Recently I was searching for a new CPM company to use with sites that I don’t have good results with adsense. Then I read a thread in a webmaster forum about CodeAds. Their program looks very promising so I thought to give it a try.

Here are some things that made me choose to start over with CodeAds :

• Fast payments. They pay 48 hours after you reach the minimum payout ($10)
• They pay through paypal
• 5% referer bonus

Starting with CodeAds

One bad thing about them is that they pay only for US traffic, but I guess that would be fair. Before using them on every site I have, I thought to give them a try from one site and monitor what happens.

In the meanwhile I got two referral signups which somehow later vanished from my control panel I know this looks fishy but it happens if the company ban someone you refer (or maybe not?)

CodeAds review

To be honest CodeAds is one of the worst networks I ever tried. My overal experience was really poor, and in many cases they caused problems that were visible to my sites.

For instance I was frequently get a “500 error - bad request” instead of an advertisement which exposed me to my visitors. Another thing that made me feel bad about them is that their ads are 99% from third party networks (adengage, CJ, friendfinder, etc.) and they even displayed a “Buy ads from this site” banner which was actually an ad of them from adbrite!

After a few thousand pageviews I finally got my first payment which was $10, but for some reason that I don’t understand they’ve sent me $9.5 Anyway I would suggest to stay away from CodeAds as there are countless programs that are better than that.

Wise Camel writes about 10 Sales and Marketing Tips he learned from Strippers

Lee Odden publishes the results of a poll about the best keyword research tool.

Eric Enge gives some very valuable information regarding paid links which you should consider in your next paid link campaign

Andy Beard give us a lot of valuable information regarding SEO and wordpress. A must read article.

Eli offers paid subscriptions

Eli of Bluehat fame is offering access to a SQUIRT an enhanced version of his QUIT tool on a paid basis along with piles of other goodies the catch is it aint cheap at $100/month and the real bad news is there is a waiting list to join but if you want some serious tools it will be worth the money!

Blogstorm causes a storm

UK based Blog Storm have launched their new tool for tracking links to your site with many pundits hailing it as the next big analytics tool. However perhaps more of a storm is their fantastic blog which while young has come up with some amazing posts including to very good Google Analytics posts looking at some of the advance features and how to include tracking software in Flash.

Getting the most from Adsense

Dosh Dosh has a fantastically detailed article on placing Google Adsense units on a site plus explaining the new rules from Google expanding the number of units from 1 to 3, this will make a fair few people happy I’m sure. “The Ultimate Guide to Adsense links unit” a payment blogger recommended read this week.

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Have we missed something fantastic or great then tell us, you never know we may feature it next week

So you want to start your own ppc search engine? A ppc search engine may be a good additional income, and you can easilly add it to an established site, or maybe start a new one just for this.

What do I need to start my own ppc search engine?

Well to start you will need a third party network which will provide you the search results. The business scheme is very easy to understand. They give you an automatically way to fetch results based on the keywords that your visitors use to search your site and they pay you for every click that your users do in those results.

Selecting an advertising network for search results

In the past I have used many networks but the only one that was reliable for me was SearchFeed. So in this tutorial I will help you create a ppc search engine using SearchFeed.

Creating your own PPC search engine with SearchFeed

Before you start you will need an account with SearchFeed. If you don’t, use this link to register one, and then come back for the rest of this tutorial

The basics

Login to your account at SearchFeed, and go to Integration Tools > XML and Text Usage. From there you will see your track identification number (trackID) and your partner identification number (pID). Those are very important as they are used by SearchFeed to assign the clicks to your account.

The script. Time to create our php search engine

The above code is very basic. I suppose that you allready have some PhP knowledge in order to work this out. Of course if you have troubles using it you can allways post a question to a PhP forum

function searchFeedResults($q, $results, $tID, $pID)
{
$res = array();
$url = "http://www.searchfeed.com/rd/feed/TextFeed.jsp";
$url.= "?trackID=".$tID."&excID=&pID=".$pID."&cat=";
$url.= urlencode($_GET['q']).”&nl=”;
$url.= $results.”&page=1&ip=”.$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$ret=file($url);
if ( count($ret) == 0 ) return $res;
for ( $i=0;$i {
$j = $i;
for ( $j=$i;$j<($i+4);$j++)
{
$a = explode('|',$ret[$j]);
$tmp[] = $a[2];
}
$res [] = $tmp;
unset($tmp);
}
return $res;
}

This function (searchFeedResults) gets the results and returns an array with them. The parameters are :

• $q => The query (search terms)
• $results => How many results to display
• $tID => Your SearchFeed track id
• $pID => Your SearchFeed partner id

How to use the script

Here is a common usage of the script. I suppose that the user is using $_GET['q'] to send a query. So here is how we can parse it:

$results = searchFeedResults($_GET['q'], 20, $myTid, $myPid);
if ( $results ){
foreach ( $results as $rec ){
echo ‘
<p>
<a href=”‘.$rec[2].’” onmouseover=”window.status=\’http://’.$rec[1].’\'; return true”
onmouseout=”window.status=\’ \’; return true”>’.$rec[0].’</a><br />
‘.$rec[3].’<br />
<small>’.$rec[1].’</small>
</p>’;
}
}else{
echo ‘No results for ‘.$_GET['q'].’<br /><br />’;
}

Conclusions

Hope you like our script. By the way I have also added a full working script, which you can download here.

YPN has just announced that they are going to use paypal for payments. Additionally publishers who opt in will enjoy a reduced payment threshold, from $100 to just $50.

I think those are great news for YPN publishers, and I wish Google will follow them. Of course this sounds more like a dream as Google wants to promote their checkout service, so I guess if they will want to respond to this they will probably use their system to send payments.