Devil Works

I received an invitation yesterday to join a new program from the creators of Text Link Ads called Shopping Ads. It’s a CPC program that says they are currently paying around 20 cents per click.

I’ve put it on a recipe site and the targeting is showing household appliances which I think will be an okay match. I imagine the CPC I get will be a lot better than the Adsense income I get for the site.

There’s 11 different ad formats and you can customise the colours to suit your site. There is a live preview on the customisation page so you don’t have to wait until you upload the code to see what your ads will look like.

One of the advantages of this program is that is no limit on how many ad units you can place on your site

It’s currently in Beta but the affiliate info says that anyone that clicks through from your ad and joins the affiliate program will give you 5% for six months.

Example Ads

250 x 250 square

125×125 button

120 x 600 Skyscraper

I’ll have to wait and see to get an idea of the results for it.

Update: For some reason the ads are not showing in this post like I thought they would. I’ve sent an email to find out if they know where I’ve gone wrong. So we’ll get to see what there support is like. They are still working fine on the ads that I’ve placed on other sites outside the blog posts, but everyone knows how well inline advertising works.

Would you believe a few crappy websites making $1000 a month are worth $200,000 ?

When I tell my friends how much time I spend working on my websites and how much income my efforts generate they generally tell me I’m wasting my time. I’m happy to let them think that but I look at it a different way.

I’ve got a full time job, I don’t need the money from my sites but it’s a nice bonus. If I looked at my hourly rate for the time I spend online then it wouldn’t be 20% of what I get for my day job.

But let’s look at it another way. I’ll use fictitious figures just to make the maths easier.

Monthly Internet Income : $1000

Annual Internet Income : $12,000

Bank balance required to earn annual internet income in interest : $200,000

(based on high interest account @ 6%)

Now I’ll admit that spending a chunk of my time on the net each weak isn’t as easy as having $200k in the bank but there is no way I could save that amount of money on my current wage. Even if I took on a second job I’d be looking at working 20 hours a week at $20 an hour for almost 10 years to have that much extra cash to invest.

And I have chosen to go down the path where my sites don’t need constant attention. I could cut back my online time to a couple of hours a week and I wouldn’t see my income shrink.

I’d originally titled this post “What annoys me about Pay Per Post” but I thought that was a little unfair. Overall it’s a good site and a pleasure to do business with them so far.

But here’s a couple of things I’d like to see changed.

When I signed up I chose this blog as the first one to add to the list. No real reason for it, I had planned to add 3 or 4 in total and spread paid posts across all of them. However once I’d nominated this one I spent ages searching for the link to add another one. I literally wasted an hour trying to work out how to add another blog.

Eventually I found somewhere that said I couldn’t add another blog until I had ten paid posts approved. It’s not a bad rule, I can understand it’s there to stop a lot of the spammy type of sites running in and stealing all the opportunities. The problem I have with it is that I had no way of knowing this when I signed up. As I said I have several other blogs and If I had to choose one of them to submit to PPP then I would have chosen my site with the best PR and highest traffic as my first one, which in theory would have given me access to higher opportunities. So at the end of the day it’s both me and PPP that are missing out.

The second issue I have is that PPP seems to have placed a reliance on TinyUrl.com. This service turns long links into much shorter ones. It’s a great free service that’s very popular and boasts 37 millions links and over 850 million hits a month. The catch is that it’s a free service and PPP have no control over. So if it goes down PPP loses it’s ability to do a lot of there stats tracking.

Now this probably won’t effect me much as a blogger, but as an advertiser if I start to see holes in my stats then I’m going to be concerned. (update: I just notice PPP uses TinyUrl for it’s referral links - it makes me nervous)
I can’t understand why they haven’t set up their own redirect service. It’s as easy as going out and buying a short domain (ppplink.net is available at the moment and no bigger than tinyurl.com) and getting a free script from Hotscripts.com and they then have control of the service. It would take less than an hour to setup and they would be in control of that aspect of their business. If it went down then they could have there own techs fix it and not wait for TinyURL to bring their site back up.

Having said all that I want to reiterate what I said at the start, Pay Per Post is a good service. It just needs a little tweaking.

(For the record I haven’t been paid for this post)

I received an email today enquiring about placing some advertising on another one of my blogs.

This is a bit of a first for me and I’m not sure how to proceed, or even if I want to proceed.

The email said they are interested in placing links with “blurb” in a fashion that it doesn’t resemble “sponsored links” or “ads by google”. The email also said that they may consider paying for reviews or even writing posts for the site.

The blog is in the credit card sector and I’m against placing anything even mildly dodgy on any of my sites and the credit card sector is full of dodgy offers. One of the concerns I have is that I entered the domain that the email came from in my browser and it just refreshed to Google. A Google search for the company name also comes up with nothing useful. It makes me wonder what sort of web marketing company would hide it’s name from the web.
I don’t even have any idea what to charge. At this stage I’m happy to accept any reasonable offer that covers my time to set it up and a little bit extra.

I’ve emailed the guy back telling him I’m open to proposals but I’m reserving my decision for now.

I finally got around to start submitting the sites I wrote about here to Text Link Ads. The first couple I tried came back with the same scripted message.

We are sorry but your site has not been accepted into our publisher program at this time. The main reason for websites not being accepted is because of our minimum traffic and link popularity requirements. Please do note that we do reevaluate all submissions monthly and will notify you via email as soon as you are accepted. Hopefully soon!

While it was a little disappointing I wasn’t terribly surprised.  I’ve done nothing to promote these sites except add about 30 unique articles or postings.

So I guess my next step will be to get some inbound links…… hmmm, linkbait, or the old fashioned way.

I’ve just spent the morning reading about pay pay per click arbitrage. I used to do this years ago when Adwords first came out. I’d buy clicks at 5 cents each and send them to a landing page with an affiliate offer paying $1.00 per confirmed email address. For the first few months I was spending 30 cents to make $1.00, which is a great return on investment.

Eventually the market got a little saturated and the return dropped to the stage it wasn’t worth my effort in monitoring it so I dropped it like a lead balloon. In hindsight I should have explored some different avenues and tested some different affiliate programs, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I tried PPC arbitrage again about 18 months ago, and the volumes I was getting on my handful of test sites didn’t make it worthwhile. But with all the reading I’ve done today I’m starting to think I’ll try it again with a few variations and see what happens.

The worse thing that could happen is I waste a couple of days and turn back to my retirement project.

After my last article on link valuations through Text Link Ads I found another link valuation tool at LinkWorth. So I thought I would do some comparisons and the results were interesting.

Text Link Ads required more information to calculate the results, I selected 4 links per page, site wide placement and chose the relevant catagory. I then picked the highest paying placement for the results.

Link Worth just asks for the URL and gives multiple results, I picked the highest value of the site wide text link option.

Text Link Ads                 Link Worth
jensense.com                         $ 99 $75

wordpress.org                     Ha, Ha, Very Funny        More than $500

engadget.com                         $ 8,611                     More than $500

problogger.net                         $927                         $145

Katespillsthebeans.com             $31                            $60

So it’s obvious that Link Worth doesnt like to automate quotes for links valued at over $500, but TLA is much more adventurous. Having said that one would think that sites with links valued at over $500 would be big enough to get private sales and not lose the percentage taken by the marketer.
As for the rest of the results there are some large variations, both pages have a disclaimer saying that it’s only a guide or an estimate and my brief experience is that I get a little less with TLA than what is estimated.

At this stage I’m going to stick with TLA basically because I know that the links do sell, but later on down the track it might be worth running a site with Link Worth and seeing what happens. When I have the time I might even read the terms of service for both companies and see if it’s possible to do a direct comparison.

John Chow has done some research on how much a link is valued at using the Text Link Ads calculator.

Engadget.com was worth $11,440 per link per month, Digg.com was listed as “more than you can afford”

According to the TLA calculator my current site I have listed with Text Link Ads is worth about $29 a link per month, but in reality most of mine have sold for around $20 of which I get half.

I’m happy with that, it’s a site I spent some time setting up, but now it takes me around 15 minutes a month to maintain.

I just need 99 more sites like that and I’ll be a very happy boy.

As you may have read here before I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, and I’m looking forward to the day where I can wipe it from my life (at the home office anyway).

I came across Explorer Destroyer today and I’ve installed it on this site. If you’re not using Firefox you will have seen a block at the top of the page encouraging you to download Firefox.

This is good for two reasons

1. Microsoft is Evil and has become blase due to it’s market dominance
2. If someone downloads Firefox from the link I will get a small commission from Google Adsense

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Opera and Explorer and it only shows up in Internet Explorer.

It’s easy to install and there are specific instructions for adding it to Wordpress sites.

Go and join the Explorer Destroyer and earn yourself some cash at the same time.

Update: I forgot to mention that the script you use for this is completely free.

Update 2: I’ve removed Explorer Destroyer from my site as it messed with my listings at google

John Chow has a post about blending adsense into your site. While I think it’s a great way to increase your clicks, but I’m not sure if google is going to like.