One of the most overlooked ways to make money from your WordPress site is by selling advertising space directly on your website. It’s not because most people are unaware that they can do that but because in most cases it’s not a simple task. Many people use Google Ad Manager but it’s a very tedious process or they use a online service like BuySellAds which takes a big chuck 25% out of your earnings or use a solution like OpenX that requires allot of maintenance and updates. When it comes to WordPress in most cases it’s best to use plugins instead of outside services to solve your problems.

Introducing OIO Publisher

This is by far one of the most important WordPress plugins I’ve ever purchased, before this plugin selling advertising became a second job alongside running and update my websites. In 2010 this plugin brought in over $20,000 in additional income, now only 3 months into 2011 It’s already brought in 40% of what it made last year.

It’s a self serving plugin that literally automates all aspects of selling advertising on your WordPress site, from taking the orders, displaying the ads, to providing the stats. It’s very easy to install and setup and only cost $47.

Lets be clear though just because you get the plugin doesn’t mean you’ll starting raking in stacks of paper, you still need to put in the ground work. So lets cover the steps you need to take in order to effectively sell direct advertising space.

Selling Your Advertising Space, Effectively!

Pitch Page: You need a proper pitch page or sales page to present to your advertising prospects, it’s the sales page that advertisers will go to when they are interested in advertising on your website. Take a look as Mixtapes.tv and iHipHopMusic.com advertising pages. The way those pages are setup have proven to be the most effective for my business, I provide allot of statistical information to help them get a general idea of the amount of traffic they’ll receive and from what type of audience. You can gather this type of information by using services like Quantcast and Google Analytics, I use both of them because each one has a different purpose.

Quantcast is very good at measuring your audience by demographics such as ethnicity, income level, education, age group and much more.

Google Analytics provides many in depth statistics about your daily website visitors, search traffic, location etc. It’s a very popular service used and recognized by millions of website owners and advertisers around the world.

They best thing about both of them is that they’re free and better than most of the paid services out there.

Press Kitt: Often referred to as a media kit in business environments, is a pre-packaged set of promotional materials of a person, company, or organization distributed to members of the media for promotional use. In our case it would be a media Kit and it would be distributed to product and service providers, this kit would include all the best things about your website how many visitors your website receive, screenshot of your website pages, what search terms you rank for, honorable mentions, success stories from past advertisers etc. Basically it’s an extended version of what your Pitch Page would be, both of which are proven to increase direct ad sales. A Media Kit though is more professional when approaching bigger companies and even agencies for advertising.

Multiple Options: Offer your advertisers multiple advertising options, such as different payment options, time periods such as daily, weekly, monthly etc. Give them incentives for being loyal customers such as a free week of advertising. Make your advertising offer as flexible  and feature filled as possible.

Knowing What To Charge Advertisers

This is where things get a little tricky, the reason why direct advertisers even exist and are looking for you is because they are looking for more affordable alternatives to advertising on Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. And the reason why your looking for advertisers is because you want to make more money than what your making from advertising programs like Google Adsense.

So now the trick is to provide a medium where you make more money but the advertiser spends less money.

How much should you sell your ad space for? The method I use is to at least double the eCPM rate you’re getting from Google AdSense. If a spot is making you $2.50 per 1000 CPM (Cost per thousand visitors), then sell it for a minimum of $5.00 per CPM. It would be stupid to sell it for anything less than double because that is what Google is selling it for (assuming Google takes 50%). The whole point of selling advertising directly is to cut out the middle man and make more money.

When you use this method you now have the option making your pricing flexible. So lets say the advertiser is looking for a cheaper alternative to Google, he’s paying them $5.00 per CPM to advertise on your site or sites similar to yours and 50% of that (assuming that’s what Google pays you) goes to you which would be $2.50. What you would do now is seek out this advertiser and offer him a rate of $4.00 per CPM, he’s already advertising on your website so best believe he’ll take the deal. So now you gave him a better offer and instead of making $2.50 per CPM your now banking $4.00 per CPM directly, that’s a win/win situation at it’s best.

You already know who your advertisers are, you can see them on your Google Adsense ads.

Calculating Your Rates

Take whatever Ad Network your making the most money with, take the average CPM rate that they pay you and double it. Then you take the total number of page views you get a month and divide it by 1000, whatever number you get from that you would then multiply by that doubled CPM rate you first calculated. Look at the example below.

Google Adsense is the highest paying AD Network for my site iHipHopMusic.com, so the math is as follows.

Google Adsense CPM = $0.63 (Google has changed it’s term from CPM to RPM which stands for Revenue Per Thousand visitors but it’s still the same thing)

My average monthly page views = 2,000,000

The math:

Google Adsense CPM = $0.63 x 2 = $1.26 (This will be your website CPM)

Now to calculate how much you would make.

Your average monthly page views = 2,000,000 / 1000 = 2000 x $1.26 (My website CPM) = $2,520

So selling advertising directly would result in you making $2,520 while Google would only pay you $1,260

How would this work with the OIO publisher plugin?

You can’t sell according to CPM rates with OIO Publisher, you can only sell ad units (eg 300×250, 728×90 etc) for specific time period such as 7 days, 30 days etc. So what you would do is to use the same system but narrow it down to specific ad units.

So lets say we have a ad unit at the top of our website which a 728×90 ad size. Google Adsense has statistics for specific ad units so you can take a look to find out the amount of page views, CPM, clicks and more that a ad unit gets.

So lets say that ad unit gets 700,000 page views per month, you would divide that ad unit by 1,000. Example below.

728×90 ad unit = 700,000 page views per month

700,000 page views / 1000 = 700

Lets say Google Adsense pays on average for the 728×90 ad unit $0.32 per CPM, you would double that which would be $0.64.

700 x $0.64 = $448 (Whatever number you get just round it off to the nearest 10 so in our case that would be $450)

So that would be $450 per month for the 728 x 90 ad unit, while Google would have only paid you $224 and no they wouldn’t round it off to the nearest ten.

It’s very simple but it gets even better, you see you can sell that ad unit more than once at the same time. They’re called ad slots, on all my websites the rule I go by is that every ad unit has 3 ad slots which are rotated every time my site loads, don’t worry OIO Publisher will handle all this for you. So now your ad unit can make 3 times as much money so instead of $450 per month you can make $1,350, you can sell more or less than 3 ad slots if you like it’s up to you to decide that. My Hip Hop site gets over 2,000,000 page views per month so I figured 3 ad slots per ad unit would be the best option for me to make the most money, while the advertisers get the most exposure for their money. Just make sure it’s beneficial to both parties or it won’t work.

To make things even sweeter, you can offer a exclusive ad slot, this means one advertiser can buy out all the available ad slots in a ad unit. If you don’t mange to sell out all your ad units frequently, this could be a good option for you. On of my less popular ad units I don’t sell out all the ad slots so what I do is offer a exclusive ad slot with a 15% discount. You might think your loosing money but remember these are ad slots you weren’t going to sell anyway.

So for the same $450 per ad slots we used above, we would also have a exclusive ad slot for $1,215 (which is $450 x 3 ad slots – 10%). I recommend giving a discount of 10% or better, they will be much more inclined to purchase if they know their getting a deal.

Now remember this still just one ad unit, on average a website usually has 3 to 4 ad units so you can easily double, triple and quadruple your earnings. It’s impossible to do this working with 3r party ad networks.

That pretty much sums up how to sell advertising on your WordPress site or any site for that matter. Even if your site isn’t powered by WordPress you can simply create a second website via WordPress and use it as your own personal ad network. I did it, so can you.

Go get OIO Publisher

In the next post related to this I’m going to cover how and where to find advertisers for your website.

Until then, deuces!

I eventually ended up removing them from the site because the payments were so insufficient that it didn’t make sense to even keep them on my site. A year later they contacted me and asked me to give them another shot, now they had a new name “ImageSpaceMedia” and new platform and said the payouts were much better now. Indeed the payments were better but since the original service was so horrible, better than that just meant that it was now just mediocre. Below is a screenshot of my earnings “in total” that I made with the so called new and improved platform.

So over the space of a year and 3 months, all I have to show for my 2,810,301 impressions and 3,065 clicks is $190.29. That’s ridiculous, how are these guys even in business? I laid the platform to rest a month ago and I’m never working with them again. I make $190.29 per day just with InfoLinks so for me to work with these guys would be a step backwards, it’s just a waste of time.

This now brings us to GumGum.com

GumGum.com claims they are the leaders of In-Image Advertising and with their client list they just might be, clients include sites like InternetBrands, TMZ, Glam and AskMen. They contacted me about a month ago and wanted me to become a publisher, of course I was skeptical and was just about over In-Image advertising and it being a reliable income source. We spoke about ImageSpaceMedia and GumGum assured me that they would pay better. It’s only been a month but I’ve already received payment from them, as soon as the month is done they pay you for that month which is cool. It was only $111 which is chump change but measuring it by ImageSpaceMedia standards I’m rich right now.

There reporting isn’t bad and the payout is about $ 4 dollars per day, no big deal but hey – I remember a time when I use to get $300 monthly payments from InfoLinks and look at me now. The one thing that ImageSpaceMedia has over them though is that ImageSpaceMedia had image reporting that showed what images were generating the most money, and they had a very useful option that enabled users to choose what images they didn’t want to display ads on. I’ll give these guys the benefit of the doubt and see what happens in the coming months. In-Image advertising still pays like crap but at least GumGum pays just enough to make me stick around to see what happens, the benefit of this type of monetization is that it doesn’t affect your other income sources – you know the real money makers.

If your a blog or website has more than 100 images on it, you might want to consider working with GumGum.com

Check them out.

This Clickbank system took Anik Singal and Saj P over 3 years to develop. The story behind it is actually pretty funny. Apparently they were independently working on the same system for years (didn’t even know each other) and realized it a few months ago when they met. Anyways, the point is that I reviewed the system. I was amazed at how fast you can execute this system (if you’re serious and dedicate to it). Last time I spoke with Saj P he told me that they’re getting ready to close the site very soon. I point blank asked him if he was “hyping” or serious and he said they are very serious.

If nothing else, at least read this page:

Clickbank Wealth Formula

Also right now they have TONS of amazing bonuses, I got sucked in just to grab some of the bonuses! For example – Have you made money using YouTube yet? Well, Anik Singal has made over $356,000 to be exact. He talks about how he’s giving away that entire system as a bonus as well. Like I said, if nothing else, I highly recommend at least reading this page you’ll regret it if you don’t and they take it down soon.

Checkout their system here.

With all these major companies setting up to control this market, we the little guys should most certainly be moving even quicker to make sure we’re ready to profit from the already billion dollar trend.

Just last month I launched my mobile entertainment site  geared towards the music market and I’ve already turned a profit with barely any traffic. The site is so new that Google hasn’t even indexed it yet. I’ve just been driving traffic to it from my personal websites. I won’t tell you the name of the site yet because I don’t want the leeches duplicating my efforts this early in game, I have to make sure I’m killing this market first before I reveal anything, the same way I do with all my other websites.

Check out the screenshot from my first month earnings. Via Affiliate.com

And that’s from one Affiliate network with only traffic from my internal websites, and as you can see the traffic volume isn’t even that high,  I made $1,320 with less than 1600 clicks. You guys have seen my traffic stats for my other sites 2 million visitors a month is a regular thing for me so just imagine where something like this can go. I really haven’t dialed this thing in yet with adverting, SEO, Ad Networks etc. With a little hard work this can easily become a 10k a month website in the next few months. And just think mobile is still in it’s infant stages.

If you already have a website start looking into implementing mobile apps for your site, and if your running a music site or blog and you haven’t implemented ringtones into your site yet your leaving money on the table.

How I Figured Out to Make Money with Cell Phones

I would love to take credit for being the one that came up with the idea but I wasn’t. I always had mobile offers incorporated into my site but didn’t make allot of money with it so I never gave it much attention. It wasn’t until I came across Cell Phone Treasure, a system made by this 18 year kid Adam Horwitz making a minimum of $378 per day through cell phones.

Cell Phone Treasure has video guides showing you exactly how to make real money with cell phones from setting up your site to advertising that site through mobile ad networks and more. He also logs into a couple Clickbank accounts to show you money that he’s making live with mobile offers.

Check out Cell Phone Treasure

Actually it’s my second month running a membership website but the first month I didn’t have a payment option set up yet because I wanted to test everything to make sure there were no bugs, security issues etc. On May 1st was when I launched the Premium part of my website Mixtapes.tv. The business model I used for my membership site is the Fremium model aka the “try it before you buy it” model. In this day and age plus the type of audience I’m selling to, this model works great. I believe my product was good enough so I didn’t have any issues with offering it for free and then later offering a upgrade to unlock more features.

A little bit about my membership site.

It’s called Mixtapes.tv, it’s a site where DJs, Artists, and A&Rs can upload and share there mixtapes for free. Users are able to sign up and download these mixtapes for free as well. The key to this site is knowing what parts should be free and what parts shouldn’t be. For example users can sign up and download 5 mixtapes a month as zip files but  a premium member can download unlimited mixtapes, another feature is premium members can download individual tracks but free users can’t. The method here is that you have to make the free service good enough for them to want to upgrade to the premium service. For example a user can use the site forever as free member to listen and download unlimited mixtapes. This creates user retention and will eventually lead to upgrades.

The money is in the re bill.

Don’t know how many affiliate marketers are reading reading my blog but if you’ve ever promoted ringtone offers, you must have wondered how some of these companies are able to pay affiliates $16 to $30 per lead on a $9.90 offer, that’s because within 3 months they’ve regained 100% return on there investment. Most users will not cancel there subscription because it automatically gets added to there cell phone bill and they forget about it, and since it’s only $9.90 they don’t really pay attention to the charge. This is why low subscription pricing is so valuable. Jeremy from ShoeMoney.com touched on something similar when talking about Gym memberships and how it’s the perfect business.

My First Month Running A Membership Website

The Premium part of my site went live on May 1st, and the first 7 days no one upgraded, LOL. I was like oh shit no one likes the site but then on May 8th my first premium membership came in. I was so excited even though it was only $5.99, it feels really good when someone wants to buy something you are selling. After that first sale the upgrades started coming in with a average of 2 sign ups per day. So far I’ve had one disgruntle customer which was not my fault but as a result of a server side issue between PayPal and Wishlist Member.

Results after 30 days

I know it’s not Yacht money but that’s not my aim at this point, right now all I’m doing is focusing on making the service the best it can be. If I achieve that then I won’t have to worry about making money because the product will sell itself. Now remember these members are now in a billing cycle and this month an estimated 30 more Premium upgrades will occur which will double the earnings the following month, the real money will be made months down the line with the compounded revenue generated through subscribers singing up month after month. So far over 8,000 members have signed up 32 of which are premium members, keep in mind that 60% of those members signed up the 1st month before the premium option was available.

Not to mention I really haven’t dialed this thing in yet, I’m still testing. I haven’t implemented follow up via email marketing,  special offers, advertising, affiliate program or anything else for that matter. 90% of the traffic going to the site right now is coming from my other websites HipHopMusicDotCom.com. and a little from ComeWatchMe.com, once the traffic from search engines starts to really pick up in a couple months I’ll start to look more like the competition, who has a whopping 20,000 premium members, so I know the market is very healthy.

In conclusion.

Don’t treat a membership website like a regular eccommerce website, it’s not a sprint it’s a marathon.You think of it that way and you’ll see the real profits in the long run, I’m going to be writing a post soon about how to set up a membership site and the right tools to use to get it done.

I’m out……Chozen

I’m not talking about making money on Facebook in a couple months here I’m talking about making money on Facebook tomorrow. You can’t do that with free traffic and that’s where Facebook ads come in.

A few things you might not know about Facebook.

1. Facebook is the most visited site in the US.
2. It now gets more traffic than Google.
3. It cost ten times less than Google Adwords.
4. You don’t need a website to advertise on Facebook.

Super Affiliate Jonathan Volk just recently wrote a very intuitive but easy to read Facebook advertising guide that shows you step by step how to advertise effectively on Facebook and save hours of mistakes and thousands of dollars. Jonathan Volk is not some newbie to Internet Marketing, he’s been doing it for years and what’s in the guide are the same techniques he used to pull in $1,107,623 just from Facebook.

I just recently started advertising my new membership site Mixtapes.tv on Facebook and I must say the ads work so much better than the free traffic I’ve been receiving from the “Like” pages. But there is a learning curve to using it. I’ll have a post up soon showing some of my first month stats and sales using Facebook, many of the techniques which are covered in the guide.

He just released the guide to the public and he’s having a early bird special.

Check it out FBAdsGuide.com

Peace out….Chozen

The new tool allows Bloggers to add links and images to their blog posts in just 2 easy steps:

1.Bloggers highlight the relevant text and the Amazon Product Finder will search Amazon’s millions of products and recommend the ones that are most closely associated with the text

2.Bloggers can then insert a link or image to that product which includes their Associates ID, enabling them to earn up to 15% in referral fees from Amazon

Bloggers will also be able to show dynamic content in their blog sidebar using a new set of integrated Sidebar gadgets, such as gadgets for MP3 clips from the Amazon DRM-free music store, an Amazon Deals gadget, and an Amazon Search box.

Also as part of this new integration, Bloggers who don’t have a free Amazon Associates account can create one directly within Blogger so tell your friends that use Blogger how they can start earning with Amazon Associates today.

Check it out here on Associates Central.

So Whats The Cause Of These Changes?

Ad Inventory: The most obvious reason for the drop in earnings is that the ad inventory for AdSense has gone down, when the economy took a turn for the worst so did the Ad rates and not just for AdSense but for all Ad Networks across the board. Advertisers have much smaller budgets to work with thus Google AdSense has to lower there rates, now of course there are some exceptions to the rule such has the health industry and few other markets that still have healthy ad payouts but they are few and far between. I can tell you from personal experience working in the music industry that music and entertainment related websites and blogs are not making much from AdSense, last year my hip hop blog was making a full time income and this year even with more traffic the site isn’t even making half what it made last year. In fact AdSense has become a third tier income stream for that site.

Ad Formats and Placements: Believe it or not this plays a major part in how well Google AdSense performs on your website, depending on your site design and what ad formats you use, it will directly affect how much money you will make. The best way to figure out which site design, ad formats and positions will perform the best. I suggest you setup three different variations of your website (Designs), run each different design with different ad formats and ad positions. Run each variation for at least a week depending on your traffic, if you have a high traffic website you can make it less than a week. This is split testing in it’s simplest form. To know exactly what your visitors are interacting with on your website I suggest you check out CrazyEgg, it’s a really sick analytic tool that gives you a visual view of your website with a heat map overlay that shows exactly where your visitors and their mouses went and where they didn’t go.

Visitor Retention: Now of course visitor retention is a good thing, it means your brand is growing and your keeping your visitors interested in your content but in terms of Google AdSense it’s almost guaranteed to kill your income. The problem is that your repeat visitors have become immune to the ads, they see the same set of ads with the same ad copy every time they come to your site. Eventually ads will become invisible to them and you’ll notice shortly after that the only clicks your receiving is from brand new visitors most of which come from search engines. The problem with the new visitors clicking on your ads is that once they click that ad there gone and they may never come back, this will hurt your overall visitor retention and stunt the growth of your brand. Now of course this does not apply to you if you just built the site to specifically to make money from Adsense then building a brand is really not important.

Seasonal Traffic: If you noticed a sudden drop in your earnings and your traffic, this is probably due to time of year. In most niches it’s common for blogs and websites to have lower earnings in the summer time. If you can afford to, wait to see what your earnings are like in another time of the year and if you don’t see any changes in your earnings then it’s time to try something new. Personally with my media site Music Video Cast, the daily AdSense earnings has gone up and the same goes for my blog iHipHopMusic.com since the beginning of September.

So What Do You Do When AdSense Starts To Suck Ass?

Find Other Advertising Networks: There hundreds of Advertising networks out there that you can test out, especially if you have a high traffic website with high visitor retention. Your visitor retention is too valuable to be wasting it on AdSense, instead find some ad networks that will pay you according CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) rates, most networks out there pay anywhere from $0.50 to $3.00 per CPM. The great thing about this is that you don’t have replace AdSense but instead just diversify your income, lets be honest the chances of you getting rich from AdSense in this day and age is highly unlikely, it’s not like 5 years ago.

Partner With Vertical Ad Networks:More and more niche specific ad networks are popping up all over the place, the great thing about these networks is that they have higher payouts than the large ad networks, I’m currently working with Global Grind Network which is a Hip Hop related ad network owned by Hip Hop mogul Russell Simmons and I’m currently in talks with CraveOnline to start a running multiple campaigns from numerous major brands on Hip Hop Music Dot Com, right now the payouts are looking like there going to be anywhere from $4 to $7 per CPM (yep you read that correctly). Currently I’m averaging 48,000 page views daily on Hip Hop Music Dot Com so I’m looking forward to getting those campaigns rolling, usually if you have great website these companies find you and make you a offer, so far I received 18 offers this year already. Global Grind has been on some bull shit lately but I’m going to save the bashing for another post.

You can find many different niche specific networks at Adify.com which hosts many popular networks such as B5media (A Blogger Network), Green Ad Network, and Martha’s Circle (Martha Stuart’s Ad Network) just to name a few.

Rotate Your Ads. This is pretty self explanatory and very important but surprisingly not enough people spend time doing this, which is probably due to do all the testing and analytics involved. They are a few services out there that simplifies the whole process which include Rubicon Project, Yield Build and Pubmatic.

Affiliate Programs: While every other form of generating income and adverting has taken a dive, the affiliate marketing/performance based industry has been thriving in this horrible economy and many networks have been showing record earnings.There are hundreds of Affiliate Networks such as ClickBank, Commission Junction, Affiliate.com I (I love Affiliate.com) and LinkShare just to name a few. I’ll have to cover affiliate marketing in a few upcoming posts and how I’m using this method to make more money than I am with AdSense.

Sell Ads Directly: Just like affiliate programs this is a whole other subject that I will be covering in a upcoming post, from what tools to use, where to find advertisers and how to pitch your website. When this is done right it can completely replace AdSense as a income source, as I mentioned earlier in this post that AdSense is now a third tier income stream on Hip Hop Music Dot Com. I’ll cover all that in upcoming post so stay tune.

In conclusion

Don’t make AdSense be your end all be all income stream, the same way you try to find different ways to expand your website or blog is the same way you should try and find ways to monetize your content. Just pay attention to most of the big guys in the industry, there not talking about AdSense anymore. Don’t get comfortable with your current earnings a start playing defense, before you know you’ll be dependent on a declining income and you’ll end up with your head up your ass like the image above.

Update: PicAdMedia.com is now ImageSpaceMedia.com, so when you click on the links it will redirect you to that site.

Even though sites like Youtube stream 1.2 billion videos per day it still pales in comparison to how many images are viewed on the web daily, yet there is still no company to successfully monetize images. Of course sites like IstockPhoto and ShutterStock make millions from selling images but that business model only works for a few. Websites, blogs and social sites with millions of images can’t benefit from that business model. This is where in-image/in-picture advertising comes in, which is an idea that works similar in-video advertising where an overlay ad is placed on top of the image. Now the concept of making money from images by means of In-Picture Advertising is not a new thing, BritePic (A product of Adbrite) was one of the first services to offer a monetization model for images but the model’s possible success was hindered by the inconvenient method of implementing the ads into your images.The idea is that you would have to log into BritePic or Adbrite and manually ad your images which would return a embed code for you to place on your website. The problem here is that the code is javascript and it generates a flash version of your image, this means Google or any other search engine would not be able to pick up those images which means less traffic and if you have a website with allot of images your already aware that a significant percentage of your traffic is accredited to the images on your site. Secondly this is a time consuming method not to mention that all the images already on your site will not benefit from the method.

Introducing PicAdMedia

About a month ago I received a email from someone over at PicAdMedia inviting me to a private Beta testing of there new In-Picture Advertising service, as soon as I saw “In Picture Advertising” I remembered BritePic and I deleted the email. For about 3 weeks from time to time I continued to receive emails from them, they eventually wore me down so before I decided on adding them to the spam list I went to check there service out. After signing up and checking out the dashboard I quickly realized that the method by which they place the ads on websites was completely different from BritePic’s and adheres to standards of web usability. I decided to test out the service on my hip hop music blog HipHopMusicDotCom since it had the most images on it.

PicAdMedia wins at everything that BritePic fails at, implementation is very simple just add the website(s) you would like to serve ads on then get the embed code, place it on your website or blog and boom shortly after that ads will start appearing on all the images on your site. The ads are shown whenever a visitor hovers over a image on your website via a slide in effect and slide’s out whenever the visitor hovers away from the image. The best thing about the ads is that they open in a new window so you don’t loose your visitor when they decide to view an ad. It 100% compliant with Google Adsense and you can also set it to only display ads on certain images for example if you have a logo in your website header, in the Image Manager dashboard (image below) section of PicAdMedia you can set it so that image does not display any ads on that logo. The ad engine is very fast as soon as your page loads the ads are available for display though I’m not sure how they will perform with billion impressions happening daily across the web.

As you can see in the image above PicAdMedia scans your website for all the images available on your website and archives them inside your admin area called the “Image Manager”, it automatically creates tags for the images which is pulled from the meta data available in the images. In the future this will be very beneficial for advertisers who want to target keyword specific images which will drive more targeted visitors to the advertiser’s website and generate higher earnings for publishers.

Above are some ads from HipHopMusicDotCom, as you can see the ads are not very targeted but that is to be expected since it’s still only in the BETA stages and currently advertising isn’t even open for testing yet.

Above is a screen shot of the Domain Manager where you can add the domains you would like to display ads on.

Above is a 7 day earning report from PicAdMedia, of course I can’t show you certain stats due to PicAdMedia’s policy but lets just say that click through rate isn’t that great which is to be expected from untargeted ads, however this doesn’t mean your site wouldn’t perform better, keep in mind that I tested it on my hip hop music blog. With these early stats I can say this could become a additional income stream with more targeted ads and also would be a new frontier for advertisers. I can see how I could drive some major targeted traffic to some of my other sites with this platform at a much lower price than Google Adwords.

Something like this would be great for sites with a thousand images or more, photo sharing sites like photobucket, imageshack and tinypic would make a killing from this. Just think about displaying targeted ads over a hundred thousand images being viewed by millions of visitors. Blogs that post images almost everyday would do great with a service like this as well.

In closing I have to say that I’m going to continue to display PicAdMedia ads on HipHopMusicDotCom since it generates additional untapped revenue and doesn’t affect my other income streams plus I haven’t lost any traffic because of it which is the most important thing. Registration for there beta test is currently open to the public for publishers but not advertisers which is what I’m now waiting for, if you have a blog or website with quite a few images you should definitely check them out.

Visit PicAdMedia

9 months into 2008 Kontera contacts me talking about joining there program unaware that I was already affiliated with them. I told them I already tried the program and the results were less than mediocre. They told me that there ad inventory had grown drastically since the previous year and that they had a special promotion going on. I decided to give them a shot to see what was up and I must admit the ads were most certainly performing better than before. I was averaging about 300 clicks daily and that’s along side my Google Adsense earnings which were not affected, From October going into December of 2008 the earnings were really good and started to think well maybe Kontera could become a long term income stream.

So When Did Kontera Start to Suck?

It started in January of 2009, as soon as the new year came around the earnings tanked, and when I say tanked I mean “TANKED!!”, I’m talking about getting an average of 200 + clicks per day and only having a $1.28 to show for it. What? That’s a waste of time to say the least, I decided to run the ads for a couple more months which was a big mistake, I should have removed them as soon as they were no longer profitable. So in May I had enough and decided to kick Kontera’s ass to the curve. I wasted 5 months of valuable ad space hoping that the program would come around and it never did. I was like a drug addict that experienced drugs for the first time and keeps on taking the drug trying to relive that first time experience.

So What Am I Using Now?

Well after browsing through a couple threads on the Digital Point forum I ran into InfoLinks, It turns out that I already had an account with them for quite some time but completely forgot about them. Most of the discussions in the forums side with InfoLinks as being a better In Text ad network. So on June 1^st I decided to give them a shot, it’s only been 3 days so I can’t give you a real estimate of how well they perform but the first 3 days are far better than Kontera’s daily average. I’m going to test them out for thirty days to see if there program is worth the time.

What If Info Links Sucks As Well?

Well earlier I mentioned that I was rejected by Vibrant Media, well they have now approved me so if InfoLinks turns out to be Kontera’s retarded little brother then I guess I’ll give them a shot but then again I’m not a fan of Vibrant Media just for the simple fact that I had to apply 4 times before I was accepted, Nothing had changed with Hip Hop Music Dot Com so why was I rejected in the first place?

Is In-text Advertising Even Worth It?

From my personal experience, hell no, But maybe your topic or niche will do better with this type of advertising. To be honest it’s one of the most intrusive forms of advertising there is and it also goes against the principles of web usability. How do I know this? Well I just remember my wife browsing the web one time and I’m not sure what site she was on but the site had in-text ads and I remember her saying “these pop up links are so annoying”. I didn’t know she was referring to in-text ads at the time but that got me thinking, if I’m getting over 20,000 daily visitors to Hip Hop Music Dot Com how many of them are saying these ads are so annoying? So with that thought after this month I most likely will be done with In-Text advertising all together. You will never know if users are clicking on the ads because of relevance or because they just think it’s a link on your site. This type of advertising could hurt your site’s credibility and the only reason why my traffic hasn’t decreased on that site is because of the reputation I’ve built with my readers. That being said I might have lost future visitors forever using this type of advertising.

In Conclusion

So not only does Kontera suck but in-text advertising sucks all together, don’t waste your time on in text advertising there are much better monetization methods available…..Stay Tuned.