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Make Money Blogging With or Without Adsense? Some Options…

November 17, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

When deciding whether to incorporate Adsense into your blog there are several factors to consider. Many feel that it diminishes their brand, whilst others see it as a useful tool for visitors which creates revenues and makes their content profitable.
The choice can largely come down to the commercial goals and the purpose of your blog. Many businesses who sell products decide to place Adsense adverts within their blog. This would appear to be a strange choice, opening up opportunities for rivals to promote their service or product to your potential customer base.
Many publishers claim that they are only doing this to allow companies who provide ancillary services to advertise. These claims have some merit, as those who for example sell pillows could provide those who sell bedding with an opportunity to advertise.
Although this would make sense, there are still those online retailers who allow rivals to penetrate their audience. Many claim that there are still benefits in allowing your direct competitors to advertise within your blog. One of these is that ultimately if visitors wish to see your competitors they would be able to see them through a Google search regardless. This may be true however the thought of an established brand like coco-cola having a Pepsi advert in their blog is not even a possibility.
Another factor which is considered in this situation is that publishers do not feel that Adsense is effective in making conversions. They feel that visitors who would click on adverts are not highly qualified customers, as they would quickly navigate to the materials or products that interest them if they were.
Despite Adsense being a questionable choice for online retailers, it is surely a good supplementary service for other varieties of online publishers. For example, a blog which provides a free service like dictionary.com gets high levels of traffic, and is able to make their service profitable through adsense. This has been the case for Bloggers who originally provided content free of charge, being unable to reach the scale that is necessary to contract with advertisers directly.
This could also apply to other previously free services, including wider forms of information broadcast, and news for example. In 2006 a man who later published a selection of Videos claims to make $19,000 a month through adsense, claiming that he was also contacted through Google to help him increase the CTR (Click Through Rate) that he achieved. The thought of success like this has been a major factor in stimulating online publishers to opt for Adsense.
Many publishers also claim that adsense makes their blog look more professional. Those who are able to contract with advertisers are generally seen to provide a service with large appeal, and therefore those unfamiliar with the program may feel that the Adsense advertiser is in this position.
Adsense however, is also aligned with those publishers who use the service purely to provide links to adverts. Everyone has done a Google search, clicked on an Adwords advert and came into a blog which reads top ten resources. This is a major problem, as is generally something that surfers find frustrating. If people see that it says adverts by Google, and they then see adverts by Google on another site, they may align that site with consumer unfriendly practices. This is therefore an issue which Google has to address, to maintain Adsense as a reputable service.
Regardless of the disadvantages and the blogs for which the service may be inappropriate it is still a useful tool for blog visitors. Those who visit a blog, and click on a link provide revenues for the publisher, whilst those who provide free services are able to generate revenue.
The only fear that Google has, is that rival PPC programs offer better deals to publishers and they decide to go elsewhere, therefore taking advertisers with them. However, ultimately it is best for advertisers and publishers if they largely remain in same PPC circuit.
Make money blogging with these alternatives
Here are more great sources to help you make money from your blog.
Bidvertiser (http://www.bidvertiser.com/)
Like AdSense, Bidvertiser displays text ads in your page. But the difference lies in the fact that advertisers bid over your advertising space, ensuring you earn as much revenue as you possibly can. This also means that bids will increase over time, earning you even more cash. You also get a great way to customize your ads with a very easy to use tool and detailed reports on your site’s status.
Quigo AdSonar (http://www.quigo.com/adsonarpublishers.htm)
Quigo AdSonar achieves relevancy by placing a filter according to your site’s categories. It also offers you on-line reports of your site’s status and the possibility to add your own custom ads replacing ads that don’t gain you any revenue. The setup is very simple, in a similar fashion to AdSense’s and quite customizable as well.
Vibrant Media IntelliTXT (http://www.intellitxt.com/site/web_01a.html)
Vibrant Media IntelliTXT offers user-activated ads, highlighting certain words within the content of the page and presenting relevant ads when a user hovers his mouse over them. It uses a pay-for-performance pricing scheme and can easily be used along with other advertising methods, because it is unobtrusive. It places you in full control, allowing you to easily integrate it within your site with some simple JavaScript.
Nixie (http://www.nixxie.com/display.php?section=Partners)
Nixie claims to hold a technology that can read and understand your site, enabling it to display the most relevant content to your site. Besides text ads, Nixie also features price comparison listings as well as live auction advertising. It’s very easy to implement and has a good payment policy as well.
MIVA AdRevenue Xpress (http://www.miva.com/us/content/partners/arx.asp)
MIVA AdRevenue Xpress is targeted towards small and mid-sized publishers. It implements Search Box functionality and also features things like a Category Directory as well as the handling of 404 error pages. It can be integrated with your page using a simple on-line wizard.
Fastclick (http://www.fastclick.com/publish.html)
Fastclick offers you an impressive 65 percent of what it makes from a click on your website. Payments are done monthly, via PayPal or through checks. The ads can be formatted as you wish, and Fastclick even offers a free support serice for its members and no fees are required to register with the service.
contextWeb ContextAd (http://www.contextweb.com/Corporate/publisher/publisher.shtml)
ContextAd offers the possibility of contextual ads for dynamic pages, meaning ads will change as soon as your page does. It’s very easy to use and free to sing up for and offers a transparent payment policy. The ads are fully customizable and real-time reports are available 24/7.
AdBrite (http://www.adbrite.com/)
AdBrite offers publishers the possibility of integrating text ads in their pages. These are done on your own rates, with the websites you approve by hand so it bares some similarities with a classic advertising scheme. You also have the option of adding a “Your Add Here” button that buyers can immediately click to ad space on your page. It can also be used in conjunction with Google AdSense, maximizing your CTR and offering advertisers the possibility of showing their links in your Google AdSense space. You have full control over the look and feel of your adds and finally, you get an incredible 75% of what the advertiser pays for on every click.
So, as you can see there are many offers for this kind of advertising, and many hybrids based on AdSense like advertising. Also, a lot of services can work together with AdSense to earn you an even greater amount of revenue for your blogs ad space.

Leon Edward presents a new way of blogging for you to learn that totally changes the way that you can make money blogging. This is a Hybrid form of blogging you’ve likely not seen before. Visit Leons website forMore online home business ideas,articles, free newsletter at his website Home Business IT

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Social Media Workflow

November 12, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Whenever I talk with people about social media they say one thing: “It’s all very well, but where do I find the time?” and that is a reasonable question.
Many think that using say Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Ecademy whilst trying to do your job seems impossible. Especially if you can’t multi-task. Also, some research now shows that heavy media multi-taskers are paying a big price and there are even some comments that some sites like Twitter diminish your IQ. ‘Scary’ stuff and obviously reports like this let you off the hook – no one wants to make themselves stupid! So, it’s easy, I’ll just ignore social media.
Better not. There is always the latest fad on the web, but sites like Ecademy have been running since 1998 and Facebook has more than 250 million users so, it’s not just going to ‘go away’.
Indeed there are emerging case studies (admittedly from Twitter) that show that large companies like Pepsi and small businesses such as Naked Pizza are finding ways to make money. Then on Facebook the big brands such as Coca Cola are there.
And things like this have happened before. Do you remember a few years ago – well, ok just a bit more than a few years ago, but certainly within the last 15 – that not everyone had a mobile phone for business and certainly not everyone had email? And now? Mobile phones and email have become so essential in business that we forget what it was like before them.
Social media is also changing the way we communicate and if you want to get a flavour of how then look at the list of well over 750 top social media sites that we have found.
So where do you start? Well if you read our recent articles Social Media 1 and Social Media 2 and you know what it’s about, how to plan it and how to behave.
This article concentrates on workflow and workflow, as I am sure you know, is the management of tasks and steps in business processes. A workflow specifies what tasks need to be done, in what order (sometimes linearly, sometimes in parallel), and who or what programme has permission to perform each task.
In the case of social media there are plenty of tools that allow you to publish once and then decide where it all goes. Of course, you want to keep it simple to start and pick just a few sites on which to get started. Many people start off by going for the big guns such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr.
There is nothing wrong with this, but if you looked at the list of 750 top social media sites we mentioned you’ll see that they may not be the best places to ‘hang out’. So choose wisely by thinking through the most important and valuable activities that you could be doing via social media and make those your priority.
Creating your Social Media workflow
Once you have decided on the sites that are most important to you, you need to make your presence regular and ongoing. It is a marathon and not a sprint, so repeated, regular involvement is needed. To make sure you do this you need to set up a schedule and then a workflow.
Firstly, decide when you will commit time to social media. Maybe it’s first thing, then around lunch and then just before leaving? Whatever suits you, but like any other activity you are learning you must devote time. You are just not going to be successful otherwise. It’s like going to school for the first time a little scary but you find you soon make friends and then you play together and joke together and…….
Being a regular in any community will also establish your personal (and / or business) online brand.
Now you have to find a way to make sure it all works together and that is workflow. This can be something that is quite personal, but also, of course it depends on your position in the hierarchy, the level of independence you may have, your job and whether you work as part of a team in all of this as well as a whole host of other factors.
Where do you start?
Unless you are going to build your own systems you have to look for standard tools that may help. They exist.
For example Salesforce CRM have just launched The Service Cloud™ which includes integrated support for Twitter amongst other enhancements and, of course, if this is the company line then……….. But let’s assume you are not looking for a team-based, corporate focused solution.
Most sites already allow some form of cross-import so that you can bring in some services. For example Ecademy allows you to import from pretty much all the sites of which you are a member. Facebook has a whole load of apps to allow you to interface with it, but then it’s not everyone’s cup of tea as their main dashboard.
If you just use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace then something like Tweetdeck works very well. It will allow you to deal with those sites from one place and also add other data such as their directory feeds on your favourite subjects.
Ping supports more than 40 sites and allows you to interface them all to Ping so that you can post from Ping and send the message and link etc to them all. With the custom URL facility you an also set it up to post to any page on which you can put a script.
However it may be that you want something a little more ‘complex’.
Then I suggest you use one site for each purpose. That is one site for status updates, e.g. Twitter, one for reading news streams e.g. Google Reader, one for photos, e.g. Flickr, etc. etc. This way you don’t have to upload things more than once. There is a real benefit to this as each site does what it does and none of them do it all. In any case it is quite likely you have multiple memberships already because sites specialise.
Once you have decided which site is doing what you will want to use an aggregator to tie all the different sites you’ve updated / uploaded together and you will be able to share your identity across many sites.
There are a number of aggregators out there and it requires some thought if you are using a number of sites to decide on the best and the flow between them so that the sites update in the way you want with minimal effort and that you don’t start creating a loop when sites keep cross posting the same things, that really does make some people angry!
One to look at is Friend Feed which automatically imports shared stuff from the sites you use across the web – they cover 58 at last count. But not only can you import you can export too not only via widgets but also via RSS straight to your own or any other site that accepts and RSS feed.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to make your life easier out there when it comes to getting your message across via Social Media. Not only that it really is still early days and the technology is evolving all the time. Remember those 1980’s mobile phones and compare them with an iPhone and you get where we are.

Richard Hill is a director of E-CRM Solutions and has spent many years in senior direct and interactive marketing roles.E-CRM helps you to grow by getting you more customers that stay with you longer.

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