Making Money

Monetizing Makeover: Making Money in the NoFollow Era

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This post has been edited since it was first published (by mistake!)

For many bloggers, making money was easy: write a not-infrequent blog, add links from a company selling links, ads from Adsense, and sponsored posts from any of a dozen companies or more. Bang! After a few months, you could earn a couple hundred dollars a month. Or more. Sometimes much more…

But with the Google Grinch coming to town in time for X’mas, the whole ball game has been upended by the demands of the Google Grinch that we all use ‘no_follow’.

There have been two opposite reactions to this:

  • Roll over, …
  • Barking and Biting…

But guess what? With all the recent changes at Google’s Search Engine, and the stricter payments for two bit websites like this, we’re needing to find new profitable ways to make money online, especially as ‘serious’ websites like Engadget still get the old style AdSense ads with large clickable areas (unlike smaller websites that get a tougher deal).

And the increasingly poor click rates on ads is not helping. It’s not good for bloggers in the World of Adsense. But now, I’m beginning to see a way to balance PR’s demands for NoFollow links with generating revenue that is better, more secure, and more stable than AdSense.

What is Scratchback?

scratchback

Well… take a look at this blog. I’ve been running Scratchback for a while on this blog (to no avail, yet!), but I’m planning to give the whole image an upgrade. It will work very well as a way to provide links for traffic (but not SEO) on your blog. It’s integrated with your blog as a plugin, and you can vary the rates. In addition, the commission is reasonable. So it should prove a good nofollow option for blogs currently using Text Link Ads. Scratchback does not currently operate an affiliate program to my knowledge. I don’t like the idea of tipping so much as that is particularly a North American phenomenon, so I’m looking to change the language on the advertisement!

TTZ Media

TTZ Media is an affiliate program that allows you to place ads to products that are dynamically updated to your blog via scripts. I’ve been running this for a while, though one of the reasons I ran it initially was to add visual variety, it has been generating a little income from clicks. I’ve not worked out the best positions for the adverts, and it works better on an appropriate blog that has a gadgets angle of some sort: Tech, Travel, Video, etc…

ttz media sample

The ads are quite sensible, and the click pay out is fixed… Both of these offer real products, real advertising, and real rates. I’ve not done well on clicks yet, because of poor placement, but this will work itself out.

MillionaireMate Affiliatesmillionairemates

These ads have been running on my sidebar for a while now. I wanted to try it out to see how people would respond to the ads. While I was aware that they offer AdultFriendFinder, I was also surprised to find out that they offer quite respectable matchmaking websites for all sorts of groups. Hence, when I found MillionaireMates, I thought it would be worth a try. And the results? Well, it’s getting a reaction of sorts from both clicks and viewers.

Apparently, one viewer thought that the picture was somewhat risque! Well, only about as risque as a Vogue magazine… But still… I should try to vary the pictures, esp. the age groups, gender, clothing… to see which elicits a stronger response. This poor visitor was prompted to turn on her ad blocker! I don’t quite know why this image is a problem…

Anyway, I’m now changing the image to something else. Apparently, experimenting is necessary for affiliate campaigns. European sensibilities in this area tend to be different from North American ones. As of now, though, I’ve not made any conversions. If I still can’t in a month or so, I may find another replacement.

AdToll: It won’t take its toll on bloggers

AdToll is also a late comer to the market, but it offers a number of ways you can tweak your ads for you blog, as well as let you determine what advertisers have to pay to be on your website. I haven’t been getting a lot ads from them yet, but I did get two that were interested in my space in quite a short time. So, I have made a little money from this system. There is an affiliate program, too that works quite well.

ads

I’ve included the video for your information, but mostly because I think it’s quite good.

 

 

These four ways are ongoing experiments on this blog. I hope that you find this of value. I’ve had some results from each of them, and given the traffic levels on this blog, the results are to be expected. I will be trying to optimize placement over the next few months, and I’m looking forward to changing theme after Christmas is over on January 6th. If you’re looking to monetize a website that is NOT a blog, then perhaps each of these methods would be effective as well.With Google recently enforcing nofollow, Izea planning to go the same way, it’s wise to get a start on planning for income from your website in the days after nofollow goes mainstream.

Adsense: Would the real clicks please stand up?

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It’s Friday again, thank goodness…! So what’s in this round up?

Adsense: Big White Elephand

First, Adsense again. I’ve blogged on using Adsense on a number of occasions in the past year: Why it is a waste of time; canceling your account; and being banned from Adsense. What I didn’t know was how much a waste of time it really is for most websites.

“…one suspects they (Adsense) are even taking legitimate clicks and counting them as invalid“

Today, though I was looking through my MyBlogLog stats because I noticed that this week I’d been stumbled a number of times and nearly doubled my recent average in terms of stats (Analytics own figures). I only have the ‘free’ package, but that was enough to confirm my worst fears. Take a look:

adsenseless

It’s quite small, but Adsense generated the most clicks that day (nearly 50% of the clicks, according to MyBlogLog… So then I went to compare the clicks on Adsense’s own statistics, and sure enough. I had a similar jump in traffic and page views as the stats showed, but let’s say I was quite shocked by the difference. (ed.) I had no clicks at all. None. Zip.

So who is wrong?

This only leads me to one of three possibilities: MyBlogLog is wrong; Adsense is wrong; or Analytics is wrong. But since Analytics broadly agrees with MyBlogLog stats (in terms of overall numbers). I’m left with the obvious: that Adsense is just not recording all the clicks. This wouldn’t be surprising as we know that Adsense does use statistical and tracking methods to calculate to drop ‘invalid’ clicks.

So, then I went back and checked six days’ worth of data. Then I checked the total number of clicks on Adsense using MyBlogLog. Unfortunately, as Adsense TOS states clearly, I cannot disclose “click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google”. But I will say this: it seems that a large percentage of the clicks are simply not being recorded on my Adsense any more. Webmaster World has an interesting discussion on this.

Fraudulent vs. Invalid

I cannot know how many of those clicks that Adsense invalided were actually fraudulent, rather than just invalid. I don’t think that even Google knows this accurately. What does surprise me though is that the extent of the false positives is likely to be much larger. In other words, Google may be invalidating a larger number of clicks than you are actually getting, clicks that would otherwise be valid, but for the ‘inaccuracy’ in their algorythms.

Another blogger noted this, too. “I found this article that generally agrees with this: Google feels strongly that the absolute $ amount of invalid click refunds given has stayed the same or declined since 2004, all while advertiser requests have gone up by at least 2-3X. This means there’s a huge amount of false positives, a point I tend to agree with.”

Would the real clicks please stand up?

Now I can see why we aren’t allowed to reveal the actual stats. Google just doesn’t want you to know the REAL truth about Adsense before you activate the program. And that is that Google’s program is largely a waste of time for many small publishers and bloggers. It’s ugly, you can’t effectively control it, you have no choice of advertising, and you’re liable to waste a lot of time tweaking it only to discover that are a large number of false positives. Worse, once you do start generating revenue, it is possible to be banned from the system, which has happened to many prominent bloggers.

For sure, Google has introduced a number of changes in the last few months to its Google program, and is continually implementing improvements for Advertisers and Publishers. What is happening is that the impact of these changes willl increase the quality of clicks for advertisers, but for publishers it’s meaning a decreasing revenue, as InvestorBlogger is experiencing.

So check your MyBlogLog stats for your websites, you’ll only get the top ten clicks, but then you can compare those results with the Adsense results. Let me know via email what you are getting.

Affiliates Income: Real Dollars, Real Sense

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Affiliates: Old and New

Steve, of AgentsChat.com fame, was telling me a couple of weeks ago that he was becoming much more interested in Affiliate Marketing and Blogging. He’s not quite ready to set up any blogs, but we’re going to be talking about Affliate Programs a lot more together and on InvestorBlogger.

Personally speaking, I’ve had an Amazon account for ages and been an Affiliate for almost as long. Over that time, I’ve earned about $32.72 in all those years, that I haven’t accounted for in my earnings and that’s mostly because I forgot!

InvestorBlogger has its own Bookstore page at Rich@InvestorBlogger.com which is maintained by Associate-O-Matic software. I’m currently using the Lite Version which is free but has some limitations. I’ll blog about this soon. I’m planning to upgrade when I earn the price of an upgrade!

Voxant has created the NewsRoom which allows you to place stories on your blog as well as video and earn money from the ads screened. I’ve already added several stories in my blog. It hasn’t made me a lot of money so far because the traffic isn’t so great, but I added it because it is a good way to have video and earn a little pocket money.

AdultFriendFinder is a recent addition. AdultFriendFinder Ads are well known over the Internet for their more ‘adult’ offerings. The service I chose is more appropriate though for this blog, called MillionaireMate. Click on the advert on the left to check out what it offers clients. Then check out the Affiliate Program. You can, of course, sign up under me!