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Blog Advertising Programs A-Z

Adsense and Chitika are not the only fruit. Far from it in fact, there’s quite a number of programs out there that can be run on your blog, some contextual, some not.

I’d like to put a list together of the A-Z of advertising options for bloggers. The list so far is pretty good, but most likely not complete, so please post anything i’ve missed!

A-Z of Blog Ad Programs

So, without further ado, here’s the list:

AdBrite

  • Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on their sites
  • About page

AdEngage

  • Description: Allows you to sell text ads on your blog.
  • About page

AdGenta

  • Description: A kind of manual Adsense
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Adsense

  • Description: The ubiquitous contextual ad program from Google
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Affiliate Sensor

  • Description: Contextual affiliate text links
  • Warning: Snake oil seller one page sales letter website with spammy looking text links in the footer. Does not inspire confidence.

All Feeds

  • Description: Varied offerings from contextual ads to search ads and affiliate links
  • About page

Banner Boxes

  • Description: Contextual looking Adsense like ads
  • About page

BidClix

  • Description: Allows publishers to sell text ads on a PPC basis
  • About page

BidVertiser

  • Description: Adsense looking ads where advertisers bid for placement by site
  • About page

Blog Ads

  • Description: Banners in all shapes and sizes where publishers join groups of similar publishers. Blog specific.
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

CB Pro Sense

  • Description: Provides auto generation of ClickBank affiliate links
  • Warning: Snake oil sale one page sales letter with lot’s of exclamation marks and outrageous promises of instant wealth.

Click Ads Direct

  • Description: Unclear what the exact model is, but they appear to be pitching the exclusivity angle
  • About page

Chitika eMiniMalls

  • Description: Contextually served interactive ads filled by Shopping.com and others. Allows readers to find reviews and more info on products aswell as purchase
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Clicksor

  • Description: Contextual network matching to affiliate programs
  • Warning: These guys do pop-up/unders
  • About page

Context Web

  • Description: Adsense look-a-like contextual ads
  • About page

Crisp Ads

  • Description: Blog ad network where publishers can join the “catalogue” and have advertisers be able to browse their blog then buy ads, or earn on PPC from showing text ads
  • About page
  • Amusingly, this blog network doesn’t appear to have a blog

Expo Active

  • Description: Lord knows, there’s no way to tell without signing up
  • Warning: Website looks like it was thrown together in about 10mins. Very worrying.
  • About page

Fast Click

  • Description: Variety of different formats including regular text ads
  • About page

Feedburner

  • Description: Various kinds of banners and text ads for RSS feeds
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Feedster

  • Description: Similar offerings to Feedburner, text ads and banners in feeds
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Federated Media

  • Description: John Battelle’s ad network for blogs. Banner ads in various sizes.
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Info Grabber

IntelliTXT

  • Description: Links words in the body of your text contextually to advertisers
  • About page

Kanoodle BrightAds

  • Description: Contextual Adsense like ads
  • About page

Kontera

  • Description: Very similar to IntelliTXT
  • About page

Mirago Context Stream

  • Description: Mirago is a third tier PPC engine, it can deliver contextual PPC results into content
  • About page

Nixxie

  • Description: UK specific IntelliTXT like product
  • About page

Pheedo

  • Description: Provide “tools” to integrate ads into regular and feed content
  • About page
  • Blog – Feed

Quigo AdSonar

  • Description: Private label PPC bidding for text ads on your site
  • Note: Must have 1M+ page views a month to join
  • About page

Revenue Pilot

  • Description: Provides a PPC Search solution for sites. Possibly a little too complex for most busy bloggers to be bothered with.
  • About page

Search Feed

  • Description: Search and content PPC text ad integration. Like Revenue Pilot, a little complex
  • About page

Target Point

  • Description: Contextual affiliate text ads payed out on a CPC basis
  • About page

Veoda

  • Description: Auto generated PPC text links provided by other third tier PPC engines
  • About page

Help Us Build this List Out!

I’m aware that the list is not complete. I’ve probably made some embarrassing ommisions, but with your help, we can build this list out to be the most comprehensive list of blog advertising programs on the web.

Please let me know what im missing in this list! and i’ll ad entries to it over time. Just post a comment and we’ll mop up any last programs we’ve missed 🙂

I have not included YPN or MSNAdCenter as both are in beta right now, and not open to all, and pure affilate networks aren’t what we’re here for, that’s a seperate list.

I hope you get some use out of this, so please tell us what we’re missing, and what you think of individual programs!

Respect your Reader, Reap Rewards

One of my pet hates from the marketing world is business people talking about their customers as “consumers”. This conjures up images of cattle being force-fed whatever garbage the business wants to churn out, safe in the knowledge the “consumer” has no choice but to consume. Robert Scoble, reporting on Mary Hodders post, makes a good point about “user generated content”. Describing your audience as “users” is not much better. What do you call people who visit your blog and why does it matter?

First of all it does matter. It matters because of the attitude adjustment that happens in your head. It matters for how you put across your message. Your world view changes your tone of voice, your tone of voice carries your message in a certain way, the reader reads between the lines. Your audience grows or shrinks.

There are a multitude of ways to describe you, the person reading this. While I am saying what I call you, at least to myself, is important, rather the meaning the word carries is the important bit. You deserve respect. If I don’t give you respect then you might well stick a couple of fingers up at the screen and click off somewhere else never to return.

Far too many bloggers have a sense of entitlement once their traffic has reached a certain level. It’s like whatever they put out will be sucked down so why bother thinking too hard, put it out there! Got to keep my posting level up! I guess those folks are in “feed the consumer” mode.

For this blog, and my other favourite Threadwatch, “reader” is too passive. The idea at these blogs is visitors become registered “participants”. Everyone wins when you participate, contribute, add to the conversation. We want you to give us the benefit of your thoughts, ideas and experience. Win, win and win.

So what shall I call you? We have two types of people coming here I guess. We have people who are not registered yet, I could call you a “guest”. We also have people who have registered, welcome back! I guess you would be a “participant”? Hmmm…

You know what though? We have an advantage here at Performancing. The one thing in common that binds us all together! We are all bloggers.

What do you think?

How to Mine Competitors and Readers for Links

Whether you view other blogs in your niche as “the competition” or, or like Performancing, part of your community, they still have information about your niche that you may not. Particularly if you’re the new kid on the block. Your initial visitors may also have a lot of information that could benefit you. The question is, how do you get that data?

There are two little known, yet very effective ways of gaining a jumpstart on niche data. Both methods involve letting your competition, and visitors do the hard work for you. Neither of these methods use anything even remotely evil, you can get all the information you want from publically viewable sources. Let me show you how…

Using Bloglines to Mine Reader Interests

If you don’t know about this, you’re gonna kick yourself, it’s so simple. Let’s assume you’ve done your initial research, and have a whole bunch of feeds you use for information on your niche. For this technique, you’ll need to open a Bloglines account if you don’t already have one.

Click on one of your feeds, and check the blue bar at the top to see how many subscribers the feed has. See figure below:

Follow the link shown in the image above, and you’ll find a list of the feeds public subscribers. All you need do after that, is to click the individual subscriber links, and check the left frame to see what else they’re subscribing to!

Some bloglines subscribers are very organized, and will even be kind enough to put their feeds in nicely labeled folders for you. Find the folder, check out the feeds. You’ll hopefully find a whole load of new information on your niche.

Often you’ll find that other bloggers in your niche have used their own names for their bloglines accounts, or maybe their blog names. This makes it even easier to work out which are the prime sources.

Using Del.icio.us to Mine Competitor Links

A similar technique can be used with del.icio.us. The idea is to find and subscribe to the link collections of bloggers in your niche. There are three different ways to go about finding the link collections of readers and competitors.

  1. Try typing in the name of your competitor, or blog name. This is the least effective, but you can strike lucky from time to time.
  2. Watch your incoming realtime link stats very closely. By finding links coming in from http://del.icio.us/UserName you can potentially find gold.
  3. Watch for blogs in your area that dump their delicious links to a daily post on their blog. This is by far the most effective way, but not everyone does this, I certainly don’t, as personally i find the posts to be more than a little shit. They have title’s that don’t tell you anything, and on that basis alone i don’t read them.

Before we get onto the details of how to mine delicious for information, let me just tell you how to go about finding the source of those dumped daily link collections in point 3.

Finding the source of daily link dumps

  1. On the daily link dump post, find the most obscure link you can and bookmark it using delicious yourself
  2. Go to your delicious home page, and click the “By UserName” link beneath the link you just bookmarked. You can also click the “By X other people” link to find out who else has an interest in that link.
  3. Now you should have the bookmarked links of your competitor, or visitor in front of you, time to get to work…

Use your inbox to subscribe to spam free info sources

One of the neat things about using this method is the avoidance of tag spam in delicious. As you’re mining real people, rather than just a tag, you avoid all the promotional crap that comes with such feed subscriptions in competitive areas.

The first thing you need to do is follow the link beneath your username at the top left labeled “inbox”. When you get there, follow the link on the right that says “edit inbox”. You should see a box like the one below:

From there, it’s a simple matter of entering the username of the person you want to monitor, and optionally specifying which of their tags you want to mine. Lastly, subscribe to your inbox’s feed, simple!

Information is Power

If you spend a little time on these techniques, you can quickly build up a very comprehensive overview of your niche, and as you’re subscribing to human compiled information, your RSS should remain spam free, which these days, is a prize not to be sniffed at.

Happy mining…

Link Shout: WebProBlog.com

Hey, my friend Rich Ord from iEntry is blogging! Rich knows his stuff, as his empire shows, but now he’s blogging at WebProBlog on “internet advertising, email marketing, search engines, eBusiness strategies”. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that that’s a blog worth subscribing to.

Good luck with the blog Rich, expecting to see good things coming out of there!

Blogging Mistakes: Launching an Empty Shell

Time and time again i read a blog entry entitiled “new blog on X launches!”. This in itself is no shocker, people launch new blogs at an astonishing rate. What constantly surprises me though, is the lack of planning and forethought that often accompanies a blog launch. Announcing a new blog, when that blog has little or no content, has got to be one of the most moronic things I see in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, I see it on a regular basis…

First Impressions

So, let’s think about this from my point of view, from the point of view of one of your readers. Here’s how the story goes with a bad launch:

  • I see your post in my RSS: Im launching a blog on X
  • I click the the RSS link as i trust you. Im not subscribed for the good of my health, i trust you enough to give you a piece of my attention by subscribing to your feed. Im interested in finding out about your new blog.
  • I get to your post, and find one of two things:
    • A one liner with a link, or worse, just a link
    • A paragraph or two selling your new blog to me. Describing what i’ll find when I get there, and why i should be interested in it.
  • Now, you may have got me to to follow the link to your new blog or not at this stage. Let’s assume that i do follow the link, either because you’ve done a great job of telling me why that action would be a good investment of my time, or your reputation (or my boredome) is sufficient to overlook the unimpressive one liner
  • I get to your new blog, and what do i find?
    • A new blog chock full of great content
    • An empty shell, with little more than a welcome post
  • Do I subscribe to the feed? Well, that depends on the above doesn’t it?

Im busy, aren’t you?

I simply don’t have time read, subscribe, or devote any of my attention to something im unsure about, do you?

As a blogger, launching a new blog, you need to be aware of this, and you need to sell your idea to me at every step of the way.

Sell it to me!

Go on, give me a reason to want to do the things you’d like me to.

  • When you announce your new blog, give me a reason to care. Explain to me how excited you are about it, tell me what im going to find when I get there, why i should care, what your plans for the site are and highlight posts of interest to give me an overview of the blog before i even get there
  • When I get to your new blog, I should be able to find exactly what I expect, based on your selling of the link to me. I want to see good content, and enough of it to make me think you’re serious about this site, and that a feed subscription is a worthwhile investment.
  • Don’t stop there! Keep that good content flowing, keep me interested. I want to see regular updates in my RSS, regular content that interests me. If i see all these things, i’ll link to you, talk about you and even evangelize your new blog

Blog Launch Checklist

Ok, so i hope i’ve convinced you that launching an empty shell is not the way to do a blog launch. Now let’s run through a little checklist for launching. It’s not complete, im not dealing with tech issues here, but these are the essentials you need be aware of:

  1. Have at minimum 10 posts of serious quality on your blog before showing it to anyone
  2. Sell your blog to me. When you post about it, or email, IM about it, give me a reason to care. A one liner, or just a link, just gives me the impression that you don’t care. If you don’t care, why the hell should I?
  3. 2-3hrs after announcing your new blog, post another great item to it. Repeat for at least 3 days. Then settle into whatever posting rhythm you intend for the blog, and here’s a good tip: Tell people about the frequency of posting. Let them know what to expect.

It’s all about selling

People are busy I am, you are, he is, she is. We’re all busy people. We need to know that your new blog is a stella investment of our time.

Not just the pre-sell, we need to be assured of that pitch by finding it to be so, when we get there. And having that perception of value reinforced at every step of the way, from subsequent promotional posts on your regular blog (or emails, im’s etc), to the content you produce. Particulary in the early days.

At the end of the day, it’s all about trust, and perception of value. If i see a one liner announcing a new blog, and find an empty shell when i get there, am i going to invest in a subscription?

The hell i am…

YPN Falling Short of Adsense

Many–if not most–bloggers receive most of their advertising revenue from Google Adsense. The reason is simple: despite the program’s annoying tendencies towards secrecy (Smart Pricing), Adsense pays out far better than alternatives (usually). But there was one slight problem–we were all dependant on one entity for monetization. Umm, *eek!*

Which is why so many of us jumped for joy when Yahoo! finally announced YPN, their Adsense alternative. The program has been in BETA for a while, and I’ve tested it out on my own blogs. I’ve got to say, YPN is nowhere near to rivalling Adsense, and I’ll tell you why in one word:

Depth.

Adsense has it. YPN doesn’t.

Admittedly, many bloggers have noticed that the two programs pay out about the same. The YPN CTR is usually significantly less than Adsense (because it doesn’t target as well–due to less advertiser depth) but it pays more per click than Adsense (because it lacks ‘Smart Pricing’).

Now, Smart Pricing annoys me as much as the next guy, but in reality, it’s the only thing that makes contextual advertising sustainable. Ads on blogs are just not going to convert as well as ads displayed on Google.com search results pages. It’s that simple. When Google implemented Smart Pricing, it knew that EPC would fall across the board, but over time it would make that money back and then some by making it feasible for many more advertisers to enter the marketplace.

Their logic in “mathematical” form:

discounted clicks = more advertisers = more ads and keywords = better contextual targeting = higher CTR = higher long term revenue

My guess is that the advertisers participating in the YPN are not getting a good ROI on their current campaigns. And long term, this will prevent the system from having the depth it needs to be a success for both publishers and advertisers.

Aside from this depth issue, Google already has the first mover advantage. When you want to buy a used *something*, do you go to eBay, or Yahoo! Auctions? I’m guessing eBay. Why? Selection. They have a much larger critical mass of users. In an efficient global multi-marketplace environment, there tends to be one marketplace that’s larger than the rest, and further, this seems to be self-sustaining. Where do the buyers go? Where the sellers are. Where do the sellers go? Where the buyers are.

Don’t get me wrong: I am still bullish that YPN can make a good alternative to Adsense. But Yahoo has to address some of these issues or it will be doomed to be an also-ran… in that case, thank God for Chitika! 😉

Dealing with Content Theft

Content theft is a growing problem for professional bloggers. You put long hours and all your creative energy into crafting a blog that is not only useful but reflects your personality only to find that your income and traffic drops off. Later you find a complete copy of your posts or entire blog. What can you do about it? Can it be prevented?

Blog Zombies

Reading through my feeds I happened across this post by Parental Olympian. It seems Scott Goldblatts content was being ripped off and a complaint to the thief was answered with

Your RSS feed is open for use on your website, which means that the user in question does NOT violate your copyright.

A thorny topic. There are many who agree with the perpetrator. After all feeds are a form of syndication. In his terms and conditions he clearly states that the feeds are for non-commercial purposes. Unfortunately just complaining will not usually have the desired effect.

Prevention

Right away, preferably before you are a victim, get print outs or dated screenshots of all your posts. You might need this proof in future.

There is nothing really you can do to stop someone stealing your content, if you make something readable then it is copyable. What you can do though is make sure all your links within your content and RSS feed point to the full address of your site rather than use relative links, that way if they are sloppy and do not rework the content you still have links pointing at your site. Both good for traffic and for evidence.

Make sure you have clear policies about use of your content and feeds and put a copyright notice in your footer.

Detection

You can search for copies of your content using Copyscape

So how do you even know to look if someone is stealing your content?

  • Drop off in traffic/Search referrals dry up
  • Another site appearing in search for your exact keywords
  • Referrals in your logs that look out of place

Let’s go through each in turn and discuss further.

Drop in traffic

There can be many reasons for a drop in traffic but if you are used to receiving a certain level of traffic from search engines, checking to see if someone has ripped you off is worthwhile. Copy a large segment of text, a couple of sentences, and see which pages come up in the results. It will be clear if your content has been copied or simply quoted.

Another site appears for your phrases

The other site might be higher in the results for good reason but they might also be ranking using your copy. What is also common is you drop out of the results completely because they are using your exact content and your site is seen as the duplicate.

Strange referrals

Weird one this but it does happen. All of a sudden I started receiving lots of traffic to page two of a three page article. It worked out that page one had been copied but they had left all the links exactly as they were in the original!

So what can we do?

If you do discover someone has copied your content then the most important thing is to stay calm. Getting hot-headed is not going to help and all you will acheive is a migraine.

The first thing to do, and the polite thing, is to contact the perpetrator as mentioned above. Find out everything you can about them, obviously most important is their contact details.

Most content thiefs will be using domains registered under dummy or cloaked details so you might need to do more investigation. Using DNSStuff you should be able to work out a fair bit about their domain and hosting solution. Before you contact the offenders ISP, take a copy of the site or at least screendumps.

If a site is ripping off content on a large scale it is also worth telling the other victims. Also if they are copying large amounts of posts they will be hoping to earn from it so another route is their advertisers and affiliate accounts.

Google, both adsense and search, and the other search engines take a dim view of this kind of thing. Let them know about it. At this point you might need to make a DMCA notice.

What’s left?

If you see it as a big problem then you really need legal advice, particularly if you are seeking damages payment. There are lawyers who specialise in copyright, obviously this could become costly but in the end if nobody defends their work the problem will only grow.

You?

Have you had your content stolen? What did you do?

Six Signs of Blog Launch Addiction

As I sit here, bearded, pinpoint eyed and buzzing through sleep deprivation, I wonder if those crucial first days of a blog launch are truly the crack cocaine of the blogosphere?

I think they are. I only managed 2hrs sleep last night, i’ve given up shaving entirely, and am living off of a steady stream of caffeine, adreneline and nicotene. Truly i am not a thing of beauty right now.

Oddly though, I feel great.

Six Signs of Blog Launch Addiction

Here are six tell tale signs of serious blog launch addiction, if you suffer from any of these ailments during a launch, you should consult your feed reader immediateley.

  1. You click your own sites bloglines subscription every half hour praying that’s they’ve updated the stats, and that you have more subscribers
  2. You IM or email someone every time you get a new comment
  3. You find yourself checking stats for incoming links every 10mins
  4. You loose sleep
  5. You forget to eat
  6. Family and friends become all but distant memories, albeit temporarily 🙂

The first few days of a new launch are tough on body and mind, but they’re full of excitement and passion for the project. This is where you define yourself in the blogosphere, and im unashamed to be addicted to the buzz it gives me.

So far, we have 85 bloglines subs and 75registered memebers, and it’s only day 3. As far as im concerned, we’re on a roll!