Kontera optimization Tips

In this article, I will specifically address why you should avoid using Kontera ContentLink ads and discuss generally why it is a bad idea to use in-text advertising on a website.

If you are not familiar with Kontera ContentLink advertising, it is the double underline links you see on some blogs and forums. When you mouse-over the link, an ad pops up. ContentLink is Kontera's specific brand; there are other advertisers who offer this type of advertising. Generally, it is referred to as "in-text contextual advertising".

Kontera ContentLink Ads are not Relevant

Look more closely at the picture above. This is a cropped screen shot taken from a website with Kontera ads. The screen shot was taken shortly before I started writing this article and it was the first link I moused-over to view a Kontera ad. You will notice that the mouse is hovering over "HTML tag". The ad that is displayed is for free Married With Children episodes.

First of all, I can't think of a more pointless way to waste my time than watching old re-runs of the TV show, Married with Children. But what is really glaring in this example is that free Married with Children episodes have nothing to do with an "HTML tag". Is this supposed to be contextual advertising? Obviously, Kontera's algorithm for determining relevancy sucks. That was my impression while running Kontera ads on Themebot for several months, and seeing that ad today only confirms my opinion. Obviously, if you have a website and use Kontera, your visitors aren't going to appreciate seeing the irrelevant ads.

Kontera ContentLink Ads will Slow Down Your Website

There was a very noticeable difference in page load times with Kontera ads running in comparison to browsing the site without them. I use quite a bit of caching on Themebot to speed things up. Kontera uses JavaScript to display the contextual links, so it bypasses the caching. During the time that I was running the ads, page loads were significantly slowed down. Not only is this a drag for your visitors, it also may hurt your ranking / indexing with Google and other search engines. It is a well-known fact that having fast loading pages will improve your performance in Google. Don't just take my word for it when I say that Kontera will slow down your site. Here is what Jeremy Schoemaker, owner of ShoeMoney has to say about Kontera.

Kontera has Terrible Accounting Tools

Kontera does not provide earnings data beyond the most recent 6 months. Furthermore, there is no way to view your total earnings from the account manager. After six months, the amount of money you have earned disappears and you just have to trust that Kontera is going to compensate you fairly. I logged into my account recently and this is still an issue. All of the other affiliates and advertisers I have worked with provide a much better interface with historical data that includes all of my earnings.

You Won't Make Money Online with Kontera

Unless you have extremely high traffic to your website, blog or forums you aren't going to make money online using Kontera. Themebot is a popular website and gets a lot of traffic, not extremely high traffic, but a lot. Click-thru on the Kontera ads when they were live was pretty good. But the daily earnings were hardly enough to buy a cup of coffee. Besides, even if you did have a website with extremely high traffic, you could find much better ways to monetize it rather than annoying your visitors with a popup ad every time they accidentally mouse-over one of the double underline links.

If You Do Earn a Few Bucks with Kontera, Don't Expect to be Paid

Over the past few months I have written numerous emails to Kontera requesting payment. They currently owe me $152.57. I had to move their ads out of the free website templates download section on this site because their JavaScript was causing a problems. When a visitor would first load the page it would be completely blank, just a white page. If the page was reloaded it would appear properly. Removing the Kontera ads from that section fixed the problem. I believe that the breakage caused by the Kontera script was the culprit for a notable increase in bounce-rate during the period that their ads were in the themes section. I notified Kontera about this and was told that I had to give 30 days notice to end the contract and that if I removed the ads I would not be paid.

What the hell!? I'm not renting an apartment. And, I don't care if Kontera has promised their partners a certain number of page views from their publishers. If your crap ads are breaking my site, I'm going to move them to a section where they don't cause issues. Which is exactly what I did. No where in the Kontera Terms of Service does it say anything about having to maintain a certain number of page views. I did not remove the Kontera tag from the website, I just moved it out of the area where it was causing problems.

The crooks at Kontera have refused to pay me and I have wasted more time on this than I have earned with their program. Today I filed a report with the BBB (Better Business Bureau). Considering how bad their service is and how expensive it is to run an operation out of San Francisco, it doesn't surprise me that they are stealing money from their publishers. It also won't surprise me when they go bankrupt.

If you are considering running in-text advertisements from another affiliate, you should reconsider...

In-Text Contextual Ads are Annoying!

There is a serious usability issue when it comes to in-text advertising. First of all, visitors expect links in your articles to represent external sources of information that you want to bring to their attention. There is no way to filter the ads presented by Kontera (I can't comment on other advertisers) and as you saw in the beginning of this article, Kontera ads are not relevant. Furthermore, in-text ads that pop-up break the flow of the article. They remain hovering there for a while after you move your mouse away. This is a great way to annoy your readers and drive them away. If you want to make almost enough money to buy a Frappuccino at the expense of driving your readers away, you must be an idiot and you should use in-text advertising.

In fact, anyone who writes a blog article on how to make money online with Kontera is probably an idiot who has sold out the integrity of their site, just to make money online. I have not used other in-text advertising services so I can't comment on how bad they are. What should be clear is that in-text advertisements are annoying and do not provide a good user experience for visitors. There are plenty of other ways to make money online and you are better off without in-text ads.

Clicksor optimization tips

Clicksor is a new advertiser & publisher program from Yesup, the company behind PayPopUp. The program is based on Cost Per Click (CPC) text advertisements superficially similar to Google AdSense. Clicksor offers webmasters (publishers) the opportunity to earn more income by simply underlining a selection of click able text (inline text links) or displaying targeted contextual ads (various sizes of banners) on their Web sites or blogs.

Clicksor Inline links are an interesting way to place ads without sacrificing screen space. But, there is no AdSense style targeting resulting in mostly irrelevant ads. The basic premise is that you free sign up and add your sites. You can have more than one, and tracking is separate, define your keywords and then place your ad codes. This keywords program is significantly worse than Google AdSense.

You are able to choose the type of advertisements to be shown on your Web site at a cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per visit (CPV) earnings based. You can earn up to 60% revenue share, depending on the performance the advertisers attain from your Web site placements.

Payments are based on two weeks schedule. That is every 15 days after your payment is released. You may select to receive your payments by check or Paypal with a minimum payout of $50.

Adtoll Optimization Tips

Launched in early 2007 in perth, Adtoll is another advertising network and is operated on a “buy and sell” principal. I.E you set a price for a certain ad space on your page, advertisers buy that zone for a week or more at the price you set. Also there is an automatic pricing option which adtoll offers. These ads are Compatible with Google AdSense. Adtoll also offers a referral program.

How do Adtoll Pay;
Methods of payment include check (min 40) Papal (min 20) and Wired Transfer (min 1,000).
There is a charge of 20 dollars on checks.
For every ad you sell you receive 75% commissions For example an Ad sold on your site for 100 dollars
is worth 75 dollars to the Publisher. The other 25% goes to Adtoll for costs and all that stuff!!!!

The Trick is finding advertisers! What you need to do is get a “rate Card” and Place it on your “about us” section of your site. Potential advertisers will see it there and if they wish they can purchase ads by clicking on it. They will then be sent to Adtoll.
It is suggested by Adtoll to begin your prices at a low price and then raise it as more offers are made. If you think your ad space is worth more then set it as you like. You may wait longer for advertisers as a result of this.

Check out what a Rate Cardlet looks like here!

The Ads
The ads are easy to implement and they appear very fast. There is an option of video ad. This is probably the most valuable ad. I am not quite sure how this works right now. Once I find out I’ll let you Guys know

New Bloggers
Ok this Section is for New bloggers. Once you joined Adtoll and set up an Ad Group you will be presented with a HTML code for your blog. This is a default ad. You are not paid for this ad. Its a method of showing potential advertisers what’s available. Don’t assume you will be paid for this.
That my only Grudge against Adtoll, that’s part of the process is slightly misleading and many NEW bloggers will assume they’re getting Paid for it.

I rate AdToll at 7/10 nice easy and simple. However for bloggers it may take a while to actually sell an ad. Sign up now and give it a try. I reckon this is great for the established blogger/ publisher with a large reader base.

Adbrite Versus Adsense

Differences–We have discussed a lot of similarities between these two programs.But there are alot of differnces between these two programs also.

1.>In case of adsense you are allowed to place only 3 text ads,2 search boxes,and one link ads per page.This is rule in case of adsense.But there is no such binding in case of Adbrite.Which means more placement of ads and more revenue.

2.>One can not use illegal means of traffic in case of Adsense.Illegal here does not mean real illegal.But one can not use ptp,or ptr or paid big traffic in case of Adsense.But you can use any means to increase the traffic in case of Adbrite.

3.>In case of Adsense,only adsense gives the ads on your web page.The code is JavaScript,which is dynamic.That gives ads based on location and state of users location.But in case of Adbrite,there are network ads,plus there are inline ads,plus you get the booking on adspace for some period of time.New in case of adbrite and adsense is the “earning with videos” and “earn with Pictures”.

Conclusion Of The Talk

Overall both are good means of advertising and very popular in thier areas.But still it is the fact that Adbrite is better for high traffic sites.While the adsense is okie with high and low traffic,both kind of sites.

Bidvertiser Versus Adsense

BidVertiser ads are very similar to Google's AdSense. For that reason, you should not mix AdSense and BidVertiser ads on the same web page at the same time. You can experiment by using AdSense for some time, and then BidVertiser ads for another time; you can have AdSense on one web page and BidVertiser on another web page of your website.

All right, let's get to the business of this article.

Pros for Using BidVertiser
1. BidVertiser pays via Paypal. AdSense pays via check. Paypal deposit is quicker to get than a check.

2. The minimum payout from BidVertiser is $10. AdSense has a minimum payout of $100, which takes more time to reach. Many beginning advertisers give up on the early stages of using AdSense and never realize any of the profits for their labor.

3. You can choose to have links opened in a separate window. This allows users to stay on your website and hopefully click on other ads on the website.

4. You can manually approve ads. You don't have this control with AdSense.

5. When creating your ads, you can see a template for what the ad will look like before you put it on your site. For AdSense, you have to click on a separate link, for example, to see what a 234x60 ad looks like. This is excellent for beginners, but also for experienced users because the default selection on AdSense is 728x90 "Leaderboard", which many times is not what you want.

6. You can choose to display eBay auction ads (by default) or not. AdSense does not allow you this freedom.

7. Finally, a very good thing, you can see how much money the advertisers are bidding for the ads that will show on your website. You can't see that information from AdSense; you have to use some other system, like AdWords, to get an idea how profitable your ads can be for your niche.

Cons for Using BidVertiser
1. Some people experience slow page loads with BidVertiser compared to AdSense. This is a problem, because users don't like slow sites. They will go to the next one if yours is too slow.

Adbrite Versus Adsense

Differences In Both Programs

Differences–We have discussed a lot of similarities between these two programs.But there are alot of differnces between these two programs also.

1.>In case of adsense you are allowed to place only 3 text ads,2 search boxes,and one link ads per page.This is rule in case of adsense.But there is no such binding in case of Adbrite.Which means more placement of ads and more revenue.

2.>One can not use illegal means of traffic in case of Adsense.Illegal here does not mean real illegal.But one can not use ptp,or ptr or paid big traffic in case of Adsense.But you can use any means to increase the traffic in case of Adbrite.

3.>In case of Adsense,only adsense gives the ads on your web page.The code is JavaScript,which is dynamic.That gives ads based on location and state of users location.But in case of Adbrite,there are network ads,plus there are inline ads,plus you get the booking on adspace for some period of time.New in case of adbrite and adsense is the “earning with videos” and “earn with Pictures”.

Conclusion Of The Talk

Overall both are good means of advertising and very popular in thier areas.But still it is the fact that Adbrite is better for high traffic sites.While the adsense is okie with high and low traffic,both kind of sites.

Chitika Optimiyation Tips

Chitika Forums and Moderators. If you have any questions do not hesitate to post questions at the Chitika forum. Give them a few hours to a day and they will have the answer. Ryan is a very patient and enthusiastic moderator who loves gadget sites.

02Most Successful Websites. The most successful with Chitika are about products and product reviews.

03Best Pages to Optimize. Spend the most time optimizing the pages that get the most traffic.

04Best Chitika Ad Position. The best placement for Chitika ads is below the page main content/ blog post and above the user comments. This is a logical place for the ad. Once the user finishes reading the item content or blog post they can then click on the ad to buy or learn more.

05Optimizing the Bottom of the Page. A great area to place Chitika Ads is the bottom of the page. If a visitor gets to the bottom of the page and they have not found what they are looking for then the Chitika ad may be just the ticket. If you place ads at the bottom, the optimal arrangement is an eMiniMall then directly below that place an RPU unit. Most clicks will be on the eMiniMall but just in case the eMiniMall is not what the user was looking for then one of the related products may catch their eye, giving you a second chance for a Chitika Ad click.

06Do Not Use Banner Ads. The banner ads are dead. The average user never clicks on the banner ads at the top of the page. You will have better results if you remove the ad from the top banner position, run the ad elsewhere and improve the look of the page.

07Side Bar Unit Placement. You will not see the best results from the left site of the page. From the Chitika Forums: "The left side of the page is also a blind spot for psychological reasons (bear with me; I'm a bit of a dork). When you're reading a document, your eye will automatically look for the first letter of the first word of that line; however with the right-side of the document, your eye is much more flexible (since you can't be sure when that line will 'end') with texts and objects on the right side of the page. You can try Plus, the scroll bar is on the right, so you're looking over there anyway..." Additionally, if you are going to use a side bar unit keep it above the fold.

08Blending the ads. This includes matching the background color, font style, font size, and font colors to your page. You want the ad to blend well with the site. The more seamless your page looks, the better the Chitika results will be.

09How to Advertise on Forums. Traditionally forums do not do very well for advertising. The best practice is to put an ad unit just below the first post. This is good spot for your ad and it has a good chance of being read. The tops and bottoms of forum pages are overlooked. This placement seems to be the best for forum pages.

10Traffic is the Most Important Factor. The most important factor for a successful Chitika campaign is traffic. Without good traffic all of the optimization in the world will not help you.

I hope these tips will get you thinking in the right direction about your own Chitika ad placements. Have I overlooked a great optimization tip? Does anything need to be further clarified? If so post, a comment!

Bidvertiser Optimization Tips

Bidvertiser is not like Adsense. It won’t read your content to display relevant ads. It is non-contextual like adbrite. So, bidvertiser will world good on niche sites, sites that are focused on a single topic.

I like some features of this ads network, which sometimes make me choose it over Adsense. Here are 3 such features am talking about:

1. You can choose which ads to appear, simply don’t approve the low paying ads, and then all you will be left with is high paying ads. This means more money per click, and yes I have got 50+ cents clicks at times.
2. It pays by Paypal. This is a huge benefit, as checks usually don’t reach me. There are other ways to receive payments also.
3. The minimum payout is pretty less, so I don’t have to wait for ages to reach the minimum payment threshold like the other ads network.

So, here are my optimization tips for bidvertiser:

1. Reject the low paying ads. No use to accept ads that pays pennies on clicks. Remember the default option is approve, so don’t forget to reject. Also reject the ads that dose not match your website’s theme.
2. Use the squares and big rectangles, and keep your ads covered by content. Use the ads text color, boarder and background the same as the rest of your website. The ads should look like a part of your website.
3. Some times bidvertiser dose not count all clicks, so if you see that happens, then email them instantly and get the problem fixed. This happened to me sometime back, but may be it is fixed already.

Adbrite tips to earn more

AdBrite is a Ad marketplace that offers publishers with a number of ways to monetize their websites. AdBrite is a very good alternative to Adsense. These include CPCs, CPMs, In-Line Ads, Video Ads, Full Page Ads and also an option for advertisers to buy a link on a website for a period of time. Their CPC concept revolves around their Site Directory of Publisher Sites where advertisers can choose to place ads on websites of their choice. Advertisers also have the option to place network Ads which allows the ads to be shown on publisher websites of the selected demographics.

AdBrite, it is program that allows you to sell link ads on your websites. It is very easy to get accepted into AdBrite - simply complete the online application form, submit your site to the directory, place your ad code and away you go. Registration is open for all page ranks groups.

After registering you can submit your sites to the online AdBrite directory. If an advertiser likes your site they might buy a link from you. You can price your own links, but I recommend always selecting the automatic pricing because it's easier. You can also choose the duration of the ads you wish to sell.

The network ads look very similar to Adsense for content units, AdBrite now offer inline ads. The inline ads, which appear under keywords in your text, have a very good click thru rate.

A lot of publishers choose to display network ads only, as me. If you have regular traffic to your site you can make very good money from them.

AdBrite pays big fat commission for every of your referrals earnings. This is also very good way to earn a lot of money only with promoting AdBrite with banner on your sites. AdBrite have big palette of banners and text links code which you can use on your site for promoting AdBrite.