My conversation with Jeff about blog bookstores leads me to share this:

When I first started blogging, I simultaneously started writing for Hubpages, primarily as a means to promote my blog. Those of you on WordPress.com, or who write primarily Bible blogs, know that Bible blogging is hardly a way to make money. In fact, blogging has actually cost me money because of my vanity url.

However, when I was writing for Hubpages, I did ultimately make a little extra cash. For example, since I have opened the BOB Bookstore, I have had approximately 11 clicks (in about 3 months) resulting in zero purchases yielding zero dollars. No big surprise.

While on Hubpages, I published 49 hubs, resulting in over 950 Amazon clicks, with over 40 purchases, yielding about $32. However, I did make considerably more in Google Adsense revenue. Without going into detail, I reached Google’s payout limit ($100) twice and will reach it again soon.

I haven’t published anything new on Hubpages in about a year, but my hubs are still active and earning, and I may publish over there again someday. Why am I not writing there now, you ask? Well, simple: it’s addictive!

I spent way too much time playing around over there, reading, writing, and hanging out in the forums. I had to quit cold turkey. My primary regret is that I spent far too much time piddling instead of publishing.

The key to earning money on Hubpages, as with most everything else, is patience. If you’re willing to invest a little time, you can make it worth it in the long run.

How you earn money on Hubpages:

• Google Adsense
• Amazon Associates
• eBay Partner Network
• Kontera

Here are a few of my own favorite hubs:

• A Dad’s Guide to Surviving Pregnancy
• Baby Names Gone Bad
• How to Scratch a Man’s Back
• How to Read the Bible:  A Lighthearted Look at a Serious Question
• How NOT to Train a Jack Russell Terrier

Example site: https://www.speedreadingtrainer.com/
Suggestions on In Text Advertising (double lined words that have pop-up advertising)

• Kontera
• TrafficVance

Suggestions for help with tracking

• pro.tracking202.com
• tracking202.com

Using banner ad advertising instead of just text in Google Adwords and site targeted campaigns

Wes did a great job of reviewing a lot of information – this is a must see.

Looks like the ghost of Christmas Present is just that, a ghost.  

MediaPost ran an interesting article about the most popular search keywords this holiday.  Last year, the #1 search was “Christmas present,” with “Christmas shopping” coming in at #4.  This year, the top search was for “Santa letter,” followed by “Christmas wish list,” and “Christmas spirit.”  The words “present” and “shopping” didn’t even make it into this year’s top 10. Where did they go?  

Somewhere along the line, the more genteel word “gift” has replaced “present” and “spirit” has become something you search for.  

Marketers take note.  As San Francisco-based Kontera surmised (they provided the analysis for this report), we are faced with more thoughtful consumers now.  And if they’re more thoughtful in their spending, you can bet that they are seeking value and meaning in their purchases.  

It’s time to adjust those marketing messages for ‘09.

I have tried a handfull of ad networks and the reason to switch from one to the other is either poor click-through-rate or poor eCPM. Granted I don’t have a great site rich of content and so don’t deserve $1.00 CPC ads. Well, not even $0.25.

I recently started using kontera on a PR4 website. First one month went well. CPC ranged from $0.05 to $0.40. Then the ads started deteriorating. Within the 3rd month, there are ads that weren’t even fetching $0.01 per click! One key reason is, most of the ads are template junk from us.com and findstuff.com.

I think ad networks should pay attention not only to the quality of publishers but also the quality of advertisers. My PR4 website recently changed to PR6 and I get more and more targeted traffic. So, why would I want to waste my visitors time for those fraction of pennies with junk ads? So, I removed those ads off my website.

All those who don’t have much traffic but whatever traffic that you get, if it’s a little bit targeted, try just using Amazon affiliate program. The fraction of pennies are not going to get you cross even $10.00 a year! So, even those occasional purchases from the affiliate links on your website could potentially fetch you more money!

Note that the issue is not just related to kontera. Same with adbrite and a few other ad networks as well.

In this regard, I appreciate what Google has done, enforcing certain level of standards for their advertisers in terms of better landing pages and the recent change of display url and the landing page url coming from the same domain.

I rode my bicycle to Crissy Field in San Francisco Marina District on Sunday.  I took some videos in what I thought were optimal conditions with my Canon HG10 High Definition Hard Disk Drive Camcorder(  HD / HDD )  The sun was out, not a cloud in the sky.
The pictures look good on my computer in full HD but on Youtube they look crappy.  Bill’s Spanish water dog LEO was running around and it was difficult to keep him on camera.  I posted the videos on my 1st San Francisco Personal Training channel on youtube.  Now the channel is just pigeons and dog videos though.

My San Francisco Personal Trainer blog has turned into pigeon diaries.

I’m kind of pissed at myself today because I only had a couple training sessions, and I really accomplished nothing.  I did a little research for my new website AskTheTrainer.com and did some photo editing and video editing but nothing major.  I actually created a couple new pages one is Brain Exercises which is going to be fun.

I wanted to finish the wire frame for my social network and finish at one page about supplements, but finished nothing.

I need help, If anybody is familiar with Kontera content link advertisements, I want something like that for my website, I want to have a mouse over javascript popup window for certain works.  I want no clicks to happen, when the word is highlighted for 2 seconds, a javascript popup with something associated with that word should pop up.

Does anybody know if I can do that with just my own Javascript? or do I have to use a 3rd party script where I would have to buy a software program?

Far-right fundamentalist news and shopping site WorldNetDaily combines sensationalistic reactionary stories with a glut of self-promotional product pitches and questionable advertisements masked as headlines and text links to produce a formula that attracts a substantial readership within the right-wing echo chamber.

Unfortunately, the twisted news judgment of WorldNetDaily makes TheHuffingtonPost look alomost like a legitimate news source, and the predominance of commercial content makes WND one of the most cynical and mercenery sites on the web.

No other news site does so much to embed ads into the news. As of 4:00pm, six of the first ten “headlines” at today’s WND aren’t news stories; they’re actually ads promoting products and services. These include:

An anti-global warming theory DVD for $29.95—just in case all the other free anti-global warming hocus pocus at WND didn’t satisfy your thirst for irrational propaganda. Publisher Joseph Farah insists that global warming can’t possibly be real because God promised Noah He’d never flood the earth again; why, then, do you need to pay thirty bucks to hear some hack say the same thing?

A full years’ worth of Advanced Artery Solution for just $239.40. This medical “breakthrough” (it’s actually just ethylenediamine tetra-acetic acid, a common chemical used in thousands of products) promises that you’ll feel the difference as your arteries are cleansed of plaque (as if anyone can “feel” their arteries) and toxins leave your body (that you can feel—it’s called urinating.)

An anti-Darwin “documentary” that “proves” that Darwinism “has probably been responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the history of humanity” (including the Holocaust) for just $4.95. ‘Nuff said.

A year’s subscription toWND’s own Whistleblower magazine for only $49.95. The next edition is devoted to “The secret life” of Barack “Hussein” Obama, “a Manchurian candidate – harboring an ominous secret agenda” who “reflexively, instinctively, will side with what’s wrong and harmful for America, and will oppose what’s right and good and wholesome for America. It’s uncanny.”

Other phony “headlines” include these ridiculous get rich quick schemes:

Turn $200 into $1.2 million with these hidden stocks! Get the 4 stocks you need to own in 2008.

$187,296 in 24 hours! Spare me just 7 minutes to show you how to copy my plan.

As if this shameless schilling isn’t bad enough, WorldNetDaily embeds literally hundreds of text links that look like normal hyperlinks in its news stories. In fact, these links are part of a third-party network called Kontera that promises ads “relevant” to the content. The ads, however, are only relevant insofar as any word in the English language that’s relevant to any Kontera ad can be hyperlinked. For example, when the word “doctor” appears in one WND story, Kontera embeds a link to an ad for health insurance. When the words “medical care” appear in the same story, an ad for Geico car insurance pops up.

Now on to the news.

The lead story this afternoon is tabloid-style sensationalism headlined, “Children’s hospital launches sex change for kids program.” It begins,

A doctor at the renowned Children’s Hospital Boston has launched a new program to drug children to delay puberty so they can decide whether they want a male or a female body … “We don’t think that demonic is too strong a word to describe this,” said a statement from the pro-family Mass Resistance organization. “It brings us thoughts of the Nazi doctors who thought they were doing good things.”

In reality, the “new program”—the Gender Management Service Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital—is intended primarily to help children born with Disorders of Sexual Differentiation, which are pathologies that make it difficult to tell whether the children are male or female. Delaying puberty in such cases allows doctors to better handle the difficult decisions involved in assigning a gender to such children. (Note: the link above on the word “puberty” takes you to www.DealTime.com, where you can ”Shop Deals from 1000s of Merchants. Find, compare & buy.” How’s that for relevant?)

Another WND story proclaims that “Clinton’s family home reflects Democrat divide” and begins,

A new front has opened in the battle for the deeply divided soul of America’s Democrats – the front porch of the long-time family home of Hillary Clinton’s father and grandparents (where) a “Hillary For President” poster is tied to one half of the fence while an “Obama For President” adorns the other half.

The implication is that the Clinton family is divided over whom to vote for. In reality, though, the Clinton’s don’t own the home and haven’t for many years; a mother and daughter live there now, one of whom supports Clinton and the other Obama.

If all of this sensationalism, sex, spin and snake oil salesmanship isn’t enough for you, some of the nation’s best political minds offer their commentary at WND, including Chuck Norris and Pat Boone. Then there’s this laughable series of smears on Barack ”Hussein” Obama that Newsprism documented earlier this year.

Newsprism “follow(s) news and politics with a big shovel.”

In the case of the massive pile of bull called WorldNetDaily, we needed a steamshovel.

Newsprism

If you are using blogger.com blog and would like to monetize your blog with Kontera ContentLink especially customized templates, it is not very easy to add Kontera ad code/tag in a messy html page. Many of you have expressed this issue to me and here are the 4 simple ways to make Kontera tags active.

These one-time steps will help distribute Kontera ContentLink ads to all pages of your blog:

1. From the dashboard page click on “layout”

2. Click on “Add a page Element” (Ad gadget if you are using Blogger In Draft):

3. Click on HTML/JS – Add to blog button

4. Insert Kontera’s tag (you can choose what color you like in your Kontera control panel)

That is all steps you need to do, much easier than installing a plugin in WordPress 2.5? Hope this can help you!

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising Networks

When you are paid per click, you are only paid when a visitor on your web site clicks the advertiser’s banner or text ad.  On most networks, the amount you get paid is generally determined by how much that advertiser is willing to pay for a click thru.  The network will serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your web site content, and then you will earn money for every click.

In order to be profitable using PPC advertising, you need a high conversion or click-through rate (CTR).  You need to have ads that entice or attract people to click it.  The ads really need to be relevant to your audience.  For example, a football web site that displays ads for football picks or cheerleaders will have a higher CTR than ads about refinancing your mortgage.

Our experience has also shown that ads blended in with your content and ads made visible without users having to scroll tend to get the higher CTRs.  It doesn’t hurt to have a high traffic web site either.

The source of your web site traffic can also affect your overall CTR performance. Traffic  that comes from search engines tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often.

List of most popular PPC  advertising networks:

• AdBrite
• BidVertiser
• Chitika
• Clicksor
• Google Adsense
• Kanoodle
• Kontera
• TextAds
• Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)  

As announced in the Kontera blog, the Kontera Hybrid – The Next Level of In Text Advertising will make a big change in in-text advertising industry that no advertising networks have aplied before.

What is the Kontera Hybrid?

Kontera Hybrid is a publisher tool designed to increase user involvement, engaging users where they are the most active – within the content. The Kontera Hybrid is a completely customizable, In-Text media layer that simultaneously displays relevant content alongside advertisements. The Hybrid layer enhances a webpage by presenting links to related content, videos, and images alongside advertisements in one cohesive unit. The Hybrid layer is launched upon a user mouse-over on a highlighted keyword within a webpage, thus increasing user engagement and site interaction.

How does the Kontera Hybrid Work?

Kontera´s patent-pending technology and proprietary algorithms thoroughly analyze each webpage to determine its topic, extract relevant Keywords, and determine which other pages within the website are thematically related to it. This real-time analysis determines which Keywords within a page’s content will be highlighted and, upon user mouse-over, will launch the Hybrid layer. The system also simultaneously selects and adds links to related content to be featured within the Hybrid’s layer.

The Kontera Hybrid enables publishers to select the source of the articles displayed within the layer, either by re-directing users to other sections within the website or by providing links to related articles from other online sources. In other words, the Kontera Hybrid helps you direct traffic where you want it to go.

The Kontera Hybrid’s advanced capabilities and multi-faceted layer encourage greater user engagement rates with publishers’ ads and content, resulting in a 20% increase in page views among publishers benefitting from the Hybrid.

According to Kontera, this customized advertising technology will bring several key benefits to its publishers and help them increase revenue as follows:

Benefits:

• Enhanced user engagement
• Related articles and videos
• Increased page views per user
• A means to move traffic within your site/network
• Additional premium advertising inventory

This new ads type was launched on Monday, March 17, 2008 and only available to selected publishers and hope it will be available to the whole network in the soonest future.

You can also see the Demo here and if you would like to try this new customized ads format, please email to hybridpub@kontera.com

Just to share with you all a very interesting and useful articles posted on the Kontera Blog that help you best SEO your blogs while using Kontera ads.

As explained in these three key SEO tips, all search engines are likely love your text rich sites not a photo blog as the robot can not identify what your blog is talking about. Further, keywords are the key to your blog especially to curtain posts that help users and readers easily find it in search queries. Additionally, the fresh content is always the best way to draw more readers and keep them stay and return to your blog regularly.

Here are the details that you help you better understand why Kontera is the best option for in-text advertising and quickly indexed in search engines results.

1. Search engines love text rich sites. In fact, the ultimate search engine friendly web-page contains 250-500 words.

This is great news for ContentLink ads. The ideal environment for ContentLink ads is a text rich site. Think of a text rich site as fertile ground for In-Text ads to thrive on. Part of the reason being that the more text a site has, the greater the selection and the number of ads that our relevancy engines can display. Optimizing your website for search engines increases your ranking while enhancing your ContentLink results.

2. Including within your content keywords that are relevant to your users. You are more likely to be noticed by search engines when your webpage contains contextually related keywords. Contextually related keywords give search engines the idea of what your site is all about. So for example, if you use words such as herbs, plants, flowers and fertilizer, you’re probably writing about gardening. Similarly, when a publisher signs up with Kontera, we determine the site’s category in order to target ads which are most contextually relevant.

Relevant keywords are the pillar stone of your SEO efforts. Search engines look for those words that are most relevant for your users. By targeting keywords, you can direct your readers to the most relevant pages on your site, forum or blog. Highly targeted content leads to higher conversions and better visitor experiences.

Similarly, Kontera’s ContentLinks searches for relevant keywords within your content in order to match it with the most relevant ad. Our engine analyzes the text on your site in order to figure what your content is all about. Within seconds, keywords are selected according to relevancy, click-through rates and revenue potential. These parameters are set to bring the most targeted, highest paying ad to your site. Considering this, optimizing your content for search engine purposes simultaneously optimizes your site for Kontera’s relevancy engine.

3. So what’s the number-one tip for search engine ranking? Fresh Content. Search engines like websites that are frequently updated with fresh, unsullied, content. This is part of the dynamic search engine- webpage relation. Luckily, Kontera’s ContentLink are dynamic ads that bring the most relevant results at real-time. It does not matter how often you update your site’s content, Kontera’s engine analyzes and matches ads to your site each time a visitor enters.

This article uses some ideas come from the post on the Kontera Blog posted by Mika Tal

In-text or in-line text ads is the unique advertising method that Kontera is now offering publishers and you do not need any spaces in your blogs to fill in as other advertising networks do. The only thing you need to do is to insert a short ad code in your html page and advertisements will automatically display on your blogs underlined your relevant text but sometimes the ads and keyword are not matched. That is why Konera is now creating in-text relevance that you can select based on your preferred keywords to avoid confusion for your readers.

The ads featured during the Super Bowl for example have their own devoted fans, and for a good reason. They are extremely creative skits, featuring A-list celebrities, and to say it out front – they’re fun. Ads introduced us to many memorable characters, my personal favorites being the Taco craving Chihuahua and the wireless company’s “can you hear me now?” guy. We all use witty ad slogans and catch phrases in everyday conversations – anyone forget the “Wazzup” beer campaign?

These are all examples of successful TV ad campaigns, but advertising online is where the future lies. Kontera’s In Text Ad Program presents a win-win situation for all members of online advertising ecosystem and we manage to do it, if to quote our very own slogan, by: Creating In Text Relevance.

Kontera lives up to the slogan’s 3 part promise. ContentLink ad units guarantee maximum creative flexibility as they can include text, logos, video, audio, flash animations, and interactive forms. ContentLinks are placed where users’ attention is focused, within the text. And finally Kontera’s advanced technology ensures that the ads will be highly relevant to the content in which they’re featured, so ContentLinks simultaneously provide added user-value and a particularly well targeted advertising campaign

I will try this and update you later and hope everything is fine and no more irrelevant ads on curtain topics.

comScore Media Metrix has released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at top online properties for December 2007.

According to comScore’s Top 50 Ad Focus Ranking: “Advertising.com continued to lead the Ad Focus ranking of ad networks and sites accepting advertising, reaching 86 percent of the more than 183 million Americans online in December. Specific Media gained four spots to capture the fourth position reaching 77 percent of the online population. Collective Media gained seven spots to position 14, while Amazon.com climbed three spots to 34. YuMe Video Network, About, and Disney Online all entered the ranking this month capturing positions 37, 44, and 48, respectively.”

comScore’s Top 50 Ad Focus list is a great overview of the internet advertising market.

It also serves as a great starting point and road map for any business looking to expand their marketing presence online.

The following are the Top 50 Sources for Marketing and Advertising your business online according to comScore Media Metrix:
1. Advertising.com**
2. Yahoo! Network**
3. Google Ad Network**
4. Specific Media**
5. Yahoo!
6. ValueClick Networks**
7. Blue Lithium**
8. Tribal Fusion**
9. Google
10. Casale Media Network**
11. AOL Media Network
12. DRIVEpm**
13. MSN-Windows Live
14. Collective Media**
15. interCLICK**
16. Traffic Marketplace**
17. Yahoo.com Home Page
18. adconion media group**
19. Tremor Media
20. AOL
21. 24/7 Real Media**
22. Burst Media**
23. ADSDAQ by ContextWeb**
24. AdBrite**
25. Centro
26. Vibrant Media**
27. MySpace.com*
28. CPX Interactive**
29. Ebay.com
30. Gorilla Nation Media
31. Undertone Networks**
32. MSN.com Home Page
33. YouTube.com
34. Amazon.com
35. AdDynamix.com**
36. Ask Network
37. YuMe Video Network
38. Business.com Network
39. Ebau.com Home Page
40. Kontera**
41. PrecisionClick**
42. Mapquest
43. Walmart.com
44. About
45. The Nabbr Network
46. Facebook.com
47. Weather.com
48. Disney Online
49. Vizi Media**
50. Real Cities Network