You have a lot of options as a website publisher when it comes to how you want to monetize your online properties. Some people find a great deal of successful with affiliate networks like MarketLeverage and XY7, but those typically require higher levels of traffic before they can become truly lucrative.

For publishers of all sizes, however, cost-per-click (CPC) advertising can be relatively easy to implement and can start making money right away. One such network that you may want to consider is AdClickMedia. They’re relatively new to the game and are actively seeking out both new advertisers and new publishers to use their program.

AdClickMedia in a Nutshell

In short, AdClickMedia aims to simplify the advertising process so that it is easier to understand for advertiser and publisher alike.

The pay-per-click advertising program is open to publishers of all sizes, so even if you’re just getting started, you can give them a try. They have no minimum requirements, as far as I can tell. In terms of payment details, publishers earn 50% of the revenue generated from the ads placed on their sites, in addition to the 10% of each click generated by publishers they refer.

Payments are issued via PayPal once a month on a net-15 payment schedule, meaning that you will receive the funds within 15 days of the end of the month, assuming you meet the minimum threshold of $50. If you fail to reach this monthly minimum, your balance rolls over to the next month. For now, the minimum CPC is $0.05, but that will likely rise as more advertisers join the network.

Three Kinds of Ad Possibilities

So, what are the types of advertising that you can implement on your site through AdClickMedia? Logging into the main publisher dashboard, we discover that there are three.

First, you have photo text ads. These are largely text-based ad banners, except some also contain a small thumbnail image. This would probably be one of the most common and popular ad panel types that you’d use with AdClickMedia.

Second, you have full page interstitial ads. These are the pages that appear “between” pages when a visitor navigates around your website. Among CPC/PPC ad networks, this is quite unique. Interstitials are usually the foray of affiliate networks.

Third, you have banner ads. These are a little more standard in practice, allowing you to place banners on yoru web pages. Each of these three types are tracked individually, but the payments all go into the same account.

Building an Ad Panel

While Google crawls your site to find relevant keywords and content, AdClickMedia bases its advertising choices on your selected categories. This is both good and bad, depending on your perspective.

In creating a new text ad panel, I was able to give the panel a name, choose the domain where it will be hosted (as the panels are domain specific), select up to three different categories, and define the default ad if the network comes up with nothing.

On the next page, I’m also able to change each of the individual colors and adjust the size of the ad panel. This is so that it can “fit” better with the overall design scheme of your web site.

Another Advertising Option

In the world of website monetization, the possibilities are virtually limitless. AdClickMedia gives you yet another option to consider. The inclusion of interstitials in a CPC/PPC network is quite novel and relatively lower $50 payment threshold is a welcome feature for lower traffic publishers too. No harm in giving them a try.

Link: AdClickMedia

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Make Money with AdClickMedia CPC Network


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

If you’ve visited sites like Cracked, you’ve probably noticed the collection of recommended articles for when you are done reading the page you are on. Very likely, you’ve found these links to be extremely addictive, keeping you long on the site long after you’re done reading the article you came to the site for.

While WordPress has a slew of related posts plugins, the most popular of which is YARPP, they aren’t for everyone.

While these related posts plugins are great, they aren’t exactly the most visually appealing (at least not without a great deal of work) nor can they be used on other blogging platforms. LinkWithin, however, aims to make this process incredibly easy. In fact, the process doesn’t have any signups or advertisements to put up with. You simply enter your site’s information, paste a few lines of code and go.

But how well does it work? The answer really depends on the type of site you have and how you designed it but for many bloggers it will likely be a near-perfect solution.

How it Works

The fundamentals of LinkWithin are pretty straightforward. You simply visit their site, enter your blog’s information and, depending on your blog’s platform, you’ll either copy and paste a short embed code into your blog’s template or install a WordPress plugin.

Once you do that, LiinkWithin will start spidering your site and using an algorithm to find posts that are related to each other. The process can take several hours and, during that time, the recommendations likely won’t make much sense. In the case of my site, it took about four hours before the results were truly “good”.

Once that’s done, at the footer of each post (or wherever you place the code) you will see a series of recommendations for content similar to what is there. If possible, LinkWithin will include an image with each recommendation, pulled from the post itself.

If done correctly, it should look like this article on For the Love of Cooking. Attractive, neat and relatively well-targeted.

The Good

Though LinkWithin is far from a perfect system, there are many things it does very well. First and foremost, it is dead simple to use. Whether you are using the plugin or the embed code, it is pretty much a matter of selecting your options, uploading the code and forgetting about it.

When working, LinkWithin does a great job selecting relevant posts and thumbnails. Though it isn’t always perfect, its algorithm is at least as good as any related posts plugin I have seen and its image selection, for the most part, is very solid. Though you have to give it time to finish indexing your site, once it does you will probably be very pleased with the results.

Finally, it seems to work and achieve its goal of increasing pageviews. Having installed it on my site just a few days ago, making the results far too premature to be conclusive, I have already noticed an increase in the pages per visitor. The difference isn’t drastic, perhaps only about 10%, but it is still noticeable.

All in all, the system seems to work great, load fast and be dead simple to use. However, there are limitations that have to be weighed.

Limitations and Drawbacks

What LinkWithin gains in simplicity it does so by sacrificing features and customization. When setting up the script, you only really have two options, the first is how many recommended posts are displayed (3-5 specifically) and whether to use a light background or a dark one. Beyond that, you really don’t get a lot of say in image size, orientation, etc.

This means that there are a lot of things you can’t do with LinkWithin. For example, I’d like to either ignore or limit the linking to certain categories on my site, especially on my main articles, but there is no way to do that. Likewise, you can’t change the orientation or make any manual adjustments as the actual code for adding the links is pure JavaScript.

Furthermore, since it is pure JavaScript, not only are you putting much of your site in the hands of this third-party service, trusting that they will be reliable and quick, but it seems to cause problems with analytics applications and doesn’t allow the search engines to see the links.

Still, for those who want what LinkWithin offers, it is a very tempting service and likely one that you will at least want to try out.

Bottom Line

It’s important to remember what LinkWithin is: It is a simple way to add an attractive list of related posts to the bottom of your blog posts. It is that and nothing more.

It is not a sidebar widget, it is not a customizable solution, it is not Google fodder. It is simply a way to get you readers to click on more articles on your site.

It’s simple and it works. If you don’t need more than what it provides, have a blog that regularly uses images and don’t mind losing a little bit of control, you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. If you need more power, you’re better off with another solution.

If you do decide to go with YARPP, you may find this template particularly useful for mimicking LinkWithin using the plugin.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Get More Pageviews With LinkWithin


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

It had been so long since I’d signed up for the Reinvigorate beta that I’d practically forgotten what it was. – and the name didn’t give it away. As it turned out, Reinvigorate is a web-based analytics program (it also has a desktop reporting program) so I promptly accepted my invitation to test it and downloaded and installed the WordPress plugin, entering my site ID to enable it to start tracking.  (If you’re not on WordPress, don’t worry, as you can simply use the tracking code.) I’ve been down this route before, trying out many analytics programs before settling on one I liked. Would Reinvigorate be the program that could seduce me away from my beloved Clicky?

Getting Started

The first page you see on Reinvigorate is the overview page, which features two large boxes showing the number of active visitors and active pages. This is similar to the Spy view in Clicky (but without the map). Click on the small report link on each button and you can see more detail, such as the page title and when it was last accessed. Reinvigorate has a ‘name tags’ function that is supposed to tag visitors and commenters by name to make your reports more reader friendly, but this does not seem to work very well, though it did tag me once. Also on the home page is an indication of how long visitors have spent on your site that day, how many visitors there have been, how much of that is referral traffic and what the bounce rate is.

What’s On The Tabs

A number of other options appear next to the summary tab, but these are setup options (name tags, snoop, tracking code and preferences). If you want more stats, move to the top row of tabs and click on one of the options, each of which has further sub-tabs:

• Traffic (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, referred, visit length, bounce rate, entry pages, page summary)
• Visitor Detail (browsers, platforms, screen, regions, languages, time zones)
• Session (visitors, activity, detailed activity, active pages, heat map)
• Search and Referrer (referrers, referred visitors, referred searches, top referrers, keywords)

In-Depth Analysis

Click on any option or sub-option and you get a couple of graphs and a table for varying periods. You can change these via a drop down menu. Most of tabs give the information you expect, so I won’t outline those in detail, but here are the functions I thought were pretty cool:

• the pie chart showing top pages on your site
• the heat map showing the areas of a page or post that attracted most attention from visitors
• the detailed activity listing showing you how long a particular visitor spent on a certain page
• the table showing when your top referrers last sent you traffic
• the map showing which time zones your visitors are in (trust me, this is cooler than it sounds!)

A Promising Start

My first impressions of Reinvigorate are that it’s promising, offering some of the same real time functionality as programs like Clicky and Woopra. However, there are still a few things to be improved, such as the ability to exclude your own visits to your site. Its visitor figures also differ from those recorded in Clicky (so one of them has to be wrong). I’ll look forward to seeing what else Reinvigorate has to offer.

Note: I’ve decided to cut back on posting here at Blogging Tips for a while, though you will find me in lots of other places on the web. Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting over the past year.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Reinvigorate – A New Way To Track Blog Analytics


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

When you are looking to make money online, you need to be mindful of the many facets that go into each of these Internet exploits. You have to consider the user experience, marketing tactics, keyword research, and the effectiveness of your landing pages.

In order to best optimize your landing pages, you need to have the right set of information. Aiding in this area is Converseo, a company that “improves your online conversion rates and therefore revenue.” You do want to make more money, don’t you?

Maximizing Your Income Through Testing

Effectively, that’s the goal of Converseo. The services offered revolve around the testing of different landing pages to discover which combination is the most efficient and most effective.

Through the Converseo process, the company will help to understand your company’s business goals, devise an appropriate testing plan, implement and monitor the plan, and then analyze the results to provide insights and recommendations.

The core here is via A-B split testing, but they also do multivariate testing as well. You can also turn to Converseo for customized solutions to best suit the specific needs of your online endeavors.

Conversion Doubler Online Software

One major component to the Converseo product portfolio is the Conversion Doubler online utility. This does not need to be installed on your own computer as everything is done through a web browser.

It is here that you can set up a series of campaigns and experiments to test the effectiveness of different landing pages. There is a wizard that walks you through the process of defining a landing page and the target (“thank you”) page. From here, you insert the appropriate code on both pages and the conversions can then be tracked.

By utilizing multiple experiments with multiple pages, you can see which pages are getting the most hits, which are getting the most conversions, and thus, which have the greater income potential. Presumably, the Converseo staff can help you with this process.

The software is easy on the eyes and you are really only shown one step at a time with the wizard. In this way, the utility may seem easier to understand for novices if it wasn’t for the relative lack of documentation and instructions along the way. You may still need some assistance.

How Much Does It Cost?

Ah, the million dollar question. Or at least the question you hope won’t cost you a million dollars. Unfortunately, there is very little in terms of pricing information on the Converseo site, so you’ll have to use the contact form to inquire further.

Link: Converseo

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

Maximize Revenue from Your Landing Pages


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Adding photos to your posts is a great way in which to get people to notice your blog and stop for a moment. A great photo can be so compelling as to make someone stop and take notice. With any hosting site you can copy the embed code and place photos on your blog posts pretty easily, but what if there was an easier way? Maybe you don’t take your own photos but would like to use other photos to express your points, that might be trickier with licenses and other factors. I’ve listed below a few WordPress plugins that can help you with those issues.

Picapp – The Picapp plugin is very useful if you don’t take your own photos and you’d like to be able to use some photos from the best journalistic and creative photographers in the business. Picapp has partners in Getty Images, Corbis, Newsroom and many others. With this plugin you will be able to select photos right from your WordPress “Edit Post” screen. You are given a window to view the image and select the one that you want. You can even search for the topic, celebrity or event that you are blogging about, there will be images. Picapp is very timely so if you are writing blog posts about current events you should be looking at Picapp.

Embed Image – This plugin from EmbedAnything is a great way to allow your content to be embedded on other blogs. You can choose to allow your photos as well as your written content to be copied and embedded on another blog with built in links of attribution back to you. And what’s more you can include ad code to be shown on that image automatically. You can choose the ad code or ad code will automatically be added. A great way to put in your affiliate links in return for someone using your content.

Here is an example of an embedded image being used.

Picasa Widget – The Picasa widget plugin allows you to easily add a sidebar showcasing your latest Picasa images. With this widget you can showcase a random assortment of your Picasa images or the most recent thumbnails from your galleries. I’m not overly impressed with the limited functionality of this plugin because I would much rather have the ability to control which album will be used to show images. However, the controls are pretty good and you can make many adjustments to size as well as layout of the images. If only you had more control over which albums were displayed it would be a much more usable widget for me.

WP Flickr – The WP Flickr plugin is similar to the picapp plugin in that you get a window where you can choose images from your Flickr library. The nice thing is that you can choose any of the standard sizes and then choose your image. You can also choose from any of your sets or directly from your public photostream. It is easy to connect to your Flickr account and a simple way to add your photos to you blog. The title of your image automatically becomes the image alt text too.

What are some photo related plugins that you would recommend for WordPress users? Please share them in the comments.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

4 Must Have Photo Plugins for WordPress


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/