February 12, 2012

Bidvertiser Review

DOLLAR SIGN (2)If you are a regular visitor to this blog then you may have noticed, the new Bidvertiser ads sprinkled around. I started running these about a week ago just to try it out. I did not really expect a lot since I used to run Google Adsense on this blog and it never did very well at all.

My overall CTR for Google Adsense is fairly decent, but on this site it never performed. Even when I did get clicks the payout was only a penny or two. Needless to say I did not expect much out of Bidvertiser on this site. well its only been running a week or two and my CTR is still not great, but I have noticed when I get links they are worth a lot more. So much more that I may dump Adsense on one or two other of my sites which are focused towards ad clickers and see how it performs there. I need to ensure there are ads focused towards my niches on those sites, but if the revenue per click sticks to the same percentage I’ve seen on this site and they have relevant ads, then I could triple my PPC based revenue across my virtual real-estate. If you have sites that perform decent with Adsense, but not to the level you expect them too, then Bidvertiser may be worth checking out.

The program has similar amenities as Google Adsense, although they are fairly new and they don’t have as many advertisers as the Jolly Green Google Giant, but it is still fairly new and seems to have some potential. In addition to the higher paying ads, they also have a referral program like Google has, but their referral program works a little better in my opinion, read its not as hard to earn the minimum payout so it stands to reason that even sites with little to no traffic may be able to earn money and thus earn you commissions for sites you refer. I’ve been with Google for a little over three years and I have referred quite a few publishers to their system, but I have yet to be paid by Google for any of my referrals. This is because with the hundred dollar payout at Google, a lot of Adsense publishers never earn their first check. With bidvertiser the minimum amount for payment is $10 dollars so this should allow more people to actually get something for their efforts.

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Speed Links

There are a couple of posts on other blogs you may be interested in this week.

The first comes from Common Sense with Mark. Well CommonSense meet No Nonsense.

Mark wrote a post on whether the actions of some people in the Blogsphere were of a herd mentality and just following the A-List bloggers. This does go on quite a bit, but in a manner that I see nothing wrong with. While every blog should strive to be unique in terms of content, what is wrong with trying to generate a little traffic to your blog. Afterall isn’t that why people spend time and energy creating the content. They want people to read it. Most of Mark’s post deals with the various traffic generation trends of late such as blog rush. Blog rush was touted a little before its time. I was even guilty of this in some of my posts, but the main reason people jumped on BlogRush was because of the name behind it. Its pretty much a given that round one was a bust, but I would not be surprised to see a round two implementation of blogrush.

Mark goes on to talk about the ever ending quest for more subscribers and more comments. Of course people want these things they are what helps to make a blog popular. If you are writing a blog and do not want readers or subscribers, why don’t you just keep it on your hard drive and get it off the net.

Sorry Mark, I don’t see a lot of CommonSense in this post.

My second link is on a subject that a lot of the A-List bloggers about blogging have been touting lately, but this one did not make Mark’s list and that is including images in your posts. I personally like images in the posts as long as there are not too many and the image is somehow related to the post. The problem for me has been finding the images that I can freely post without copywriting problems. Skelliewag to the rescue with the guide to find incredible Flickr images for your blog. There are some decent suggestions in the post and I will definitely be bookmarking it. I’ve been using Live Writer lately to write on blogs and it has an addon you can download to help you find Flickr Images and insert them. It works great with WordPress, but the search for images is a little awkward. This post should help me with that problem, so you may start to see more images around here soon.

Big Pimpin

Lara from I Make Money On Facebook has posted an article about traffic generated form Facebook and how its the worst traffic on the net that caught my eye. Lara provides some insight into how Facebook works in regards for utilizing it as a traffic generation technique which has some possible merit. I’ve never really got Facebook really but with Lara’s help, I’m starting to see how it could be a powerful tool if utilized properly.

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Flagship Blog Building Project

DoshDosh has an interesting post on his blog recommending building Flagship blogs. The concept he lays out is interesting, but I’m not sure how practical for most people. The concept involves creating a Flagship blog( as he calls it) every 30 days for a year.

The idea is to build up a blog and follow a development cycle on a monthly rotation. If done properly then after a year you would have 12 blogs in various niches that could be sold for a profit. The idea sounds reasonable in terms of it could earn the person a lot of money, but there is also a lot of risk in such an endeavor.

First you need to find all the domain names for your various niches. That part probably won’t be that difficult for most Internet Marketing types. Chances are you already have numerous domain names registered that you have not built out into sites yet. I know I have a few.

The main time constraint is content. Now if you have plenty of money, you could contract out the content, but if all your content is contracted out how is this really a blog. A blog should have a unique voice. Readers are attracted to this as they always know what they are going to get. Now there are exceptions, sites like Engadget come to mind, but these are few in between. This endeavor could get very expensive in a hurry. If you want subscribers to a blog which is a must if you intend to make money off advertisers or to sell the blog eventually. Buying unique blog posts could get very expensive.

Then comes the whole process of advertising your blog. This could also get very time consuming. I suppose if you had a great deal of great content and then paid some high profile bloggers such as John Chow to review your blog, then this may take care of launching you into the blogsphere and you may gain some subscribers. Of course this is always a risk as people who subscribe to a blog such as John Chow’s probably are not interested in your blog on other niche topics that may not cover making money. So for this to be effective, you will need reviews on other sites within your niche. This may not be easy to obtain as a lot of people won’t pimp another blog the competes with them for SE rankings. Of course I’m sure you could pay them enough money and they would do it.

Blogging is a time intensive task and unless you have hords of cash( which is probably not something everyone has) then it would be very hard to make this work out to your benefit.

Of course you could take DoshDosh’s idea and use it to build one or two blogs and do it in a development life cycle that allows more time. Say you push the cycle out to 3 months or 6 months, then that would give you time to properly perform all the needed tasks in a time frame that meets your needs. AS you build revenue through this process you could reinvest your profits into outsourcing the time restrictive tasks. This would allow you to build more blogs and eventually reach the level of Flagship blog building DoshDosh mentions. The important thing I got out of the article was that you should develop a plan for blogging. This will help you maintain a consistent schedule and as a result build a better blog.

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