John Chow’s blog recently featured a great link to a wonderful plugin that will help bloggers earn a little more money by allowing advertisers to go direct to the blogger. I haven’t installed it yet, because I’m still working through Payperpost and Sponsored Reviews.

However, with the way things are going with both of these companies (though for different reasons), I may be looking for the exit in both cases. This alternative should be worth researching. Visit John’s Blog to find out more about the plugin.

Simon Emery’s OIOpublisher Direct isn’t the first to offer a Wordpress Plugin that allows you to sell your own reviews or text links. I’ve profiled two such plugins already; Wordpress BankRoll and WP Text Ads. However, OIOpublisher is far superior to the other plugins and best of all, it’s free. That’s right, the plugin that can make you money doesn’t cost you money.Selling Your Own Reviews & Text Links with OIOpublisher

It’s interesting to note that though he thought highly of the plugin, he himself is unlikely to be using it any time soon!

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I was recently experimenting with domain names in Chinese for my other blog. I discovered that you can domain names in not just Chinese Traditional and Simplified characters, but also in Japanese, Korean.

If you find that your audience is largely literate in one of these languages, but finds using English to access their favorite website (yours!), why not consider getting a domain name in their language.

My own school website now has its domain in Chinese… so it’s much easier for our clientele to find our website on the Internet. Try it and see: http://www.狄克森.com.

Try it for yourself and see. My domains in Chinese are provided by Unicode Domain Names.

Having been involved with online advertising as a publisher for quite some time, I’m used to low click through rates on advertisements. Rates tend to vary from 0.5% upwards depending on which ads and where the niche readers are.

But I was quite surprised, and perhaps you should be skeptical, but Payperpost was reporting recently that their click through rates are in excess of 10%. That is unheard of in many online environments.

Here is the quote:

We now have data from over 40k bloggers and 8k advertisers to prove the naysayers wrong. The truth is that not only do people click on sponsored posts, on average they click through at a higher rate than any other media I am aware of. 10.545% average CTR to be exact (this is an average over all opportunities, obviously some will be much higher and some will be much lower).

While the initial cost of running a campaign with Payperpost might seem much higher than say running an Adsense campaign, if you pay $10 for a post, not including PPP’s fees (about 35%), that would total about $13.50 If you ran that post on a blog, with reasonable traffic like mine, within the first day, it would likely be seen by over 50-100 visitors.

After that, it would reside in the archives permanently, and would likely garner traffic through search engines as well as through readers of the blog. Such incremental readership would be achieved at no additional cost. That would result with an initial cost per visitor of about 6.75 cents to 13.5 cents (yes, CENTS!). If 10.5% of the visitors clicked through, you’d be getting click throughs for 67.5 cents to $1.35 on the first day alone.

This is beginning to sound like a very good way to generate additional advertising and would likely complement other approaches very well.

The only downside is post-blindness, but in the hands of a careful writer, that should be much less of a problem than with AdSense.

Disclaimer: I’ve never advertised with Google or Payperpost, though I have written such posts for Payperpost. You can find these in the archives here.