The NewsRoom is a great idea syndicated content, with short adverts, easily mashable and very easy to insert on to sites. Now it has managed to add the BBC content to its list. This is great news for those outside the USA or who wanted some more varied news, though while attempting to embed a BBC story the teething problems were there apparently I can’t view the Feed in the UK!

This is the problem with News Room great concept but they seem to have continual teething issues, many affiliates are now complaining they haven’t been paid, slow servers and irrelevant ads for the videos.

Its a shame for the BBC that they chose to work with such a company - though the Good news is that nearly all the video on News Room is also available on Youtube as part of the BBC Google deal so while you might not get paid to show the content you might at least have a chance some of your visitors might see it!

Only time will tell if the NewsRoom will be a success but while the problems and doubts over payments, how it determines video views and its slow servers we can’t recommend it.

AuctionAds announced a $25 bonus to all the new publishers that will sign up with them.

I guess this is a great opportunity to check their program. In a few words - for those who are not familiar with AuctionAds - AuctionAds is a CPC network that uses eBay auctions to display relevant ads in your site. The best thing about them is that they pay through PayPal so I guess it worth trying.

Minimum payout is $50 so you still have to do some work before you get your cheque though and auction ads is one of the fastest growing networks out there with every man and his dog desperate to get accounts.

Perhaps the smarter money therefore is in ebay affiliate marketing itself maybe a future post but for now if you haven’t already get along to AuctionAds and Sign Up for your $25 bonus!

Its been a great few weeks since we last did a Link around so I thought we would cram a few more then normal in.

Geo-targetting Visitors

Kicking things of is Patrick from Blog storm with his post on Geo-targeting users also check out his 9 Link baiting tips for eccomerce.

Geotargetting is simply the art of showing different content to your visitors depending on which country they are from. For example if I have an affiliate offer that is only available to customers from the UK I know that it will be useless to US visitors.
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/blog/geotargeting-with-php/

Patrick uses the pay for version of the Maxmind database but those on a budget and who don’t mind mislabelling all AOL users as Americans can use the free version and Nick ran up a quick script this morning on Webdigity for using the Free geo-targetting DB.

Using no-follow on your own pages?

SEO Fast Start has a great article on how and when to use no follow attribute on your own sites it follows on from a series of discussions by SEO on the merits of no follow.

The key question is whether you can improve your position with search engines by changing the internal linking structure of your web site. http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/internal-nofollow-help

You might also like to look at SEO Fast Starts SEO guide (say that 3 times quickly) which can be downloaded for free!

Staying the course

Melanie has made her 100 post on SEO Cog (technically 101 by the time you read this) in which she lists her top 10 posts from the previous 100, I strongly recommend you go and read them all but if I had to single one out then I would go with ‘Small touches with big results‘.

There is nothing more satisfying than a little something with a big yield. I love these things! Its like polishing the chrome on and old car….Instant gratification.
http://seocog.blogspot.com/2007/08/seo-small-touches-with-big-results.html

Congrats Melanie, I hope you celebrated with style and we look forward to the next 100 posts.

Other notable links

Some of the hundreds of posts that caught our eye these last few weeks.

• Developing a mailing list - Web Development blog
• Proof you can gain Links with Google News - 97 Floor
• 17 Wordpress Plugins for Adsense - Mashable

Both myself and Nick would also like to take the opportunity’s to thank Olaf from finalwebsites.com for his Guest post yesterday and like to remind you that we are always looking for guest bloggers.

As long as community sites like Myspace or friendster are blocked by firewalls in schools, universities and corporate environments there is a chance for the web proxy business. There are a lot of web proxy related services which makes this business also attractive for people with limited webmaster skills. Beside proxy hosting there is submission services and a range of proxy advertising services.

Topsite submission services

It looks like proxies and topsites make a good team, I know of at least two topsites with a moderate amount of outgoing traffic to their listed member sites. This is of course why such service exists: Just submit your site to several topsites paste the button code into your footer and you’re done. The submission service providers use various scripts to post your site to a number of topsites. My experience is that a lot of these submissions are nearly always useless because the topsites they submit to are often down or not popular.

Conclusion:
Using topsites for proxy related traffic is fine, but select them by yourself carefully and use only those sites where the top user is ranked based on inbound traffic rather then button impressions. Check the topsites where your sites are listed frequently and also check to see if you are seeing visitors from these sites.

Proxy building services

If you don’t know how to setup a proxy or you are just to busy you could use some help. There are a few kids offering a proxy setup service. You get a Phproxy powered proxy website incl. you own adsense code and maybe other ad code inside the proxified pages. The design is most of the time a free template with the requirement of one or more backlink(s). This kind of service provider is often not a professional web designer/developer. These people are using some pre-configured scripts where the knowledge of PHP code is not needed.
Conclusion:
Use them if you need it because of missing knowledge, but don’t forget that the configuration is very basic and there might be hundreds other proxy websites with exact the same content. Because the bandwidth is not cheap you need to be aware that this basic/unfiltered configuration can be very expensive as your bandwidth will be eaten up quickly by users with little or no return.

Proxy websites/script sales

There are a lot proxy websites for sales every day, some of them are new and some of them have traffic and earnings history. Proxy websites are a very common offer, but sometimes there are also other proxy ideas for sale like proxy list scripts which can go for almost $200 or modified proxy scripts with additional functionality. Proxies do not sell for the amount they use to but you still need to be careful of any high priced proxy sale. If you are considering buying an established proxy website with good traffic and earnings you need to confirm its current traffic, don’t buy a site because of the traffic it had in the past. Domains often get placed on Blacklists which are used by a lot of schools and often a proxy owner will be keen to sell if he see’s a dip in traffic. Starting a new proxy website is more work but you have much better chances to have success at least in the short to mid term.

Driving Proxy traffic

I mentioned before that there are topsites which could be a good traffic source. The bad thing is that there are only a few of them. A lot of proxy topsites are full of cheating members or spammed by not related websites. There are also several proxy lists, submitting your site to these lists is free. They offer also paid top or bolded listings. Think about how much traffic you need, the maximum return for the traffic and the cost of advertising.

About the Author:
Olaf Lederer is the owner of several web development related websites, one of which is finalwebsites.com which hosts several popular PHP Classes. He also knows a thing or two about web proxies.

Would you like to be a Payment Blogger guest author then get in touch!

Most webmasters I know believe that in order to make more money with their sites, they need more traffic. Of course this is true but you can always optimize your inventory in order to make more with what you have, and give better value to your advertisers. In today’s article I will try to focus on some of them and give some general tips on subject.

Know your audience

Let’s start with the basics. Knowing your audience is really important for your web site. By knowing your audience you can offer products that may convert better, or make advertisers (in case you sell your inventory) love you Of course if you are monetizing your site with a contextual program like adsense, then you probably wont need this but you need to know some things regarding the traffic of the site. I will explain that later.

Improving CTR (click through rate)

It’s all about clicks right? So we need to make the visitor click on the ads. Let’s give some tips on that.

Don’t fill your site with ads

First thing you need to know is that there is no rule like “the more ads you have, the more will be the possibilities to click on them”. In fact if you fill a site with ads is like begging and 99% of your visitors will never come back. In my opinion you should not have more than 2 ad units and one link unit, or a few small banners in your sidebar.
This way your site looks more professional and your visitors will be able to know that your site is cool before they click on an ad (after all we need return visitors, right?)

See what people see first in your site

That’s a very important thing. You need to find a few non techies and ask them to tell you what they see first in your site. This is the place where you need some advertisements. Past researches teach us that a user decides about a site in the first two seconds. So if they don’t like our site we need them to click on an ad in that time.

Ad placements

One of the major problems today is ad blind users. I mean people who know very well how ads look, so they wont even see the message in an advertisement at all. To prevent this you need to use a smart ad placement. To understand this better we need to know how a user see our site.

Experienced users understand very quickly what is the template of the site, and where is the content. So they will try to focus in the content from the beginning of their visit to your site. A good thing to do in that part is to put an advertisement in the top of your content or even better use a box mixed with the content. If this is an adsense style advertisement then using the site colors is better as our intention for this ad is to “trick” the user that it is content.

Now if the user find the way to read the content he/she needs to take a decision. Stay on your site - which is good anyway - or leave it? For the second option we can use a big box advertisement after the content. This advertisement should be something that user will pay attention to, so I would suggest to use blue colour for the links of this advertisement.

If your site has a sidebar in the left, it is good to have a 160×600 banner there. This is mostly because most of the people check the left side first. So this way if the user don’t like the site from the start of the session he/she can leave and give us some money

Colours for contextual advertisements

The colours you will use with your advertisements is a very big factor regarding contextual ads (adsense, YPN, etc.) Of course the exact colours you will use is connected with the colours of your site, so I can’t say much to this. But something I know and I advice you to test, is that the blue colour in links in most cases has better CTR.

Another important thing to consider, is that if your site has many return visitors, you might want to serve different coloured ads per pageview. This is because your loyal visitors know where your advertisements exist in your site, and they don’t look at all there. But with colours changing on every pageview you may get them to see your ads.

Are your ads really contextual?

Sometimes the adsense bot doesn’t understand what your content is about, and that’s mostly a SEO problem. For instance if you have a blog and everywhere you can see the word “blog” adsense will display blog related ads even in your post about your vacation! In order to prevent this you can use section targeting. This will help the google bot figure out what to get from your page, and serve more targeted ads to your web site.

Do you know what the results are?

No matter what kind of advertisements you serve (CPM, CPC, own inventory, etc.) you need to know some basic stats for the advertisements you serve in your site. This can be done with channels in adsense or zones in openAds or even conversion goals in Google Analytics. The important thing is to note the changes you are making and then see what the results are for each individual advertisement. With a little trial and error you will be able to find out what really works with your site. To be sure that your experiments give you right results each experiment should be live for at least 2000 impressions, but if your site has some serious traffic then 10.000 impressions is even better.

Some final thoughts

Most webmasters own sites because they want to make money, but in the process they forget that the users actually look for information Be cool with the ads on your site, and always pay more attention on how to make a better site for the people who are using it. This way you may bring in less money in the next few weeks but I am sure it can make you a living in a year or two

Hope you enjoyed this article. Later we will publish more articles regarding ad optimisation, so keep in touch