money from you
• great referral program to earn residual income for life
• 3 distinct ad channels – technology products, local businesses & travel – all three are extremely popular within internet visitors

We have almost doubled our ad revenues when we started to focus on blog ad networks apart from Google Adsense. Moreover, Widget Bucks can be used along with any other ad network. You can also optimize your blog space by using competitive ad networks against them – so that the one with the maximum bid gets to show their ads on your blogs.

Click Here to Sign Up for Widget Bucks Ad Network.

In a recent change Google has introduced Ads or Sponsored links within the search suggestion box, while getting rid of the drop down that showed how many results are available.

This change does not have much benefit to the publishers yet. Google has not mentioned whether similar ads would also appear in Custom Google Searches that many publishers use.

However, it will be a benefit to advertisers – they would show up in the search box, while the user is typing their search query. The picture shows how Pontiac ad could show up while the user is typing in GT8.

This is one of the 4 changes that Google is rolling out on Google Suggest. Just when we thought that there may not be any further options to make money from the Search page, Google found a way to introduce paid ads in search boxes as well.

Meanwhile, Google advertising revenues hav not gone up since my earlier reports. The alternative ads that are doing extremely well are:

• Widget Bucks – they have improved their advertising banners & made them more attractive & informative.  They have also introduced local business  & travel channels over their usual high performing shopping ads. Click Here to Join Widget Bucks now & Start Earning Money from Blogs.
• Chitika Premium Ads – this continues to give me very high returns. The products advertised are top of the line popular products & the earning per click is also very high, sometimes over a dollar for a click. This is much higher than any of Google’s ad earnings by any means. Moreover, they have also refined their search boxes making it easier to make money from them. Click Here to Join Chitika Premium Network for Bloggers & Online Publishers & Make Money from Blog Ads.

In case you are a new or advanced blogger who make money from multiple ads from your blog, this is a great theme to help you earn more. We, though, recommend that you use the theme judiciously & keep your primary focus on creating great content.

You can read the details of the multiple ads Wordpress theme on the Wordpress Pro Ad Theme page.

The theme takes less than 5 minutes to set up & all you need to do is to add your advertising codes into the theme. If you need help with finding great blog advertisers, you can read our post on 15 Ways to Make Money from Blogs & sign up with the advertisers.

The Pro Ad Theme is modular in nature, allowing you to show as many or as few ads in any place as you want. Users have also commented that the Pro Ad Theme is also a great multi ad theme for bloggers to experiment with ad placements.

The Pro Ad multiple ads theme shows all the high paying ad format – multiple leader board formats, multiple rectangle formats, the multiple skyscraper formats & half banner formats. You could experiment with the best placements as well as the best ad formats that will work for you.

You can see a live demo & download the Wordpress multiple ads Pro Ad Theme on the Wordpress Pro Ad Theme page.

The video ads saw a meteoric rise. Internet Advertising spend in the Digital video category shot up from $324 million in 2007 to $734 million in 2008. The Internet advertising in the United States grew to $23.4 billion in 2008.

You can read & download the PwC 2008 Internet Ad Spending Report from the IAB website. The report includes data reflecting online advertising revenues from Web sites, commercial online services, Email providers, as well as other companies selling online advertising.

According to the report, some ad formats are performing better than the others:

• Search advertising is holding up relatively well, at $10.5 billion for 2008, up 20%
• Display ads, the second-largest category, are suffering slower growth — up 8% to $7.6 billion in 2008

The chart below (courtesy Media Post) shows the distribution of the 4th quarter 2008 advertising formats & their performance.

According to reports in the NY Times & the Wall Street Journal for Internet Ads spending in 2008, a few other points worth noting, especially for bloggers who make money online from ads, internet affiliate business owners &

• Performance-based ads (CPA ads, Shopping ads etc) made up 57% of all Internet advertising in 2008, according to the report, up from 51% in 2007
• CPM ads performance fell to 39%, from 45%
• Sponsorship advertising, where publishers create custom pages and advertisements for brands, was less popular this year than last: it fell to 1% of all fourth-quarter revenue in 2008, down from 3% in 2007

The major spend in the internet advertising came from the consumer-packaged goods companies (CPG), rising to $1.5 billion in 2008, up from $925 million in 2007.

Market researcher eMarketer predicts that online-ad spending will grow 4.5%, to $24.5 billion, compared with a previous prediction of 8.9%.

The problem is two fold (a) A drastic drop in clicks & (b) the revenue per click has gone down, so much so that many clicks now pay less than a cent!

The combination of low click rates & the low earning per click has been quite devastating on most of the publishers.

From all the reports on the internet & various publisher forums, these problems with Google Adsense earnings have been happening for quite some time now, especially after Google started experimenting with diverse advertising models.

Balancing your advertising earning is one of the best ways to get through a situation where one of the advertising agencies fail. But Google Adsense have continued to provide extremely relevant contextual ads with a fair earning per click, for a long time. For many publishers Adsense has been the only source of making money from blogs.

I have also noticed a lot of Google’s proprietory products in Adsense ads nowadays. Google has been pushing Picasa, Google Docs, Google Checkout & Google Toolbar a lot more. Such ads had mostly been used as “backup ads” for situations where there were no contextually relevant ads.

If that were true, then the situation means that Google does not have enough advertisers to work with. The other reason could be the sad state of the economy, where many publishers & advertisers have either cut down on online ad budgets or are looking for alternative advertising (like CPA ads).

While Google has been a life changer for millions of online publishers helping them make millions of dollars from Blogs, they continue to have a very poor focus on their publishers. Without a proper help desk or a customer rep to address concerns or issues, Google remains completely shut in explaining their often absurd decisions.

In the most recent example, Aaron Greenspan, a long time Adsense publishers, won a legal battle with Google where his Adsense account was allegedly suspended without paying out his dues. Huffington Post mentions the struggle which every Adsense publisher may have to go through in some form or another, looking for some help from Google Adsense teams.

The issue in Aaron’s case was he was alleged to have been involved in “click fraud“, though Google had no logic or reason to convince the judge that it was true, or that Google has a fool proof way of detecting the frauds! That puts every publisher in risk of being banned from Adsense program by a mistake on Google’s part.

Here is a quick reference on Additional Advertisers that are great Google Adsense alternatives:

• Adsense Alternatives
• Make Money From Blogs
• PPC CPM CPA Advertisers
• CPM CPC CPA Advertiser
• Sign Up for Best Shopping Ads

This is nothing new to publishers, but lately Google has been quite non-responsive to these publishers’ issues. Last year Google announced that in it’s reponse to publisher’s concerns regarding Adsense, it was launching the list of known issues with Adsense.

But it is clear that Google engineers did not wish to keep the publishers updated on all the issues. The page now displays no information on the immense delays on reporting Google Adsense stats, Adsense earning issues etc.

While in a post on Webmaterworld forum Google announced a site maintenance. I may have missed the email from Google, but I cannot recall them announcing that maintenance either. While I would still tend to believe when Google says that “all clicks will be tracked & no Adsense earnings will be lost” during the periods when Google Adsense faces these issues, several reports from individual publishers point otherwise.

A report on incorrect Google Adsense clicks from Pinoy Money Talks raises the concerns that even the clicks may not be tracked correctly. Publishers have no way of writing to Google & getting some prompt response either. This hard attitude from Google is making it difficult for many bloggers to keep depending on Google Adsense as their sole means to make money online.

I have personally faced these issues with Google Adsense on & often. But I always had a great Adsense back-up plan in case I run into issues with Google. Especially in a bad economy, publishers need to balance income from blogging effectively.

Since blog advertising still remain one of the most popular ways to make money from blogs, I have focused equally on other ad agencies apart from Google Adsense. And so goes my suggestion to anyone who wants to build their income from blogs.

You can either depend completely on Google & hope that they are doing the best to help publishers & advertisers with effective advertising & profiting from blog ads, you have no way of convincing yourself that it is always true.

Refer to my detailed article on All the Ways to Make Money from Blogging, Google Adsense alternatives & some of the popular Shopping Ad systems for blogs.

In fact, there is a Twitter Political Widget that shows Capitol updates on Twitter. Called Capitol Tweets, it shows the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter. The Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Tweets widget updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress.

A recent post on how Twitter is used for Business refers a market study that shows Twitter is used as a business-to-business marketing platform, alongside its emerging utility for consumer marketing. The article highlights the social media consultant Rodney Rumford’s views on Twitter being used for business.

1. small businesses are using Twitter to advertise
2. marketers use Twitter for reaching out to customers with promotional messages
3. get feedback on ad campaigns
4. track consumer behavior & customer sentiments by following Twitter conversations
5. promote press releases

Twitter has been used for advertising for Small Business. But if done the wrong way, wrong Twitter use could hurt your brand & your business as well. Here are some innovative thoughts how using Twitter to help grow your business & build your brand.

• invite your email contacts to start using Twitter, then add them as followers. This grows your Twitter followers immediately. It is just not important to have followers – it is only important to have the right followers
• request your friends to Re-Tweet your posts in their networks causing a viral effect. You can also request your followers to get more followers. You can also get into arrangements with other Twitter users to help promote yourselves mutually
• run a social campaign on Twitter to create a buzz. Social campaigns get a lot of attention & you will also be associating yourself with a good cause
• start using your Twitter URL in your email signature & business cards
• join conversations related to your business. You can use Twitter Search to find out similar businesses
• put a business logo on your Twitter profile
• help promote your Twitter followers by using a Twitter widget. Widgetbox has a free Twitter widget for your website & blogs for download

You could follow Pro Media Blog on Twitter for more interesting updates on setting up & running a profitable online business.

You have to do your homework well before you advertise on blogs. From my personal experience I look into 5 important aspects. You can form your own selection criteria, but knowing these could help you make a more informed choice.

Before I go into the criteria, here are the 2 reasons why I am so serious about blog advertising:

• Blog Advertising has a viral effect – if you are able to choose your blogs right, within a strong & a network of people who are held in high respect among the blogging community, you are more likely to be referred from one blog to another. This viral effect could help you get new & serious visitors very fast.
• Generate back links – back links are very important when you are planning for a good SEO strategy. A recent article why back links are important for SEO shows that it helps to improve the Page Rank & the search positions.

So what do I look for in blogs when you think of Blog Advertising?

• the credibility of the blog in terms of its content – I personally follow the blog for sometime, reading every post, reading the comments to see how serious it’s readers are & then form my opinions on whether to advertise or not
• the credibility of the author – I do my research on social networking sites, Google the name to know about the author & read as much of the author’s work as possible. I try to identify if the author has been through the same phases of blogging as I. And only when I find the resemblance, I become confident that the readers would likely be my readers too
• the blog statistics – this is commonly available from Compete or any similar data source. The few statistics that I look for are the (a) daily visitors (b) average page loads (c) number of comments left by readers (d) the average time readers spend on the pages & (e) the frequency with which the blog is updated
• the blog design & the advertising that shows up on the blogs – if the blog is too crowded by ads, I would rather not show my ad. The type of ads are also important – whether it shows more affiliate ads that are currently in demand, or is it too niche for my blog
• whether the blog allows other reputed bloggers to post or whether it is a personal blog – very often popular blogs allow other members of its network to publish on that blog, while others maintain a solo performance. Both have their own advantages & disadvantages but the fact that a blog is open to publications from its members attract me more simply because they always have influence over a bigger audience

I often write to the owner for discounts & in case there are no advertising at all, I have also written to find out the author’s thought on allowing me to show a sponsored ads. They have often worked out well for me, getting me information that was not available anywhere else.

The Business Week article focuses on six areas that a serious business owner should focus upon to get the maximum value in marketing their business. However, there is another definite area that I would like to highlight.

Micro-conversation or micro-blogging, as many of these services promote, is the next generation tool for collaboration & interaction. There are large sections of serious business owners who use any of these Web 2.0 online networking tools day in & day out. Google for one has been trying to understand these 140 letter conversations to display contextual ads.

GMail & Hotmail shows relevant ads on any of their pages. If you have noticed, the ads are fairly relevant to the texts that show up on any of these pages. There have been great improvements in finding more contextual ad logic.

Advertising on Social Media websites & tools are still not so popular yet. Facebook for one is encouraging people to show their ads on Facebook pages by enticing them with $25 free credits. Many of the business owners who have paid for ads on similar Web 2.0 Social Networking tools, have mixed results.

We have released a great new feature from Pro Media Blog that you can add to any blog or website & show customized popup ads.

The package is so simple & customizable that you can show any type of ads, in any number, in various options with this Custom Pop Up Ad builder.

Although popup ads earn more money for the publisher, people often hesitate to show them because the ad’s cannot be controlled. Very often the ads are sourced poorly and they crash browsers or open up so many browsers that the user has to shut down the computer.

Now, with the custom popup ad builder you can completely customize the popup ads you show in a pop-up window. You can also combine your own text along with the popup ad so as not to violate any of the advertiser’s policies.

A demo of the custom pop up ad builder & the complete list of features are listed on the Custom Pop Ad builder page.

The key features of the custom pop-up ad builder are:

• add the feature to any sort of website – a blog, a standard website or even a portal
• customize the color theme to match your website or blog’s theme
• customize the shape & size of the popup box
• show as many ads as you wish, you can embed the ad code you want into the popup box
• add text around the ads or add any other images along with the ads
• customize features like how long to show the ads, where all to show the ads

The Custom Pop Ad builder is a great tool for any internet business owners, MLM business owners or for anyone who wishes to have control over the pop ad blocks.

The pop-up box can also be used for purposes other than just showing ads. It can be used to show some new features or new product released, or pop a window with your newsletter sign up information!

Although various MLM business have their own rules, the most that I have come across, is a simple landing page with a Pitch at the beginning, ending in an effort to sell.

I have not seen many MLM business owners even trying to show Google PPC ads to supplement their MLM income. There could be various reasons for that, including the MLM rules & regulations, as well as restrictions by many advertisers to show their ads on MLM sales pages.

Let us look at some of the popular internet PPC advertising companies & see what their policies are towards MLM sites.

Google: The Google Adsense Policies do not restrict any publisher from showing Google PPC or Google Image ads on MLM websites. However, Google mentions that ads from other companies – be it MLM company or any other source, should not be displayed in a way to confuse the reader that such ads are also from Google.

Although ability to combine Google ads with others could result in better earnings from ads for sure, Google policy does not talk specifically about CPM betting on Adsense ads. However, Google does say that the ads cannot appear on a pop up window but should always be on the main page.

Most of the ad servers do allow for Google Adsense to compete for CPM. Ad brite for example. It is one of the best ad servers for new bloggers & allows you to bid Google Adsense with other competing ads.

Google ads can be placed on any website as long as the site runs on the given Google Adsense rules of advertising. You can show MLM ads or other CPC, CPM & CPA ads along with Google Ads on your MLM & business websites.

Though there is no empirical formula to decide that, the are various ways to figure out what works for you.

In the context of new bloggers, people who have just started seriously to make money on the internet, the answer is quite simple. I will tell you from my experience what has worked for mein making money from ads  & what has not!

Let’s look at the payouts of each of these ad types:

CPC Ads pay per click. If anyone clicks on the ads shown on your website, you get to make some money. The payout depends on the rates set by the advertiser – it could be as low as 1 cent per click to as high as US$ 1.50 per click. I have seen both the extremes.

When I was advertising, very often I had to payout as high as 70 cents an average for some keywords, while in general my CPC payout varied from about 20 cents to 30 cents per click!

CPM Ads pay per 1000 visits. In some cases, advertisers pay only for unique visits, which in some, advertisers pay per 1000 page loads. What that means for Unique Visits is, if you have a visitor who sees one page of your website & goes away, the advertiser who showed their CPM ad on that page will pay you by the CPM rate for 1 impression. If the visitor visited 10 pages & the same advertisement showed up 10 times, the advertiser will still pay for only 1 visit.

When the advertiser is paying for page loads, then you get paid by the advertiser every time your page shows up & their ad is shown. In order to avoid malpractices, various ad agencies have rules as to make sure that the visitor is genuinely interested in your page. Google only pays for CPM after analysing Time on Page, Bounce Rate & other parameters. You can read the details of all the important parameters on the Google’s page.

CPA Ads pay per action. CPA ads result in the advertiser getting what they desired. Some ask for email IDs, some ask for contact numbers whicle some ask for a credit card number. The action depends on the advertiser. But for the publisher, any time a visitor clicks on a CPA ad & completes a set of actions like the ones I mentioned, the advertiser pays out a referral amount.

CPA advertisers do not care if you have low hit rates, or even if your pages are very popular. You get to make as much money as your visitors do the actions that the advertisers wants. The payouts on CPA ads vary from about a dollar to over US $100 per action depending on what the advertiser is trying to sell.

Now lets look at which of the above advertisers logically make sense for new bloggers.

CPM Ad earnings:

• if your website or blog is new & you have only a few hundred visitors a day, that is like having about 5000 – 6000 page loads a month, even with the best CPM rates, you can only make a couple of bucks a month. Lesser monthly page views would result in even lesser CPM earnings
• if you webaite or blog is fairly old & has over 20,000 page views a month, with at least about 10,000 unique page views a month, you can fairly make close to about US $100 a month from the CPM ads

CPC Ad earnings:

• if your website or blog has the correct search keyword you have a very high possibility of making a few hundred dollars a month, even with page views between 5,000 to 10,000 a month. CPC earnings depend on how good your content is, how well your page shows up on the searched keywords & where your ads are placed
• the earning I mentioned above can vary depending on the relevance of the ads shown. Some advertisers provide very contextual ads whicle some dont. I have assumed that the ads shown on your pages are very relevant to the page’s content

CPA Ad earnings:

• you can safely assume an earning of a couple of dollars from CPA ads, unless your blog is very reputed & visitors can trust you.  Generally, free giveaway ads tend to get more attention & the users often do not mind giving out their email addresses for something free
• serious CPA ads often payout well over US $100. These ads however require visitors to buy something, or requires visitors to pay some money. For a new blog, the chances are low that the reader could trust your lead & spend a large sum of money on a product that you are referring

In summary, for a new blogger, the CPC ads make more sense & could make you a few hundred dollars every month. The important aspects in all these 3 ad channels are:

• the quality of your website – the value the reader finds on your blog page. When the readers see a lot of value on your page, they are likely to stay longer & explore
• the quality of ads served – the advertiser should have the ability to understand your content & provide relevant ads. You have to choose your advertisers well. Refer to the list of some of the best CPC CPA & CPM advertisers
• the design of your blog – this lets you show ads of the right formats, in the right places & should not distract the serious readers. Pro Media Blog has a lot of great themes that are designed especially for people who want to show ads & make money

Since no one apart from the core Google team members who designed the search algorithm (that includes the owners Sergey Brin & Larry Page), knows how Google could devalue your website, there is not much information for people who display Google ads to be sure that they will not be penalized.

So, it is in your best interest that you have backup advertising revenue plans.

There are quite a few advertisers that are very profitable for new bloggers. You could choose from CPC or CPM based advertising or you could go in for the higher paying shopping ads.

Choose the advertisers that:

• is easy to work with
• is transparent to tell you their business model & revenue sharing process
• has a forum or a help desk number that you can call for help
• pays you on time
• lets you know in advance if there are any changes to the payment schedules & advertising rules

Google is too big a company to look into the interest of the new bloggers. If you have noted, even when you are buying advertising through Adwords, Google will not provide you with a helpdesk number.

Anyone who is using Adwords & have faced problems have to communicate with AdSense Administrators via email – which is responded by an automatic email. Individuals & small business owners who have build their ad plans around Google are now stuck!

In one of my personal experience, Google started using up all my AdWords budget in non-US traffic. I found out that Google was giving my websites a high rank in searches that were originating outside US, whereas my content was specifically for the US readers!

Surprisingly, on US searches, Google was ranking my pages very low & was charging me over $ 1.50 at times for a single click. No individual or small business owner can survive that high CPC rate.

I suggest that when you build your ad revenue plan, look out for backups other than Google. That would help you keep earning even if Google decides to ignore you completely. My suggestion is backed by a lot of successful bloggers who have generated more revenue from smaller advertisers & affiliate marketing & never really bothered to advertise Google at all.

In layman’s language, click fraud occurs when people who are not interested in your product or services, click on your ads and run you out of your money.

Big advertising companies like Google, spend a lot of money in veryfying any click frauds. They do it through intelligent systems as well as having real people look into suspicious ad-clicks.

For a small business organization & new bloggers who has a small advertising budget,  Statcounter provides an easy way to detect & report unusual clicks on their advertisements. By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages you could see the IP addresses, location & frequency of visits of the clickers.

Competitors often click ads to run their competition out of the advertising budget. Every time they click on your Google ad, for example, you pay them a small amount from your ad money. So the more they click, the faster your ad budget runs out.

Since your competitors were clicking on your ads with the intent of consuming your advertising money only, none of those clicks result in any sale or leads. The advertiser simply spend their money on false visitors.

Many times, website publishers who are showing your ads, often click on the ads on their own websites to earn money. Since website owners earn money when anyone who clicks ads on their website, such fraud publishers earn money at your cost, while you do not get a true visitor.

There are few simple ways that a website hit counter could help publishers detect click fraud:

• Multiple entries from the same IP – the site counter tracks IPs. If you see the same IP repeatedly coming to your website in short spans of time, it could mean a click fraud
• Same Redirecting URL – hit counters show the URL which a visitor has clicked to come to your website. If any of these URLs are the advertising URL & show up repeatedly on your hit counter, you could suspect a click fraud
• High Hits from Specific countries – StatCounter analyzed click fraud reports. It suggests that many  third party Click Fraud operations are located in countries such as India, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania and Russia. If you see repeated access from any of these countries, it could be due to click frauds

Although you cannot stop click fraud completely, if you suspect click frauds, you could take the following steps to control click fraud:

1. report the activities to the advertising agencies – Google for example, suspends the accounts of all fraudulent webmasters
2. report click fraud to DMCA - reporting the fraudulent website owners to the hosting DMCA office often results in the suspension of the websites. However, government of many countries like India, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania and Russia are never able to enforce copyright laws in these regions
3. elminate certain countries from seeing your ads – with Google & good ad agencies you can choose where to show your ad & where not to. Geo specific advertising would lower your chances of leads & sales but could save you from losing money on click frauds

New Bloggers

Blogging could be very rewarding for people who want to earn money on the internet. Especially when the investment is practically zero! All it requires is about a couple of hours of dedicate writing a day.

There are so many articles on this subject that it could easily confuse the new blogger. I have created a very short list of proven tools that are essential for new bloggers.

• Choose the Right Blogging Platform – Wordpress & Google Blogger are the most popular ones. Google Blogspot will allow you to show ads so that you can make money for free.My personal choice is WordPress, simply because it is an open-source program & you can easily host your own blog if you want to. That apart, WordPress has a great blogger community who constantly deliver high quality themes & plugins that improve your blog’s performance.You can even opt for other networks like Media Cubs where you get a free blog with ads & you can make lots of money by displaying ads & affiliate sales. It is a new group & has a lot of focus on quality & content.
• Choose the Right Blog Content – What I mean by “right” is that you should have enough confidence on the content. It should be original & add some value to the reader.One way is to choose a niche content where you have your own expertise. The other is to keep the content slightly general so that you can also benefit from expertise in related areas.
• Choose a Great Blog Theme (or template) for your blog – Themes are very important to your success. Themes with Professional look & feel gives readers the confidence & the comfort. It also enables proper SEO & should be favorable to building your Website Page Rank.Pro Media Blog has a lot of Free WordPress Themes for Advertising. They are carefully designed or modified from popular themes & are search engine optimized. However, as I have mentioned several times before, it is not the ads that earn you money. It is the great content that makes the ads successful.
• Have the Right Blog Plugins – Plugins are small programs that have to be installed separately to your blog. The Best WordPress Plugins could add a lot of value to your blog. My suggestion is to use only the essential plugins – they are few & easy to maintain.Since most of the best plugins are free & created by part-time programmers, you may not have a life long support for them. So keep them few & choose only the best plugins.
• Sign Up with the Best Advertisers – There are hundreds of advertisers, but only a few are worth focusing upon. You can choose from CPC CPA CPM advertisers & also from Shopping Advertisers.Before you sign-up with any advertising agency, do your own research on how much they pay out, whether the payouts to publishers are consistent & what other publishers talk about the quality of the ads.Many of the advertisers increase the payment with higher number of clicks. So as your blog becomes more & more popular, advertisers tend to pay you more for the same number of clicks.

If you still need more ideas & suggestions on any of the above topics, do a quick search on this website. If you are still looking for answers to a specific question, send us an email.

A Peel Ad is usually shown when a website visitor moves the cursor over a specific corner of a web page that shows the ad beneath.

AdToll is a great advertising solution for new & advanced publishers. As always, ads can only be helpful if your content is great & the ads are contextual.

Sign up for free and Give AdToll a go with high earning Peel Away Ads.

A Peel Away Ad is a new technology that provides a different and innovative method to advertising. A peel appears on the top right hand side of a web site and when the mouse moves over it the peel opens smoothly to reveal the advert within.

AdToll Sells Peel Away Ads On Your Site And You can Make Money. This unique method of Peel Away advertising has it’s advantages:

• Make use of the corner of a web site which is commonly not used.
• It is non intrusive to the web site visitor.
• Only uses a small amount of space when folded away making efficient use of web site real estate.
• It is a new ad format arousing user interest resulting in more clicks.
• Completely customizable to your website or blog.
• Ability to set your own price & offer discounts to long term advertisers.
• Choose which all ad categories to show & which ones not to.
• Different formats of ads along with Peel Ads.

The set up is easy – you can install the Javascript code on any blog either in the php template files or as a widget content. No matter where you place the code, the Peel Away ad will show on the top right corner of your web page.

You do not need any plugin or any extra codes to run Peel Away ads on WordPress or Blogger blogs. As long as the themes support widgets, you can create a Text widget on Wordpress or Blogger & add the Peel Ad code to start earning money from Peel Away ads.

As a Publisher you can easily use Peel Away Ads on your site. You can book fixed price Sponsored Ads on specific Publisher sites or you can book a Run of Network campaign priced on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis.

Advertising could become very expensive if you are not doing it right. Assuming that you do not have a team of 10 people managing your ad-spaces, you have to choose your advertisers carefully.

I have tried using Google Adwords for a long time. But I have faced a number of problems with Google Adwords as a newbie to sell advertising on my blogs.

For one, since no one but Google alone knows how the Search Engine really works, most of the knowledge available is fairly hypothetical, or a good feel from individual’s past experience of what is happening inside Search Engines.

Secondly, if you do not have a strategy & high focus on Adword spending, you will either not see the results or you will be spending more on Google than you should.

Thirdly, many times advertising could bring in a visitor but they may not be the right visitor for you. As an example, click frauds by competitors on your ads could bring people onto your website who has no interest in your content. So you do not get to gather followers.

For the new bloggers or new web masters, free advertising are available. I have listed 3 of the best free advertising options available that can advertise your websites & bring in some visitors for free.

1. A professional advertiser like Ad brite realized the need for new bloggers to advertise for free. They launched Spott, a free advertising network that shows one publisher’s ad on another publishers blog without any fee. Since the ads are shown in blogs within the network, the exposure is fairly decent. In fact, with Spott, you can advertise free as long as you have a webpage. It can be your blog, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, or any other website.
2. Use a free advertising service like AdGridWork. This is a network of webmasters & new bloggers, some in very niche areas. The ad layouts are clean & there is an option of Text-Link Ads as well. The system also provides fairly good information on which ads are becoming popular & other click / display data.
3. Get free ad clicks worth of US$ 20.00 that you can spend in advertising your websites. In this offer you can Place your ad on thousands of sites with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks. I would suggest that you use the Free 20 dollar advertising money as a trial period to see if the network is effective for your success plan. You could opt out of the plan any time you want.

Both Ad Brite & Bid Vertiser are professional advertising agencies. And once you are able to finalize your advertising strategy for your small internet business. However, in my personal experience I had better results with Ad brite. Simply because of the variety of websites (website, blogs, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook etc) that you can advertise.

Since there are more people using these social network profiles as their websites, your site automatically finds its way to more number of people!

Media Cubs has already partnered with promising new bloggers & have launched the site Media Cubs to encourage new bloggers to start earning money.

New bloggers have several options to start a blog. There are free hosts & there are paid hosts. But most of the better known free hosts do not allow bloggers to earn money from ads.

Media Cubs give you a free subdomain, free blog templates & will host your blog for free. They will also sign you up with some of the best paying blog-ad companies.

As a blogger all you need to do is configure your advertisements & display them on your blog. You publish to your heart’s content & let the money roll in. So whats the catch?

While you earn your money from ads or selling your own products on your blogs for free, Media Cubs will also show one ad, usually in the footer. This ad does not interfere with your blog’s theme, content or messages in any way. Media Cubs will earn about 5 – 10 cents a month (if you blog is extremely popular) from your blog.

What are the advantages of a Free Blog with Ads host like Media Cubs? Plenty!

• you don’t pay a dime to host your site
• you don’t sweat to to maintain the infrastructure, upgrades, updates or anything
• you own your own sub-domain; if you already have a registered website you can redirect your domain to your Media Cubs site; you can even cloak your sub-domain URL if you want
• you get Themes that are properly tested & optimized for Search Engines
• you get the essential plugins for free
• you don’t have to think of search engine submissions; Media Cubs submit your blogs to hundreds of search engines
• you can sell your own products, promote your own company as much as you want
• you don’t have any contract with Media Cubs; you can take your content away any time you want
• you can create as many blogs as you want for free

Media Cubs is always looking for new enthusiastic bloggers & they come up with a list of priority subjects. Preference is given to those whose blogging interests match with what Media Cubs is looking for.

However, if there is something you wish to blog in a niche area, send them an email with you ideas. Most of the time they listen!

I listed my first Nikon FM10 camera on eBay when I first started. The camera was extremely well maintained, about a year old & still on extended warranty from Ritz Cameras. But the eAuction was a disaster ! The maximum bid did not even cover my shipping costs.

I browsed through other auctions & found that other Nikon cameras, some of them FM10, that were not as good as mine, were attracting very good money. But mine did not.

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All new bloggers go through the same stress of finding the right advertisers. I will point you to the right advertisers – advertisers with good click costs CPC & advertising with good impressions costs CPM.

There are more articles on his website that will help you find out themes for effective ad layouts, free wordpress themes for ads & how to choose the best ads for your blog .

Adbrite accepts new blogs to display ads. Adbrite displays both CPC ads to earn from clicks & CPM ads to make money from impressions.

Apart from just ads, Adbrite also displays ads for videos & pictures helping you to earn from all images on your site, as well as any video that you display.

The program is free to join & is extremely suitable for all bloggers who are new to blogging & have just started with earning money from ads.

The other advantage is that there are large number of text formats to fit your themes. The ad formats can be customized in size & number of ads to make it more like an integral part of your blog.

Widget bucks provides both CPM as well as CPC ads together. This is one of the best part of this ad. The sign-up is free & there are always ads for international blog traffic.

You get paid every time your blog loads & every time anyone clicks on the Widget Bucks ads.

One of the highest paying CPC & CPM ad provider for new bloggers as well as the advanced pro bloggers is Chitika. This is one of the best ad providers for new bloggers for 2 reasons.

The CPM ads are extremely high paying – some ads pay over US $2 to US $5 CPM. The ads also has added CPC click rates so you get paid when visitors click on the ads too.

Chitika also has a wide range of ads, from Whitespace ads to fill any space on the monitor, to entire shopping sites for parked domains.

The number of ad formats is the most varied with Chitika so that you can always find one format that matches your website.

Google Adsense is extremely contextual. This means that the ads would be effective if you have sufficient good content on your page. New bloggers should take some time to plan for a strong Adsense Strategy, since Adsense revenues can be tweaked & improved for very high revenues.

This website contains a lot of information on how new bloggers & small business owners can improve revenues from advertising. Feel free to browse or suggest content that could help you more.

Not many free ad themes available. Most of the themes that display ads are sold in the marketplace. And some could cost as much as US $200.

Since Pro Media Blog is all about helping new bloggers make money on the internet , we have compiled a list of 5 Popular Free WordPress Ads Themes .

Along with that we suggest that you read the 4 part series on How to Get Started with Blog Advertising . A theme itself will help you in placing the Ads in the right positions , but you have to choose the ads right to make good money from your blog .

• What Sort of Ads Make Most Money Part 1
• What Sort of Ads Make Most Money Part 2
• What Sort of Ads Make Most Money Part 3
• What Sort of Ads Make Most Money Part 4

All these 5 Popular Wordpress Themes reviewed here have a few common advantages:

• the layout is optimized for ads – which means the locations of the ad placements make it seen, avoid ad blindness & banner blindness
• the ad themes are all free – some are released on GPL which means you can modify the themes while some are not, but being free they all require you to keep the designer credits intact
• the layouts offer multiple ad sizes – this means that you can choose different layouts to maximize your ad revenue from blogs
• the layouts are simplistic & focuses on content, including ads. This also means that these ad themes are more suitable for text-based blogs rather than image based photo blogs
• the layouts are a combination of widgets & built in div tagged ads. This is because generally all the widgets are placed vertical

BloggingPro – Blogging Pro Ad Theme

Features:

• 2 widgets ready for vertical ads
• minimalistic design with clean layout
• Ad position at top suitable for high CPM / CPC ads
• proven success – this theme has been used extensively by many successful bloggers

See a Demo | Download the Blogging Pro Ad Theme

AdLines Professional Ad Theme for Free Download

Features:

• 3 column layout with focus on wide content area
• partially widgetised & with ad layouts for 120, 160, 180, 300 & 728 px layouts
• good layout of pages & categories with tabbed header
• header ad for high CPM / CPC ads

See a Live Demo

BlogginZone – Pro-blogger Magazine Wordpress Theme

Features of the Free Wordpress Ads Theme:

• Tested on Wordpress version 2.5, works with 2.6.x
• 3 columns
• Widget ready
• Fixed width
• Cross browser compatible with IE, FF, Opera, Flock & Safari

See a Demo | Downlaod the Free Theme

AdVault Wordpress Pro Ad Theme

Features:

• This is one of the most popular free Wordpress Themes for ads
• 4 column theme with 2 widgets & one fixed left bar
• accommodates all the high paying IAB ad formats
• extremely relevant for contextual ads
• tabbed summary on sidebar for posts & other links or ads

Read More on AdVault Pro Ad Theme

WpDesigner7 Wordpress Theme

Features:

• The theme is created / tested & released by one of the blogging communities earliest success Small Potato
• two-column, semi-grid-based WordPress theme
• minimalistic design – extremely suitable for text based as well as image content
• built in style-switcher to pick theme colors red, blue or green or any other color
• Avatars plugins has been integrated with the comments template (needs activation)

See a Demo | Download WpDesigner7 Theme

Not all advertisers pay the high amount of money cost-per-click-money or cost-per-impression-money . Ads have to be optimized to maximize your earning from website .

I have stressed over & over again that content is the king . For one, content is the main reason why you have your readers. Ignore content, and you lose them one by one.

For two, content generates interest & followers. Social networking starts with valuable content – that which provides important facts & information to your readers.

For Three, solid content helps attract the best contextual ads. Contextual ads complement your content – so they are more likely to be clicked by visitors.

I have discussed the practical aspects of a good layout of content & ads . If you search this website you will find so much valuable content on designing an effective website, choosing advertisers & themes that are suitable for earning advertising revenues.

For beginners, choosing an advertiser could be a problem, primarily due to the fact that good, high paying advertisers will have entry requirements. Some advertisers are suitable for starters who do not have a high page rank or high link popularity.

Google stands out to be one of the best advertiser , both to starters as well as for the highly popular sites & blogs . It is essential that you have a Strategy for Google Advertising right from the start.

Here are the Top 10 Reasons why Google Makes the Best Advertiser for Publishers :

1. Google Ads are international – no matter who visits your ads from around the world, Google will have enough good ad inventory to display. This increases your chances for higher ad earnings
2. Google Adsense Ads have the highest cost-per-click rates – the CPC rates for Google Ads are one of the best in the industry. Because of the best contextual ads, Google is able to deliver a high success value to the advertisers. Hence, advertisers on Google pay high CPC rates
3. Extremely Contextually Relevant – Google Ad strategy is best designed when you treat Google Ads are an integral part of your content. Form your posts & content in a way that leaves room for Google to publish relevant ads
4. Combination of CPC & CPM Ads – Google ad inventory provides impression based CPM & click-based CPC ads. So there is a good balance in your earning from Adsense ads
5. Low Click Fraud Rate – Google Monitors click frauds very minutely. Click Fraud is one of the biggest problems in the ad industry. Google monitors their advertisers & publishers very minutely to reduce loss of earning for false ad clicks
6. Google Adsense has Multiple Ad Streams – Google has all the possible ways to maximize your content. It has text & image ads for your post content, Feed Ads for all your RSS Feeds, Video Ads to earn from your videos & Mobile Ads for your blog or websites mobile website
7. Integrate with other Advertisers to Maximize Ad revenue – Google Adsense has the option of providing alternate ads in rare cases where Google cannot find relevant ads for your content. Google is also accepted by most of the other good advertisers as the back-up ad server so you can maximize your earnings. Advertisers like Chitika , Adbrite , BidVertiser , Vadpay all work well with Google Adsense
8. Integrated Ad Earning Reports – Google services include webmaster tools, Adsense monitoring tools as well as AdWords tools along with Site Monitoring tools. All these services are integrated to help you understand how your website is working, how your ads are working & what are the best keywords for your blogs posts & website’s content
9. Timely Payout of Ad Revenue Earning – Google is one of the most respected advertising companies in the world. Google has made millions or bloggers & internet business successful & continues to pay billions of dollars to publishers as their earnings. Their payout is on time, everytime & Google also details how, when & what you have earned from the ads
10. Google Adsense & Google Adwords Support & Help Forum – Google has a dedicated help & support program to help people succeed & maximize their ad revenues. Google also runs the Adsense Blog to keep their publishers & advertisers posted on new developments, issues & solutions

I would recommend that new publishers focus on creating a Google Adsense Strategy from Day 1. You would need to experiment with Google Sandbox to refine keywords & ad formats for maximizing the ad revenues from your blog ads.

To be Successful at Affiliate Marketing & Sales, you have to follow some basic steps. Again, I will focus on being successful in Affiliate sales on the internet.

This does not require you to have any shops or any real estate. You do your business on the internet. All you pay for is hosting your website & paying for your website’s registration. Nothing else.

Before I get to the 5 tips on making big money from affiliate sales, I must say that you have to really learn the ropes. You can either do it by trial & error – refining your techniques over years, or train yourself in a structured way with experienced & successful affiliates showing the way.

In my case, it was a combination of both, though I focused on reading as much as possible from some of the best training materials. Here are a few tutorials that are worth the money. The advantage with these tutorials is that you can prevent many pitfalls & avoid financial disasters upfront. I call this preventive planning .

The second it, you get to pick some of the best affiliate options available. Note that not affiliate programs would be suitable for everyone. You have to learn how to choose programs & how to market them. I shall also share some of the affiliate options that have worked very well for me.

Tip 1 to Make Top Earning from Affiliate Marketing

Learn from the best – learning before you jump into affiliate marketing is the most important lesson, we all know that. Affiliate marketing is a combination of tact, art & technique.

• This is a great affiliate marketing resource -Ultimate Affiliate Package
• Enjoy huge success and freedom!

You have to be tactful when choosing your affiliate programs . Not all programs are successful in themselves & the programs die out after a couple of years. Each time one of your affiliate organization closes down, your effort stop to make any money. You lose any possibility of recurring or residual income opportunities .

Affiliate Marketing is an art since the product or service information has to be presented to the right people in the right way. Many affiliates lose customers simply because they do not know how to make a customer relate to the product or service. They open up web stores, they get visitors but that’s it. There is no conversion – no sales.

You have to choose the right technology to support your websites. Technology involves choosing the website host (Web Hosting Services ), designing the website, figuring out if it should be a static site or a blog or a combination & email marketing technology.

Tip 2 to Make Top Earning from Affiliate Marketing

Network with the best affiliates . Affiliate marketing succeeds with good networking. Networked affiliates not only get more customers but also share valuable affiliate marketing information & opportunities within the groups.

This is not any sort of PLM or Multi Level Marketing. This is one affiliate helping another. In the same lines, you have to help other new affiliates as well. These are professional relations & often these professional groups get better commissions from the parent affiliate programs.

There is no substitute to hard earned experience. And any advice from experienced successful affiliate marketers is invaluable.

Tip 3 to Make Top Earning from Affiliate Marketing

Have an effective lead generation mechanism. Typically, 10% – 15% of visitors to your web store will generate positive leads. And overall about 2% – 5% will finally convert. So an effective lead generation technique will keep new customers coming to your web store.

At the same time, you must make all the attempt to retain any existing customers. In affiliate business existing customers often make about 40% – 60% contributions to your revenue. So you have to make sure that your process & technology is scalable to attend to both existing & new customers’ satisfaction.

Choosing a good affiliate program makes huge sense here. If the product is great & the product support is great, you have nothing else to do!

Tip 4 to Make Top Earning from Affiliate Marketing

Keep your accounting straight. Most affiliate tutorials will stress on keeping your expense & earning record upto date. This is important for 3 reasons:

• it helps you to track your budgets – a good budget plan with the right investments into advertising & promotions is essential to successful selling. It also helps you plan for the future
• it shows you which programs are easy earners & where you need to spend more efforts. You should not be driving blind any time
• for audits – assuming that you do not have the liberty to empoly a few accountants nor the will to spend thousands of dollars to the tax preparation people, keeping your earnings & expenses straight could help you file returns in days

Here is a great resource on basic accounting as well for highly lucrative financial affiliate programs – QuickBooks Online Opportunity

Affiliate marketing could be made extremely successful by being data driven. Read your affiliate reports, read your conversion reports, understand why a promotion works or why it doesn’t & decide on which programs to keep & which to retire fast.

Tip 5 to Make Top Earning from Affiliate Marketing

Get the latest promotions to your customers. Affiliate programs run promotions from time to time. But there is always a latency in internet marketing – pages usually get indexed in 30 – 90 days time. That is too long a period to lose.

You need to understand what techniques & technology you need to have in place to provide the latest offers to your customers or leads.

There are several ways to do it. Again, learning from the experts is the best way to find out what option of technology or technique will work best for you. This is one place where you would have to experiment a little bit before you can find the right method that works for your customers.

• Learn How to Make your own Home Business
• Robert Allen can teach you a better way to create wealth

In my experience, I have found these tutorials to be extremely helpful. Some are time tested, almost fool proof methods, and unless you have a really unfortunate situation, they will work out for you. They provide you with lots of tips & tactical information to help you become a successful affiliate.

• Ultimate Affiliate Package – Become an affiliate marketer and make thousands from home
• Successful Affiliate Marketing working from Home
• Increase My Margin puts users on the road to boost their sales and maximize their profits, making them a more powerful seller – Increase Your Margins on eBay
• QuickBooks Online Opportunity

Online entries for the Great American Baby Contest will be accepted on a monthly basis beginning August 1, 2008 & ends on August 31, 2008.

All entries must be received by 11:59:59 p.m. EST on the last day of the month in order to be eligible to win the Great American Baby Contest.

The basic rules of entering the competition is very simple:

• Complete the online registration
• Upload your baby photo and win

You have to be the rightful owner of the cute baby’s picture or you should have the written permission from the owner to submit the cute baby’s photo.

You can upload up to 6 pictures & the baby’s pictures should not have been digitally altered.

The winner will receive a check in the amount of $2,500.00 (twenty-five hundred dollars). Winning photos may appear on the home page of the Great American Website, where potentially thousands of viewers may see the photograph.

Winners are usually announced within 4-6 weeks of the end of the Contest.

The Great American Cute Baby Photo Contest ends on August 31, 2008.

Integration Marketing is the way to maximize your JV leverage, yet this is an extremely overlooked area of Internet marketing. Few people grasp the importance of this tactic, and even fewer people are teaching this method.

Just like it sounds, integration marketing is the process of integrating your marketing with other people’s marketing. It allows you to generate hungry, targeted traffic and create consistent cash flow for your business rather than one-shot profits from a product launch.

A typical JV deals goes something like this: “I’ll mail for you when you launch your product if you mail for me when I launch my product.” Then after the product launch es, the deal is done. You both make money on the actual launch, then momentum from your launch dies because you have no way of bringing in a steady flow of customers – and therefore cash – with your JV partnerships .

By only focusing on the pre-launch and launch phases of the sales cycle, your message becomes stagnant. So you have to prepare another launch to bring in revenue . Then another. And another. Soon all you’re doing is product launches to stay in business .

You can operate your business this way if you don’t want a thriving business that is doing what is necessary to survive long term . So would you rather rely on huge product launches or on consistent cash flow ?

Then again, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. You can have the best of both methods when you integrate your marketing with each other. Integration marketing brings you a steady stream of responsive customers through leveraging the marketing real estate of your JV partners . By promoting your complementary products on this “real estate,” you reach targeted prospects.

The real profit power of integration marketing is that it allows you to take advantage of the back end. The back end is where you make your money, so the purpose of front end offers is to drive back end sales.

But imagine not having to do any work to get front end traffic. Even better, imagine being able to take prospects directly to your back end and convert them into customers at a rate of 10% or more. You can do just that if you find people in your niche with proven front end offers.

Let them spend the time and money to drive traffic to their sites. Then help them make money back and more by offering your back end products to customers who respond to your JV partner ’s front end offers.

Although you are best able to maintain the leverage in your favor if you are the one offering the back end products, you can also benefit if you are the front end traffic generator . You simply allow your JV partner to offer his back end products to your customers as they walk through your customer path. Then you get a hefty commission while you let your partner do all the work involved in delivering the product.

Article For Long-Term Success create Consistent Cash Flow by Guest Author Mandeep Saini

For more useful tips & hints, please browse for more information at our website:- http://www.reprintarticlesite.com

http://www.jointventures.reprintarticlesite.com

Housewives, Retiree’s, Mom and Pop’s who’ve never made a dime on the Internet have created full time incomes by simply placing AdSense Ads on their web site or blog. Then you have the “Super AdSense ” earners.

We have all heard of them – the Elite few who are on track to make half a million dollars a year or more promoting AdSense sites. Do not be mistaken though. These people are not building like your Mom and Pop’s do.

They have systems in place that create sites for them – people who build sites for them – they have outsourced and automated many of the tedious tasks such as posting to blogs and searching for keywords.

While most people cannot emulate everything these Super AdSense earners do, many of them you can.

Here are 7 Required Steps you can implement today to copy their success.

1) Starting today treat your AdSense business like it is a REAL business and track what you do. Begin tracking what you are doing that works as well as what you are doing that does not work. This will keep you from making the same mistakes over and over, and you can repeat the steps that have worked in the past.

As simple as this step seems most people do not know the reason(s) to their success or failure.

2) Utilize the latest tools and software available. The Super AdSense earners are not any smarter than your average person. I know many people think they are., but for the most part, they are regular non techie people.

They are smarter in one respect though, they use the latest tools available to them to automate most of the tasks involved with researching and creating sites. They use the latest keyword , site creation and search engine optimization tools available. The tools they use are their secret weapons .

3) Quit chasing the Mega Dollar keywords . You cannot compete with the search engine experts who create sites for the $80 payout keywords . You may get lucky every now and then but in the long run, you are better off building sites for the low to mid range payout keywords .

The competition is less, and your chance of success is much higher over the long term.

4) Choose broad niches and break it down. Choose a broad subject as your main theme (lets use computers for an example). From there break it down into as many sub niches as possible. Using Computers as the example you could build sub niches/sites like laptop computers, computer hard drives, computer keyboards, etc.

You could literally build hundreds of sites around one major theme and stay totally focused. Once you have exhausted every possible sub niche of that major theme choose another main theme and repeat the process.

5) KISS Keep your sites easy to navigate and forget the fancy graphics that distract your visitors attention. Unless you are just building AdSense sites for the fun of it and to impress your friends the purpose of having the site is to have people click on one of the ads, right?

Then keep the site layout simple . Dump the scrolling banners, dancing chickens and colored scroll bars. They are distractions.

6) What is the purpose of your web site? Your web site cannot be everything to everybody. If you have a full fledged e-commerce site, with products for sale, links to other products, it is not a good site for AdSense. If the primary focus of the site is to sell products, let it do that.

Do not distract or confuse your visitor with too many options or choices. The best AdSense sites are AdSense only content sites that sell nothing. They are sites that “Tell” not “Sell.”

7) Be consistent . This is not one of those deals where you build one site and you are done. Refer back to Step #4. You must continuously build in order to be successful.

Think of it as planting a crop that you will harvest in a month or two, and the sites you build are seeds. Once the seeds have grown and matured you will reap the harvest. The more seeds you plant the larger the harvest.

To sum it up, utilize the tools available to automate as much of the process of building sites – doing research and building keyword lists as you can. This alone will help keep you organized and on track. Be consistent in building. Treat it like business it is and you will reap the rewards of your harvest.

Article Written by Guest Author Harjeet Kaur
About the Author: For more useful tips & hints, please browse for more information at our website :-http://www.Instant-adsense-dollars.com http://www.adsense.reprintarticlesite.com

The new Free Theme, named AdLine Theme for Wordpress , is partial widgetized. The right free column that can be customized to a different width to suit any professional need.

This free wordpress theme is especially suitable for blogs with a good mixture of images & text or just plain  text. The wide layout of the AdLine Theme for Wordpress gives ample room to show all variations of ads. The AdLine Theme is extremely suitable for small business houses.

The new free Wordpress theme is based on the NightLife Theme. The users who have used the theme had a lot of suggestions that led to the new AdLine Theme .

Our AdLine theme for Wordpress incorporates many of the suggestions that could help the bloggers make money by displaying high paying ads .

The 2 key focus areas while developing this free wordpress theme had been:

1. Focus on content area with essential utilities like sharing, emailing & printing ability within the posts. This free theme is suitable for blogs that has a large content of text.

2. Ads are grouped on one sidebar which can be customized to display different ads on different posts, pages & archive pages.

The AdLine Theme is already running on Travelduniya , a popular travel photography website. Here is a snapshot of the screen.

The New Free AdLine Wordpress Theme for ads will be available shortly to all the subscribers of ProMediaBlog & ProDigitalTips .

The other key features of this new Free Wordpress AdLine Theme are:

• professional blog theme
• fixed width of 1200px Wordpress theme
• suitable to Wordpress blogs that display ads
• the widgets are designed to display CPM, CPC & CPA ads
• there are 2 levels of navigation – header level pages & categories to allow you to display pages like privacy etc at the footer
• wide area for displaying content
• theme is widgetized with 1 left aligned widget
• the right bar for ads can be customized for displaying different ads for content, post, archive & index pages
• Fairly optimized for Search Engines

Reference : Other Free Wordpress Themes for Ads from ProMediaBlog.com :

• AdLine Theme for blogs with ads for high CPM earning
• BlogAds Theme for blogs with optimized advertisements
• ProAd Theme for Wordpress blogs with maximized ads

We will release a new free theme, AdVault Theme, suitable for blogs that want to display a good combination of CPC, CPA & CPM ads.

The AdVault Theme is developed from the basic concepts of the popular Pro Ad Theme with many additional features.

The attractive features of the new AdVault Theme are:

The other key features of this new Free Wordpress AdGrace Theme are:

• fixed width Wordpress theme
• suitable to Wordpress blogs that display ads
• 2 widgets are designed to display CPM, CPC & CPA ads
• theme suitable for showing high paying ad formats of 160×600, 728×90, 300×250 & 250×250 formats
• wide area for displaying content
• Index page with Latest Post displayed on top
• theme is widgetized with 2 right aligned widgets
• Left side bar can be easily customized to show different ads on index page, post pages or normal pages
• Easy to subscribe & submitted to networking websites with bright buttons on the top left bar
• Fairly optimized for Search Engines

This new Free Wordpress Theme will soon be available for downloads from ProMediaBlog.com as well as ProDigitalTips.com . Download links will be sent out to all the subscribed readers .

Reference : Other Free Wordpress Themes for Ads from ProMediaBlog.com :

• BlogAds Theme for blogs with optimized advertisements
• ProAd Theme for Wordpress blogs with maximized ads
• AdGrace Theme for Wordpress blogs with high paying ad formats

The approach is simplistic with focus on uncluttered content & design. The color scheme is chosen to be a combination of green & mild blue to sooth the eyes.

The AdGrace Theme is completely widgetized with 2 right aligned widgets.

Here are the screen shots from the header & the footer of the theme.

The other key features of this new Free Wordpress AdGrace Theme are:

• fixed width Wordpress theme
• suitable to Wordpress blogs that display ads
• the widgets are designed to display CPM, CPC & CPA ads
• there are 3 levels of navigation – header level pages & categories, footer level pages, to allow you to display pages like privacy etc at the footer
• wide area for displaying content
• theme is widgetized with 2 right aligned widgets
• Fairly optimized for Search Engines

This new Free Wordpress Theme will soon be available for downloads from ProMediaBlog.com as well as ProDigitalTips.com . Download links will be sent out to all the subscribed readers .

Reference : Other Free Wordpress Themes for Ads from ProMediaBlog.com :

• BlogAds Theme for blogs with optimized advertisements
• ProAd Theme for Wordpress blogs with maximized ads

The current affiliate ad program under Google Adsense will be discontinued from September 2008 & Google has asked all the publishers to remove the affiliate ads.

The new referral ad program from Google is under the name of Connect Commerce.

Publishers are required to apply to the new Connect Commerce for reviewing & approving of the websites. Unlike in the past, where anyone could set up an Adsense account & start providing affiliate ads on their websites, the new Affiliate program calls for a fresh start.

It is our policy to fully review each site before approval into our network. If your site has not been approved, please feel free to re-apply after you have made the necessary adjustments to your site.

You cannot login with your Adsense ID unless you have registered with Connect Commerce with the same. But as with the Adsense program, Google does not have any minimum sales requirement for the new referral program as well.

The free Blog Ads Theme is optimized for showing ads on your sites or blogs. The main feature of the Free Blog Ads

This is the second free Wordpress theme after the popular Pro Ad Theme . In the Blog Ads Theme the layout & structure are optimized to display CPM ads as well as CPC & CPA ads & yet focus on the content.

The free Blog Ads Theme is completely customizable & could be further customized to display different ads on different pages too. The ads are laid out so that there is strong focus on the content. The ads are placed close to the main content to serve more contextually relevant advertisements.

Here are the complete features of the Blog Ads Theme:

• Wide layout – evenly spread across the screen
• Ads are close to the main content to make ads relevant to the content
• About column on every page
• Tabbed content on the main index page to accommodate critical parts of the blog like Recent Posts, Popular Posts or Random Posts, Recent Comments. The tabs can be customized easily
• Widget ready theme with widgets 160 & 200 pixels wide to accommodate most high paying ad layouts
• Different ads on sidebars, top of pages, bottom of pages & in between pages & posts
• Optimized for Search Engines
• Customizable footer links for all pages or some like Privacy, About, Contacts etc
• Customizable header tabs to show all or selected pages & categories
• Site Search using Google Search for Search advertisements

• Usage of Popular & Random Posts links on individual pages giving good navigation to visitors.
• Good usage of Linked Ads for higher Click Through Rates

The first version of the Blog Ads Theme is running on Journal Image . This new theme will be released on PRO Media Blog & PRO Digital Tips simultaneously.

Publishers will no longer be required to promote Google Products or any of the Referral Ad programs. AdSense referrals feature will be retired for AdWords advertiser products as well.

Google would serve Adsense for content & DoubleClick Performics Affiliate.

Although Google does not publish any data on how much publishers have been earning from the Referral programs, Google mentioned that it was necessary to discontinue the program to focus on newer advertising tools.

The Help note published reads "We are currently reevaluating the Google Referrals program to ensure that it is providing the best possible monetization opportunity for our publishers as well as meeting the needs of Google. At this time, we have suspended the Google Referrals program."

To prevent any loss of publishers’ earnings, Google suggests that publishers of Google Referral Ads replace all referral ad code on your sites with AdSense for content ad code prior to the last week of August.

Reference : Adsense Help Desk

While writing the Wordpress Lifeline Series to help new bloggers with a step by step how to guide to start blogging & then make money from it, I realized that there were not many good free Wordpress Themes that were created & optimized for advertisements.

So I created the Free Wordpress Pro Ad Theme. I am still working on the cosmetic part of the theme & I shall be able to roll it out by Aug 2008.

The main feature of the Free Pro Ad Theme is that the layout & structure are optimized to earn money from both CPM ads as well as CPC & CPA ads as well as affiliate marketing.

The Free Pro Ad Wordpress theme is completely customizable & does not need any programming knowledge to use. The advertisements are laid out outside the templates, so that they can be modified very quickly without the risk of bringing your website down.

See a Live Demo of the Pro Ad Wordpress Theme.

Here are the other attractive features of the Wordpress Pro Advertisement Theme:

• 3 column layout with adequate space to introduce the blog & emphasis the purpose, offerings etc
• Customizable Navigation bar to show selected pages as well as selected categories
• Optimized layout for maximum ad revenues. You can show CPC ads close to the content & CPM ads for balanced earning
• Tabbed content summary in the sidebar
• Widget ready to show standard widgets like custom text, RSS feeds
• Includes Google Search capability to widen your SEO ability & improve your money making possibility through sponsored search listings
• Ability to show more ads on any pages you like. You can decide to show customized text or show ads in the same space. In the image above, since this is the home page, you have a text introduction at the top containing keywords. On the archive page, the introduction text is replaced with another banner ad, as shown in the picture below.

See a Live Demo of the Pro Ad Wordpress Theme.

[Update: The Pro Ad Theme have been revised with a few additional improvements. You can read the details & download the Pro Ad Theme on the Wordpress Pro Ad Theme page.]

When you use GoodSearch to look up information on the Internet, you could help donate 50% of the advertising money raised by search engines, to a charity of your choice. You do not need to sign up or spend a cent. 

GoodSearch is powered by Yahoo! and the technology allows the searches to track and direct these search-generated proceeds to charities.

On the GoodSearch homepage, choose from thousands of organizations or add your favorite cause to our list. Search the Internet just like you normally would — the site is powered by Yahoo!, so you’ll get high-quality search results. Fifty percent of the revenue generated from advertisers is shared with the charity, school or nonprofit organization of your choosing. 

GoodSearch estimates that each Web search will generate approximately $0.01 for the designated charity or school (image, video and site-specific searches are not included). You can select the charities already listed on the website, or you could add your own charity organization too if you want.

Along with GoodSearch, the website also allows charity donations on Shopping through GoodShop.Every time you click on the partner merchants from the GoodShop site and then make a purchase, your charity or school earns money.

The website specifies searches that do not result in any donations.

“All of your searches will count toward donations except for the following:

1) image searches;

2) video searches;

3) “search this site” searches;

4) searches for URL’s (i.e., search terms ending in .com, .org, .net, .edu);

5) searches to sites for which the URL is well known such as HotMail, ESPN, MySpace, Facebook, GMail, AOL, etc.;

6) searches for stock quotes;

7) searches for word definitions, and

‘8) any searches generated from fraudulent use of the site.”
 

You could also help in spreading the news. And thanks to Lisa for writing about it on her blog too.

And now you need sponsors & advertisers to help you sustain & grow your enterprise. So how do you go about looking for advertisers and sponsors? And when you do, how do you fix the revenue ?

The most important part of the three things I mentioned (niche area, good content & engaging the audience, your revenue would depend on the latter – how many visitors does your website or blog have. The ratio of number of people making it successful on their internet enterprise to the number of people setting up a blog or a website enterprise every day is quite poor.

Estimates say around 2 – 5 % of the web internet enterprise become successful. The situation is even more difficult for passive publishers – that is if you are not creating any new technology or if you have nothing gratifying to offer. Having said that, I have highlighted in many articles how to build your internet intellectual worth substantially over a period. But tis article is about choosing advertisers & sponsors.

Here are the key points that would help you decide on how to go about finding out who to advertise & how to choose the best advertiser for your blogs & websites. The key aspects of an advertiser or an ad agency that I recommend to look out for are:

1. Reputation in the industry – how are they perceived by the advertisers, publishers & media

2. Goodwill among the publishers – how satisfied are the publishers to be with the agency

3. Technical & Support ability – how have they set up their systems for applications, approvals & revenue reporting & response of their help desk support

4. Privacy & Security – how secured are the transactions & whether your information would be secured with them

5. Payment terms – do they share good revenue with the publisher & if they make payments on time

Let me explain the points is details as to how you can evaluate the ad agencies for your purpose.

How long is the advertiser in business : Research on the internet – the best place is to look up Yahoo! Finance and see how the agency has performed over the last couple of years. Before you sign up, understand why any of them have given any “Website Requirements”. Many times, that minimum number of page views that some agencies require is to make it helpful for both the publisher & the advertiser to mutually benefit from the advertising.

What payment options do the ad agency offer : Look for electronic payment options. They are fast, secure & independent of where you are located. They should also be able to offer you enough information for your tax-return filing. The agency should also be able to handle international customers who have complex currency conversion & tax rules.

Technical Set up : Look around the website of the advertiser or the ad agency. Look for the Privacy & FAQ. A good agency will have a good compilation of all the situations & recommendations. Look for ad approval process. The good agencies will give you the ability to accept or reject ads depending on your requirement. The good ones will also allow you to combine multiple advertising from other agencies to increase your chances of earning more.

Help Desk Response : If you sign-up you would be one of their customers. And you would like to be treated like a customer. Forums are a good place to find if the help desk is responsive. Otherwise you could email them your preliminary questions to see if you get a good response even though you are just a prospect.

Transparency : You would like the ad agency to share their revenue model & commercial information upfront. An example of that could be what portion of the ad revenue do they share with their publishers. The good ones will also mention their publisher selection process & what they expect from their publishing partners.

Variety of Advertisers & Ad Content : The better the agency, the better advertisers will they have. But the flip side to this is if you are a new publisher, you may not be able to get in as their publisher. However, knowing the advertisers & their media could help you understand if your website or blog could build any association with the advertiser. For example, if you are a photographer teaching on the internet, you would like to show ads from say, Adobe or Nikon rather than those of Casinos!

Having said that, you have to start somewhere. And you may have to start with advertisers & ad agencies that pay lower than the reputed ones. It is good for a start. And once you start building your internet intellectual reputation, you would be able to attract high paying advertisers & sponsors.

CPM is typically used throughout the advertising industry as a measurement of how much your inventory, that is your internet space available for advertising, is worth at a given time. CPMs can fluctuate based on supply & demand, time of year, sales cycles, traffic and other internal & external factors.

So, how do you know if your CPM is right? Well, that takes time to determine, and over time you will find the market value of your inventory.

eCPM is the Advertising Term for effective CPM. You will see each of your advertising agency & adserver will mention eCPM along with the CPM for your advertising layout. eCPM is used to compare ad sellers against each other.

Let me explain that with an example:

1. Your site metrics are 10,000 impressions per month

2. Ad Rep Firm A: They offer you a CPM of $10 on all the sold impressions per month. They sell 1,000 impressions (10%) during the month and send you a check for $10. Your effective CPM is $1.00 ($10 ÷ (10,000 ÷ 1000)). Note that an ad agency may not always be able to show advertisement every time someone opens your website. Hence they also quote a fill rate (as a percentage) showing how many times they have been able to display ads compared to the total number of times your website was viewed.

3. Ad Rep Firm B: During the course of the month, Firm B sells 70% of the impressions at a $3. At the end of the month, you receive a check for $21.00. Your eCPM is $2.10 ($21.00 ÷ (10,000 ÷ 1,000)).

As you can see, even though Firm B was giving you a much lower CPM, your eCPM was much higher. Ultimately, the goal is to get the number of ads sold per month as high as possible while maximizing the CPM of the ads sold. This will yield the most amount of money for you!

So while you consider an ad agency for your websites, you should also take account of the CPM & the fill rate that your ad agency supplies. Either one alone will not help you estimate your total ad revenue.

The Google Audio Ads program allows its radio ad buyers to track the impact of their broadcast spots on site traffic. The Audio Advertiser could now see where the ads are running, the time of day, and number of audio ad [air plays] overlaid with the analytics data.

The Google TV Ads program similarly allows its TV Advertisers to see when their TV ads ran, the number of impressions delivered, the cost they paid and the CPM. Those reports are integrated with other metrics already covered by Google Analytics, such as Web Site traffic, which allows marketers to see if their TV ads are impacting activity on their sites. Google sponsors about USD 2000 to TV Advertisers to popularize & boost its newly launched TV Ads system.

The other important feature launched almost simultaneously were the benchmarking & data sharing tool. The system aggregates site & traffic data from various websites & offer comparative information on different verticals. The most frequent use of this information is to view & analyze seasonal changes on sales. Comparative data across different verticals could help marketers understand which all industry verticals are showing a dip in the same time and / or region where some other industry vertical is picking up on advertisements.

The new benchmarking and data sharing offerings allow Google Analytics users to understand user behavior on their sites in the larger context of their industry segment. The data-sharing feature allows Analytics users to control where a site’s data is used in other Google services and features, including industry benchmarking. Site owners can decide whether to participate in data sharing for industry benchmarking only, for other Google services, or to opt out completely.

By allowing their data for use across other services, Google says Analytics users will not only contribute to the knowledge base of benchmarking users, but will also benefit from direct integration with other products.

Microsoft also added some enhancements to its adCenter Analytics beta (formerly called Project Gatineau) in March 2008. Microsoft added detailed visitor tracking, tree map and campaign reporting features, and has also waived a $5 signup fee for the tools.

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"Getting your door unlocked when you’ve left your keys inside, for example, "might be courtesy of Red Bull," explains Velle Kolde, senior product manager for Microsoft Auto, which recently released its 3.0 automotive operating system to industry developers."

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With the rapid advancements in telematics, you could have a more "personal" connection with your car. You will be able to tell your car all about yourself. That includes your blood type, where you work, what restaurants you prefer, the type of cell phone you carry, even the temperature you like your seat to be in the morning. Then, you can tell your car what you want it to do and when. Maybe you want your car to send an alert to your cell phone if the alarm goes off. Or alert you whenever you get within a stone’s throw of a Starbucks.

Your car will be so smart that it will be able to tell you how it’s doing, too. It can announce the miles per gallon it’s getting or whether its tires need some air.

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The success of such telematics would depend on the subscription rates. General Motors for example, offers the On-Star features for about USD 19.00 a month and so does Ford, though on a flat rate of about USD 400. These subscription rates are fairly high when compared to the most popular car prices. With advertisers pitching for the transit time & the attention of the people in the car, the subscription rates could be brought down to make the services available for the large majority of low & mid segment automobile users.

With more & more drivers willing to spend on newer technology gadgets in cars, a survey of about 1,100 drivers by the Consumer Electronics Association, showed that 37 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were willing to spend money on installed consumer electronics in their vehicles. The average they were willing to spend: a mere $270. The Telematics Research Group in Minnetonka, MN, expects more than 50 million vehicles to be on the road with sophisticated telematics systems by 2013.

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Here are 2 other important statistics to follow:

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1. The top 10 languages that are used by the world internet users – English at 30.3% , Chinese at 16.6% & Spanish at about 8.7% . Of the European languages, French has 4.7% users, German coming in second with about 4.5% & Italian coming in third with about 2.4% users.

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2. Growth of internet users – The data shows growth in the number of internet users from 2000 through March of 2008. Middle East has grown the largest with about 1177%, second comes in Africa with 1030% growth followed by Latin American & Caribbean population with about 660% growth between 2000 & 2008.

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Even though some of the continents & countries has shown massive surge in both internet usage & usage penetration, the data should be used with some caution when planning for commercial sites or for advertising. Many of these countries are black listed for internet frauds & illegal commercial operations. African countries rank highest amongst them. McAfee also publishes a list of countries & domains that are prone to spreading viruses, malwares & spywares.

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For small business owners & bloggers this data could provide meaningful insight in planning your advertisement campaigns, managing your email campaigns & also in designing contents relevant to countries where they would be most read.

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The first launch will be in Europe, which has the largest number of MSN Live users. Europe today has about 95 million registered MSN Live users, the largest concentration among the 250 million worldwide registered users. Users will now be able to use & share music, videos & media clips from MTV Networks, UK Channel Four, Sony BMG & EMI. Microsoft mentioned PepsiCo & Twentieth Century Fox among the brands who have already signed up with Microsoft to run advertising campaigns on Messenger TV.

• In Part 1 we discussed which all ad agencies could help you start building your advertising revenue
• In Part 2 we discussed the most effective ad formats for the highest revenues
• In Part 3 we discussed the best placement areas for your ads either on a traditional website or on blogs

In this last section, Part 4, we will share our experience on the best performing advertisement types. By ad type we mean whether its a content based advertisement, a referral ads, link ads, text ad or an image ad. Though the effectiveness depends on your content & the audience for your site or blog, we will share our experience that would give you some hints on the high performing ad formats.

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High paying advertisement formats for your blogs & websites:

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1. Contextual Text Ads – they are the most productive & most effective ad formats. The ability to put ads relevant to the content makes it even more effective. Not all ad agencies could achieve high level of relevance. The best example, again is Google. Contextual ad clicks could vary from about 60 cents a click to about US $ 2.00 in some cases.

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2. Referral Ads – they are the second highest in terms if effectiveness. Though in most cases the advertisers pay a high amount for clicks, from our experience the number of clicks are usually low for referral ads.

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3. The 3rd most effective advertisement group are the Link Ads – though Google is probably the only adverting agency providing Link Ads at this time, with expansion in the ad network they would probably add and improve on the link ads they serve.

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4. Text Ads – though many image based ads earn CPM money, not all image ads earn upon being displayed. There are a large number of CPC advertisers that provide image ads. Our ability to merge text ads with the content makes them high performance earners over image ads.

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5. Affiliate ads – these are large selling houses who you have decided to promote as affiliates. These are not usual CPC or CPM ads, but are more Click-per-action (CPA) type of displays where the visitor has to click & then take some actions before you get paid (like signing up for the product or service, or enrolling for a free trial etc.) Since there are 2 steps involved (click & sign-up, which could involve payment) the effectiveness of affiliate ads in terms of your earning is less. But each affiliate could pay you on leads or on purchases and the amounts could be as high at 15% of the sale value. But we have rated it low since the number of hits & sign-ups are usually low.

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This is the last concluding part of the series – What sort of Ads Earn Most Money – Best Ad agencies, Best Ad formats, Best Ad placements & Best Ad types. Here are a few additional links that you could use to get started:

• Sell ad space & earn
• High CPM revenue ads
• Show ads on Videos
• Earn money from Pictures
• High revenue Pop Up ads
• Monetize Website & Blog
• Monetize RSS Atom Feeds
• Earn from Pop Under ads

• In Part 1 we discussed the best ad agencies to sign up with
• In Part 2 we discussed the highest paying ad formats

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In this part, Part 3, we will share our experience on ad placements that earn highest click though rates (CTR).

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Click Though Rates earn revenue for the ads that you display irrespective of whether it is CPM or CPC based. That means, you definitely get to earn if your visitor clicks the ads on your site. Each click earn you advertising revenue. Hence it is very important to have some practical idea on where to place ads so that they are clicked.

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As a reference, please read my post on Ad & Banner Blindness to understand how visitors usually browse your website, what all places on your site get the most attention & what gets the least attention.

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Many ad agencies see placement of the ads very carefully. While the click indicates a sincere interest of the visitor in the advertiser, the ad placement should not be seen as an attempt to deceive the visitor to click them. Google for example, has humans & systems monitoring ad clicks to prevent injustice to the advertisers. Having said that, we will our experience with how effective ad placement could help increase the click rates.

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Most effective ad placements for higher click rates:

1. Ads in the content area – placing ads in close proximity to the main content of the page allows agencies to serve extremely relevant ads. This automatically boosts the ad hit rates. Google for example, could serve very contextual ads and this allows the serious visitor to explore more options. Having the ad layout (colors, fonts & borders) similar to the page content helps to blend the ad with the content.

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The maximum earning happens from advertisements placed in the content space.

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2. Blogs & websites have different layouts and hence effectiveness of ad placements are different for blogs & websites. Since blogs offer a vertical or columnar reading pattern, vertical ads placed next to the main content area have high hit rates.

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3. For traditional websites, since the reader follows the page from a left to right (for English websites at least), the top right corner is a very effective place for ads.

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4. Columnar ads on the left side of the page suffer the brunt of ad blindness. But the right columns do not – especially for languages that user a left to right reading pattern (like English). The top columns on the right is the next best place for ads for higher clicks.

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5. Reader interaction area – blogs for example have a Comments section where the visitor could comment on your post or simply share their thoughts. Since this area receives very high attention from engaged readers, this is one place where ads have received high hits.

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Though clicks would earn you money, you should not over do with ads. Too many ads take away the readers attention. Too many image ads distract the reader with colors. The ones that are specially distracting are the odd colored moving gif images. While your website picks up ad revenues, you would like to eliminate, or at least restrict such distracting ads.

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This is the third part of the series – What sort of Ads Earn Most Money – Best Ad agencies, Best Ad formats, Best Ad placements & Best Ad types. Here are a few additional links that you could use to get started:

• Sell ad space & earn
• High CPM revenue ads
• Show ads on Videos
• Earn money from Pictures
• High revenue Pop Up ads
• Monetize Website & Blog
• Monetize RSS Atom Feeds
• Earn from Pop Under ads

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In this part we shall look into the best ad formats. When I say the "best ad format", I mean which all types of ads have shown to have the maximum click through rates or CPM rates. Although the rates differ from one advertiser to another, experience shows that some of the many available formats perform very well.

The 3 Best performing Ad formats:

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1. 300 x 250 or the 250 x 250 format – This is the highest paying ad format. This is mostly applicable to image ads and there are 2 reasons why this format has turned out to be the highest performing CPM format (a) large number of advertisers can contain their ad message in this format (b) there are a large number of advertisers who pay CPM for the 300 x 250 & 250 x 250 creative format. So most of the times, you do not require visitors to click on any ads. CPM revenue requires you to display the advertisement for earning money. If a visitor clicks on a CPM ad, you get to earn more money.

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From our revenue experience we can say that 50% advertisers pay over 75 cents CPM for the 300 x 250 ad format. And over 90% advertisers pay over 50 cents CPM for this ad format.

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2. 160 x 600 format – This is the second highest paying ad format. This is the skyscraper format and most of the advertisers prefer this creative layout when designing ads. This means that you will always have paid advertisers willing to take up an ad space that is 160 x 600 size on your website. Many advertisers also pay CPM ads for this size.

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Typical earnings from the 160 x 600 formats have been from 45 cents to about 70 cents CPM.

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3. 728 x 90 format – This is the third most highest maying ad format. This is the leader board format & all advertisers have creative for this format. Due to the large size, they are especially noticeable by visitors and again, because of their size, the most usual place where such ads could be placed are either the top or the bottom part of your blog or website. Since this format has large number of image ads, advertisers often pay CPM rates for this ad format. Since most of the time this format occupies prime location on your website, the CPM rates are also high, though generally not as high as the 160 x 600 format.

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Generally the CPM rates for the 728 x 90 format vary from 35 cents CPM to about 55 cents CPM.

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The other formats like 468 x 60 & 200 x 200 format are usually more text oriented and pay mostly on CPC rates even though they serve image ads. The revenues, from our earning experience, is fairly low for these ad formats & varies from a CPM rate of 35 cents (over 95% of the advertisers pay this) to about 70 cents (about 5% pay this rate). Which means, 95% of advertisers pay about 35 cents for 1000 impressions of a 468 x 60 CPM format, while only about 5% of the advertisers pay about 70 cents CPM for the same format.

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Note though that the revenue could change depending on a few factors:

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1. the number of impressions you are serving – that is the number of times your website / blog page is viewed. Advertisers could change the CPM rates on the number of impressions. Usually they pay higher for websites that have higher impressions. For example, they could pay, say 10 cents CPM for impressions between 0 – 5000 & the advertisers could pay, say 20 cents CPM for impressions between 5000 – 10000.

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2. the geographic region they are viewed in – not all ads may be displayed to any visitors across the globe. Some ads are geo-specific, which means they are only shown to visitors in a specific country & not in others.

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3. availability of ads – not always will the advertising agency show ads. In case their advertisers are fewer in number, and they do not have enough advertisers to show, they will show either a blank space or non-revenue earning social ads. Fill rate is the term used to show what percentage of the visitors have been shown paid ads. Fill rate depends on your pricing, on the number of advertisers with the ad agency, time of the day, the region in which they website or blog is seen & other factors.

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4. A subtle point that could help you earn higher revenue (apart from setting the prices correctly) is to define ad channels or ad tags carefully. This is how you specify one creative unit. For example if you are using the 728 x 90 format on the header & footer, you would earn more if you use separate creative tags. That is because, advertisers bid on a format. Since ads displayed on headers have higher possibility of being noticed & clicked, advertisers pay more for an ad displayed in the header than in the footer. But if you use the same ad channel or ad tag in both header & footer, the average value of the ad space comes down & hence average earning for you goes down too.
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This is the second part of the series – What sort of Ads Earn Most Money – Best Ad agencies, Best Ad formats, Best Ad placements & Best Ad types. Here are a few additional links that you could use to get started:

• Sell ad space & earn
• High CPM revenue ads
• Show ads on Videos
• Earn money from Pictures
• High revenue Pop Up ads
• Monetize Website & Blog
• Monetize RSS Atom Feeds
• Earn from Pop Under ads

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When you begin to server ads on your website you come over a difficult choice – which all advertisers to chose. This is not easy, since not all advertisers or all advertising agencies may like to enroll you as a publisher. So at the beginning you have to go with the ad agencies that serve ads to new comers.

The few of the advertisers that allow new bloggers and new webmasters to join are:

Ad Brite for Publishers – They serve a wide variety of ways in which you can start earning advertising money. There are 7 types of advertisements that they provide (a) contextual text ads (b) contextual image ads (c) full page interstitial ads (d) inline keyword ads (e) ads for your pictures (f) ads for your videos & (f) revenue for brining in new advertisers & publishers – referral money.

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They also allow you to optimize your ad space by combining 2 or more advertisers competing for the same ad space. You could set your own ad revenue and any of the advertisers that pay the highest money could display their ads.
You can sign up for free here.
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Make money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser – Bid Vertiser provides only text ads. But there are 3 advantages with Bid Vertiser. (a) They have attractive and high revenue for all clicks (b) they provide ads for your websites, blogs as well as your RSS & Atom feeds & (c) they have two different referral incomes.

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Place your ad on thousands of sites with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks. – you can also refer advertisers and earn referral. Very often, publishers also advertise. Especially at the beginning of the campaign, many publishers often start off with advertising and Bid Vertiser helps beginners and new webmasters with attractive free incentives.
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Chitika Mini Malls – This is one of the more popular, upcoming & extremely high paying advertiser. They have very high CPC & CPM rates and very helpful for new bloggers & website owners to start building online ad revenues. The Chitika Mini Malls team is very forward looking and are constantly enhancing their technology to serve better contextual ads. They combine image, text & search all in one to offer the best possible attracting to your visitors.

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The Chitika Mini Malls referral program is also open to all publishers & advertisers. The Chitika Mini Malls Referral Sign Up is Free.
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One of the best part of Chitika Mini Malls system is to serve ads on a parked domain. If you have just registered a new domain and you need some time to set up your site, you can display Chitika Mini Mall ads as a landing page. This lets you earn even while you do not have a website!
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The last but not the least is Google Adsense. Extremely contextual and relevant to serious visitors, Google serves ads of very high quality and high rates. It is quite common for experienced webmasters to earn anywhere between US $10,000 & above from Google Adsense.
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Google also serves Link Ads, Ads for Videos & Referral Ads. Log into the Adsense.com website and sign up for free with Google Adsense. Google, in the midst of severe competition, is also consolidating the ad agency business by acquiring popular & reputed advertising agencies. That apart, they are also deciding to serve only selected advertisers for higher payments.
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The advantage of going with Google are plenty. (a) They are technically the most advanced & this helps not only to serve the most relevant ads, but also in tracking and reporting (b) completely dependable & company with high integrity towards the advertisers & publishers (c) allows everyone to sign up. You dont even need to own your website to run Google ads. They even allow you to run Adsense Ads on your free blog on blogspot (d) Google has just started to serve ads in RSS & Atom Feeds, although at this time they are only accepting applications from webmasters with over 10000 subscribers. They also own Feedburner for automated feed subscription.
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This is the first part of the series – What sort of Ads Earn Most Money – Best Ad agencies, Best Ad formats, Best Ad placements & Best Ad types. Here are a few additional links that you could use to get started:

• Sell ad space & earn
• High CPM revenue ads
• Show ads on Videos
• Earn money from Pictures
• High revenue Pop Up ads
• Monetize Website & Blog
• Monetize RSS Atom Feeds
• Earn from Pop Under ads

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3M wants to hear from others on their creative ways of using Post-It. The person that creates the one-in-a-million idea will win $10,000. Every person who enters will receive a free trial of Post-it Digital Notes to use with computers. The contestants will be judged on creativity and originality, demonstration of effective use of the product, appropriateness of content and overall impression.

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This is a brilliant direction that Google & YouTube is setting for us. We have already started to see various educational institutions leveraging the immense power of video communication by uploading videos of class room lectures, key note presentations and mass communications on YouTube. Carnegie Mellon University has been one of the more prominent participants who have started to build its culture around Google YouTube too.

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According to a report published by Adweek , web promotions and mobile advertising are going to play a major role in tomorrow’s advertising. Borrell Associates, who conducted the study, revealed that the internet’s interactive capability will be put to test over the traditional banner and paid search advertisements.

Online promotions, including contests and coupons, are expected to triple from $8 billion last year to more than $22 billion by 2012. Currently, online promo spending is only 22 percent of the total $37 billion overall interactive marketing pie. Overall promos account for about 60 percent of all dollars spent annually in global marketing.

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For the past two years, spending on online display ads, banners and pop-ups has been flat. Those ad formats are forecast to peak this year at $12.6 billion and begin to decline to less than half that amount over the next four years. Paid search is facing a similar spending trend, peaking next year at $16.9 billion and then gradually declining, the report said.

1. just like any other advertisement you display on your website with a small piece of code on your page or blog, you similarly put in a small piece of code but not to "display" anything, but to play a small audio

2. just like you earn money from Google Adsense if any of your visitor clicks on the ads, you get paid every time an audio ad is played to a visitor (note that not every time an audio ad will be played). For audio ads though, your visitors do not have to click on anything

3. just like with any advertisement you get to chose who to advertise and who not to, Audio Advertisers also lets you chose which all ads (or what all types and categories of ads) you allow to be played

4. unlike ads that are displayed and take up space on your web page, audio ads will work behind the scene. They do not show up on your web page and does not occupy any space

5. just like with pop-up advertisements, the audio ads will play for 5 secs and will play only once for 1 unique visitor. This is an intrusive advertising since you are invading into the readers attention, but since nothing else "shows" up, your visitor will not tend to be taken to another website from yours. Your visitor can get terribly annoyed with the pay per play audio advertising and may never return to your site

6. if your visitor happens to have their computer speakers on mute, they will not hear a thing. If they are already using the speakers for some other reason, say listening to music while browsing, they will be interrupted

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The internet is currently filled with all the news of how Larry Host has scammed the affiliates and the publishers. I will not comment on that and you can voice your opinion on those scams. I would like to focus on the technology though. It seems we have all been bogged down with 1 person who scammed people and confused the audio advertising technology with the implementers.

I think the PPP advertising (as it is commonly abbreviate from Pay-Per-Play) is a step forward. I see a lot of benefits for that:

1. Keeps your website neat and clean. You do not divert your readers attention to flashy ads

2. You do not throw your user into a different website

3. Since it is intrusive, publishers stand the chances of higher Cost Per 1000 Impressions (higher CPM)

4. You can target audiences from different geographies more easily. Even though your site maybe in one language, say English, and is being seen in Germany, you can target them with a German voice advertisement. So you basically increase your reach and cut down on the language barrier of your website

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The more I am reading about this PPP advertising, the more I am seeing that it is the technology that is being blamed for the incorrect implementation or just because Larry Host has a debatable past!

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What if a company like Google or Yahoo! Network or Casale Media had implemented Pay Per Play advertising? The difference would not have the technology but the company who implements it.

• I am sure that Google or YPN or others, with their strong search & interpretive algorithm could have made excellent contextual advertising even with audio.
• More over, these companies, Google for example, are perceived as organizations with a lot of integrity towards its advertisers and publishers. They would have laid out and abide by acceptable rules for both publishers & advertisers.
• Again, each of these high profile organizations would have had enough transparencies within their processes that would have helped build the trust of the publishers, advertisers and the internet users.

I sincerely believe in the immense power of audio advertising. Voice2Page – the company that conceptualized and implemented the new technology is certainly forward looking. However, it maybe just a little too early for us to accept that advertising model on the internet. And maybe the researchers should have thought through the implementation loopholes and partnered with someone like Google or YPN to make it successful.

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There is no reason to doubt the technology. While traditional internet advertisers keep cluttering spaces, audio advertising could be a sustainable advertising mode of the future (except that you cannot put more than 1 audio ad on a page).

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The quickest option is to use Google Reader .

Google Reader is a very stable & standard tool that can convert your website & blog on the fly that could be viewed on mobile phones. It is a free service from Google and you could use a link on your website to route visitors using mobile phones to the reader.

It is very easy to use Google Reader to create your mobile website. Add the <<Feed URL>> of your website as shown: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/<<Feed URL>>. As an example, type the following on your browser: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://www.promediablog.com/feed . The portion in red is the rss feed from Pro Media Blog. You can also use a burned feed from Feedburner as well.

Another option is to use Mippin .

Mippin allows a free service to convert your website & blog to a mobile version. As long as you have a site that supports RSS or ATOM, Mippin will convert your site to a mobile version in an instant. All you need to do is to type in your website’s URL and Mippin creates your mobile website. You can create a Free account with Mippin to futher enhance the look & feel of your mobile site and even put advertisements to earn additional money!

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Miffin creates a summary page (first picture) and you could click on any of the links to go to the story. Options like Email or sharing the post on Twitter or Facebook comes along with it. Miffin will provide you with a short link upon registration (like http://www.miffin.com/your_user_ID ) to be used specifically for mobile phone users.

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Another option very similar to the above is Mofuse .

Mofuse is very similar to Miffin & creates a mobile version of your blog or website for free in minutes. The difference, and the advantage that Mofuse has over Miffin is that even if your website does not have a RSS or ATOM feed, it can still allow you to create a mobile version of your website or blog. Sign up on Mofuse is free.

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Mofuse will provide a short URL for your mobile version (like http://your_url.mofuse.com ). Mofuse also allows you to show ads on your mobile websites so that you could earn additional money from your mobile websites.

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If you are an Online Publisher and you display advertisements on your website. Advertisers pay to have their ads displayed (CPM payment method) or they pay when someone clicks on their ads (CPC payment) or like in case of affiliates, they pay when the visitor does some actions, like signing up, downloading trial products (CPA payment).

Now a legitimate visitor could take an interest in an advertisement and click on them to find out more. There are ways in which some computer programs could be made to simulate click actions on these ads. These are false clicks since no real person, with any interest in the advertiser’s product or service, are clicking. This is called an act of Click Fraud. The advertiser still has to pay since their ads have been clicked.

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Click Fraud is a major challenge to both advertisers as well as the ad agencies. Google, for example, have a strong technical system plus a large team of humans to constantly verify suspicious ad clicks. And Google for one suspends accounts without any further negotiations. I have personally suffered from this very early in my publishing career when my site was subjected to malicious click bots. It took me almost 2 months and a lot of persuasion along with hard core technical data to prove that it wasn’t me who was clicking my ads.

Clickforensics now have systems that you can employ to monitor and protect your ads. The Click Fraud is a much bigger menace as this graph for 2007 shows.

Graph & content courtesy of ClickForensics.

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Traffic quality management is now a requirement for both advertisers and publishers alike. Traffic quality management means monitoring and filtering traffic for fraudulent and low quality visitors to optimize ad serving on your web site.

Advertisers do not want to pay for clicks that do not add value to their business. They treat a click as Fraud when:

• Bots generate clicks – Bots are computer programs which click on links and increase PPC costs. Advertisers want to target humans, not machines.
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• Repeat clicks – Traffic that clicks on the same paid ad repeatedly has a lower ROI than single ad-click visits.
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• Hidden referrers – Advertisers want to know who is sending them traffic in order to conduct research and optimize their site experience. Traffic from hidden referrers is an immediate red flag to advertisers.
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• Bounces – Advertisers do not want to pay for bounced traffic (e.g. traffic that does not wait long enough to load and review at least one page).
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• A-typical Traffic – Advertisers do not want to pay for ‘fake’ traffic i.e. traffic that navigates in atypical patterns without converting.

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Advertisers who are displaying ads on your sites, as well as the ad agency that is delivering ads from the advertising networks to your site (like Yahoo! Publisher Network). One certain conditions they will treat the clicks on your site or blog as fraudulent. Here are a few general situations that you, as a publisher displaying ads need to be cautious about, as to how advertisers determine the severity of the fraud is:

• Publishers knowingly or unknowingly purchase fraudulent traffic.
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• Bots or crawlers are working on publisher’s sites and committing click fraud.
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• Publishers are engaging in spamming other publisher sites.
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• Publishers are delivering traffic during times that are not desirable to advertisers. This is a less severe offense and extremely hard to control or prove that these traffic are illegitimate. In most cases, the advertisers either do not display ads in certain geographies or do not pay for any clicks from some geographies.
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• Publishers are delivering traffic from geo locations that are not desirable to advertisers. Again, in most cases, the advertisers either do not display ads in certain geographies or do not pay for any clicks from some geographies.

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The search providers are extremely strict with fraudulent activities. They respond in various ways helping both the advertisers to maximize their ad spending, as well as publishers to maximize their ad spaces.

• Search Providers Rank Publishers – Web site or portfolios of sites receive a quality score rank. The rank is usually an index, indexing one publisher against competitive publishers. Quality rank impacts commission levels. The ranks are done periodically and publishers and advertisers could be upgraded or downgraded.
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• Search Providers Discount Clicks – Clicks are ranked based on traffic quality. For some networks, the quality of the click determines how much the advertiser pays for the click. Low click quality can cause CPC’s to be adjusted downward resulting in lower EPC.
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• Search Providers Confiscate Earnings – Search Providers give money back to advertisers for fraudulent clicks. Google claims that it gives back or does not charge for 10% of all clicks through its network; Yahoo claims 15%. A portion of these amounts represents money back to the advertiser which in return equals charge backs to publishers.
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• Search Providers Give Exclusion Control to the Advertiser – Many search providers, including Google and Yahoo, allow advertisers to ‘opt-out’ of advertising with content network web sites. Soon, Google and Yahoo will start allowing advertisers to opt-out of search network web sites as well.
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• Search Providers Give Day Part & Geo Control to Advertisers – On the larger networks, advertisers can control the time, day or week, and locations their campaigns target.

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All these are aimed to protect to Advertisers interest. If any advertiser in turn engages in any activity that could jeopardize the publishers (competitor publishers for example) that could be reported to the Search Providers for action too.

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Panasonic will supply various HD video and audio technologies to this year’s Olympics, taking place in Beijing, China, in August. They include recording equipment, VCRs, system cameras and TV monitors.

As a side note, Panasonic did a similar promotion last year for the new HD Brands. Named "Living in HD" searched for people living a digital lifestyle. The "Living In HD" program was created to understand how people’s lives change as they become aware of HDTV and aid Panasonic with future product development, according to the company.
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Through various sweepstakes, Panasonic will give away VIERA HDTVs by playing Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. You could visit www.panasonic.com/olympics to enter the sweepstakes online.

But on the internet, there are people who make significant money from people who are ignorant. There is also a handful of people who impose ignorance on them to throw you off guard – what a fantastic idea to attract people!

Wordpress hosts the site http://icanhascheezburger.com/ . This site is about people posting funny pictures of their pets, mostly their cats. They promote themselves as ‘LOLCATS ‘ an acronym for Laughing Out Loud at my Cats . The site thrives from its funny and off beat name – I Can Has Cheezburger & the rather mundane topic. But as long as people like it, everyone wins! And believe it or not, it draws over 500,000 visitors on an average day! I call this Imposed Ignorance . The people knew what they were doing, and there is enough intellect and intelligence behind naming & creating the site as such.

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On the other hand, if you misspell http://icanhascheezburger.com/ (which by itself is quite confusing) as:

• http://www.icanhascheeseburgers.com, or even
• http://www.icanhazcheeseburgers.com/

you will land in completely irrelevant pages that will lead you to nowhere. These two are perfect examples of Monetizing Ignorance. Believe it or not, icanhascheeseburgers.com draws about 100,000 visitors on an average day, most of whom have probably heard of I Can Has Cheezburger but never knew how to spell it!

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What prompted me to write this post is an advertisement. It seemed to acknowledge the success of I Can Has Cheezburger and also follow in its footsteps. It just copied the LOLCAT theme to promote itself!

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Naming your website could be a nightmare and an exhaustive process. Not because it is so hard to find an appropriate name, but because of internet squatters. These are people (and many of them are site registrars) who create a site thinking that someone someday would look for the same website name and would pay them money to buy it over.

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Intelligent Squatters look for popular websites and think of possible misspelled versions. They would then create the websites and simply sit back and see traffic coming in. Unless they violate copyrights or pose a security threat to any of the more famous brands or website, they would remain to draw traffic from people who land just from spelling a website incorrectly.

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So what is Keyword Bidding?

Every time you use Google to search for something, you enter a few words or phrases that you think will bring up the best possible results. When the results show up, you see something called Sponsored Links on the top or on the side. You probably click from the first one to the second & third one. The probability of you hitting the first of the Sponsored Listing in the search results is almost 99% while the probability of you even going on to the 3rd page of your search is as low as 10%. Given that, any website that can show up on the top of the search would benefit from attracting visitors.

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So companies research words and phrases that users are likely to use and based on that pay Google to for those terms to be shown as Sponsored Links in the search results. Google uses an automatic bidding system where people can bid for this.

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So what does the Open Keyword Bidding policy mean?

It simply means that anyone can bid on any term. Ideally you would think that only Best Buy company could bid on terms like Best Buy, Bestbuy etc, so that when anyone types them up, bestbuy.com would have the 1st position in the search results. In the Open Keyword policy, Circuit City or another competitor like Radioshack can bid on the phrase Best Buy! This obviously builds higher prices on commonly known brands, like Coke, Cola, Pepsi, MTV, Sony etc.

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So far, UK & Irish bidders were not allowed to bid on competition. A large demography of advertisers are also prevented on naming their competition in any media advertisements. Not so in the US. While this makes it beneficial for the shopper, it brings on a huge financial responsibility to the large brands. They have to now pay additional money, and compete too with other bidders, to reserve the ability to show up in Google on those key words that probably "should" only show them.

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In many countries advertisers are legally prevented to name competitors in any media campaigns. These rules are specific to demographies and vary from one country to another. The Google’s key word bidding policy change do not alter any nations legal binding on advertisements.

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What does it do to small or mid size organization?

Whether small or mid size companies have the budget to bid against large brands or not, this change in Google’s open keyword bidding policy still gives them a chance to compete if they want to. I cannot imagine why one small garment trader will try to bid for Macy’s terms instead of putting in that money to improve their business logistics.

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What does it do to affiliates?

The affiliate rules that are imposed by individual companies still run as usual. Many of the affiliates sign you up with an agreement that you cannot bid on a set of their key words. For example, as a Microsoft Affiliate, you cannot bid online for key words like Microsoft, Live, Microsoft Access etc. The rules are applicable irrespective of which geography (country) your affiliate teams work in.

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Since a large portion of Google’s traffic comes from UK & the European countries (almost about 33% in UK from a March 2008 report), this could tempt the large organizations to look into other popular search engines. But since this adds a lot of revenue to the Search Companies (like Google) it is likely that the others in the race, Microsoft Live, Yahoo! & Ask, sooner or later will also follow in Google’s footsteps.

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Though these Sponsored Links are expensive and cuts down on your earning per conversion, surveys show that the top three positions of sponsored results for high-traffic keywords are likely to attract enough prospective customers to justify advertising expenses.

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And some of their new headlines have caught some attention too:

• Solio, plug into the sun! Shop Now!
  
• Save the planet! Use Solio the eco-friendly solar charger. Now 10% off. CouponCode: GoGreen2008!
  
• The Universal Hybrid Charger! Shop Solio Now!

The design that caught my attention was a very unique fan-blade design. On reading more I found that Solio features this fan-blade design that allows it to achieve maximum solar area when in use. Just spread out the blades, expose them to direct sunlight either out of doors or affixed to a window, and get ready to take your power on the road.

The performance facts quoted by Solio is also very interesting. According to them:

• Charging Solio’s internal battery takes 8-10 hours of direct sunlight.
• Solio will charge your device at the same rate as your conventional charger.
• Using the included wall adapter or USB charging cable solio will fully charge in approximately 4 hours.
• A fully charged Solio will completely charge an average cell phone at least twice.
• When charging a cell phone directly from the sun, 60 minutes of sunlight will provide approximately 25 minutes of talk time and ten hours of standby time.
• When charging an iPod directly from the sun, one hour of sunlight will provide about one hour of play time.
• Solio can store energy on its internal battery for up to one year.

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Currently they have 3 models to chose from for your everyday use – the Solio Classic, Solio Hybrid 1000 and the Solio Magnesium.

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Solar Chargers are not new. But the time and the design makes this so appropriate. It is a conscious effort by these large corporations to make the planet better, one step at a time.

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Here is a link for more reading . There is a 10% discounted promotion on all Solio products through the end of December 2008 – 10% off all Solio Products. Use coupon code GoGreen2008
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Trendpedia from Attentio , Brussels.

A small fast tool that is launched in 2008 to search only social media – blogs and posts and derives market intelligence. For now they are only reporting out on basic searches. I found the tool quite easy, but at this moment not very helpful in any sort of deeper analysis.

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You can enter up to 3 words and phrases to search, and you can add labels to it. Again, the labeling feature is not very helpful since the graphs are already color coded and come with legends.
The interface has options to track and plot 3 words or phrases at one time. There is an option of additional labeling but that is hardly necessary.

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The tool reports out in line graph and pie charts. And when you hold the mouse on the graph, it shows you the search volume in absolute numbers. This two way representation is nice. What is not so nice though is that you cannot control the period, or the time line.

The lower part of the tool shows links to the posts where the tool found the relevant search terms. This is a good feature since you can look up any of the data right from the report itself.

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A search for the terms New York, San Francisco & London showed the results above. Note the number of posts the tool went through for the search (in the above image) is 154,000.

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Blogpulse from Neilsen BuzzMetrics .

Nielsen has been an authority on online trends, analytics and measurements. That makes the Blogpulse information sound very reliable. Their tool is quite simple too, and the Blogpulse website has a Live feature which shows the post volumes in real time.

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The Live data is a real time snap shot in a few pre-defined categories Diary, Memes, MoviesTV, Politics & Sports. I liked the feature, but the fact that I cannot set it up for my specific categories, does not help. Although you can identify what people are writing about at any point of time.

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The Nielsen Report comes in percentage analysis. While this could indicate a niche space and a niche topic, without a complete picture of what total number the percentage represents, it is hard to make any conclusion.
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The feature that I like here is the Date Range. You can chose a period of last 2 months, 3 months or 6 months to plot the analysis. You need to click on any of the graphs to go to the detailed search pages with the links.

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My suggestion is to use a combination of both the TrendPedia and the BuzzMetrics together to get a better picture of the posts in a relevant category. Either one could lead you to incorrect analysis, but in all possibility the TrendPedia will suffice for most of our needs.

]]> http://www.promediablog.com/blog-search-tools-find-search-blog-popularity-blog-search-trends-and-blog-post-search-volumes-in-blog-posts/feed/ 0 http://www.promediablog.com/social-network-media-create-maintain-an-online-identity/ http://www.promediablog.com/social-network-media-create-maintain-an-online-identity/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:16:55 +0000 Ranjay Mitra http://www.promediablog.com/?p=70 A very crucial trust building exercise is building, establishing and maintaining an Identity. This applies for your self as well as for your product, services, websites or blogs – anything that YOU authorize or commend. For a long time, before the advent of MySpace and Facebook, people have established Identity by word-of-mouth.

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In a small post early in 2008, I published a Nielson Report and analysis on how various countries are influenced by word-of-mouth, and its no surprise that that word of mouth not only is a strong influencer in buying habits, but also one when it comes to Identity & trust building.

If you are not a big fan of scrambling into any of the Social Media warfare, a few ways in which you can create and persist your Identity could be:

• Since you would be using these profiles to either promote yourself or draw more people to your websites and blogs, it naturally implies that you are interested in people who similarly value those social network sites.As an extreme example, you will probably not publish the profile you set up in an adult dating network to any of your business associates. On the other hand, if you have a paid profile with Forbes, you will probably flaunt your profile in your signatures! Either way, you express your solidarity with any of the networks where you set up your profile.
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• You have to maintain and keep all your profiles on various websites updated. This could be a tedious process. Remember when email was very new and everyone had one email ID with MSN, one with Yahoo!, one with AOL and soon their business cards had no more space for the organizations mission statement! It is advisable to have a selected few profiles with neutral social networks that you can use without any hesitation.
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• The more profiles you create, the more you are subjecting yourself to spam and marketplace scams. Worse still, you could have your identity stolen. Read a similar post here. In some profiles you may like to share more personal information like your Emails & Contact numbers. In some, you definitely should not.

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This is a short clip from Seth Godin’s presentation at TED.

Seth Godin talks from his experience in this 2003 presentation. He draws examples like the Purple Cow – cows are so normal that you do not stop to look at them. But if it were a purple cow, you will stop to see what it is, till the time when purple cows become so innumerable that they are no longer "remarkable".

He urges on niche marketing. To provide to people who would be steady followers. Obsession – thats the quality he looks in the audience if he is to be successful. At the end, he summarizes his belief and thoughts in 2 simple points:

1. Put design to work – make something extra ordinary and spread the news. The more you spread the news, the higher is your chance of success. The better you do it (to the right, obsessed, passionate audience) the faster you succeed.

2. Be Remarkable – "Remarkable", Seth Godin says, is not necessarily "very good". The example of the purple cow is the quite apt. And you have to persist to bring on remarkable ideas, services & products. This is the niche market he is talking about – sell where you would be listened to.

the purple cow

Refer to Google’s suggestion on how to make ads more effective by controlling their layouts, shapes and colors.

A more relevant article was published by Jakob Nielson of the Nielson Norman Group where he studied how visitors normally read web pages. Read the study here . Nielson points out that visitors usually scan the content until they find something interesting enough to stop and read in detail . His study demonstrates the various hot zones that receive the visitors maximum attention span. And from all other similar studies, it is almost safe to assume that the top 35% of your content is what either attracts the user or makes them move off to another. And advertising blindness subconsciously guides them away from all possible places where they would have to spend their valuable time looking at advertisements.

The technical groups have not stood still either. With studies like that of Nielson pointing out the various browsing patterns of users, they have constantly pushed user’s comfort zone by placing advertisements in unusual places, and by blending the advertisements with the content. More advanced technologies as used by Google, MSN and Yahoo tend to add an incremental value by displaying ads that are closely relevant to the content. This is also known as contextual advertising.

For blogs supported by Wordpress for example, there are additional programs that will randomly place advertisements within your content. The position, shape and content will change every time your blog page is displayed. And Google , for example, allows you to create ads that has the same look and feel. And Google places ads that are extremely relevant to the content.

Technology & usability aside, this trend raises the ethical question of mixing up editorial content that your user values with a commercial advertisements. As Nielson pointed out its the publishers call to separate out ads (and hence cut down on advertising revenue) at the cost of retaining the trust of the readers. In my opinion, readers do understand the necessity of ads (which keeps information and tools free) but only to a certain extent. Too many ads, too many pop ups or too irrelevant ads could prevent even your dedicated readers from coming back as frequently as they want to.

	Hitwise	Compete	ComScore	Nielsen	Avg*
Google	67.3	69.4	59.2	58.7	63.6
Yahoo	20.3	14.8	21.3	18.1	19.9
MSN	6.7	10.2	9.4	12.0	10.5
AOL	–	1.5	4.8	4.1	4.5
Ask	4.1	3.7	4.7	2.4	4.2

Although the data is for March 2008, and would theoretically be outdated in another few days, I think it does serve 2 purposes:

1. Gives you a clear idea of where people are looking for information today, and given the numbers, even with all the luck that AOL, MSN & Ask could ask for, Google will still remain the leader in the coming years.

2. Knowing that Google & Yahoo are jointly working to allow Google Adsense advertisements on Yahoo Searches, and that Yahoo might run into collaborations with one or more of the major IT players of the day (Microsoft or Time Warner etc), you could peacefully focus on the top 2 in the chart for your search engine plans and forget the rest of the players for the next few years.

About the data:

1. These are all percentage market share of the search engine providers Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL & Ask.

2. The Average is calculated by eliminating the outliers.

3. The data is for March 2008 for US searches.

4. MSN has boosted it’s search engine mechanism and MSN Live is a potential player in the coming years.

Conclusions: From the perspective of a small home based business owner, and a freelancer, this information would help:

1. in Allocating advertising budget – the likelihood of succeeding with Google & Yahoo is higher than any other provider. Given that Google is actively buying smaller niche online ad servers (recently bought DoubleClick), there could be a lot of consolidation within the ad serving industry

2. in getting your website & blog onto any of these search engines. Typically visitors would browse through the first 3 pages on a search result. You could now concentrate on getting your website and blog on Google & Yahoo searches and leave the rest out

3. you could plan for search result advertising . Google provides contextual search advertising and if you are not already using it, it is time you started. Log into Adsense to create ad campaigns for Google Search

4. Make your website & blog compatible with Google & Yahoo web crawlers . Web Crawlers (or search bots ) are computer programs that run periodically to index all the data on the internet. Each search provider would have it’s own style of crawling. There are ways to make your website & blog very friendly to these crawlers so that your content could be easily indexed

5. Focus on what people are searching in Google & Yahoo!. Finding out the terms and the phrases would help you create content with similar key words. Do note though that people will search for different things at different times. And with the amount of junk and duplicate content on the internet, you have to be cautious on what you publish. A way to balance out your content is to publish standard "always necessary" information along with seasonal "in demand" topics. And lastly, do not stray from the general objective of your content, no matter how hot a topic is. If that is not related to your website or blog, let them go!

Additional data: Here is the actual search data for the top 10 search providers in US for March 2008.

Provider	Searches (000)	YoY Growth	Share of Searches
1. Google Search	4,791,057	25.50%	58.70%
2. Yahoo! Search	1,480,690	-4.50%	18.10%
3. MSN/Windows Live Search	979,761	36.60%	12.00%
4. AOL Search	334,376	-19.40%	4.10%
5. Ask.com Search	199,305	52.40%	2.40%
6. My Web Search	70,194	-5.40%	0.90%
7. Comcast Search	44,227	32.40%	0.50%
8. NexTag Search	29,400	58.40%	0.40%
9. AT&T Worldnet Search	25,302	130.50%	0.30%
10. Dogpile.com Search	19,321	-32.90%	0.20%

]]> http://www.promediablog.com/search-engine-populatirty-market-shares/feed/ 0 http://www.promediablog.com/affiliate-marketing-a-growing-source-of-revenue-from-your-websites-blogs/ http://www.promediablog.com/affiliate-marketing-a-growing-source-of-revenue-from-your-websites-blogs/#comments Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:17:03 +0000 Ranjay Mitra http://www.promediablog.com/?p=55 Bloggers and people who run websites will see a significant revenue from affiliate marketing programs. This makes bloggers and online media communicators more sensitive to their readers.

It is just not about the excellence in content, not just about unbiased views or reviews, it is about an ability to constantly engage the reader in a to & fro communication. It is about earning the trust. And lastly, it is more importantly about retaining that trust.

A survey conducted by Forrester Research and Shop.org (a division of the National Retail Federation) predicted that online sales will grow by 17% to US $ 204 billion by the end of 2008. And in spite of the economic slowdown, the American shoppers continue to buy online. It is no wonder that large retailers are spending a large budget on both acquiring new customers (53% budget) as well as retaining old customers (21% of budget).

Large retailers benefit from trusted bloggers and social marketers, and their devoted readers and followers in turn, for increased online sales. Affiliate marketing came out as the most significant way to reach out to new customers as well as retaining old ones.

At a micro level, small affiliates could influence and draw small groups of trusted buyers and the strategy will pay off. Large corporations are beefing up their affiliate budget for the coming years, the report said.

The other interesting part of the Forrester report said that search-engine marketing brought in 35% of the sales the past year, and about 90% of the online retailers used pay for performance for their advertisements. 79% of retailers plan to have search engine placement as a focus for 2008 and derive even more from affiliate based pay-for-performance marketing.

Adbrite allows you to earn money and monetize your videos. And you do not need to install any code on your side to start advertising and earning money. You need to sign up with Adbrite & create a publisher account .

Currently AdBrite InVideo supports Flash video format (FLV) only. Some video editing programs, such as Adobe Premiere, allow you to export your video directly to FLV. If your video is saved in a different format, such as Quicktime, Windows Media, or MPEG, you’ll need to convert your video to FLV.

Adbrite will not host your videos, but will only provide with advertisements to all the videos you want. In addition to that, Adbrite will let you put a watermark with your own logo.

Sign up with Adbrite for Free & create a publisher account to start earning money from advertising .

With videos becoming a sole communication media over the internet, the most popular ones are those that are about 2.8 mins (average) duration. That apart, short nicely done videos could be a strong component of your internet publication also. More and more blogs and websites that had to do with tutorials and trainings are now complimenting their internet pages with a video unit.

Here is the link to the official launch message from the Google Product Team.

Anyone with a Google YouTube account could track how their uploaded videos are being used by viewers. YouTube Insight provides video usage information like:

1. how often a video’s viewed in different geographic regions
2. how popular it is relative to all videos in a market over a period of time
3. how long until a video becomes popular (the fuzziest of fuzzy metrics)
4. what happens to video views as popularity peaks

For bloggers, now it becomes even more relevant to start publishing small video content along with the literary ones. Google has created a host of APIs (these are small programs that you can easily customize to integrate Google’s content with your website and blogs) and Blog Forums have created more plugins to integrate your videos on YouTube in your posts and blogs and website.

The one data point that stands out is the 39% concentration of viewers on User generated amateur video clips. And combining movie trailers and comedy clips, its a whopping average of over 45%.

For beginners and small online publishers, this data carries a significant amount of direction towards creating and publishing short video content. There is a definite rise of tutorials and video lessons in YouTube. Patrons have started collaborating with the ivy league universities to promote popular class room lectures on YouTube. And the earlier you get to be in there, the better chances of you succeeding in your entrepreneurial efforts!

The other portion to this data talks of the large advertising budgets, which incidentally did not see much of a slump in the US even though the economy did. More and more advertisers are leveraging the technical advances made to converge on television and the internet. This article on eMarketer gives a good snapshot of how the advertisers and the sellers are buying into that idea more vigorously than they did in the past.

I have spoken about the various formats (also known as creative ) earlier on advertising-on-your-website-the-first-step-to-monetizing-your-blog . Say you have set up ad banners 160×600 in design. And you have selected to use Google Adsense and Yahoo! Advertising for this space.

Now at any time, both Google Adsense as well as Yahoo! Advertising would have say a thousand advertisers waiting to place their banner or text ads on your website. Not all of the advertisers are paying the publishers (you in this case) the same amount of money for displaying their ads. Some pay more and some pay less. And there beings the competition within the advertisers!

It is much like auction that you could automate with the help of your advertising program. Instead of putting in just the advertising code for Google Adsense or Yahoo! Advertising, you combine the code together and create one single code. Your advertising system will then find out at any given point of time, which advertiser is paying the most for your spot and will display that ad.

Not all advertisers will allow you to maximize your ad revenue. I will take the example of your advertisement revenue. Let me explain what I mean by "maximizing the website and blog’s advertising revenue".

I have spoken about the various formats (also known as creative ) earlier on advertising-on-your-website-the-first-step-to-monetizing-your-blog . Say you have set up ad banners 160×600 in design. And you have selected to use Google Adsense and Yahoo! Advertising for this space.

Now at any time, both Google Adsense as well as Yahoo! Advertising would have say a thousand advertisers waiting to place their banner or text ads on your website. Not all of the advertisers are paying the publishers (you in this case) the same amount of money for displaying their ads. Some pay more and some pay less. And there beings the competition within the advertisers!

It is much like auction that you could automate with the help of your advertising program. Instead of putting in just the advertising code for Google Adsense or Yahoo! Advertising, you combine the code together and create one single code. Your advertising system will then find out at any given point of time, which advertiser is paying the most for your spot and will display that ad.

Adbrite who does allow you to choose between various advertisers and earn the most from your ad space.

The automation is placed under the Pricing tab. Once you have decided on the format of your ad and you have another advertiser (say Google Adsense) also planned for this space, the Pricing option will enable you to do two things:

1. Set a minimum price for your web space. This is mentioned as US dollars for every 1,000 effective page loads (eCPM)

2. Combine Adbrite code and Google Adsense code (and any other advertiser’s code as well) and create one single code that you need to paste on your website.

3. Be sure to check Yes on the Reserve Pricing option.

4. Be sure to put a value in the $ field of eCPM. This is what you expect advertisers to pay you for every 1000 times the ads are displayed. To give you a hint, generally an eCPM of anything around US $ 0.50 to US $ 1.00 will help you serve a high percent of paid ads. The number of ads displayed decreases sharply when the eCPM is over US $ 1.50 for most of the advertisers.When there is no ad to serve that could meet your price, free public ads are served to occupy the space. You do not earn any money from those public service ads.

5. Have your advertising code ready from other ad agencies like Google Adsense. Copy the code in the last white space and click on Save button.

This will generate a final piece of code that you need to paste on your website or blog where you want the ad to appear.

Set up a Publisher account with Adbrite and start making money from your websites. The pay rates from Adbrite are a little low (varies from US $0.25 to US $ 1.00 eCPM) but the regulations are very easy and quite helpful if you are just beginning. The best part is that Adbrite is open for new bloggers even when the site hit rates are low!

]]> http://www.promediablog.com/earning-the-most-from-your-ads-maximizing-ad-revenue-from-your-blogs-websites/feed/ 0 http://www.promediablog.com/advertising-on-your-website-the-first-step-to-monetizing-your-blog/ http://www.promediablog.com/advertising-on-your-website-the-first-step-to-monetizing-your-blog/#comments Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:06:08 +0000 Ranjay Mitra http://www.promediablog.com/?p=24 When you have a website or a blog, it is like real estate on the internet. And when you have a strong content on your blog and website, it is similar to placing that real estate next to the Caribbean sea shore!

It becomes a very attractive place for advertisers to display their products and services. And in that process, you lend spaces on your blogs and websites to them for money.

But before you go on placing advertisements to monetize your websites and blogs, you should know the various types of advertisements that people could display on your website and blog, and the different monetizing or payment options.

This would help you maximize your earning from the limited web spaces you hold.

Banner Ads

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These are advertisements of specific dimensions that are placed on premium locations on your website and blog. They could have text in them or they could be image files. The most common formats are:

• 468×60 (Full Banner)
• 234×60 (Half Banner)
• 728×90 (Leaderboard)
• 300×250 (Medium Rectangle)
• 250×250 (Square)
• 120×240 (Vertical Banner)
• 180×150 (Rectangle)
• 240×400 (Vertical Rectangle)
• 120×600 (Skyscraper)
• 160×600 (Wide Skyscraper)

Many of the banner advertisements have re-direction code built into them. You may not know that, but when visitors come over to your site or blog, an advertisement with a re-direction code could automatically hijack your visitor to another website.

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But generally, when a visitor clicks intentionally on any of the advertisements, they would be taken to another site outside yours.

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Pop Under Ads

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In this type of advertising, a new window opens up each time a visitor comes over to your website. The new window will take the visitor to another website for the advertiser. However, the new window will not pop up over your website, so the visitor will still be able to browse your site and blog. It is only when the visitor closes your website or blog window, will he or she be able to see the advertising window that was opened earlier.

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Since these advertisements are not directly displayed on your "land" they do not occupy any space on your website or blog. They take up a whole new window in turn. They are silent, non intrusive type of advertisements that do not distract or hijack your visitor from your website and blog.

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The formats could be a new web page or an image. The most popular sizes of pop under ads are:

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• 800×600 Full-Page Pop-Under (Landing Page)
• 720×300 (Graphic Image)

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Pop up ads

In this type of advertisement a new window with the advertisement opens up in front of your website or blog the moment someone tries to visit your website. So the visitor is immediately taken over to the advertisers’ site. Even though your website or blog is still open somewhere in the clutter of other open windows, the visitor is temporarily distracted. It is often confusing to the visitor not knowing if they have come over to your website or some place else!

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As with the pop under ads, the formats could be a new web page or an image. The most popular sizes of pop up ads are:

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• 800×600 Full-Page Pop-Under (Landing Page)
• 720×300 (Graphic Image)

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Unless you have a trusted source of pop up advertisements, in some cases, malicious codes are built into these advertisements that could harm your visitor or compromise on your website or blog’s security too.

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Transition Ads or Interstitial Ads

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This type of advertisement display a full-page ad to a visitor while navigating between pages on your website. The Transition Ad includes a frame at the top of the browser window that allows the consumer to skip the ad and continue to their desired page on your website. You earn money each time a consumer views an ad.

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Since the visitor would be forced to stop and view the advertisement while moving from one of your pages on your blog or website to another, there is a higher chance of earning money on this. But it is a definite interruption to the visitor’s navigation through your website.

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These ads could be web pages, banners, images or flash content. The popular formats are:

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• 800×600 Full-Page Browser Window (Landing Page)
• 720×300 (Graphic Image)

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The positioning of these ads should be limited so as to cause the least number of disruption to your visitor. Usually placing these ads between two of the most popular pages give high returns. You also have the option to control the number of times these ads are shown (that means that you could decide to show these transition ads once every five times your visitors move from one page to another).
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Search Listing Ads

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When you search Google or Yahoo or any other popular search engines, they show you a set of links at the top and the sides, often labeled as Sponsored Links. They are ads relevant to your search but the search engine show them as some thing special. They are advertisements!

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Very similar to this, if you have a search button on your website or blog, you can display ads when visitors search from your site. You earn money when your visitors click any of the ads in the search result.

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In Text Ads or Roll Over Ads

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In this type of ads, a few words, often called ad key words, are highlighted automatically. When your visitor takes the pointer over any of these words, a small ad window pops up. This is a very small window, much like a call out or a bubble that is relevant to the key word. When your visitor clicks on that ad, they are taken away from your website to the advertiser’s.

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Generally about 8 – 10 words on your page is highlighted for In Text Ads. The words at the top of the page are more prone to be targeted and often include the website or blog’s name and description. The style (color, font, underline etc) for these key words are altered so as to attract the visitor’s attraction.

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This short guide should help you find out the right type of advertisements for your web pages and blogs. You may need to change the type of ads and formats depending on the nature of your sites and pages within the website and blogs.

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