I had lots of great excuses as to why I hadn’t done it yet. ‘Time’ was the convenient one, but my perfectionistic tendencies were the real roadblock. I have friends that have made their careers in market research. I know how important it is to ask the right question in just the right way – but I now had to admit it was more important to ask the questions at all instead of waiting for the money to hire someone with 30 years of agency experience to write my questions for me.

Please Do a Demographic Survey!

Whatever my (or your) excuse is for not collecting demographics, it is just that – an excuse. Immediately when I got back from BlogWorld, I set about getting my survey up and running. All perfectionistic tendencies aside, I found the cheapest (free!) solution and went with it: 10 questions on Survey Monkey.

As data started coming in I had a OMFG moment. I had NO IDEA of the gold mine I was sitting on – and I already thought I was sitting on a gold mine.

Here’s what I found. Sparkplugging readers are:

70% Female

63% 26-45 Years old

69% Married

80% Parents

78% Business owners

88% College educated

69% Come to us for home business/lifestyle advice or to read our opinion articles

98% Shop online

71% Read other blogs

–> and 90% of our readers create content online.

So why is this important to a web publishing business?

While some of these stats I already knew (I was spot on with gender and parenting percentages of our readers), some of these things I didn’t know. This kind of information is critical as I create future plans for content expansion. But most of all, this is my bargaining chip with direct advertisers.

Sometimes I get down on myself for not having the traffic numbers I wish we had – and to be fair, I will probably feel that way no matter what our traffic numbers are. But when I can tell advertisers that our readers are some of the most vocal people on the internet and we are influencing the influencers, suddenly every one visitor could be worth hundreds of visitors. And I’m in a much sweeter position as a business owner than I thought I was before I did this survey.

So here is where I beg you as a fellow web publisher to go out and do a survey. I don’t care if you have 10 visitors a day – those ten people could be the exact ten people that ‘Advertiser X’ wants to know. And this data can drastically change your advertising strategy and impact your bottom line.

I use OpenAds to run the ads on Sparkplugging.com. It is a full-featured ad server that displays ads, manages impressions, rotates advertisers, and tracks every channel on the site separately – all from one place. I can also run ads on other domains from the same application. But to say its “easy” wouldn’t exactly be truthful. It’s not ‘hard’, but it’s also not intuitive, it’s cumbersome when you have a lot of channels or inventory to track, and their help files leave a lot to be desired.

That being said, OpenAds can be a bit of overkill for most bloggers who don’t need this level of tracking and inventory management.

So I was pleased to see this new WordPress plugin get launched today, MaxBlogPress Banner Ads by Pawan Agrawal at MaxBlogPress. While it is not a fully-functional adserver, it is a pretty slick-looking plugin that makes it quite simple to put banner ads on your site.

Here’s a video preview of the plugin in action. (It’s not really NSFW only because of the rather loud and constant dance music in the background, so mute before you hit play.)

Some MaxBlogPress Banner Ads features:

• Tracks impressions, clicks & CTR
• Rotates banners in any one ad spot
• It will even randomize where your ads appear to help combat ad blindnes
• Inserts banners without having to edit your template code, and even offers some surprisingly advanced level fine-tuning as to where the ads appear.

Setting up ad zones

Has more precise control features for more experienced WordPress users

MaxBlogPress Inventory Management and Rotation

I obviously haven’t been able to give this plugin a test run, but I’d love to hear from any of you who use it. I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the level of control it offers, and to not have to mess with your templates is a huge plus.

My remaining questions would be whether it’s been tested under Digg conditions, if it can mail reports to advertisers, if you can track/predict inventory, and if you can assign costs/earnings to ad units. Most of those are not necessities, but I know from experience that ad-serving can be a resource hog, and under high-traffic I’d had to turn them off to keep from getting shut down (in a shared hosting environment, not on a dedicated server).

Congrats to Pawan on your launch!

I also met Kris last year while at Elite Retreat – his breadth of knowledge is really incredible, and he’s also coming out with a book soon as well!

Kris, at Elite Retreat, I remember you being very clear on the fact that there was no one factor that got traffic to convert into affiliate sales, and that you always tested a variety of variables to find the right conversion “formula”. What are the most important variables that you change in that testing phase?

Earnings-per-click or EPC is one of the more important factors to consider when attempting to evaluate profitability, especially for affiliates using pay-per-click advertising. For instance, if your EPC for a particular affiliate program is 36 cents and your average cost-per-click (CPC) is 40 cents, you are losing roughly 4 cents on every click you purchase. On the other hand, if your EPC is 36 cents and your average CPC is 20 cents, you are making on average 16 cents everytime you generate a click (not bad!). If your EPC is lower than your average CPC on a particular campaign then you should lower your CPC; if your EPC is great than your CPC you may consider increasing your CPC so that you can generate higher volume. There are many large search marketing affiliates that use this simple formula to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing.

Another important factor when evaluating Web site performance is Web analytics. In short, Web analytics programs like Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics – are free and allow you to better understand the sources of traffic to your Web site. This information is very important to affiliate marketers since Web analytics programs provide data on the specific kinds of traffic being generated across multiple sources ( i.e., organic search-engine traffic, pay-per-click traffic, ad networks, traffic from other Web sites, etc.).

How do you choose which products to spend the most time on in this testing process?

Most of the most successful affiliates on Pepperjam Network test offers based on seasonality. For instance, with Valentine’s Day coming up there are a number of offers that will convert especially well, including flowers, dating Web sites, gourmet food / chocolate / candy sites, day spas, etc. The key is to get your campaign ready to go with enough time to take advantage of early shoppers and then have enough staying power to make profits when many other marketers are vying for seasonal sales.

Another suggestion is to test offers that peak based on something that is happening in the world right now. For instance, American Idol just started up again recently (it was hilarious!). Now is the time to launch a blog or Web site talking about the show, including the contestants, the judges, and what you like and dislike about American Idol. On your Web site you can monetize your Web traffic by promoting American Idol ringtones, apparel, etc. In short, playing seasonality and “what’s hot” is a great way to test the affiliate marketing space. Your imagination is the only limit to your success as an affiliate marketer.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

First, I would make sure the post is search-engine optimized. For instance, make sure your title includes the “target” keyword(s) you would like to rank for. Your exact target keywords should also be used in the post. Second, you may also want to have others link back to your post with the anchor text (aka, target keywords) you want the post to rank for. You can do this by asking other blogger friends to link back or consider pay per post networks such as PayPerPost.com or ReviewMe. Thirdly, another idea is to supplement the natural traffic to the post with pay-per-click traffic from Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Lastly, if you still want to purchase more traffic you can use networks such as Adbrite and Etology.com or send out a press release through PRWEB telling the world why your post rocks.

(From Wendy – Google doesn’t like you buying links, so be careful and do your due diligence on research before you decide to make a link purchase. But I do wholeheartedly recommend testing out pay per click traffic on your posts, which has worked well for me in the past. Kinda sad to see those two sentences together… makes me feel like Google is winning the war on squashing the competition paid links!)

More from this series:

Jim Kukral, The Daily Flip

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

Rosalind Gardner, Net Profits Today

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

When I first started building my online business, her Super Affiliate Handbook was my startup bible. To this day it remains one of my most highly recommended affiliate marketing learning resources, because Rosalind is so honest, down to earth, and is vigilant about making sure she helps people run an ethical and profitable affiliate marketing business. Honestly, she is one marketer that I am just dying to meet in person someday.

Rosalind, you have been affiliate marketing for a long time, and the internet has changed pretty drastically in that time. How have your conversions changed over the years, and what is the most important lesson you have learned in that time about getting things to convert and keeping them converting for longer periods of time?

In industry terms, it has been a long time indeed. I celebrated my 10th anniversary on January 1st of this year and because it’s been so much fun and so lucrative, that I have every intention of doing another ten.

As for my conversion rates, they have actually improved over the years as I’ve learned more and more about the business world in general and marketing in particular.

I think the ‘most important lesson’ about achieving higher than average conversion rates is that it is a lesson most of us learned at our mother’s knee — and that’s just to be honest.

It really is that simple.

I like to connect with my site visitors and newsletter readers on a highly personal level and share the ‘honest goods’ with them about products and services that are relevant to their interests. I say exactly what I think about whether a product is incredibly useful or downright junk… and often use highly emotional language to convey my like or intense dismay, i.e. “It’s Crap! Crap! Crap!”

Because many affiliate marketers are unilaterally positive in their product assessments, the result is that many of my long-term loyal readers report that they will not buy a product until they have read my review.

Increasing conversions over the long term is therefore about building long term relationships through honesty and trust. The spin-off benefit of this approach is that I never have trouble sleeping at night.

When you launch a promotion, new product or service now, what are some of the things you do every single time to ensure that your chances of getting the sales are the highest possible?

I don’t really have a formula – although perhaps I should!

However, I would say that the one element that remains consistent from promotion to promotion is having first-hand experience with the product.

When I haven’t had access to the product but still feel that it’s worthy of promotion, I tell my readers that I haven’t personally used the product and will justify the mention with a quote and link to my trusted source of information.

For example, just as I was looking for a new camcorder, I learned about the Flip Ultra through one of Shawn Collins’ posts in which he included a sample video from his camcorder. I knew I needed one and blogged my excitement about having discovered and ordered the little gem on my Roamsters.com travel blog.

Although this approach may result in sales for the original reviewer, it effectively increases the ‘trust factor’ which is again my primary m.o.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

There are so many different ways to promote your entire blog or individual posts, but I usually stick to those that I find least time-consuming, including having a list of recent entries in my sidebar and producing a weekly digest of posts for newsletter subscribers who are not subscribed to my blog’s feed.

If a subject continues to be raised over a period of time, I’ll often refer and link back to the original post from new entries. And on rare occasions, I’ll link back to the post from a comment that I may post to another webmaster’s blog.

More from this series:

Jim Kukral, The Daily Flip

Darren Rowse, ProBlogger

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

Jim is someone I consider on the leading edge of video blogging, in fact, he doesn’t do a lot of “writing” anymore. When I sent him my questions, I suggested he might want to answer in the format he knows best, which he has done amazingly well (making me more intimidated to get into video!).

In this 3 and a half minute clip, Jim answers my questions about his most successful online sales campaign ever, setting up split testing, and promoting blog posts with affiliate links. His info is especially relevant to people who sell products or services. He makes a good point near the end about disclosure, and I might try out his idea about offering two links instead of one in a post.

(YouTube link for RSS subscribers)

I think nearly every internet marketing program out there promises riches, but honestly, I don’t think many of them focus enough on this very, very important part of your internet business. Massive amount traffic that doesn’t earn you any revenue isn’t going to keep you in business for very long. So I have reached out to several well-known marketers & bloggers for a 3-Question interview on the subject of getting visitors to covert into revenue.

First up is Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. Although Darren has a business model in which his revenue comes from a wide variety of sources, Darren is particularly talented at making money from CPC (Cost Per Click) ads, in which you earn revenue when a visitor converts into a click. So I the questions I asked Darren were specific to this kind of “conversion”.

Darren, you are well known for earning a six figure income from ads that pay if a visitor clicks on them. What are the different things you have done to test, change and improve your click-through ratio over the years on your sites, and what has worked the best?

The first lesson to learn is that every site/blog converts differently. For starters some ad types work well on one blog but not another but also the positioning and design of ads will work differently on different sites also.

The second lesson (with the first one in mind) is that you need to experiment and track your results. Try different designs/colors but also ad sizes and ad positions. You’ll be surprised what you find when you do. I run split tests on some of my blogs (A/B tests) and will run one ad unit with one color scheme 50% of the time and one with another color scheme the other 50% of the time. Do this for a day or two and you’ll see the difference. Then go with the better converting one and split test it with another style. You can do the same thing with the size of ads and positioning (and even between networks). It’s fiddly but it can be well worthwhile.

Some general principles to keep in mind:

Positioning – in general ads close to your content work best. Ads above the fold usually work best. Other key spots are anywhere that your reader naturally ’stops’ reading (ie at the end of an article).

Relevancy – you can have the prettiest and most well positioned ads in the world but if they are not relevant to your reader (and the content you’re writing about) then you’re unlikely to have them click it. This is why ‘contextual’ advertising works so well – it see’s you’ve just written about iPods and puts an ad up for iPods. If you’re using an ad network that isn’t contextual you’ll need to find ways to manually choose relevant ads.

Traffic - it’s obvious, but once your ads are well optimized you can have the most impact upon how much it earns by getting more traffic to it. However not all traffic is equal in terms of conversion. I’ve found that traffic from search engines can be quite good at getting clicks on ads like ‘AdSense’ ads while traffic from another blog with a good recommendation from the blogger can do better with affiliate programs. Traffic from regular readers is harder to convert with CPC ads so again affiliate programs can be better.

What are the factors that a publisher should take into consideration when choosing a CPC ad network (Chitika, AdSense, AdBrite, Kontera, etc.), and how can they find the one that is the best match for their niche?

Probably the main thing that I’d suggest is signing up for them all and testing. Like I said above – I find that they all will convert differently on different blogs. This is partly about the topic of your blog (ie a product related blog can do better with Chitika) but also about the type of reader you have (ie a blog with lots of loyal and regular readers can become blind to AdSense).

For me the main thing I look at is the topic of the blog and try to match it with an ad network that I know serves relevant ads.

If you were a blogger with an excellently written article/review with affiliate links in the post, how would you go about promoting that post?

Depends partly upon the blog and it’s current readership but I’d probably consider:

• Emailing a few key bloggers in the niche with the link
• Posting it to Twitter, Facebook etc
• Talking to a social media expert friend to see if it was worthy of them Digging it
• Adding it prominently to a sidebar/navigation bar on every page of the blog
• Writing a follow up post a few days later linking back to it

Most of the above is fairly basic – but together it can have an impact.

If you would like to request that I interview a particular person for this series, or want to be interviewed yourself, please email me with the details such as name, URL, and why you think this person (or you) would make a good addition to this series on Converting Visitors to Revenue.

I didn’t really set out for this blog to be a how to make money online blog, though it has kind of evolved into covering that niche much of the time. It has evolved that way for three reasons :: Reason one, you asked for it.  Reason two, I love helping people work from home. Reason three, there is a ton of $hit information out there, and I work my a$$ off to help make sure that OUR readers don’t lose money on these garbage programs.

Thinking of new ways to help you be more successful and profitable keeps me up at night. Seriously, it does. So what better way to help you more, than by asking you what you need.

So what is your biggest challenge regarding making money online? Whether you have a blog, an eCommerce site, an eBay store, or even a service based business that you market online. What is the hardest thing for you? Driving traffic? Finding good paying advertising? Converting leads into clients? Converting affiliate traffic into sales? Something completely different than any of these?

Please let me and the rest of the authors on this site know how we can help you better.

But 2008 is going to be all about the ad network, and all I can say to that is that it’s about flipping time. Most emerging networks pay on a CPM basis – CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand impressions (where M stands for the Roman numeral of 1000, for added confusion). This means that publishers are paid a set amount of money for every 1000 times they display an ad on their website. The reason this is an important revenue model is that publishers are paid more consistently than when site visitors need to take an action like in CPA or CPC models. And sometimes, advertisers have either terrible landing pages, insufficient tracking systems, inappropriate ad creative or a clunky shopping cart, all of which are completely out of the publisher’s control and can foil the click, lead or sale.

In the last quarter of 2007, I saw more niche ad networks emerge than in the last two years combined. Ad networks like Casale Media, Tribal Fusion & Advertising.com have been around for a very long time. But they haven’t been a good revenue option for most bloggers for two main reasons :: they either pay very little, or they have high traffic minimums that 90% of bloggers can’t meet. Better options for bloggers started to appear in the last couple of years, like Federated Media & BlogAds, but they were still not available to all publishers regardless of the size of the blog audience.

Most of the ad networks out there now will make you sign some kind of legal agreement, and DO NOT SIGN or AGREE TO ANYTHING without reading it start to finish. There will likely be some tricky things that you need to be aware of if you will be running ads for someone else. Here are some of the things you need to know and look for:

1. Where do the ads need to be placed on my site? Most require that the ads need to be placed above the fold. And if so, your blog template needs to accommodate this requirement.
2. What ad sizes does the network use? Most run the most common sizes, which are 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600. You again need to ensure that your blog template can run these sizes, as not all templates can handle these sizes and still look good.
3. What other ads can I have on my site? Some require the exclusive right to all of your ad space. Some require exclusivity only on the portion of your pages above the fold. Some require that they are the highest ad spot on the page. And still others require that they be the only banner ads, but you can sell text ads. Be very clear about what they require, because the network could drop you if you don’t comply with the agreement on ad placement.
4. Can I still sell my own ads? This is an extension of the previous question, but like I said, some will require that you only work with them or that you cannot join any other ad networks, but can still sell ads directly to advertisers. Be sure you are clear on what you can and can’t sell on your own.
5. What else do I need to place on my site besides the ads to be a part of the network? Many networks will also require that you include some kind of badge or other text that promotes the rest of the network, as is the case with RealGirlsMedia, in our own sidebar. Usually this is included with the ad code, so there is no additional work for you to place it on your site. But you do need to take this into consideration when you make your decision, because it’s going to take up real estate on your page.
6. What is the average price they charge their advertisers? Competitive CPMs range from $10 to $30. From my experience, you can most frequently expect CPMs in the $12-$17 range. Some networks like BlogAds sell ads for a flat rate per week, month, or quarter. Some networks will allow you to set your own prices, which means that you need to know how much to charge to be both fair and competitive.
7. What is the revenue split? Networks will split this CPM with you, 50-50, 60-40, or sometimes 70-30. If you don’t like the CPMs they are charging and don’t like the revenue split, shop around.
8. What are their payment terms? Monthly? Quarterly? How long do they take to pay you? 15 days from the end of the month? 60 days? Can you get paid by PayPal? Or do they cut checks in the mail? Will they pay you no matter what, or is payment contingent upon the advertiser paying them, which means you have to wait for their billing cycle to finish before you will get your money?
9. What happens when they have no ads to run? This is especially important if they require some level of exclusivity, because if they have no ads, and you can’t run anyone else’s ads, you have a problem on your hands.
10. What kind of advertisers do they normally work with? While this may not be in the contract, you do want to ask this question, or look at their existing ads to determine what kind of ads you can expect to run on your site. If they have existing relationships with large, well established brands, this is a good sign.
11. Can I control which ads are shown on my site? Some networks allow you to accept or reject ads that come through their network. Others will simply give you what they have and you have to run them, no matter what. You also might not want flash or expanding ads on your site, so you need to know if you can opt out of these campaigns.
12. What is the term of the contract? 6 months, a year, 3 years?
13. Who will take credit for your ComScore rating? Many networks are requiring that bloggers sign over their traffic so that the network can look larger in their ComScore rating. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you plan on growing your site to the point that you want to eventually sell all advertising directly to advertisers yourself, then you need to make sure that you can get that ComScore rating back when the contract ends. Otherwise, advertisers won’t be able to find you when you strike out on your own, because media agencies rely on ComScore to find and measure sites to buy advertising from.

New ad networks are appearing every day. And as the industry matures, terms for smaller publishers will get more competitive. Overall, this is great for the industry, as larger sites want to be able to sell more and more ads to their clients, and publishers gain access to higher earnings and better brands that otherwise wouldn’t work with such small sites.

So where do you find an ad network to join?

Remember, some have open enrollment, others are invitation only, and again, some have traffic or page view minimums that you must meet in order to join. Some act more like a rep firm, while others are extremely flexible. Check application instructions carefully to ensure you aren’t wasting your time in applying:

BlogHer

RealGirlsMedia

Federated Media

Adify (Which is a network of 30+ excellent niche networks, including Martha Stewart Living, Forbes.com the Washington Post Blogroll & Mom*Logic)

AdRoll (A more grassroots option that lets sites form their own networks)

Glam Media

BlogAds

Casale Media

24/7 Real Media

Advertising.com

Tribal Fusion

Burst Media

Gorilla Nation

Blue Lithium

Context Web

Quigo

ValueClick

And iMedia connection has a more extensive list of ad networks here

Got any other points to add? Any other hot networks out there to recommend? Or any other questions about ad networks for bloggers and small publishers? Share them in a comment!

In fact, the program has gone very well, to the point in which Yaro now has to limit the membership to ensure that the people who are in the program are getting the attention they deserve.

This is great for the people in the program. But terrible for anyone who wanted to sign up in the future.

I’m late in getting the word out – today is the day they are closing their doors. Will they open again someday? Maybe – I don’t know. But if you need the help, and want to invest in a program that is both high quality & legit, I really recommend getting into Yaro’s program now.

He’s also still got his free Blog Profits Blueprint still available – I suggest grabbing it whether or not you plan on joining, as it’s an excellent resource, especially for anyone newer to blogging.

There were some really excellent companies there that I learned about for the first time, or finally got to know and understand better thanks to the conference. All of them are really excellent companies and if you are looking to make more money or adjust your blog monetization strategy, they are all worth a strong consideration depending on your niche.

Plus, all of these options are “Google compliant” and are viable alternatives to my beloved TextLinkAds. :’(

CrispAds

Although I had heard great things about CrispAds in the past, it wasn’t until very recently that I took better notice of this ad network. I believe that CPM (pay based on page views) is the way to go to monetize a blog once you have established traffic, and CrispAds offers just that.

What’s interesting is that sometimes they will put together custom campaigns for their advertisers and cherry-pick blogs best suited to the target market. When this happens, usually you can get a premium price for your advertising inventory. And I’m all about premium prices for you (and me!! ).

Podango

Evidently Podango has been around for a while (early 2006), but since I’m not too active in the podcasting/video scene, this company was new to me. But I love the fact that different networks are rising to help small publishers gain access to large companies who want to tap social media in their ad campaigns, no matter what the medium.

Podango offers more than just advertising support for podcasters and vidcasters, including hosting, production tools, and distribution. One of their flagship shows is Mommycast, one I will be checking out pronto.

BloggerReps

Technically not a monetization source, BloggerReps is a PR firm that connects companies with bloggers to build buzz. They won’t pay you to post anything, but what they do offer is “access to exclusive interviews, sneak previews of your favorite TV shows, pre-released products for review, and more. [They] also arrange co-sponsored promotions and sweepstakes that will boost traffic to your site and elevate your profile as experts in your area of interest.”

So if you want a source of products for review either for yourself or to use as contest giveaways, BloggerReps is a great source to check out.

RealGirlsMedia

RealGirlsMedia is a new ad network that was borne out of DivineCaroline, a social site for women. Like BlogHer, they are a CPM ad network with a really impressive roster of clients including Home Depot and Ann Taylor. Unlike BlogHer, they are less restrictive on ad placement and exclusivity, plus they also have sponsor opportunities as well as email marketing options if you have a mailing list targeted to women.

For now, RealGirlsMedia is open on an invitation only basis. But they are one to watch closely, and if that changes I’ll be the first to let you know!

Ads-Click

For those of you hankering for an alternative to Google AdSense (especially now that they are paying less) Ads-Click looks like a compelling alternative. Not only are they a promising-looking contextual advertiser, but they have built-in optimization tools and far more flexibility over how the text ads appear, including tag clouds and RSS advertising. Plus they pay a generous and pretty unheard-of 80% of ad revenue to publishers.

Interestingly, they also have a “white label” solution in which you can start your own contextual ad network and run text ads on your own site as well as on a network that you create (I believe the ads are Google compliant, too). I can see the bigger blog networks dropping AdSense for this kind of alternative (and I hope they do!!!).

ClipSyndicate

ClipSyndicate is an interesting blend of monetization sources for both blogging publishers and video bloggers / content creators. ClipSyndicate has the advertisers and the publishing network. You run videos on your blog or website, and the video publishers and you get to split the ad revenue off of the views that the video receives.

Plus, if you are a video publisher, they will distribute your clips throughout their publisher network, gaining you exposure on top of it all. They have a wide variety of niches covered and I have to say it looks pretty compelling on all fronts. I’d love more info from any of you who might have tried it.

Photrade

Photrade is a site in which you can upload and share photos like Flickr, but also allows you to make money for views, clicks, links and the reproduction of your photographs. Technically it’s not a blog monetization program as much as it is a photo monetization program. Which is an exciting concept for freelance photographers who have relatively limited ways to make money from their photographs.

Two more I knew about already:

Kontera

Kontera isn’t one of my favorite programs, because I feel it is a little intrusive to the user experience. They find keywords on your pages and pop up an image bubble with an ad in it when you mouse over it.

But for websites that can get away with using them, I hear that they can be an extremely lucrative option. I’m starting to see some of the larger news media sites use this kind of advertising lately, so it’s finding some mainstream acceptance. I know John Chow makes a lot of money off of them, but then again, it’s John Chow, who makes a lot of money off of everything.

Chitika

Although I do like Chitika very much, I have not had nearly the success with it as some other blogs have. Best suited for product blogs, Chitika has emerged to become one of the largest blog monetization companies around, largely because they are the one of the only serious contenders in the cost per click space next to AdSense.

If you give them a shot (or are already a publisher for them), be sure to ask Ryan to lend you a hand if you need help customizing or optimizing your ad units. He’s a super-helpful guy!

Advertising and Google

For more on advertising without pissing off Google, James Morris let me know about a post he wrote yesterday that is a great read:

Selling Text Links Without Getting Into Trouble

When I find a great direct advertiser that also adds value to our readers’ experience, nothing makes me happier – like with Search Engine Guide, who not only provides valuable content, but they also sent one of the eMoms at Home readers to BlogHer this last summer. I have another one as great as Search Engine Guide to announce soon as well.

My favorite actual ad program is TextLinkAds, because even though it’s not my top earner, it provides the most consistent income and I don’t have to think about it – money just comes in like clockwork on the first of every month.

But I’m curious – what is your favorite program, tool, ad network, etc. that you earn money with on your blog or site? You needn’t disclose how much you earn from it, but which one is your top earner? Or do you have a favorite earner that maybe isn’t tops in dollars, but is tops in another way?

Last week I talked about the different internet advertising models for making money from a blog: Affiliate Advertising, CPC Advertising and CPM Advertising. Let’s dive a little deeper into the details of affiliate advertising for bloggers.

Although you can put affiliate ads on your blog from day one, there are a few things that you need in order to make money from affiliate ads:

1. You need an audience (site traffic) that is interested in a specific topic
2. You need to select the right affiliate offer for site visitors
3. You need to present an affiliate ad in a way that compels your visitor to click on it
4. You need a tracking system in place to understand and analyze what converts into a sale with a merchant and what doesn’t

Step 1 :: Building a Targeted Audience

Although this is critical to the success of affiliate advertising, this basic step is important for all money-making strategies (and not just for blogging). You must have a specialized niche and topic for your blog that will draw a unique audience to your site.

This doesn’t mean that you can only write about one thing. Even though this is a home business blog, we’ve even gotten away with writing about Harry Potter, social networking for babies, and Nelson Mandela without ever straying off-topic – as long as you find a way to make a topic relevant to your audience, you can make it work (and never get bored writing!).

For more on building targeted traffic read:

An Introduction to Social Media Strategy and Socially Driven Content

My 8 Hours As A Blogging Socialite

Do You Have a Seasonal Search Engine Optimization Strategy?

Step 2 :: Selecting and Promoting the Right Affiliate Offers

I wish I had a magic one-size-fits-all answer as to how to know what is a great affiliate offer that will convert into a sale. But the only way to figure this out with your blog and your audience is to test, test, test. When I first started out, I thought that mail order home office products & furniture would be a natural fit with the site readers – I never made a penny off of the hours of work I put into building that dang affiliate store.

On the flip side, I also never would have thought that a measly $3 commission would ever add up to much. But I have found that this free local advertising listing offer from MerchantCircle.com has been a consistent revenue performer for all of my blogs for many months in a row, adding up nicely over the long haul.

For more on getting the right affiliate offer in front of the right visitor:

Affiliate Marketing Lessons Learned from Merchant Mistakes

How I Grew My Blogging Profits While My Traffic Numbers Went Down

Step 3 :: Ad Placement and Choosing the Right Ad Creative

While it is fairly easy to slap some banner code into your template, it’s not so easy to have that convert into an affiliate commission for your pocketbook.

Although I do have banner ads on my site, honestly the best way to get an affiliate ad to convert into a sale is within the text of your post. It’s especially important to “pre-sell” your reader on the product or service you are promoting. Reviews, testimonials, or how-to articles have been the best performing ways to promote affiliate offers. An example would be the recommended resources in Top 10 Internet Home Business Ideas You Can Start and Run in Your Underwear.

Generally speaking, text ads perform better than banner ads. But banners can and do work well, depending on your niche (the more tech-savvy your audience, the less likely they will click on a banner ad).

Other ways to promote affiliate ads, in order of best to worst performance:

1. Place a text ad within a post, but separate from the content such as this:
   
2. Place an ad between a post and your comment box. (Actually, I prefer to put Google AdSense ads here because the click-through justifies it).
3. Place an ad in one of these areas recommended by the Google AdSense heat map (the darker orange is the preferred placement spots):
   
   (Thanks to Beau for the reminder that Google has a different recommendation for blogs!)

For more on ad placement and advertising strategy:

Monetize Your Blog Like an A-Lister

Step 4 :: Track and Analyze!!!

The most valuable things I have gotten from blogging for a year and a half have come from the mistakes I have made. As I could see what didn’t work over time, I was able to adjust and change things to find out what did work.

As you build traffic, you can start analyzing the sources and understand what is the best place to promote your revenue-generating content. Social media traffic is fantastic for readership, page views, and SEO, yet is terrible for affiliate marketing.

Most affiliate networks will give you great stats in regards to how well your ads convert (from views –> to clicks –> to sales). Commission Junction gets my top award for the best analytics, which also offer trend graphs so that you can see your clicks, impressions, earnings, etc. over time.

For more on using analytics to optimize your affiliate advertising:

Increase Your Blog Revenue with Analytics :: Part I

Increase Your Blog Revenue with Analytics :: Part II

Recommended Resources

If you really want to learn affiliate marketing, there are two products that I recommend extremely highly – and put out by people who have made lots more money than I have at it. If you put into practice what these people teach, I guarantee you will make your money back and then some:

The Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner

I can’t recommend this book more highly. Rosalind lives her mission to help other affiliate marketers succeed, she’s one marketer you can trust for great advice and her book really delivers what it promises.

Affiliate Classroom

For a more hands-on learning experience, try the Affiliate Classroom. They have a full resource site, tutorials, case studies and an active community of affiliate marketers. And considering you can try it for $1 for the first two weeks, you really have no excuse to not give them a go.

Most of the regular readers of this site know quite a bit about making money from a blog – some of them more than I do. But when I talk to people outside of the blogosphere, the most common question I am asked is, “I don’t understand how you make money at blogging, how do you do it?”.

The short answer is: Advertising.

The long answer is: There are so many kinds of internet advertising and different programs & networks that a person new to blogging or web publishing can get rapidly overwhelmed with the idea of learning more about it.

A Breakdown of Major Internet Advertising Models for Blogs

Most advertising options open to publishers (bloggers) fall into three main categories:

Affiliate Advertising

These are text links and/or banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher if a sale is made on the merchant’s site.

Pro’s:
Even the newest of websites can get accepted into most affiliate programs run by merchants.

If an affiliate ad is targeted well to the site visitor’s interests, affiliate advertising can pay quite well.

Con’s:
It might take you a while to figure out how to target ads well. Until then, you will be basically running someone else’s ads for free.

You can’t control a shopper’s experience on someone else’s site, so you could work hard to send well-targeted visitors to a merchant’s site, only to have the sale fall through due to any number of ecommerce missteps they could make along the way.

Best resources to get affiliate advertising on your blog:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare.com
• Shareasale.com
• Kolimbo
• Clickbank
• Azoogle
• Amazon Associates

CPC (Cost Per Click) Advertising

These are text links and/or banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher if a site visitor clicks on the ad.

Pro’s
CPC ads provide a bit more consistent income than affiliate ads.

You are paid simply for the fact that you sent a visitor to a merchant, whether or not the merchant makes any money.

Con’s
AdSense is the leading CPC advertiser, and ad-blindness is only getting worse.

Despite promises of AdSense riches, a very high percentage of publishers never make enough money from AdSense to justify a continuation of displaying their ads.

Best resources to get CPC advertising on your blog:

• AdSense
• Chitika

CPM (Cost Per Impression) or CPT (Cost Per Term) Advertising

These are banners you add to your site, which pay the publisher for every time the ad is viewed on a page, or for a set period of time (i.e., per month).

Pro’s
These ads are the most profitable, because the publisher will get paid as long as they continue to display the ads.

These ads provide the most reliable and stable income; nearly all major internet destination sites make their money from CPM advertising.

Con’s
You have to have a fairly established site and following in order to be an attractive option for advertisers. Benchmarks usually start around 500 unique visitors a day or 25K page views a month.

Most merchants won’t even look at a site under 1 million page views a month, which is quite out of the range of most blogs (including this one!).

Best resources to get CPM or CPT advertising on your blog:

• TextLinkAds
• Casale Media
• BurstMedia
• BlogAds
• BlogHerAds

Next week, we’ll start to discuss how to use these different advertising methods effectively on your blog. For now, I’ll leave you with a short list of commonly used internet advertising terms so that you can start understanding the terminology as you do more research.

Internet Advertising Glossary

Above the Fold
A phrase used to describe all of the information visible on a page without scrolling down.

Ad Network
A company that works with multiple advertisers and to match them with smaller publishers. They offer a great deal of value in connecting independent publishers with large companies. Usually they have built automated systems to make it easy for advertisers to screen potential ad placements, and for publishers to leverage a mass audience to connect with large income opportunities.

Ad Rotation
The process of rotating ads in a single spot on a web page. This can be tracked and adjusted to give more impressions to better performing or more important advertisers.

Ad Server
A software program installed on your hosting company’s web server that delivers, regulates, tracks and sometimes automatically optimizes advertisements on your site. They can also be set up so that advertisers can have access to their own statistics and can upload new ads on their own.

Creative
An ad industry slang term for the actual ad that is seen by a site visitor – used as a noun, rather than an adjective. “Can you send me the creative for this ad campaign?”, meaning the actual banner, or the text used in the ad.

CPM
Cost Per Impression – An advertiser pays a certain amount of money per 1000 ad impressions.

CPC
Cost Per Click – An advertiser pays a certain amount of money for every ad click.

CPA
Cost Per Acquisition or Action – An advertiser pays for every sale or lead that was generated from their web site. Also generally known as PPL (Pay Per Lead) and PPS (Pay Per Sale)

CR
Conversion Rate (or Ratio) – The difference between how many times an ad was clicked or viewed vs. how many times that click or view actually turned into a sale, a lead, or a desired action (like a subscription).

CTR
Click-Through Ratio – The difference between how many times an ad was viewed vs. how many times an ad was clicked.

Geotargeting
Serving ads to only a certain geographic area or population segment

Interstitial
This is a somewhat intrusive but highly effect ad format, in which a full page advertisement is loaded in between two pages of content.

PPC
Pay Per Click – Usually refers to search engine advertising, the sponsored links that appear when you do a search. These advertisers pay for each click they get.

What I wish was that there were more blogging chicks on the list – because, I know you are out there, ladies!

If you write about Making Money Online, shoot Mark an email and get yourself on The List!

Ways to boost your site traffic numbers include using social networking, social bookmarking sites, contests, SEO and viral marketing campaigns. Advertising gets less attention because there is usually a smaller ROI (Return on Investment). But even the smallest of websites can find ways to advertise effectively and on a super-tiny budget.

The key is to plan effectively. There are plenty of free advertising opportunities out there – but if you don’t have a plan behind the campaign, you can waste your time and everyone else’s, too.

Step 1 :: Define Your Target Market

Who wants your product or service? What’s their age, gender, nationality, income level, and general interests? If you’re just starting out, make some guesses. As a company or site evolves, different target markets will emerge, and sometimes surprise you.

You can find out quite a bit about your target audience by analyzing site traffic origins, search engine keyphrases, polling current customers/site visitors, and by examining your competition very closely.
Here’s my target audience for eMoms at Home:

Work at home parents (40%+ are males – to my surprise!)
Age 30 – 50

Primary residence in US (according to Alexa and Google Analytics)

Household Income level >75K

Primary interests (while they are on this site): Business, Entrepreneurship, Online Marketing, and Work-Life Balance
Secondary Interests (in general): Personal Development, Parenting, Communication and Shopping

Step 2 :: Understand Your Target Market

This is where my background in psychology has helped me tremendously in business. What motivates your target audience? What do they care about? What does their generation value?

Put yourself into their shoes. Create a profile of the person that you think would be your ideal customer. Even better, if you know some people in this demographic, call them up and ask them a few questions – especially if you don’t know a lot about what is important to them.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project also publishes free reports about the way people interact with each other and businesses online.

Step 3 :: Research Your Competition

Your established competition has likely made some mistakes along the way. You can learn from them and skip the mistake part – study your competition carefully. Who is linking to them? Where are they advertising? Are they doing any offline promotion? Have they changed their approach over the years, and if so, how?
Call them up and ask for a quote if they are a service business. Google your top keywords to see who is on the first page of results. You could even find a ‘complimentary’ competitor to interview (someone who targets the same audience, yet sells something different than your business).

Also, look for sites in your niche that have a SiteMeter button like this: Some sites actually leave their traffic stats open to the public – which is a peek into way more information than they should be giving you about their company!

Step 4 :: Brainstorm Ideas

Get creative and keep your end goal in mind. You want people to come to you or your site who will be the most likely person to become a repeat visitor/customer/client. The higher the quality of the referring source, the better the possibility this person will turn into just that. Things to consider:

From a technical perspective: Alexa rank, Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank, mailing and RSS subscriber lists.

From a branding perspective: Reputation, relevance, location, authority, context.

Do a little homework:

Do you want to create a banner ad or text link campaign?

Do you want to tap the power of search engines? They may require a small learning curve, but they also have the ability to send you the most targeted traffic of all.

Is your business local, and are there ways you can advertise both offline and online?

What barter options are out there in your niche?

Step 5 :: Pick Your Best Advertising Ideas and Just Do It!

In the end, there is nothing that I can say that will predict the best advertising path to take. When I went to Elite Retreat, I was surprised that even the most experienced marketers on the planet always created several campaigns to TEST which one got the best results.

Regardless, your site or business will pick up more visitors and build brand awareness – which is critical to your long-term success. And if your site/blog is your business, investing time and/or money into advertising your site will do that, and make you more attractive to other advertisers. Search Engine Guide advertises on this blog – yet sells their own advertising on their site. The investment they make in building traffic creates more value for their own sponsors.

Remember – there is no failure, only feedback.

For some free and cheap ways to kick off an advertising campaign, read today’s Entrepreneur.com post Ten Free Advertising Opportunities for Your Business.

First of all – Contact Google through your AdSense account. People can and do get reinstated if indeed there was no fraudulent activity (although from my morning research today, I’ve found this isn’t what happens all of the time).

But I’m always up for looking for the silver lining. Perhaps this is just the kick in the pants you need to do a little more experimentation with your site advertising!

Regardless of what contextual advertising you use, for some great tips on optimization check out this Search Engine Roundtable report on Jeremy ShoeMaker’s and Jennifer Slegg’s presentation at last year’s SES. Plus, both Jeremy and Jennifer have written extensively on the subject and I highly recommend digging around in their archives on this topic.

What are My Alternatives to AdSense?

Yahoo Publisher Network

This is probably the biggest competition to AdSense simply because Yahoo has the reach that many of the smaller ad networks don’t have. Generally speaking, Google serves up more relevant ads than Yahoo – but this little JenSense test offers some interesting observations on the subject.

AdBrite

I use AdBrite here on this site, and have encountered some of the same relevancy issues as stated above. What’s nice about AdBrite is that you can use it in combination with other contextual advertising programs (including AdSense). Just tell AdBrite what eCPM to beat, and it will rotate all of your ads for you based on how much money you could make with each program.

Chitika

Chitika has a reputation for being one of the better performing advertising options for sites that promote products (not so much services). But this is something that they are devoting some serious attention to improving, which is why I’m excited to watch them evolve and take on AdSense. My hunch is that if they stay on track, they will be soon giving AdSense a serious run for their money.

Auction Ads

I’ve been using AuctionAds ever since they launched a couple of months ago. Though it hasn’t been a huge source of revenue to date, I must say that it has a really impressive click-through rate. I also give them props for relevancy – although technically this isn’t a “true” contextual ad program because the publisher controls the keywords when the ad code is created. Results to date indicate this network is a keeper.

TextLinkAds

Although TLA is not even close to being a contextual program, I include them here because of two reasons – I make a good amount of money every month from TLA, and they recently added advertising at the post level, which increases your opportunities to make money in various ways from your site. TLA is a little harder to get approved (you need traffic and page rank first), but it is worth it to pester them (sorry, Patrick, but it’s the truth! )

BurstMedia

Amanda just reminded me about BurstMedia – and she offers a pretty glowing review of their services in the comments. Burst has been around a really long time – but never really got close to being a front-runner in the space. Their longevity says good things about the fact that they at least ‘get’ contextual advertising and I don’t think they will be going away any time soon.

Azoogle

Technically Azoogle is a PPA (Pay Per Acquisition) network, not PPC (Pay Per Click), so you only make money when a site visitor actually buys/takes an action. Regardless, I found it interesting that Azoogle was mentioned repeatedly at the last Elite Retreat, by both the presenters and the participants as one of the stronger programs out there. It’s a program I hope to play around with very soon.

Quigo/AdSonar

I know very little about Quigo, but I do know they have been around for quite a while. A scan of their FAQ’s states their program is for US-based publishers, and it also looks like you have a little more control over what ads appear on your site. Anyone who has used this program want to comment further?

Kontera

Kontera’s ads are slightly different than the ads mentioned above – they are the double-underlined links that serve up an ad in a pop-up bubble. I know that some bigger bloggers have had some success with Kontera, but personally, I think this kind of ad interrupts the user-experience too much.

Clicksor

Amusingly, I hadn’t heard of Clicksor until today when I did a search on contextual advertisng. But since they came up first in the natural results, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that!

CrispAds

Again, another one I didn’t come across until recently – but this one looks quite interesting as it is targeted specifically to blog publishers. With their main claim being that they “Put an End to Irrelevant Ads”, I’m hooked into investigating further already!

Your Own Ads

I have to say that although this option is little more difficult for a newer blogger to implement, it is also the one you want to dedicate the most time to for long-term growth. I’ve written quite a bit about this in the past in regards to ad optimization and strong ad placement. Promoting your own free reports, professional services, or posts with good affiliate link placement will always outperform outside advertising.

Not only has Neil renewed my faith in Digg, but he’s given us GREAT reasons as to WHY WE SHOULD CARE in the first place. And Digg isn’t all we talked about – we talked about a pretty stupid viral video that was made for about $600 bucks – but brought in over a million dollars in eBook sales by getting to number #1 on Google Video.

You read that right. Over a million bucks.

He even gave me some tips on how to get to the front page of Digg with a url like eMomsatHome.com. We’ll see how it goes, but if I can get to the front page of Digg, ANYONE can.

Using social networking traffic as a branding tool is the biggest boon – several of the presenters told us about how they got into the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times by getting onto the front page of Digg.

Some of the best advice we got was to be hyper-perfectionistic about writing great headlines and content summaries. No big surprise here, but Neil told us about a story that made it to the home page despite the fact that the actual story was on a crashed server for two days straight. The reason it made it was because the Digg story title and description rocked.

When I asked about actually making some money off of social networking traffic, Neil made a really fantastic suggestion – Diggers like cheap deals on tech stuff. So ads served up from networks like AuctionAds or product ads on cheap RAM deals will actually perform really well, even if your story isn’t related to these things.

Darren also made an excellent suggestion specifically for bloggers. When he sees one of his posts climbing the ranks, he’ll swap out ads on those specific posts and put in more prominent RSS subscribe buttons, or promote his newsletter more prominently. And if you don’t already use the Related Posts plugin, it’s a wise idea to add 3-5 links manually into your post footer of hand-selected related posts, to increase your page views.

We’re on break, and next up we’ll be brainstorming together as a group… then Aaron is speaking and tonight we’re off to Bobo’s for dinner.

And yes, if you’re jealous, you should be – I would have paid $5K just for the networking that happened last night before the conference even began. It’s THAT good!!!

PS :: Kris is blogging this too! (And he’s giving away more info than I am!!!)

More than ever, site visitors don’t want to be “sold to”. But they do want to “buy in”.

We talk about our blogs and web sites as a place to have a conversation. Our ads can either add to or detract from that conversation. Admittedly, I’ll give kudos to AdSense for improving the relevance of ads that they are serving. But to truly add value to a site visitor experience, shouldn’t an ad be a little more than relevant?

Enter Monetization 2.0.

This requires more than html skills. And more than design skills. And more than optimization skills.

To make money from a blog you need People Skills.

Social networks, blogs, and word of mouth marketing have changed the way companies market to consumers because they have finally figured out what works: Add value, and people will listen. Connect with people on an emotional level in a positive way, and marketing isn’t a push, it happens.

This is a no-brainer when it comes to writing great content. But how can your advertising do the same?

1. WIIFM? “What’s in it for me?”When writing an ad, always, always ask “What’s in it for me?” from the readers’ perspective. What is the benefit is the advertiser offering? This goes for advertising your own products as well as promoting affiliate links.

   I’m continually dismayed at the wording that many advertisers use for their text ads in Commission Junction. As if we care about something being new or improved! I change the link text in those ads 90% of the time, reworking the message to let a reader know why the heck they would want to click on that link in the first place. (Keeping in mind, of course, that the product or service is one that is truly relevant and is delivered at a time when a reader is seeking that kind of information.)
   ~

2. Track EVERYTHINGI just installed OpenAds on this server so that I can split test all promotions on the site (running two different rotating ads to see which one gets a better response).

   By tracking what ads get the most clicks, site visitors tell me what they really need – and sometimes, it’s not what I think they need. I’ve yanked more ads than I’ve added to this site, based on what doesn’t get a response. If readers don’t click, the ad hasn’t added value.

   In fact, it probably takes away value. So if you don’t want it around here, neither do I.
   ~

3. Guard Your Brand Like a HawkAs individual bloggers, we are our own brands. The advertising on your site is akin to the clothes you wear to a networking event. Show up in a pink boa, and you’ll likely not make many good connections.

   Be PICKY about the advertisers and products you promote. If site visitors have a bad experience with one of your advertisers, that bad karma will rub off on you. Notice that Darren Rowse only rotates six banners at the top of ProBlogger, and all of them are companies or products he is personally involved in, or will personally stand behind.
   ~

4. Be Creative and InnovativeWhatever you think about John Chow being the root of all evil, his Google IM campaign was one of the best ideas in blog marketing I have seen to date. People are drawn to innovation and fresh ideas – it’s probably best called the “entertainment factor”:

   

   Give site visitors a cohesive experience, in which ads actually create interest by themselves, and nobody will be complaining about ad space.
   ~

5. Invoke an Emotional ExperienceWhen I redesigned this site a few weeks ago, a couple of regular readers mentioned they missed seeing pictures of my kids. I was surprised to say the least as I was hoping to go for a more professional and clean look. But as I thought about what they said, it occurred to me that by including personal pieces of my life on this site, people were able to connect with the content on an emotional level.

   So to foster that emotional connection again, I put together a custom designed campaign in the most valuable real estate on this site – the upper right corner. Each ad is now an emotional endorsement of hand-picked favorite advertising partners by including photos of the little people most important to me. And the click-through on them is astonishingly good.

   Of course, not every blog can get away with this kind of ad campaign, but every blog can find a way to appeal to the emotions of their readers:

Lest anyone assume the worst, this kind of advertising optimization only works when there is a real person behind the campaign – one that cares about advertisers, customers, and readers on a personal level. People can spot a fake or ingenuine author a mile away.

It takes an emotional investment into the process in order to get a real experience from the process.

Dare I say it… inject a little love into your site.

If you can’t do that, you should probably pick a different business.

Then earlier this week I got a ReviewMe request from John to review his blog. Since he has no shortage of people reviewing his blog for free (in a sheerly brilliant linkbait strategy, I might add), I totally wondered why the heck this guy would this want me to review his blog. Was he just looking for more backlinks and to spend his huge ReviewMe paycheck?

Digging deeper to write this post, I had to take a hard look at John’s really questionable “evil” tactics for growing his blog and readership. Just the other day he put up a post filled with total hacks to game companies into giving you free traffic and links. And in the past he’s been banned from Technorati and Digg. In the last few weeks alone, John suggests:

• Seeding comments to kickstart blog conversations
• Manually uploading all backlinks to your blog to Technorati’s pinging service to increase your rank
• Opening multiple accounts to use PPC ‘coupons’ for up to $1000 in free PPC traffic to your blog

OK, enough of the drama.

I have to admit, though I’m not sure that I would employ all of John’s promotional tactics, John has been both shrewd and sheerly brilliant with his innovative marketing. He has totally pushed the envelope and with nearly $8K in earnings in February alone from his blog, he’s doing something right.

And I’m totally guilty of being ‘evil’ myself in this post, because I’ve taken his tactics way out of context to get you to go read for yourself why and how he is so annoyingly inspirationally successful with JohnChow.com.

Being the kind of person that loves a good mentor, I don’t just read John’s blog for the tips and ideas – ones I quite literally have not found anywhere else. I read his blog to understand how he thinks, how he runs his businesses, and the beliefs he holds about family, wealth, community, and balance.

Here’s some insights into the real man behind the “evil” grin:

• His daughters Sally and Ashley have their own blogs
• In between John’s posts on fine dining and fast cars, he actually slipped in a post about work – life balance (to his mostly young, male audience that probably doesn’t read a lot about balance in the first place!)
• He has asked his readers to help feed the hungry this Easter
• He openly states that in order to be a true “Dot Com Mogul”, you must help other Dot Com Mogul Wannabes

Sorry to start out my post in such an “evil” fashion, John. But I wouldn’t be a very good student if I didn’t put into practice what you’ve taught me.

PS – Thanks for the ReviewMe opportunity!

So I’m going to do a little experiment and see if AdBrite outperforms AdSense.

I’m going to kind-of split test AdBrite, by adding them only to my home page, while keeping the Google AdSense ads on the individual post pages.

Here’s the initial pros:

• I can have unlimited AdBrite ads on a page. I’ve added them above each post on my blog home page, whereas with AdSense, I can only have three. Since they will be sandwiched between posts, they don’t seem that intrusive to me – but if you disagree, I’m certainly open to your feedback!
• AdBrite’s referral program is more generous than Google’s, so there is a built-in additional revenue stream that is compelling.
• AdBrite will even rotate my AdSense ads onto my page somehow if they don’t have the ad inventory for my site. Try getting Google to do that – HA!
• I can set my own minimum payment schedule, meaning you don’t have to wait until you’ve earned $100 in order to get your earnings
• They have a video ad option – so I can use AdBrite to place ads into any video content you produce (THAT’S COOL!)
• They have more options than AdSense in regards to serving up ads in general. I could add one of those full page ads like they have all over Forbes.com in between clicks (Don’t worry! I won’t! But it’s nice to have the option if I actually had an appropriate context for it.)
• I can have more control over my advertisers with AdBrite, with the option of approving all advertisers before they hit my pages. Since this hasn’t been an issue in the past, I’ve placed my settings on auto-approve to open up my inventory to more advertisers. But I can change it at any time.

And cons:

• Thus far (it’s only been 30 minutes), I’m not impressed with AdBrite’s targeting. I don’t think a lot of you care about “Automated eCommerce Ops” (well, you might be, but it’s such a poorly worded ad I’m having a hard time figuring out what the heck they are selling!). But even AdSense sometimes takes a while to get their targeting accurate.
• You really can’t beat Google’s brand awareness – but whether or not that turns into more or less clicks is up in the air.
• Of course, I’m paying a middle-man with AdBrite, but that’s the same with AdSense. Until my own advertising program is up and running, this is a good alternative.

If you sign up with AdBrite, drop me a line – I would be curious to hear about your results with their program.