Blog Income Report: March 2007

Well, I’d like to report that I blew away February numbers…or even topped them. But I can’t. When I first started Derrich.com, I was excited about the prospect of making money online. I immediately jumped into a few affiliate link programs including AzoogleAds.com and LinkShare.com. I placed them in a conservative manner. A few received excellent response, but the majority were overlooked. Toward the last half of March, I removed most of the banner ads. They were replaced with Amazon ads, which I began to integrate into my posts at the end of Febraury (my total revenue was $95.27). Here’s how I fared.

Farewell to the The Ads of March
Advertising needs to be relative to your content. I should have acted sooner to implement pertinent advertising. In April I’ll be running Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, Kontera ContentLinkâ„¢, ReviewMe, and AuctionAds. From time to time, I’ll run some more Amazon ads, but I’ve decided to give AuctionAds a try. So far, even with unobtrusive placement, I’ve managed to attract a higher CTR than I have with the Amazon ads. However, as you can see, I haven’t done too badly with those.

Kontera ContentLinkâ„¢
I have high hopes for ContentLinkâ„¢ I added it on March 18th. My eCPM has improved from $0.50 to just under $3. After I applied, it took a few days to go live…and it takes a week or so to learn your blog’s content. As I mentioned last week, Kontera features five unique ad formats including video and flash. Today, I finally saw 2 different flash ads pop up, one of which was from Turbo Tax. Hopefully, that means that advertisers believe my content is good and that they’ve noticed the increase in traffic.

Our technology will then automatically determine which of these pages will work best with our product and will identify the keyword(s) which should be converted to ContentLinksâ„¢ – i.e. the ones which will prove to be the most profitable for you. Please remember not to paste the ad code within an IFRAME or DIV.

On Sunday, I began running around the Kontera site and discovered a few helpful hints in the ContentLinkâ„¢ Implementation Guide to optimize your ads and their placement. Here are a few that I found helpful to me.

ContentLink Link Color
As with any textual advertising (i.e. Google AdSense), you want to integrate your links with the rest of the text. This is suggestion #1 in the guide.

The example above shows ‘Orange’ as the color. Mine came with ‘blue’. To change this to match your link color, simply substitute the color name with a HEX code…or ‘#xxxxxx’.

ContentLink Text Filter
In my opinion, aesthetics are an important part of a blog’s layout. Text, such as subtitles, that you just don’t want ruined with links. Here’s an example from one of my 2007 Bloggers Tournament posts that contains a link in a subtitle…before I began using Kontera’s solution to this issue.

To prevent this from occuring, use the “span” tag to eliminate it.

Simply surround the text you wish to filter between the tags…and no more tags. The example above from the Kontera website shows you how to use it around an entire paragraph.

Try It On For Size
Signing up for Kontera ContentLinkâ„¢ is simple. Fill out this application at Kontera.com and expect a few days for a representative to get back to you.

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Related posts:

1. Blog Money — April 2007
2. Blog Money — May 2007
3. Kontera ContentLinkâ„¢ For Your Blog
4. Blog Money — August 2007
5. Blog Money — July 2007