AdMoolah News and Views

The following is a paid review of ReviewMe

ReviewMe is now taking registrations for advertisers and bloggers.

Overall I think it is a pretty good concept and it seems like an easy way for bloggers to make some money. The basic idea is that advertisers pay bloggers to write about a product. Unlike some similar services, this one forces bloggers to disclose that a review has been paid for. Since this blog is all about monetization and ad networks, I would have been writing about this anyway, this just gives me a chance to make a couple of bucks for it.

The sign up is pretty quick and easy. Once you have an account you can register up to six blogs. Each blog gets a rating based on Alexa, Technorati and estimated RSS subscribers. Blog acceptance seems pretty instantaneous.

I signed up this blog and it got a two out of five star rating. This set the price for a review on the blog at $60, with my payout being $30 if I write a review for somebody. Right now when you sign up you automatically get a chance to write a review of ReviewMe and you will get paid the standard payout for the review. (That’s what this review is.) They are going to keep offering this opportunity until they have paid out $25,000.

The only conditions for a review are that you disclose that it is a paid review, and that the review is at least 200 words.

I did a quick search of the blogs available for advertisers, and it seems like there are currently only 3. AdMoolah was the most expensive at $60 dollars, while the other two were proced at $40. I’m sure that will change quickly as bloggers sign up and write the paid reviews of ReviewMe.

So, if you have a blog I would recommend you sign up and write a review of ReviewMe for some quick cash.

I am on a bunch of Internet Marketing email lists, and about 99% of the emails I get are crap. But I ran across something fairly interesting today. There is a new forum called the Conquer Your Niche Marketing Forum (that’s an affiliate link).

I found this one interesting because they offer you incentives to post by offering ad space on the web site. Unlike AdSense revenue sharing sites, this one lets you put up you own text links. I like this idea, because the revenue from your own ads could be much better than putting AdSense ads on a forum. It will also bring in a variety of ads from all the participants, instead of repeating the same AdSense ads everyone has seen 100s of times.

And, like all internet marketing ideas, they have an affiliate program where you earn more ad space for referring members.

I’m not sure if the forum itself will be any good, it just launched and there aren’t a lot of real posts yet. But, it does seem like a neat way of getting some ads in front of people so I’ll keep my eye on it for a little while.

Graywolf has a list of people he wants to meet at Pubcon in Las Vegas next week.

I would basically want to meet any one who’s blog I read. I figure if they mention things I am interested in while blogging, we would have things to talk about in person. The only one I have met is Jennifer Slegg (a.k.a. JenSense), who I briefly chatted to at last year SES Disneyland event. People I haven’t met yet would include (listed alphabetically, not necessarily in preference order):

John Battelle
Matt Cutts
Rand Fishkin a.k.a. Randfish
Michael Gray a.k.a. Graywolf
Andy Hagans
Jeremy Schoemaker a.k.a Shoemoney
Danny Sullivan
Aaron Wall

I’m sure I left some people off the list, so if I didn’t mention you and I meet you in Vegas, don’t say “Hey you didn’t want to meet me so bugger off.”

The other group of people I would like to meet is anyone who reads this blog, of course. I should be easy to spot, I’ll be the guy with a Mohawk.

Publishers can now sign up for Turn’s advertising network. As I mentioned a few days ago, it might be good competition for AdSense and YPN. It’s a contextual ad network, but unlike their main competitors, it uses CPA instead of CPC. For publishers concerned about low revenues from CPA ads, they have this to say:

At Turn we want the ads on your site to perform as much as you do. So, unlike a traditional CPA network, Turn uses a unique bidded CPA pricing model with effective CPM (eCPM) ranking to ensure you receive the highest performing ads on your site.

What I assume that means is they take every ads payout, multiply it by the CTR and the conversion rates it gets, and the ads that come out the highest are shown.

I signed up for it, but haven’t been accepted yet. They don’t mention any acceptance criteria, but they did ask what sites you have and how many unique visitors and pageviews your sites get. I’ll be sure to let you know my impressions of it if I am able to use it.

LinkBucks is an interesting new advertising network that is currently in beta. They are different from other ad networks because you don’t place the ads on you own site – the ads are displayed after an outgoing link is clicked.

There are two options for displaying ads, intermission links, and top banner links. An intermission link will display an ad before the site that is linked to is displayed. The ads stay up for 5 seconds or until the user clicks a “continue” button. Top banner links display a banner ad in a frame above the site being linked to.

Here is an example intermission link.

Here is an example top banner link.

Creating these links is pretty easy, you just give them the link and they give you a new URL to substitute. You can also include some JavaScript that will convert all the links on a page to LinkBicks links. This JavaScript method also allows you to exclude specific links from being converted. They allow you to choose whether you want an intermission or top banner ad, and whether you want a clean or adult ad to be displayed.

The payout is done on a CPM basis. They pay $1.00 US for every 5000 top banner ad impressions, and $1.00 US for every 3500 intermission ad impressions.

There is a new payout rate table, which will go into effect early next week. This makes the payments even lower than they were before.

Tier	Top Frame Rate	Intermission Rate	Countries
1	1$ / 9,400	1$ / 3,500	United States(US)
2 (Teir 1 + 30% more clicks)	1$ / 12,220	1$ / 4,550	Canada(CA), United Kingdom(GB)
3 (Teir 1 + 60% more clicks)	1$ / 15,040	1$ / 5,600	France(FR), Germany(DE), Italy(IT), Netherlands(NL), Spain(ES)
4 (Teir 1 + 85% more clicks)	1$ / 17,390	1$ / 6,475	Australia(AU), Austria(AT), Belgium (BE), Denmark(DK), Finland(FI), Iceland(IS), Ireland(IE),Mexico(MX), New Zealand(NZ), Norway(NO), Portugal(PT), Singapore(SG), Sweden(SE), Switzerland(CH)
5 (Currently will not pay)	–	–	All other countries We are working hard to try and supply ads to Asia and other low ad earning countries

They minimum payout is just $5.00 and they pay via Paypal or EPassPorte.

I think this is a fairly innovative way to monetize your site, but I’m also afraid it would annoy users quite a bit. I won’t be using it on all my outgoing links, that’s for sure, but I may experiment with it in a few places where it might make sense.

Found via: SEOMoz

Linkbaiting is a hot topic in the SEO world these days. As old-school link building techniques such as directories, link-exchanges and buying links become less effective, SEOs are trying to get (Gasp!) natural links. Linkbaiting is just a tactic to try to build content that will attract natural links. This fits in nicely with social media sites, such as Digg and del.icio.us that have been all the rage lately. Getting linked from these social media sites is likely to result in many bloggers writing entries about it. Done right, there is a viral spread of the link around the web, resulting in hundreds or even thousands of natural links.

It sounds fairly simple, but it’s not. If it was simple everyone would do it, right? Some of the critical aspects to getting linked to include getting the right idea, having good headlines, and getting it in front of the social media sites and bloggers in the best light possible.

The best piece of linkbait I came up with for AdMoolah was the AdSense Revenue Sharing page I started in January. According to Yahoo, that page has close to 100 links to it, including some high quality ones from places like SearchEngineJournal and ProBlogger. I don’t think linkbaiting wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but I knew it would attract a lot of attention. I didn’t promote it very well and didn’t position it well at social media sites. If I did, who knows how many more links I could have gotten.

SEOs are starting to provide link baiting services. They will help you come up with the idea for link bait, develop it, and make sure it gets the right exposure. These services are not cheap though, they start at $5,000 for the basics, and go up from there. Here is a list of linkbaiting services:

• Andy Hagans
• SEOMoz
• Stuntdubl
• Text Link Ads

At these prices, I’m not sure how much business they are getting. It would be interesting to get get the feedback of someone who had used these services. Maybe somebody with deep pockets (like ShoeMoney) could test out all 4 services?

In February, there was buzz that Turn.com was going to launch an AdSense competitor. They are going to have an official launch tomorrow at the Web 2.0 conference.

An Adweek article discusses some of the details.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn in recent months has attracted $18 million in venture backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. Turn has about 1,000 advertisers in its system, which displays ads on approximately 30 sites.

1,000 advertisers seems like a pretty good size for a beta. Of course one of the keys to competing at the same level as Google is to have a lot more advertisers. Hopefully there will be enough buzz about them to get advertisers interested. There are some difference with AdSense that may be appealing:

Unlike Google, which charges advertisers on a per-click basis, Turn relies on a cost-per-action scheme.

and,

Turn has another key point of differentiation: It analyzes 60 factors to decide which ads to show users, weighing variables such as past behavior, publisher demographics, copy contents and brand quality.

These differences sound interesting enough to get advertisers to be interested.

Of course, it remains to be seen what the publisher side of things will look like. No word yet on if they will allow the same type of self-service system that ad networks like AdSense and YPN have. Hopefully we’ll have a good alternative very soon.

Found via: John Battelle’s SearchBlog

SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) are often described as White Hat or Black Hat. Black hat techniques are considered the dark side of SEO – things like cloaking, keyword stuffing, splogs and other tricks to fool search engine and users. White hat SEO consists of nothing but writing good content for users and getting natural links. Of course there are many shades of gray between white and black, and now Tim Converse has given a definition to eight different shades of SEO. Here are the shortened definitions:

Dark inky black: The SEO’s (or in this case the spammer’s) interests are totally divergent from both the engines and the users – the SEO wants to trick the search engine into handing over users who are ripe to be tricked themselves into a situation of malicious harm.

Charcoal: The SEO tries to trick the engine into showing the user something totally unrelated to the query, and possibly offensive, but doesn’t actually commit any illegal or fraudulent acts within five seconds of the first user click.

Dark gray: The SEO collects (aka steals) random text from other sites, and uses it to create thousands (or millions) of pages targeting particular queries.

Slate gray: The SEO creates thousands (or millions of pages), all of which point (by linkage, or framing, or redirection) to the same content, which might actually be interesting to the searcher.

Gray: The SEO reads the guidelines of search engines, and tries to juice up their sites just enough to fly under the radar on all dimensions – artificial linkfarms that remain small, automatic content duplication that is arguably not too abusive, etc.

Light gray: The SEO creates “original” content in bulk the old-fashioned way, thinking first of all of search engine rules, secondly of duplicate detection algorithms, and lastly of whether the text makes sense to human beings and is something anyone would ever want to read. Then the SEO experiments with all the parameters (keyword density, internal linkage) trying to move up for the queries of interest.

Off-white: The SEO ensures crawlability of the site, restructures it if necessary for size of pages and internal linkage, and then injects terms to specifically target the important keywords and queries.

White: The SEO starts (if lucky) with a site full of content you can’t find anywhere else, and that answers a need that searchers actually have.

Luminescent pearly white: This would be a case where the SEO designs a site to show up for relevant queries and not to show up for irrelevant queries.

There probably aren’t any webmaster who are luminescent pearly white or dark inky black, most of them fall somewhere in between. I tend to stay very much on the white end of the scale – I feel this is where it best to be if you are in this for the long run. I’d rather put my effort into creating sites that people actually want to link to rather than trying to stay abreast of the latest techniques to try and trick the search engines.

What color is your hat?

ReviewMe, which I have mentioned before, is a new revenue opportunity for bloggers. Bloggers write reviews of products or services, and they get paid for them. They are launching on November 9th.

They have just announced that:

When we launch, we’re going to give away $25K USD. Here’s how: every new blogger accepted into the ReviewMe network will immediately have the opportunity to earn cash by reviewing ReviewMe itself. This gives new reviewers a chance to see exactly how our system works, and helps spread the word about ReviewMe, too (good or bad). This offer will be in effect until we have paid out $25,000 total for reviews.

This looks like a good way for bloggers to make a few bucks if they don’t mind posting paid reviews. Look for a paid review of ReviewMe 0n this blog next week

Search Engine Roundtable today had a post about some free coupons for CPC advertising.

Get $50 in your account when you sign up for a new advertiser at MSN’s adCenter and Google’s AdWords.

PDF file of $50 Coupon for adCenter. Note that these are good for US residents only.
Form to receive a $50 coupon for AdWords. I’m not sure what restrictions this coupon has.

If you’ve never tried advertising before, this is a good chance to do so. If you manage to get $0.05 clicks, you can get 2000 targeted visitors for $10.00. Not a bad deal.

Note that both adCenter and AdWords have $5.00 USD activation fees that need to be paid.