Today a new advertising network, WidgetBucks has been announced. This looks as a good opportunity for publishers, as their ads look very clickable as they don’t look to what we are used to think of as an advertisement.

Why to use WidgetBucks ads

The best reason is that their ads have high CTR. Now according to their site you earn $3-6 CPM which is a great amount (if that is true of course ) They pay through cheque and the lower payment is $50 which is very reasonable.

The adverts are separated into 13 categories with each category having several sub categories, their is also the option for a pseudo contextual advertisements which they have called ‘MerchSense’ widgets themselves come in a range of sizes and colours which can be used to match a site or to make the widget stand out.

$25 bonus for signup

As an opening promotion they are offering $25 just for sign up, which makes the target of $50 much easier.

Last comment

I always look into testing new programs and this looks very promising. So I am going to test it and give you a full review later this month. In the meanwhile here is how their ads look like :

With a $25 promotion its worth signing up even if you later take it down as the offer is part of their initial opening and may not be around for ever to sign up to WidgetBucks takes just a second or two.

The idea that I am promoting the best web browser, and in the same time help to make internet a better place was always fascinating me. The bad thing when you promote Firefox affiliates from the adsense program, is the low conversions. First of all let’s try to see what are the reasons that cause this problem.

Why people don’t install Firefox from your site

• People usually don’t submit an offer because of a banner. You need more than that in order to convince them
• Some of your visitors already use Firefox, why display the firefox advertisement to them?
• Lack of motivation. IE users already use a browser that works for them. You can’t explain to the average user that IE don’t follow W3C standards. This is information useful only to web designers and web developers

How to promote Firefox

In my honest opinion in order to promote firefox you need to be intrusive. The first rule is that you don’t have to promote Firefox to any other than internet explorer users. To do this you will need to use a small fragment of code in HTML like :


<!--[if IE]>
Show the ad here
<![endif]-->


or if you prefer the php way, something like :


if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE')!==false)
echo 'Your firefox ad here';


The second thing you have to think is how intrusive you are going to be. You can display a landing page to every IE visitor - instead of your regular content - and ask from them to install Firefox because IE has many security problems, etc.

This way works the best but you will lose a lot of loyal visitors that use IE. Of course this is your decision, and if you like to play with landing pages for IE users, then I will definitely recommend you to check the Explorer Destroyer, a web site dedicated to destroy Internet explorer

Now if you want to be less intrusive, but yet having conversions, here is how you can do it. Open your template file and after the body add this line of code:


<!--[if IE]>
<div style="width:99%;border-bottom: 2px solid red;background:gray;padding:5px;color:#FFF;">
<strong>Warning</strong>: You are using Internet Explorer. <a href="http://getfirefox.com/">Get Firefox with Google Toolbar for better browsing </a>
</div>
<![endif]-->


Of course you will have to change the link code with your affiliate code. I’ve took this style from blows hard and it still has some good conversions. Bellow you can see how it looks like :

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Blogs are the hardest sites to monetize, but yet when it comes to wordpress there is always an automated solution for you In today’s post we will write about the top wordpress plugins that you may use in order to earn money from your wordpress blog.

Using adsense with your blog

Adsense never worked well for my blogs - as they are all tech related and people know how to avoid those ads - but for many bloggers adsense is the best earner. One of the best plugins for this task is the Adsense Deluxe plugin which gives you the ability to have different ad placements/colors on each post and decide what ads to run, etc.

Besides adsense deluxe there are other plugins for adsense too. Here are a few:

• AskApache Firefox Adsense will display Firefox adsense ads only to users that don’t have firefox
• Shylock Adsense Plugin gives you the ability to display more ads to the old posts and less to the new ones. This way you will not bother your regular readers
• If you are a refresh geek, then Adsense Earnings is the best plugin for you, as it will display your adsense earnings in your dashboard
• In case you want to share adsense revenue with your co-bloggers, then Author Adsense Plugin is exactly what you need.
• You can also use the Adsense Manager Plugin, which actually generates code automatically and allows positioning of ads with Widgets
• Who Sees Ads, will help you create some rules regarding who is viewing ads and who is not. This way you can display ads only to search engine visitors, or only to non registered users, etc.

More adsense earnings

If you want to earn even more, there is a great plugin from web 2.0 announcer which uses a unique revenue sharing system to help you make more from adsense. The web 2.0 announcer monetizer plugin will display links to the top stories from the web that are related to your blog, and in addition you’ll get half of the adsense pageviews in their site. This way you can earn money for giving cool content to your readers.

Amazon affiliate program plugins

Another cool income source for your blog could be Amazon. But if you are lazy like me you would like to have a plugin that will add those ads automatically, right? Well there are a few plugins that help you monetize your wordpress blog with Amazon. Here are a few I know :

1. Amazon links pro is a plugin that according to its author is a contextual solution for Amazon as it is displaying ads relevant to your content.
2. The Amazon Wishlist plugin will display your wish list at amazon to your blog. I know this is not actually a monetization method but a free book or cd is always cool, right?
3. TicTap Contextual Ads is probably the best plugin that I saw for Amazon (haven’t tested it yet) This plugin will display contextual ads to your blogs with Amazon products, and what I really like about them is their unique style (check the site to see what I mean)

Selling links: Do it yourself

If you followed the tips we gave you for selling links without the help of middle man companies, then it is probably the time to install the WP Text Ads plugin. I have never used this one, so if you want to read a review check this post from proBlogger.

Sponsored posts: Do it yourself

As you know there are plenty of services that act like a middleman for sponsored posts in your blog. Services like ReviewMe have marketplaces where advertisers search and order sponsored posts to your blog and they get a big cut of the sales.

If your blog has traffic maybe this is not required, so if you think you can do this yourself, you can use a plugin like WP BankRoll. The plugin is integrated with the Paypal IPN system, so it is a great solution, and the best is that there is a free version too.

CPM/CPC ads: Do it yourself

Now if you think you can sell CPM or CPC ads yourself, the first thing you need is a great piece of software to automate the process and have your clients confident that everything is working well. To have this result I would definitely suggest you to install OpenAds (formerly known as phpAdsNew) and then use WP OpenAds Plugin

PayPal Donations

Another way to make some extra money with your blog is offer paypal donations. If you think this monetization method can work for you, you can try the above plugins:

1. EasyPayPal Wordpress Plugin
2. Buy Me a Beer - PayPal Donation WordPress Plugin
3. Paypal Donate

Monetizing your feeds

Personally I am not a fan of this monetization technique - as feeds are supposed to used in order to get visitors back to our site - but if you are, here are two plugins you can use:

1. Feedvertising by text link ads has a plugin for feed ads for wordpress
2. The PostPost plugin helps you display CJ ads to your feeds

More monetization options

Do you want more ways to make money? Bellow are the rest plugins that you can use to make money from your wordpress site:

1. The DealDotCom plugin will help you earn more from this new - and promising affiliate program.
2. If you are registered with Chitika’s affiliate program - which by the way is great for sites that have product reviews - you can use [CA] Chitika, a plugin that will automate the whole process
3. On the other hand if you prefer to display BidVertiser ads, you can use the Bidvertiser wordpress plugin. Bidvertiser for me was the one of the worst cpc programs I ever used, but that doesn’t mean that it wont work for you too.
4. If you want are affiliated with CafePress then you definitely have to install the CafePress WP plugin

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!

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