Project Wonderful Update
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For the regular readers of this blog, you may have noticed the Project Wonderful ads in the sidebar. Of course now they are gone and and this post is why. I ran Project Wonderful for a couple of weeks. During that time my ad prices fluctuated between .05 and .20 cents per day. For the people who had the advertising spots this was a pretty good deal, but for me the ads where too intrusive and I did not see where they added any value to this blog, so I killed them.
I never posted the ads to earn any money from them, but more as a way to reward people who visit this blog regularly, but that is not really what happened.I had a lot of requests and while some of the advertiser requests where valid and something I would not mind advertising on this blog, there was also a lot of requests for affiliate programs. Of course those where declined, but it did not stop the requests.
Project Wonderful is probably a decent place to advertise your blog and to build your brand, I’m not sure the ROI will be acceptable. I ran over 400 ads on various blogs the past couple of weeks and really only saw a few actual visitors to my site from those ads. So to me its not really worth it and I won’t be using them for this blog in the future.
Now back to the Affiliate programs, that’s not really a bad idea. If people will approve those types of ads and you did it properly then you could probably post quite a few links which could earn you a little money for a cheap advertising place. If you chose your keywords for a campaign properly and kept the costs down to a penny or couple of cents then you could post affiliate ads out to hundreds of websites for only a little bit of money per day. putting your ad on 400 websites for 4 bucks a day is a pretty good deal and if you made the graphic catchy enough then you may could earn some commissions from your efforts.
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Comments
I could not get myself to get behind Project Wonderful. There are way too many downfalls to meet the good. While in theory, there’s something “wonderful” about Project Wonderful, I’d have to say that in general I agree with you and BizGiftGuru.
After just a week I pulled the ads from my site. I, like you, wanted advertisements that would provide value to my readers. That wasn’t happening so they had to go.
Finally, after all the semi-rude comments (and e-mails) I received of my review of Project Wonderful, it’s nice to know that I wasn’t alone in the idea to pull the ads.
Thanks for the post!
[…] Chanced upon Bruce Hopkins’ Project Wonderful Update, which makes me pause and think if I’m willing to experiment with PW. We’ll see… If you liked […]
I was one of your PW advertisers and thank you for putting my ad up for a few minutes :D. I actually hate PW because there are a lot of bugs with the system and I can only get into the site properly using a single computer. All my other computers with updated browsers get rejected. It keeps asking for that darn cookie to be enabled but it already is.
Secondly, I found that its so easy to rig the system by having multiple accounts and jacking up the prices so that you’ll end up paying the maximum bid. I won’t name the EC user here who did that but it was quite obvious that HE did since NONE of the other spots were taken but my single ad out of 5 had bids on it. Bizarre, right?
Lastly, it seems that the majority of PW users are EC users which means you’re getting the same eyeballs over and over again. When I did advertise with what seems to be a large comics related contingent, it was just expensive and brought in 0 traffic.
PW, unfortunately, I see no hope for it the way people are using it now, plastering their sites like crazy. It’s like EC but you can put up 30 at a time and then have to pay for it.
Hi,
I googled it to find the site and fell on this blog post. It doesn’t look like Project Wonderful is worth our blog’s space.
To help avoid devaluing your other spots all you have to do is use the option that deletes the price of that ad. Then to know that data they would have to go to project wonderful, join and look it up–so not very likely. I think RW works best for people wanting a little extra money of relatuively low traffic sites, who lack the skills to sell the ads directly. For me 20c a day for an ad on my personal blog is money for jam.
Has anyone tried Etology yet? I’ve been using this service for a few months now and so far I’m quite happy with the results. Project Wonderful is nice, but I wasn’t happy with my overall earnings. Therefore, I started searching for something better and eventually found Etology. One of the nice things about Etology is that you can set your own prices, which in the long run equals higher earnings.
also still do not know what to make out of the Project Wonderful. I run it one of my sites, but quite low on the sidebar as the cents and pennies prices for ads are devaluing the value of the ad spots that I am directly selling. I am not sure if I will keep it or not, but will give it few weeks.
but to promote affiliate programs this would be one of the great channels, costwise at least …