Advertising

PayPerPost are a fairly new company offering yet another revenue stream for bloggers (although for most blogs the existing ones probably aren’t earth shattering). This one’s a lot more controversial on the surface however. You get paid to write content about something specific. And you get paid quite a lot (at least in blogging revenue terms), usually about $5 per post. It has however pissed quite a few people off.

Jason, CEO of Weblogs seems to be one of the loudest. I’m going to take the wimpy way out and simply say it’s a tool with potential, that can be abused. But in the long run that’s not a problem for the blogosphere. If you destroy your own integrity by blatantly posting ads instead of actual content you will lose out as surely as if you filled the page with conventional advertising. If you don’t annoy your readers however, you will be fine. In this case it means choosing “opportunities” (that’s what PPP call them) that are actually relevant. That’s how Google AdSense came to be accepted, remember?

Performancing.com have just launched a new ad network type thing for bloggers. Ads are sold per blog for a flat fee per month and you get 70% of total revenue. Could be quite good.

The very eagle eyed amongst you may notice I’ve altered the layout of the site slightly. One of the most prominent changes is switching to a smaller ad size for old posts (before I had a large rectangular ad above any post that is more than seven days old figuring that anyone visiting old content on a blog really wanted to be there and would get over it).

The new 200x200 size immediately started showing video ads on a few pages. For an example, visit my post about the cartoons of the prophet Mohamed.

I saw an advert for Bulldog Broadband today on the London Underground. In large letters it offers 16 MB broadband for £9.75 a month plus telephone line rental of £10.50 a month - “cheaper than TalkTalk”. That price is indeed less than TalkTalk, but what you pay isn’t. That price only applies for the first three months, after that it’s £14.75 a month. Not only that but you only have a 1 gigbyte/month download limit, that’s about 34 Mb a day.

Surely this is a more strenuous claim than TalkTalk’s “free boadband” and they were stopped from broadcasting that one on TV?

When I came up with the idea for mini themes it occurred to me that it could be a reasonable possibility for advertising. Reasonable in theory only since my limited traffic would be a problem. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t affiliate stuff up :P

So here’s the first one: a fairly unobtrusive advert for a website of mine offering cheap international calls. I say unobtrusive simply because the layout of the content of the page is identical to before. And if you browse at a low resolution you don’t see the advert at all.

One quick note, you have to view the post specifically to see the theme. I intentionally stopped them from showing on the homepage.

TextLinkAds are offering $100 of free text link ads. The catch? You have to buy $125 of advertising. The catch isn’t as big as you’d think. I assumed it meant you spend $125 and get another $100 free, but it doesn’t. You order $125 worth of advertising and only pay for $25. You still need to be careful though. You’re actually ordering a subscription and if you don’t cancel within a month you will be charged again.

TextLinkAds sell hard coded text links (oddly enough) on publishers websites. Hard coded means detectable by search engines. And you can get them at one fifth the “normal” price. To qualify just enter “New client” as the coupon code.

There are quite a few marketplace-type sites out there facilitating text link trading. I don’t mean link exchanges, I mean buying and selling text links.

I’ve read a few reports of high profile sites having their PageRank-passing-on-ability removed by Google because of this, but for the most part it’s probably safe. The main reason being so many sites are doing it that the skew caused by removing those sites could well be bigger than the skew caused by leaving them in. On the other hand, it may not be that much of a problem. Although it is a very suspect argument, you could say that a site willing to pay that much (and we’re talking upwards of $15 per month per link) must have something to offer.

At the moment it doesn’t always work like that since many sites are some sort of affiliate adding no new content or are domain-parking-like sites. People are becoming aware of these things though (it’s easy to spot such pages in Google’s own sponsored sites section of search results) and as such more useful sites are actually using this as a valid advertising source.

If you’re interested you might try Text Link Brokers or Linkworth. Linkworth have lots of little tools people can use without actually buying or selling any links and have no minimum PR, and are more open. Text Link Brokers have been at it for longer and have more high PR sites (some PR 8 sites with .gov back-links).

I found a site a while ago that was willing to pay for text links on your site. The wanted them not because they thought they’d get more direct traffic but because they’d get an increase in PageRank.

It’s quite a popular idea these days with a few sites offering text link brokering services. You pay them and they get several high PR sites to link to you. Doesn’t matter if the sites content don’t match, just that Google finds the link. I never had a site with a high enough PageRank until now to actually join. Now I do, I thought I’d give it a spin; I joined Text Link Brokers.

A quick search on Google revealed little information (lots of question on forums with no answers). There was one negative comment but it was apparently about one of the competitors instead that has a very similar name. Anyway a couple of days after signing up I was told I need to reduce the number of external links since they only allow 20 in total and want to be responsible for five of them (that’s why I now have a bit at the bottom of the page counting external links). After sorting that out they sent an email for the rates they are willing to pay. And they’re pretty good. Not marvelous but they don’t actually require people to click like Adsense ads do.

The one problem is I now have to wait for someone to actually buy links.