Version 2.0 of the Ad Buttons plugin has been released. Now, the plugin itself hasn’t changed much, but an exciting new feature has been added: Ad Buttons Ad Network Ads. The Ad Buttons Ad Network has been created for the plugin and allows you to show 3rd party ads on your blog. So, if you don’t know what ads to add to your site, let adbuttons.net handle it for you. The credits you earn by showing ads on your site can be used to finance your own ad campaign on the network.
Right now, adbuttons.net is still very limited, but functioning. I like to give people access to the system as early as possible, so I can extend the software based on feedback from the users. I’ve done the same with the Ad Buttons plugin and, based on your feedback, this seems to be a model that the users like.
Joining the Ad Buttons Ad Network is not mandatory, you can still use the plugin to manage your own ad inventory for your blog.
]]>A lot of CPA programs only pay for conversions from certain countries. There is no point in showing these ads to people from other countries. It would be better to show these visitors other ads.
Per Gustafsson has made the ip2nation database that enables you to retrieve the visitors country. I have incorporated the ip2nation database into the latest Ad Buttons plugin release. This enables the program to know from which country your visitor is and enables you to control which ads are served.
Unlike other ip2nation plugins that are available, Ad Buttons is currently using the latest version of the ip2nation database and has update functionality already build into the admin panel so you can update the database with one click when a new version is released.
]]>AdSense ad colors can be changed right on the Ad Buttons settings page and an ad preview is shown for your convenience.
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A new social networking site is coming and even before the official launch it already has over half a million members! “How did they pull that one off?” you might ask. They are using some very clever viral marketing. Everyone that signs up is given some shares, which, according to them, will go up in price over the next few years. If you believe their numbers, your free signup bonus shares could be worth over a thousand bucks in a few years.
You have probably heard this one before: “If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is” Yes, this one does sound too good to be true, but we are talking social networking sites here. What if you had gotten a few shares of MySpace when you signed up, or Facebook? Who wouldn’t want to own a few shares of one of the big social networking sites. This one could just prove to become the next big thing!
Why would this one become the next big hit? I think they have a few very neat ideas, in their own words:” me2everyone is going to be a cool new website where you can meet friends, chat, shop, play, watch videos, create an art gallery, open a virtual newspaper, play the free inworld lottery and make money from your own online store! You and everyone you know make the decisions, shape the world, create real incomes and share in the profits. It’s a new place where you meet new people or invite your friends. Learn new skills or expand your business. Find the love of your life or help the planet.”
Sounds to me like the next place to be for all of us web-entrepreneurs! Check out me2everyone.com (and if you are asked for a referer id you can put in 515879 
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There’s no money in blogging, sure there are a few that reel in the cash, but there are millions of bloggers that don’t make any money at all, or at least not nearly enough to justify the time they spend on their blogs. Try to blog for money and you will be frustrated pretty soon. In stead, treat it as a hobby, hobbies cost money. If you do it for a few years, maybe, you can turn your hobby into your job.
As soon as you stop worrying about the number of visitors and the number of ad clicks you get each day, blogging becomes so much more enjoyable, as a hobby should be. Readers will notice a positive change in your writing and before you know it, positive things will happen.
I am running a couple of different blogs, one of them never got too much attention, but these last few weeks I have been feeling very positively about it and really enjoyed working on it. Last week I suddenly got an e-mail from an editor of a printed magazine. He liked the information on my blog and wanted me to write for the magazine!
I know, it’s not the jackpot, but I got a few hundred bucks for about a days work plus very targeted advertising for me and my blog to 70000 magazine readers. Plus, they liked my writing so much, that they offered me a regular column in the magazine.
It’s stories like this that the big bloggers will also tell you: the blog doesn’t make the majority of the money, but it helps the money to find them.
]]>There are a number of different ad types you can use on your website and each has its own pro’s and con’s. I’ve discussed PPC ads before, today we’re taking a closer look at CPM ads.
CPM ads
CPM ads are ads that pay per ad view (CPM = Cost Per 1000 impressions) so it doesn’t matter if your visitors click on the ads. Your earnings are directly related to the number of visitors and page views you get on your website. A steady traffic stream will generate a steady income stream for you.
Different CPM programs offer different rates. A rate of, say, $2 CPM will not necessarily make you $2 for every 1000 page views on your website or blog though. The ad programs often pay different rates based on the location of the visitors. The $2 CPM offered might only apply to US based traffic, while visitors from the UK might only make you $1 CPM and Asian traffic could not be paid for at all.
If you want to optimize your ad income and the CPM ads you are running on your site are only paying for traffic from certain countries, it could be a good idea to only show the ads to visitors from the paying countries. The ad space could be used to display PPC ads to visitors from other countries. To do this you can use the free ip2nation database which lets you look up the visitors country based on their ip-address. A simple php program can then be used to display ads based on the visitors country.
Another thing to look into when selecting an ad publisher network to sign up with, is how exactly is the traffic measured. They might not count every page view, but only the unique visitors per day. A single visitor looking at 100 pages on your website could only count as a single view instead of 100. So, the ad network advertising with higher CPM rates might bring in less money than the one with lower rates. Have a good look at the details of the program you sign up with.
]]>Finding the best monetizing strategy for your website involves a lot of testing and tweaking. You’d be amazed, how a seemingly insignificant change in your ad placement, can suddenly double your income. Before we can start tweaking our ad settings, though, we’ll have to sign up for some ad programs. There are many companies in online advertising and finding the right partner can be a difficult task by itself.
There are four major types of ads you can place on your website CPC, CPM, CPA and direct selling of ad spots for a fixed price per month. Most online advertising companies specialize in one of these methods, let’s have a closer look at the first option.
CPC/PPC
Cost-Per-Click or Pay-Per–Click ads will make you a little money each time a visitor clicks on an ad. The pay per click is generally very low, but with enough clicks this can add up to a nice income stream. Looking through my Google AdSense reports, I see many clicks that paid only 1 cent, but also some that paid a few dollars. When I add up all earnings and clicks, for the 4 years I’ve been using AdSense ads on many different websites, the average pay per click is about 10 cents, with single site averages between 2 cents and 85 cents.
The average pay per click, however, isn’t really interesting. What you want is the best possible total income, which normally is directly related to the number of visits to your site. This brings us to the better ad performance indicator: CPM or cost per thousand impressions. PPC ad programs usually show you the realized CPM value in your ad statistics. This makes it very easy to compare how well your PPC ads are doing compared to a CPM ad program. Google doesn’t allow publishers to share their ad stats, but I can tell you that my different websites, that have AdSense ads running on them, have a CPM ranging from 1 cent all the way up to $43. So, replacing the Google ads with a $2 CPM ad program would make sense for some sites, but not for all.
While with the impression based CPM ads earnings can only be raised by a rising number of visitors to your website, PPC ad revenue can easily be optimized by trying different ad placements and color schemes. PPC ad networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network let you manage the color scheme and ad layouts for ads displaying on your website. While most sites benefit from trying to have the ads blend in with their content (i.e. using the same text and link colors as the main content of the website and not using a border around the ads) some sites make more revenue by using ads that are, well, less subtle.
Optimizing your PPC ads is an ongoing task. The ad settings that work best today might not bring in the most clicks next week, so it is important to keep tracking ad performance and try new settings regularly. The difficult thing with ad performance tracking is the interpretation of the results. Statistical data is only useful in big numbers. Tracking the ad clicks on 100 page views is hardly going to yield you any usable data. You need to look at the data for tens of thousands of page views. If your site isn’t pulling that kind of visitor numbers in, your ‘ad optimization’ is pretty much guess work.
]]>StumbleUpon is one of the sites that can bring a heap of new visitors to your site. I’ve seen 18,000 page views in a single day on one of my sites, all traffic from StumbleUpon. The number of visitors that came to my site from StumbleUpon decreased considerably over the next couple of days, but I was still getting over 1,000 visitors a day for about a month.
We all want traffic, right? Well, actually, most webmasters think it’s all about the number of visitors, but what they really want is to make some money from ads running on their site. If you are running AdSense ads on your site, StumbleUpon traffic, or rather social media traffic in general, is no money maker. If you want to get a good return on all that free traffic, you have to know who your visitors are!
So, who is stumbling? Your typical StumbleUpon user is not as easily described as the average Digg user. StumbleUpon has a much broader user base than Digg. You can find any kind of people on StumbleUpon, which of them get send to your website depends on the category that your site was submitted to.
One thing that can be said about StumbleUpon users is that they are bored, not boring, just bored. See, the whole point of StumbleUpon is to give bored people something to do on the web.
I know I’ve spend countless times staring at a search engine, trying to figure out what I wanted to search for. I didn’t have anything better to do, and just wanted to browse the ‘net, but I had no idea where to start.
Today, whenever I feel like just browsing the web, with no particular goal in mind, I just hit the Stumble! button in my browser and I will be taken to an interesting site. I’ve put the subjects I’m interested in into my profile page, so the system knows what I like and doesn’t send me to just any random website.
When you get visitors from StumbleUpon to your website, you know they are people that are interested in the topic of your site, you also know that they are bored and where not looking for your website in particular. Visitors from search engines came to your site by searching for something that is on your site, they will probably also click on your AdSense ads, because the ads show links to sites on a similar topic. StumbleUpon visitors will not click the ads on your site, when they are done reading, they click on the Stumble! button to be send to the next website.
A few might click an ad, bookmark your site or even subscribe to your rss feed, but most of them will not. The best thing they can do, is give your site a thumb-up, so it will be send to more StumbleUpon users. So, if you are enjoying this post, please give me a thumb up!
What about other ways to make money from the StumbleUpon traffic? Your best bet would probably be CPM ads, these are ads that pay for each time it is viewed, instead of requiring a click to make money. This depends on your websites topic however, I’m mostly writing for webmasters and they are generally more web-savvy than your average visitor on other sites. Most of my visitors use the Firefox browser and I’m pretty sure a lot of them have some ad-blocking extensions installed, so they will never see the CPM ads, and will not make me any money.
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Eric pointed out Adgetize to me today, so I thought I’d give it a try. This ad program seems to have the greatest potential so far. You are getting paid not only for ad views or ad clicks, but also for posting on your blog. This is not a paid posting service, you just go about blogging like you normally would. You post what you want and earn points with their system.
Another big difference with services like Xavier Media Banner Exchange is that your accumulated points will be converted into cash! So, if you are getting clicks and hits from traffic exchange programs, but really rather be paid for your blog, this is your chance to sign up with a brand new service.
Adgetize has only been around for a month, but people have already been paid for this program, so it seems to be legit. Looking at how their system works, I’m not entirely sure they will last long in the advertising market. People are currently signing up like crazy and displaying the Adgetize ads on their websites to earn cash. If the program fails to attract enough advertisers, this nice program could soon be gone.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their service for free and start showing ads on your site within minutes. Just go to the Adgetize website and sign up now!