New Chitika Premium Ad Units - Apply Now

Posted on May 12, 2008

Chitika are usually one of my top 3 money makers. Previously , they haven’t converted well on information based sites, kind of like this one. This could hopefully be about to change with their new Interactive Premium Ad units.

The units look like traditional text based ads but have a relevent image to the left of the ad text, giving your visitors graphical information as well as getting their attention (a bit like the old trick some publishers with manually did Adsense until Google forbade it).

The image to the right is how the unit would/could look on Self Made Minds, I had to use an image rather than the unit for reasons I’ll explain later.

Presently the unit will only show to your US traffic and even then it’s described as behavioural so will only show to “some” of your US visitors.

From our tests and observations it looks like one of the key factors to whether the ads are shown is based on the referrer, primarily is the visitor from a search engine, if so show the ad and base the ad content on the keywords used to find the page. This leads to highly targeted ads which should result in a higher than normal CTR and eCPM.

I’ve only been testing these for a couple of weeks but performance so far has been an improvement. I’d recommend at least giving them a test (especially if you have a none product based site that performed badly in the past) and make sure you specify a default ad (instructions here) to monetise the rest of your traffic.

One of Anybody can apply to Chitika and if you’re already with them, the new ads in the Get Code section.

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Now You Can Manage Your Banner Ads With Google

Posted on March 13, 2008

Thinking about it now, it does make sense. They already have the largest ad network on the Internet. They have Google Analytics. They have Feedburner. An ad management application can fit well inside all that stuff.

Google Ad Manager will enable you to manage your advertising inventory, target specific visitors, produce reports and more. The interesting thing is that you can integrate banners that you will sell directly with AdSense units or even ads coming from other ad networks, and manage all that under a single interface.

OpenAds announced a hosted ad management solution some time ago, but now they will have some fierce competition. I like to host my ads on my own server, mainly because I am paranoid about load time performance. But now that big G is in the business I might give their service a try. They sure must have some big pipes to make sure that everything flows smoothly.

via dailyblogtips.com

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Chitika RPU, is now open to all Chitika users

Posted on February 28, 2008

The RPU (Related Product Unit) first launched exclusively to select publishers for testing, during which time we received tons of great feedback on how effective this unit is for publishers. And it is now open to the whole Chitika network.

Your wait is over, login, click your “RPU Code” tab and join hundreds of publishers who increased their revenue using eMiniMalls and RPU.

About RPU
The RPU is designed to work exclusively for blogs and news/article based sites that works as a simple, non-intrusive text link format that integrates right in to your content.

The RPU has instantly become one of the most successful ad units across our network. Our users experienced overall revenue increases and enjoyed it’s complete customization features.

Publishers love this ad unit because it doesn’t “look” like an ad.

Use the RPU to:

Monetize space which has traditionally gone un-monetized
Provide your users with a logical “next place to click”
Keep your readers happy - the RPU is completely non-intrusive

If you are not yet a Chitika publisher you can sign up and also have access to all our interactive CPC ad unit.

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ValueClick Online Advertising Network

Posted on February 26, 2008

Representing over 15.000 publishers and hundreds of advertisers, ValueClick Media is a large and well-respected advertising network.

It was created when ValueClick Media finished acquiring FastClick Media about a year and a half ago, and thereby gained the capacity for some new features and options, as well as an increased network of advertisers and publishers.

In addition to CPMs, ValueClick offers its users some affiliate marketing opportunities, as well as referral incentives. With many different ad types and a very detailed control panel, ValueClick Media offers great opportunities for publishers to monetize their sites.

Features

ValueClick Media has three ways for its users to make money from their sites: display ads, affiliate marketing, and referrals. Multiple sites can be managed through a single account.

CPM display ads are offered as text, image, or video and come in the form of both in-page and window ads. Additionally, video ads can be displayed not only as in-banner, but also as in-stream, with the ads being fit to the video window and beginning either before or after the site’s media content. These ads are compatible with all major media players.

Affiliate marketing is also available through ValueClick Media and all types are controlled through one panel. These types include CPAs, CPSs, co-registrations, and promotional advertisements. These options require more effort from the site’s viewers, but also pay the publisher more when the required action is completed.

Finally, referrals can provide ValueClick Media users with a bit more revenue. When a publisher is linked to the advertising network through a user’s site and signs up, that user gets a bonus equivalent to 5% of the new user’s earnings for the first twelve months of service.

Control Panel

Display ads are controlled by a control panel that users can access by logging in to their account. This control panel offers users a remarkable degree of control over the content they publish on their site.

Publishers can view the CPM rate they are receiving from each campaign and remove their lowest paying campaigns, and even ban future campaigns from these publishers. In addition, it is possible to set a minimum CPM rate for advertisements to be shown on the site.

The control panel also displays other relevant information about the ad campaigns, including the countries targeted by the campaigns and how often each campaign generates revenue.

Finally, publishers can view their revenue in a variety of ways through their control panel, generate new codes for advertisements to be placed on their sites, and manage their personal and payment options.

The control panel for affiliate marketing, or as this site calls it, lead generation advertising, has its own control panel. This panel allows users to view the offers they may advertise, select whether they would like to do CPAs, CPSs, co-registration, or promotional ads (or more than one of these options), and to create codes for these types of ads.

It also allows publishers to view the success of their campaigns so that they can better decide which ads to run.

Available Types and Formats

In-page advertisements are available in a variety of sizes, including a leaderboard (728 x 90), a banner (468 x 60), a half page (300 x 600), a medium rectangle (300 x 250), a rectangle (180 x 150), a wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and a skyscraper (120 x 600).

Window advertisements include an interstitial (728 x 600), a pop-under (720 x 300, max 720 x 400), and an InVue (250 x 250). Rich media banners are also available, as well as in-banner and in-stream video ads that resize themselves to fit the media window on the website.

Reporting

The control panels for both CPM and affiliate marketing advertising are very detailed and customizable.

Earnings can be viewed by ad type, site, month, or campaign. Graphs of earnings are available for each day’s revenues or each month’s revenues, as well as pie charts for the revenues of each type of advertisement.

This variety of options makes it very easy to compare ad campaigns and ad sizes to find which combination is the most lucrative, as well as seeing how advertisements have done over time.

With all of these means of viewing income reports, it is much easier for publishers to decide which types of campaigns to allow and which advertisers to ban from their sites in order to maximize their earnings.

How to Get Started

To begin publishing ValueClick Media’s advertisements, site owners must complete a short application on the company’s website which is processed within 24-48 hours in order to be given an account. To be considered, publisher’s sites must have a minimum of 3000 views per month.

They must also display their content exclusively in English and own their own domain name. The sites may not support or discuss anything of a profane, adult, or illegal nature, offer incentives for clicking on advertisements, consist largely of a forum or message board, or advertise excessively.

Once accepted, publishers may log in to their account and choose the types of advertisements they would like to run. When these are selected, the control panel on their site will generate a code for this ad, which can be pasted into the website’s code. Publishers will then start generating revenue from these advertisements.

Payment

ValueClick Media pays its publishers on the 20th of each month for the preceding month’s earnings. If a publisher’s earnings for the month exceeded $25, they are eligible to receive a payment, although payment minimum amounts may also be increased through the control panel to $50, $100, or $250.

Unpaid excesses are rolled over into the next month’s earnings. Publishers can be paid by check, PayPal, and direct deposit for US and Canadian publishers.

More Information and Support

Two accounts are necessary at ValueClick Media to run both the CPM display ads and the affiliate marketing ads, and they are run through two separate control panels. Both panels, however, are very straightforward and detailed.

Support at ValueClick Media is easily reachable by phone or by email, and they have a reputation for being responsive and helpful.

Summary

ValueClick Media is outstanding due to its extensive control panel and the variety of options it offers publishers in terms of ad types.

It gives its publishers a lot of control over the content they display, and its size ensures an abundance of advertisers to fill publishers’ ad spaces, even after they weed out the lowest paying advertisements.

ValueClick Media is a strong competitor in the field of advertising networks.

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10 Practical Tips for Writing in English

Posted on February 26, 2008

If you speak French, Spanish or Chinese, there is a bit more incentive for writing in your own language, but even then, the only way to reach the whole population of our planet is to write in English.

It’s not always easy, so that’s why today I am sharing with you the ten most useful and practical tips for writing in a foreign language that I have learnt during my blogging career.

1. Read in English

When you want to master a language, you can never read enough.

Every new book, short story or article you read teaches you new words, new ways to formulate sentences, and more natural ideas on how to use the language. They go to your subconscious and slowly start becoming more natural to you, until one day you notice that you start to think in English and know that you’re on the right track.

The easiest way to get started with reading in English rather than your own language is to pick up a non-fiction book on a familiar, interesting topic. Non-fiction tends to be easier to follow than fiction (fiction authors use tricky words to touch their readers’ feelings) and reading about a familiar topic makes it easier to guess what the author is trying to say to you when you don’t quite understand the words he’s using.

Don’t use a dictionary unless you really have to - just skip the parts you don’t understand. If you make your reading feel too much like work, you’ll lose the fun in it, and the habit of reading won’t last for long.

Some great, free e-books to get you started:

The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson
Make a Name for Yourself by Scott Ginsberg
Why’s Poignant Guide To Ruby: This is a programming book, but also a reading experience like no other. I suggest you take a look even if you are not interested in learning to code in Ruby.

2. Listen to native speakers

Blogging is a form of public speaking, which is why one of the best tips for making your text come alive is to write as you speak.

But if you don’t speak English every day, this is a rather tricky advice to follow. So, one thing I have found useful in practicing conversational writing is to watch and listen natives speak.

The Internet comes to rescue here through podcasts and videos from speaking events. Pick your favorite speakers and listen to them deliver their message. You will learn not only about how they use the language, but also how to captivate the audience, and a bit about the topic at hand.

Check out these videos for a good start:

Randy Pausch on Time Management
Steve Jobs talks to Stanford students
Scott Ginsberg, “that guy with the nametag”, tells you how to be more approachable at NametagTV

3. When writing in English, think in English

This is one of the most important tips that separate a decent foreign language writer from a lousy one. The lousy writer thinks in his own language and then tries to translate his thoughts to English. But that simply doesn’t work: the idioms, grammar rules, and cultural differences make text written in this manner sound clumsy and unnatural.

Finnish is probably one of the extreme cases when it comes to grammar. In Finnish we concatenate a big part of words together (for example a railway station would be called railwaystation in Finnish) whereas English is full of small words. We have no future tense. We don’t use prepositions but suffixes… The list of examples could go on forever.

That’s why every time I set out to write in English, I push all my Finnish thoughts far to the background and don’t even look back. Then I pretend to be English speaking until the work is done and I can move back to my Finnish self.

I suggest you do the same.

4. Write

The best way to learn anything is by throwing yourself out there and practicing. With writing practice is even more important. In fact, I would give you the same advice even if you were considering writing in your native language. But of course, it’s even more important when writing in some other language.

When you are just starting out with your blogging, you should write something every day to really get your writing routine developed. After a while it’s OK to drop the pace a bit - although even then, if you want to become best at what you do, keeping up the habit of daily writing helps a lot.

Write in different styles: lists, humorous posts, serious posts, interviews, and if you have the time, even text that is completely unrelated to your blog. Just to get more practice.

5. Trust your gut

The human brain is an amazing machine.

You put in the source material by reading, listening to people talk, and speaking. Then you start writing your own blog posts and tune in the mind set of writing in English. And all of the sudden, words just start flowing from straight from your brain to the keyboard.

This can be a bit scary at first as you don’t know how you have learned the sayings and word plays you are using, and can’t be sure if they are correct or not. Uncertainty is the price you have to pay for trying to learn to use the language in a natural way. You just have to go with your gut and trust your brain when it keeps popping up words that you didn’t know you even knew.

I usually write freely on my first cycle, just trying to get the words and ideas out on paper. And then, on the second round of checking my text I drop sayings that sound too uncertain to me - or run them through a friend to see if they make sense or not. Usually they do.

6. Proofread

When you have finished writing your article and it seems nearly perfect to you, the next thing to do is to check it for typos, grammar mistakes, and just some plain weird sounding sentences.

The easiest way for checking for typos is to use a spellchecker:

If you have a word processor, you can use the spell checker that comes with it.
If you are using Firefox as your web browser, you can use the built-in spell checker support.
Another option for having a spellchecker in your browser is Google toolbar.
And finally, if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, you can use the spellchecking feature built in to WordPress ever since version 2.1.

Checking for grammar mistakes is a lot trickier. What I do is that I usually check the grammar first in Microsoft Word or in an online tool and then go through it manually. For manually checking your grammar you can use a checklist of the most common grammar mistakes (here’s another one) or just play it by the ear, depending on how much you trust your own English language skills.

And of course, if you want to play it safe, you can always ask one of your English speaking friends to double check your article once you have done all in your own powers.

7. Have English-speaking friends who are not afraid to correct your mistakes

The best way to learn to sound like a native is to hang out with them as much as you can. By paying a close attention to how they speak, you will learn the sayings they use, the slang, and even the jokes that they throw at you. All of this is important in making your English sound more natural and conversational rather than something learned from a book.

Instant messaging, e-mailing, or even chatting with them face to face, if possible, are all good ways to learn from friends. And the best part in all of this - you can do it while having a great time getting to know new, interesting people.

When you apply tip number five, having native friends to point out your mistakes gets even more important. Even my gut goes wrong every now and then, and at times like that I rely in my friends. When they notice something weird in my posts, they let me know and guide me to the right direction.

8. Study spelling and grammar

Yeah. I admit it, this doesn’t sound like a lot of fun at all. But to achieve greatness, you have to put in some effort. And in the end, the reward of learning and becoming more confident with your writing is really worth it. Go find the books you were using on your English courses back in school, or if you can’t find them, check if there are any good course books at the local library.

If you still want to go one step further, you can enroll to a language course. Just make sure to pick one that is mostly about creative writing, because that will get you moving faster towards your goal.

But you don’t have to go that far for good results. These days you can find pretty much everything on the web - also material for studying English. Check out these links to get started:

Visual thesaurus: A fun way to improve your vocabulary by finding synonyms and related words. The page also contains word lists and a word of the day. For example, today I learned that Sesquipedalian is a fancy word that simply means long.
40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation: A sesquipedalian list of tips and tricks to improve your English from the Dumb Little Man blog.
Dictionary.com: I use Dictionary.com mostly for checking up words that I have used when I’m not sure if they mean what I think they do. But that’s not all you can do with this brilliant web site. They have an interesting feature called reverse dictionary that looks up words when you write few words to describe their meaning, and a good list of further online resources for writers to check out.
The Economist Style Guide: The guide book given to all journalists who write for The Economist. Most of the advice applies really well to blogging.

With online services like these you will soon notice that learning English is indeed a fun activity that fuels your curiosity and gets you even more excited on your writing.

9. Commas and hyphenation - the tricky buggers

Commas are hard. Hyphenation nearly impossible.

The good thing here is that not even the English speaking bloggers always get these things right. But does that mean you don’t have to worry about them? No. If you want to be a great writer, you have to try to practice the hard things as well.

Let’s tackle hyphenation first: Definitive rules for how to do this right don’t even exist, so the trick I have adopted is simply to never do it. When blogging, you can always keep words in one piece and thus never make hyphenation mistakes.

Unfortunately you can’t get past commas and punctuation that easily. All you can do is to learn about using them and then always double check your text to see if your punctuation is correct.

Tips on Using Commas at Dumb Little Man.
Top 4 Guidelines for Using Commas Effectively at About.com.

10. Relax

Last comes the most important tip of all: Relax, and enjoy your writing. To be a great writer, you have to put in a lot of effort, but it’s not going to happen overnight. So, while you are practicing, don’t panic. Just write the best content you can with the skill set you have right now. Put it online on your own blog and learn more as you go.

Also, when you think about it, blogging is quite a forgiving platform: many of your readers are not from the English speaking parts of the world and won’t notice the small mistakes you make with things like prepositions or commas. Plus, people these days are busy. They don’t have time to stop and read every word you write. While that can be annoying in the sense that you can’t get their full attention, it also means that they won’t notice all of your mistakes either.

Relax, have fun, and share your thoughts with the world !

[Via northxeast.com]

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PubMatic - Automate Ad Optimization

Posted on February 24, 2008

If you’re a blogger and you have ads on your site, you probably have heard the term “ad optimization” before. Especially if you’re using an ad network like Google Adsense, you’ve probably read a hundred articles on optimizing layout, colors, size, location, etc, etc for your Adsense ads.

But most people do not bother with manually tests because it simply takes too long and it’s too tedious to sit and watch, compare, adjust and start over again. That’s why a couple of smart people come out with a way to automate the whole process of ad optimization.

Performance review of PubMatic automated ad optimization

On my site, I currently only have one Google Adsense block that is right below the post title before the actual content of the blog post. It’s a 336×280 rectangle and it has been performing well over in the last few months, especially in December of 2007.

I also decided to sign up with a few different ad networks other than Google Adsense to insure that I would be getting the highest ECPM ad displayed on the site. I joined the Yahoo Publisher Network, Tribal Fusion, and BlueLithium. They also support many other ad networks, so you can test it out with the network you are currently using.

According to PubMatic, they only need about 50,000 to 70,000 page impressions in order to completely optimize their display of the ads. At first, the colors were horrendous with matches like black orange, or neon pink and blue. I’m not even sure why they try those colors together since they look so terrible.

The ECPM dropped the first day quite dramatically as can be excepted since the ads were absolutely disgusting to look at, much less click on! After a few days, the color combinations became slightly better, but still quite bad and the ECPM and click through-rate were both miserable, almost 40 to 50% percent less than before.

Even with the loss of income, I decided to stick it through till I gave them all the impressions they needed for their system to “optimize”. I ran the ads from January 5th to the 21st with a total of about 90,000 page impressions.

Eventually, PubMatic only displayed Google Adsense ads in various color combos and not very much of Yahoo or any other network.

I have to say that I was disappointed with the performance of their system. Even after all of that time and a significant increase in traffic from Google, my income actually went DOWN!

The amount of money that I had previously made on 8,000 impressions now needed 13,000! This was very disheartening and I’m not sure how well this service works for technology blogs. It may work well for some sites, but I’m fairly certain that the way it’s setup right now, it won’t work for me.

I thought that eventually PubMatic would at least be able to get me the same ECPM that I was getting just be choosing the default ad color scheme from Google, but it did far worse.

So if you’re looking to optimize your ads, you might want to wait out on using any of these services unless you are absolutely making no money from your ads currently.

Anyone else try PubMatic or the Rubicon Project to optimize their ads ?

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Yahoo! Search Marketing Review

Posted on February 22, 2008

Yahoo! Search Marketing evolved from GoTo.com and Overture. Yahoo! is in the middle of modifying its PPC offering via the Panama update.

The previous strictly bid-for-position model will be supplanted by a system ranking ads based on how much an advertiser wants to spend.

Advertisers enter a bid and daily ad spend they are willing to pay, and Yahoo! will tell you what position in the sponsored listings is available for that amound of money.

Estimates of the number of impressions, the number of clicks likely to occur and the total cost over 30 days are provided to help you plan.

Advertisers can specify goals they wish to reach with a campaing and Yahoo! Sponsored Search will provide information on how best to accomplish that given the keywords and creative available.

Geotargeting can be applied to campaings, instead of merely inclusing the location in the ad creative for a search match. Campaings can be scheduled by date.

Yahoo! can automatically select the versions of your ad that are most profitable and rotate those more often.

Contextual advertising will, in the future, be based upon your ad and landing page content rather than keywords, which should provide more relevant listings. Ad listings will no longer take days to appear; most will be active within a few hours.

The partnership network includes AltaVista, InfoSpace, CNN, and others. With Content Match, it expands to incude major content sites such as iVillage, The Weather Channel, and National Geographic.

Pros:

ROI calculator tool available both for CPC and CPM and setups.
Insert keyword feature dynamically inserts the keyword the bid is based upon into the ad’s title or description.
Depends on the niche Yahoo! has more users that converts better than MSN

CONS:

Gradual transfer of accounts to new Panama setup could mean uncertain results for campaings through first half of 2007.
Interface can be fairly confusing, control panel is not laid out very intuitively.
Have to prepay for your ads in set amounts and set a recurring pre-payment.
Ads have to be reviewed before they are shown. This can take several days. (Not like adwords which is almost instant)