AdesBlog.com

Making Money with Twitter

Posted in » Make Money, Online Advertising, Social Networking - by Ades

33 Comments 

While twitter is still trying to figure out how to make money, others are already making money with its platform. One such service is Magpie. Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter.

How it works:

In basic terms, you allow them to access your twitter account, and they will tweet relevant ads to your account. You get paid based on your number of followers, the rate of the ads (different category ads have different prices), and the number of clicks on these ads. How exactly they calculate your earnings is obviously known only to them.

You can define the tweet frequency, and for maximum control you can choose to pre-approve each tweet from magpie yourself.

How much you can make?

It depends on the number of your followers. Magpie has a calculator on their website. According to this calculator with my 177 followers, apparently I could make up to 8.61 pounds per month (i know.. that’s very small).

Let’s insert someone’s username who is influential on twitter. And that’s none other than @aplusk or Ashton Kutcher. He has over 1.5 million followers.

So the calculator says he could make over 90 thousands pounds every month! (see screenshot) Wow, that’s a lot!

Summary

So, as you can see, number of followers does matter. On twitter # of followers are like a “unique visitors” in normal websites. The more followers you have the more money you will likely to make when the twitter based publisher networks come out. Therefore, start building your twitter community, grow your twitter’s following. I am quite sure that twitter’s own (and other) “making money models” will rely on the number of followers that one has first. And perhaps this will be combined with the number of clicks that each ad will get.

Whatever it is, you will need to have a healthy twitter community, which is active and will actually follow your tweets. Because I am sure twitter (and other future publisher networks on twitter platform) won’t just pay you for having the most number of followers. Having thousands of zombie followers who do not click on your tweet-links won’t benefit you. Therefore, don’t try to grow your network with those automatic tools that will just fill up your twitter network with dead followers. Most of those followers are actually empty accounts that won’t get updated ever.

Well, Magpie might just have thought a lesson to Twitter on how to monetize their network.

Website: be-a-magpie.com (they should really get that magpie.com!)
Follow me on Twitter: @ades

Checking out EntreCard Ad-Network

Posted in » Make Money, Online Advertising - by Ades

13 Comments 

As you already know (yes you should check my miniblog) EntreCard is running their own ad-network now.

I did a test run with $25 funds, promoting my color picker software in their Web Development category. Here is the results:

From the results you can see that the CPM rate was $0.4927, and CPC rate was $0.1096. I guess they run a combination of two types. In total I got 50,739 impressions and 228 clicks for my $25 bucks.

My funds were depleted right away within 24 hours, that’s because they do not provide daily limit options.

Here is how campaign creation page looks:

Yeah, it’s dead simple. No daily limits, no campaign type (cpc, cpm) selection. Also at first they did reject my website, I don’t know why, perhaps it was not a blog? But then I see they re-approved it.

Selling your credits

I am sure most of you had EntreCard accounts and perhaps some of you have some credits in their accounts still. If you do, now you can sell them for $1 for every 1000 entrecard credits as announced by EC founder on his tweet.

So, it’s time to make money if you had thousands of credits in your EC account! If you are new, you can always sign up for EC now.

In general I think it’s a good move by EC to open their own ad-network, both for advertisers and bloggers.

Website: entrecard.com

Facebooks comments replacing WordPress comments soon?

Posted in » Blogging Tips, Business Ideas, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

13 Comments 

With Facebook’s new commenting widget you can put comments box on any page and allow people to comment using their facebook login. Great thing is that, the comments will appear on their own profiles just like any other notification message in the Facebook.

Do you know what that means to you as a blogger? It means a great opportunity to promote your blog on the facebook for free. Imagine 20 people commented on your blog and these 20 comments appeared on their own facebook profile and seen by their network of friends. E.g “Adam commented on AdesBlog saying….” Obviously there will be people who click on the link and come to your blog.

Mmhh… I think I have to sit and figure out how to replace my wordpress comments with this facebook comments widget. If you find a way how to do it, do let me know. Because it needs to correspond to every post on your blog accordingly. I am not sure if that is possible. It would be better if facebook team could come up with wp plugin for replacing wp comments.

The widget does support comments from people who do not have facebook accounts. So that’s great too. It means you won’t lose anything.

Here is a video by facebook engineers on how to setup this comments widget on your site, (might be little techie for beginners):

For more info you can go to here, developer wiki or forums.

Google Ad Manager

Posted in » Google, Online Advertising - by Ades

14 Comments 

Google Ad Manager is now open to public. Anyone who has Google Account can login and start managing their advertisements.

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

I have always used phpAdsNew (now OpenX) for managing my ads. Compared to Google Ad Manager, I found OpenX to be much more user friendly (or is it just because I have been using it for a long long time?).

Again Google wins…

Basically besides being the No.1 search engine on the net, Google is an ad-network too — with its Google AdSense on one side and Google AdWords on the other. So, what does that say about this new ad-network platform — Google Ad Manager — that Google introduced?

OpenX has a good answer to that on their blog, below is the excerpt from their article:

Google is Your Biggest Competitor
By allowing Google Ad Manager to serve all ads on your site, you are reducing your ability to get advertising elsewhere. Because Google could ‘cherry pick’ users that are the most lucrative for Ad Sense, they will leave the other users for your remaining advertisers. Therefore, your advertisers will not get as much ROI, and leave you for another website.

The same theory goes for ad networks. If ad networks do not have access to your most lucrative users, then they will not pay you as much for them.

Google’s Margins will Increase, Not Yours
By allowing Google to serve your ads, you allow your biggest competitor for ad revenue to know how much you make from ALL advertising on your website.

Therefore, if your average CPM from Google is $0.75, and your average CPM from other ad networks is $0.50, there is no reason that Google should give you more than $0.51! Remember, it is up to Google to determine what revenue share that they will pass back to websites. source

I think that’s a huge plus for Google and very very big minus for all the other ad-networks.

How To Start Selling Private Advertisements

Posted in » Guest Posts, Make Money, Online Advertising - by Ades

21 Comments 

This is a guest-post by Rajaie AlKorani of www.rajaietalks.com. In this post Rajaie discusses how to get private advertisements to your newly launched blog.

Unless your blog brings in thousands of visitors its first day of launching, you’re going to have a pretty tough time attracting new advertisers and filling all those ad spots on your blog. And having eight of them (i.e 125×125 buttons) with “Advertise Here” in bold definitely will not make your life any easier.

To start pumping in the money, you need to provide your sponsors with reasons as to why they should pick your blog from the millions of others. No, they don’t care about your mission or about helping pay your bills. The only thing on their mind is getting the best bang for their buck, and if you can’t help with that, than you’re out of luck.

What if your blog has been bringing in some impressive results for a while which happen to be sky high, and yet the image ads are still empty?

That’s it! When advertisers see all those empty spots, their brains will automatically tell them that - something is wrong with your site! What can you do to get out of this everlasting cycle?

1 - Testimonials
Ask your existing customers for a testimonial. To make your testimonials more credible; include person’s name, the name of the company he/she works for, and the position he/she holds at the company. Also provide a link to their company website and if possible get a picture of them. I’d say that this is the best way to boost your chance of selling anything since it’s real proof given by other people.

2 - Hold A Contest
Everybody likes free stuff, so hold a contest where readers can win free ad spots, this will help fill up the empty spaces. And hopefully they will turn into regular advertisers.

3 - Do A Banner Exchange
Do a banner exchange with someone in your niche, you link to their blog and they link to yours. It is a win-win situation if both of you have empty slots available.

4 - Become An Affiliate
Most websites that sell products have an affiliate program where you earn a percentage of every sale you make. Usually they will provide you with the banners so you’ll have nothing to worry about. So instead of having 8 buttons with “advertise here” word on them, display affiliate banners and make some money at the same time.

5 - Start Exploring
If you have the idea that your sponsors are going to search for you, then think again. It’s your job to hunt down potential sponsors, not theirs. Special promotions and discounts are always welcome ;-)

6 - Be A Nice Guy
Why not just email a friend telling him that you’ve added his site to your “blogroll” or that you’ve given him a free ad spot for the month. This usually pays off in the long run where it helps develop a relationship between you and him.

7 - Don’t Be Irrational
If you just started your blog a couple of days ago, then asking for $500 a paid review isn’t very reasonable. If you want to be taken seriously, then present yourself seriously!

I believe that those are the best ways to start selling private advertisements on your blog. What are some ways you used to sell private advertisements when you first started your blog?

MarketLeverage Team - smart advertisers

Posted in » Advice to Businesses, Blogging Tips, Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

15 Comments 

Guys at MarketLeverage.com are quite creative. They have found a novel way to get mentioned on top blogs like problogger (46K+ readers) and shoemoney (16K+ readers) with a small investment that the team themselves will enjoy wearing. They purchased these two blogs’ t-shirts and wore them and sent a picture of the whole team wearing the t-shirts. Guess what? They got dedicated post on both blogs. That’s what we call a win-win situation. MarketLeverage (win), two blogs (win).

Shoemoney t-shirts are just $5.00 each for both men and women, and problogger t-shirts are $17.99 for women and $23.99 for men. So, LeverageMarket spent about $50 on shoemoney and $132 on problogger (unless they bought double logo t-shirts, which are more expensive). It’s a fraction of what you would actually spend to get publicity on these high-traffic blogs, if you were to go through normal conventional way of advertising.

Moral of the post: Be creative!

Using Scribd as a source of traffic for your blog

Posted in » Blogging Tips, Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

12 Comments 

I am sure many of you know Scribd right? Scribe in their own words: “Scribd is a Silicon Valley startup creating technology that makes it easy to share documents online. You can think of Scribd as a big online library where everyone can publish original content, including you!”

Basically, you can upload your documents and it will be available to other members of scribd, as well as to anybody who searches for them online.

Scribd as a promotion tool

One thing you can use srcibd is - as a promotion tool. In fact, it can be a great promotion tool if you write great, useful articles. Before I wanted to post about this, I gave it a try and uploaded 14 documents of mine to scribd. Eleven of them were photoshop related tutorials and 3 were blog articles. Documents were uploaded on 10th and 11th of February, so has been roughly one month.

As you can see, so far they have been viewed 2053 times. That translates to average 146 views per document. Most viewed article was 356 times, and the least viewed was 27 times. You can view list of all articles here.

Ways to promote your blog on scribd

• First of all, if you write good articles people will click on the author link on that particular article and view your profile. Therefore, you must have a proper profile page. What I mean is, try to put some info about yourself, your picture, and most importantly your blog URL. Start building your brand from your profile page.
• Secondly, end the articles that you published with your blog URL. You can have a one line sentence like “for more articles go to yoursite dot com“.



• Thirdly, try to join groups and communities that are relevant to your niche. If there is no group available in your topic, you can create yourself one.

But most importantly do not spam! Just share your best articles with other scribers and start building your repuation in scribd. start here scribd.com.

I hope you found this article useful. Subscribe to RSS to read upcoming useful articles. click here.

ReviewBack - you blog about me, I blog about you

Posted in » Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

19 Comments 

Don’t want to spend money on ReviewMe and similar networks purchasing paid reviews? How about exchanging free reviews with other fellow bloggers then?

Well, ReviewBack does exactly that. You browse among 1,659 blogs in the ReviewBack network, choose a blog that you want your review to appear on, send the owner of the blog a request and if he/she accepts, you write a review about that particular blog on your blog, and he will write a review of your blog on his. Sounds good? Check it out www.reviewback.com

EntreCard performance after 12 days

Posted in » Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

10 Comments 

It’s been 12 days since I have joined Entrecard. Within this period, Entrecard brough 162 visitors, that’s about 13 visitors per day. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. I also noticed that people are not really clicking on the banners. I have purchased 2 ads so far (2 more in queue), from these two ads, one was from a high traffic blog that has 13K+ readers (not JohnChow dot com, I don’t want to mention the URL because people might avoid advertising on that blog). Clicks from these two ads were only 7 clicks, that’s about 1 click in every 8 hours.

Due to long waiting period and limited credits, I was not able test my ad performances that well.

I also have to note that, the poor click-through-rates might be due to my button design. I am sure design of the button affects the CTR (click-through-rate) a lot. Therefore, I will need to test it with different button designs after this.

Entrecard Improvements

Since Entrecard is still new (launched 8th Nov), it’s improving almost daily. Recently they have introduced an Entrecard shop where you can purchase “Featured Status”, “Fast Pass” and “Entrecard Stickers”. Featured status costs you 200 credits, and will make your button stand out from the crowd, with gold borders (see screenshot).

Fast pass costs you 300 credits, and it allows you to jump the queue. Fast pass can only be used once. The question is in a life-time? or in a year, month, week?

Entrecard is also in discussion with its members on how to monetize it without annoying them. I think they are taking a very good approach, consulting with its members. So far they have suggested 3 possibilities:

• Option 1: Upgrade to “pro” account
• Option 2: Sitewide advertising via “Sponsored Inbox”
• Option 3: Take a slice of the impressions

I had proposed making money through selling credits (to its members) instead, but let’s see what they will decide as the final monetization option.

Conclusion

In summary, Entrecard is doing quite good. I would say it’s a must tool for new blogs. Because unlike other services (like BlogRush) it does work, and it does bring traffic every day. Even if it is not much, but there is a constant traffic flow to your blog from Entrecard.

I will still be using it for the next few weeks and then decide if I want to continue. Have you joined Entrecard yet? If yes, how is it performing? How is your ad’s click-through-rates?

Testing Entrecard, my views on it

Posted in » Online Advertising, SEO & Promotion - by Ades

8 Comments 

I decided to test Entrecard. I have integrated the button beside the Top Commentators section at the sidebar.

If you do not know what Entrecard is, it’s simply a banner exchange program. You display others’ banners on your blog and in return you get to advertise on others’ blogs. Everytime someone advertises on your blog, you earn credits. These credits later can be used to buy advertisements from other blogs. Actually the system is more complex than that (you can earn credits in many ways), but in simple terms it’s a banner exchange program. You can read more on how it works here.

After I signed up and put up the code on my blog, the advertisers started to flood in. After 20 minutes all 10 spots (for 10 days) were full (sold out). You know why people flood the new blogs? Because in the beginning it is very cheap (only 1 credit) to advertise on the new blogs. Later, the system will start to adjust the price depending on the demand and the number of people drop their cards on your blog. As you can see below, the price has changed to 3 credits (it’s just changed to 5 credits).

Does it bring any traffic?

It’s too early to tell, but if I were to state the stats only, then so far within half an hour it brought 19 clicks. I will have to see at least few days before I can say anything on the performance. Also as you can see these clicks are from entrecard and not from other blogs.

As you can see below 19 clicks, I have not bought any advertisements from other blogs. So, actually the performance of the system would also be based on the blogs that you are advertising. Some blogs bring tons of clicks, and some not. So you have to know where to advertise. In the beginning you don’t have credits, so you won’t be able to buy any advertisements until you have accumulated some credits.

Even after you have accumulated tens of credits, you will need hundreds of credits more if you want to advertise on popular blogs like JohnChow.com. So it might take you some time, before you get your banner on those popular blogs.

My Recommendations to Entrecard

Based on my limited usage, I would like to suggest few features to Entrecard.

• Introduce “buy credits” feature - this would allow new members to buy credits if they want. Otherwise it might take few days to weeks for someone to accumulate 200+ credits.
• Allow members to convert their credits into $$ - if user has too much credits, he/she might simply remove the code from his blog (i.e stop using the buttons). After all, he/she will have enough credits to spend on buying ads from other blogs. But if the user have the option to make money, he/she will want to use it even more effectively. Because the more you use it, the more money you will make.
• When the spot is full, allow people to advertise anyway - currently if the spot is full, you cannot advertise on that particular blog. You can only check back the next day, most probably to find that the spot has been filled again. I think it’s better to let people at least to get in the queue. So if the spot is full (all 10 of them), let the interested person to queue and be the 11th. This way, next day, he can automatically become the 10th. Why loose advertisers when it’s difficult to get them in the first place?
• Rotate multiple ads in one day - this would allow to clear the bottleneck that the system is having at the moment. Also, I think having 2-3 buttons rotating in one day will be more interesting to the blog visitors.
• Introduce referral system - this would encourage members to promote entrecard, as a result entrecard’s number of users would increase. More users means, more banner exchange, and that is good for everybody.

I will update you guys again on its performance after 1-2 weeks. Till then you can join Entrecard and advertise your blog on AdesBlog (while it’s still cheap, only 5 credits). You can also read Entrecard blog here - entrecard.com/blog