Cornymans Money-Blog

Supporting a good cause while searching the web!

2011-02-06T23:58:00.003+08:00

Today i found a new easy way to raise money for your favorite cause. Just start using Yahoo! powered GoodSearch.com as your search engine and they'll donate about a penny to your favorite cause every time you do a search!

In addition, do all of your shopping through their online shopping mall, GoodShop.com, where you can shop at more than 900 top online retailers (including Amazon, Target, Staples, Best Buy and more!) and a percentage of your purchases will go to the charity or school of your choice.

You pay the same price as you normally would, but a donation goes to your cause!

Here's the web site — http://www.goodsearch.com. You can also read about GoodSearch in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, CNN, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.

Cashgopher lets you earn money for doing nothing on your Computer!

2011-01-27T23:28:00.005+08:00

The title sounds too good to be true for you?

I thought the same as i saw the advertisements in my preferred discussion website myLot (by the way, a fun way to earn some extra money too - read my myLot guide if you're interested in discussing almost everything you like!)

So i signed up a few weeks ago and what shall i tell you... it's as simple as it can be.

Download their free CashGopher software
Cashgopher is working in the background when your computer is idle
It tests the website up-time for webmasters who like to know if their websites are accessible from different parts of the world for any given time
A part of this income from these customers will be shared daily with the members who used Cashgopher.
The income from Cashgopher depends on several factors:
- Location of your country
- Internet connection speed
- Computer power
- your usage habits of the internet
Payout is monthly via Paypal as soon as you reach 10$.
The earning estimate that we can achieve is between 10$ and 1.000 $ if we use Cashgopher each day for a full year.
Increase your income by inviting your friends to use Cashgopher, too and Earn 25% of their income.

If you like what you read just now, simply sign up and start earning some extra cash for letting your computer do the work

Other easy ways to earn you some extra money without spending much time:

With these programs you can earn money on Twitter, Facebook or on your websites/blogs

MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, Facebook + Twitter, earn for each click, earn for producing youTube videos),
Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
Revtwt (earn for each click on Facebook + Twitter),
Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
Twivert (get money for each click)
Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)
myLot (Discuss & Socialize with the myLot community and get on top paid for doing this - How to get the most out of myLot? Read my myLot guide)
CBLeads.com (earn up to 2.30 $ just for providing e-mail submissions for Tim Bekker's Affiliate programs, a free Clickbank Account is necessary before you sign up to earn additional commissions!)

Twitter: How to be followed, retweeted, mentioned by a celebrity!

2010-09-23T05:15:00.014+08:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeTwitter is one of the most powerful marketing & promotion tools anyone could think of! But for using it as a powerful tool, you have to accumulate thousands of followers and interact with hundreds of them. Otherwise you will end up with followers who are not responsive at all to your own tweets. But building up such a huge follower base is a time consuming job and could even get your account suspended by Twitter if you follow and unfollow too fast too many other members!

The easiest way to get noticed your tweets would be to get a Retweet or a Follow from a member with many followers (which would be a celebrity, another possibility for free is mentioned at the end of the post).

My experience in getting a retweet from Alyssa Milano

In March 2010 i found an extraordinary website which combined music and beautiful animations while you moved your mouse to the music! And Alyssa Milano found it so cool that she gave me a Retweet for it.

The first preparation should be to take care

how many @-replies the celebrity gets at the moment.
REASON: As soon as the celebrity made a tweet, hundred of fans will do a retweet of it. This would mess up with your intention that your tweet will be seen by your celebrity in the mentioning-Timeline.
The best time to send your celebrity a tweet would be when the retweets are dying down to just one per minute (Can take 1/2 - 1 hour after the previous tweet depending on the tweet).

Now you should just tweet your celebrity something like

outstanding news,
beautiful animations/music or
cute videos
funny graphics
helpful advice for other members
funny comment on one of the celeb's tweets.
or you take part in

The TwitChange-Celebrity-Charity-Auction

Getting more than a Retweet is possible until Saturday 25th September by a charity event called Twitchange.

Twitchange did setup an Ebay-Account "TwitChange-Auction" and is auctioning the following items of more than 100 celebrities (358 auctions to take part in).

You can bid on

Twitter MEGA packages which include a single mention, follow for at least 90 days and a retweet.

For the smaller budget you can bid on

a single mention,
a retweet or
following you for at least 90 days.

At the moment the cheapest prices for

a Twitter MEGA Package is around 35$. (The celebrity @liltwist has 350.000+ followers, this might be a great bargain!)
a Retweet may be around 40 - 50 $
a mention could be 52 - 65$
a follow is at 56$

If you have a fat pocket, you might enjoy to bid on these three TOP auctions for a Twitter MEGA Package:

You may ask why are there not the celebrities with the most followers on TOP of this list?

The cause for this order in the list is that these celebrities offer a special bonus for the winner of their MEGA Package auction. Most celebrities offer additionally a phone or Skype call, tickets for their shows/events, backstage meetings, signed DVDs/Books/autograms or fashion tips.

For example Dana White offers additionally the complete costs of a journey to his next fight that's why he seems to be ahead with the highest bid of more than 15.000 $.

The Background for this TwitChange-Celebrity-Auction is to raise money for a good cause!

The TwitChange-Auction is for a good cause, that's why so many celebrities take part in it. When you bid and win the auction the spent money will be donated to aHomeInHaiti.org.

This is a charity who takes care that the Miriam Center can be finished to be rebuild. It's a Home for orphans with major life challenges like cerebral palsy or severe autism.

Do you think it's worthwhile to take part in this kind of auction and do you think it will be beneficial to grow your own Twitter account when you buy a mention, retweet or a follow from a celebrity?

Tomorrow you can read on The One Minute Guide - How to get Retweets to thousands of Twitter followers for FREE! (even when you have just 1 Twitter follower)

CMF ADS: Infected by a superbug!

2010-08-15T04:16:00.004+08:00

One month ago i started again to buy for several dollars campaign ads in CMF Ads Network instead of buying one of their low-cost Network ads (which by the way exploit just the CMF ADS publishers!).

As there are not many campaign ads running anymore in CMF Ads because they missed out that low-cost Network ads will harm their monetary system and as we can see leads to a severe recession with deflationary tendencies in their CMF ADS economy (a blog post about the devastating economical situation in the CMF ADS Network is prepared for Monday. There i will bring some light into their newly announced changes and "improvements").

When Network Ads (NA) got introduced, they've been running equally side by side with Campaign ads (CA).

This meant when you had SINGLE Ad widget and 2 CA, each CA got 50% of the available page views.

From end of January 2010 on around 8 - 12 NA have been running additionally each month which reduced the visibility for CA, especially on single ad widgets.

ONE CA would get now only -> 100% page views/(10-14 Ads) = 7 - 10 % of the available page views.

For a blog with 10.000 page views, your ad views would have been reduced from 5.000 to just 700 - 1.000 ad views. Most likely you paid up to 1 $ for that ad spot! Now the return in ad views would have been just like a low traffic blog on which you could advertise for 0.25 $ or less!

One week after the introduction of their Network Ads CMF ADS announced that the equal sharing will be changed and NA will show up only 30% of the time when they are running. This should mean CA could get 70% of the available page views - theoretically!

In the last weeks i had some extreme examples in which this was and still is completely NOT THE CASE. There have been some high-traffic blogs which get several thousand page views and my Campaign ad should get at least 1.000 page views after 10 days but instead of getting 100 ad views/day, the ad showed up just 35 - 45 times daily (in other cases up to 75% less views).

The behavior of the Campaign ad is just like before their announced change to a 30% reservation for Network ads. It had to share the page views EQUALLY with the Network Ads and didn't get 70% of the available page views!

Taking as example Ben Barden's Blog (CMF Ads Admin). This blog gets roughly 1.400 page views/month.

30% would be around 400 page views reserved for all running Network Ads, so a Campaign Ad should be exposed 1.000 times/month.

In my case i got just 170 ad views within 20 days instead of 500 ad views (excluding the surge in the first 5 days)!

In an email conversation in which i told Ben about this matter with the two "high-traffic" blogs, he replied me as if there is NO WEIGHTING and that the page views i received are the correct numbers even when Network ads should just get 30% of the available page views.

For a better view of the e-mail click on the screenshot!

Hopefully this superbug in their code could be changed to an algorithm in which Campaign ads are favored with 70% as they give paying advertisers a bigger portion of exposure when you want to buy an ad individually and publishers can earn again more money because they deliver the ad views an advertiser deserves!

I'm sorry for the members which ads got cancelled in the last days and weeks as their CPM was -due to this superbug - much higher than the 10 cents which i'm usually calculating to pay for my ad views.

Finally - The payment proof of LinkShowOff.com

2010-08-01T23:59:00.003+08:00

When you look on the upper left corner, you can see the LinkShowOff.com widget. The LinkShowOff.com widget lets other advertiser place a text link with description (visible when you hover over the links) for a set amount (starting from 1 $, on my blog you would pay 2 $). You can show between 5 and 10 text links on their widget. When the widget is completely filled with your set amount of text links, the following advertiser will replace the first advertiser.

In my case it would take between 8 and 12 months (with 5 text links) until your purchased Text link would be replaced. In this time your text link ad would have been shown off between 25.000 and 40.000 times on a TOP location to my visitors! Here you can buy directly a text link ad from LinkShowOff.com on my blog.

Last week LinkShowOff.com paid me for the first time 11,34$ after almost 13 months (click on the payment proof for more details!). In the end it's kind of hassle-free earned money as you have almost no time to invest!

You have full control over the displayed text link ads. You can approve or disapprove every single ad which advertisers place on your widget. If you disapprove an ad, the paid money will be returned to the advertiser.
Payout is usually when you reach 10$ but they deduct 3$ as service fee before you can cash out. So you have to earn at least 13 $ to be able to get paid.

Get a FREE Make Money Online Training Package!

2010-07-27T05:52:00.009+08:00

Tim Bekker is giving away his Money Training Package for FREE (usually it costs 77$).

Download the Make Money Online Training now or read the instructions below the Banner

If you want to know how to make money online, simply grab his offer today.

It's very easy to claim his FREE Make Money Online Training Package:

Sign up a FREE account for the Money Training Package
Activate your account by clicking on the link in your e-mail
Download your ebooks with Tim Bekker's Money Training Package
Read the ebooks & follow the examples to make money online!

Make money with Twitter: Be a magpie or not?

2010-07-09T23:59:00.002+08:00

Image via CrunchBase

Be a Magpie is another company who claims that you can make a lot of money by posting advertisements to Twitter. Before you register with them they give you an estimate of how much you could earn per month from their tweets.

In my case their estimate was more than 1.000 EURO / month as i had six months ago around 10.000 followers. But they don't tell you how they calculate this income because in my case it was 0.00 EURO even after 6 months and several tweets from them.

Why you don't earn much with Be a magpie?

Most of my offered tweets have been affiliate links to website on which the interested clicker has to buy the offered item. Only in this case you would earn real good money (up to 10% of the sales price). In my case it was mostly for Web Hosting, holiday flights and software. But you could choose as well that you don't want to tweet such offers. In this case you have to wait a very long time until you would get a Pay-per-Tweet offer (or perhaps this was only in my case as the price might be more expensive for an advertiser to show up in my timeline).

Another reason why you have to take care when you are member of Be-a-Magpie!

Your account can get easily terminated (which happened to mine yesterday) because of violating their terms. You will get the following Account Suspension notice 4 weeks before they may terminate your account if you don't follow their rules:

At Magpie we are committed to providing a quality service for Twitterers, Followers and Clients. To ensure we deliver on this commitment, Magpie periodically monitors our accounts for compliance with the Magpie & Friends Ltd. Terms and Conditions which can be looked up at http://be-a-magpie.com/twitterers/terms-and-conditions.

Our system has flagged your account @cornyman as in violation of clause 4 - Misuse and Fraud – the posting of tweets in an automated manner e.g. by aggregating one or more RSS feeds. As per these terms and conditions, this sort of Twitter account does not qualify for participation in the Magpie Network and as a result, your account has been suspended.

To automatically have your account reactivated, please reduce the number of automated tweets to less than 15% of your total tweets. Your Twitter account will be monitored over the next four weeks to gauge compliance with our terms and conditions. If compliance is achieved during this period, your account will automatically be reinstated. Continual non-compliance will result in account termination and forfeiting of your earnings.

I just had no time to post that much to my Twitter account on my own as i moved back to Germany and had much more important things to do than to think about a certain percentage.

I guess if you are on several months holidays but have scheduled blog posts, you could get in trouble, too. The same will be when you might be sick but inject some RSS-Feeds from other blogs without posting yourself...

Not a very nice move from Be-a-magpie but as i didn't loose any money (just wasted my time with it), i can say

Hopefully everyone else has more luck with Be-a-magpie!

I'm much more happy with

MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
Revtwt (earn for each click),
Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
Twivert (get money for each click)
Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Adgitize: Special Summer Promotion until 31st July 2010!

2010-05-27T08:43:00.004+08:00

Adgitize announced today in their blog a Special Summer Promotion in which every member who is a paid advertiser will earn back their monthly advertising fees of 14$ if you score daily 300 points or more.

This means Adgitize will add each day a minimum amount of 47 cents in your account when you reach the 300 points goal which earns you 14.57 $ within 31 days + you'll get between 1.200 - 2.500 visitors/31 days!

With the Special Summer Promotion Adgitize wants to reach the goal to attract 25 new (or former) advertisers and exceed again the level of 200 advertisers (currently just 176).

A comparison to the previous earnings for the 300 points tier - it has been around 33 - 36 cents.

I guess now we can drop our excuses in saying "i will loose some $" as this promotion is valid until 31st July 2010 and might be extended until the end of the year 2010 - in this time you will definitely earn more money than in the last few months and get additional ("free") traffic!

You can read my

Tips on how to reach the 300 points easily and earn more money with Adgitize (on the One Minute Guide) and
on this blog The Secret of getting an Ad paid by Adgitize.

If you're not yet a member of Adgitize -which earned me in the last 12 months more than 110 $ (ad fees deducted)- simply sign up using my Referral-Link by clicking on the Special Summer Promotion link or button at the top of this post and you will receive after Adgitize's approval a ONE WEEK AD VOUCHER (7$) for FREE to start your own successful Adgitize ad campaign without any risks attached!

Have a great time enjoying more traffic and earning more money with Adgitize in the coming days, weeks and months!

Update: It's enough during weekdays (Monday - Thursday) to achieve just 300 points, even with 350 - 370 points on these days, you won't earn more than the promoted 47 cents.
Simply check how many points you achieve without dropping cards (100 points - blog post, 100 points - advertiser, xx points - page + ad views) and then add the amount of points needed to reach 300 points (with 60 page / ad view points the amount is 260 points - 40 points needed for 300 points => click 25/50 ads depending if you're advertiser or only publisher - add 5 extra clicks as page / ad view points can fluctuate).

Is Twitter killing Get Paid to Tweet companies? Ban on third party ads!

2010-05-26T05:33:00.002+08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter announced yesterday that they will ban tweets of third party applications which inject ads in a user's timeline in the near future through their API.

This 3rd party ad ban affects everyone who works together with Sponsored Tweets, Ad.ly, Revtwt, MyLikes, Twivert, Twittad, Magpie and many other advertising companies who connected advertisers and Twitter users to promote their product in Twitter.

Twitter announced this step for several reasons:

Third party application companies don't have to deal directly with problems that are caused by their tweets. Twitter will get the support tickets of the other users who complain about it, may it be spammy accounts (only ads) or virus infected links and so on.
Twitter's own Promoted Tweets won't be so effective when other third party applications want to monetize user profiles and make themselves a lot of cash with the fees they collect from the advertisers without sharing the earned $ with Twitter (Twitter itself doesn't share their income with users, too!)
Twitter's unique user experience may get lost because of hundred similar tweets from these ad networks which annoys in the long run a lot of users and could minimize the number of active users over the time.

My Opinion:

It will be interesting to see how the above mentioned ad companies react as they have only 30 days to change the way their third party programs work.

I could imagine that several ad companies might let the users tweet the ads manually or a two click-action similar to the Retweet-Button which takes you to your Twitter account and you press then the "Tweet"-Button to tweet it into your timeline. Sponsored Tweets already announced this kind of change in their latest blog post.

The problem with this method is that the companies can't detect easily how often a tweet will be tweeted within a day (many of the companies permit only between one - six tweets/day) and advertisers might not get a their required diversified audience for their spent budget of the paid tweets.

Another problem will arouse when advertisers give you a certain time frame in which the paid tweet should be published. As most advertisers are from the United States this could get difficult if Asians or European have to tweet it manually at sleeping times ;)

Another interesting aspect might be what will happen to the earned money which the members of these 3rd party ad companies hold in their account?

Will they get paid even when the minimum amount is not yet reached because their business is no more available?

Google reveals Adsense revenue share

2010-05-25T03:49:00.008+08:00

Google revealed yesterday their Adsense revenue share with the publishers of their content ads and Adsense for Search queries. Google is taking 32% of the Adwords revenue for the Content ads and 49% for the Adsense for Search.
For us publishers will be 68% left when we display the Google Adsense ads on our blogs and websites and 51% when someone searches from our own Google search box.

Google disclosed that large websites have a different revenue share percentage (they earn a bigger amount of cash). This means Google wants to keep good costumers happy with this method.

It was not disclosed if these percentages are averages for every publisher or if there are regional differences. Usually advertisers have to pay a higher amount per click if you select specific countries like USA, Canada, Western Europe instead of worldwide advertisement. With worldwide advertisement the "cheap" pay per click costs are usually generated from Asian and African countries and you'll generate only little traffic from Western countries.

Google will make further disclosure of these percentages directly inside of your Google Adsense account in the following months.

More information can be found in this post from the Google Adsense blog.

What are your thoughts about Google Adsense and its revenue share?

How to lower the risk in your portfolio!

2010-05-21T23:59:00.002+08:00

Image by Cold Cut via Flickr

As soon as you start trading stock and build up your own stock market portfolio, you will recognize that there are several factors which influence the risk of your portfolio.

If we look at the previous trading weeks, we saw a lot of ups and downs even within one trading day. The worst time came as the US stock market got it's flash crash two weeks ago. There several of the Blue chips (biggest stock market companies) lost up to 46% of its value within 30 minutes. But most of them recovered throughout the trading session and closed the day with a much smaller percentage loss (e.g. Procter & Gamble, McDonalds).

In case you have been invested in these companies, you would probably have "lost" them when you set a stop-loss limit to secure your existing gains or to avoid a bigger loss from a further decline of your stocks.

Setting a stop-loss limit is always a good choice but it doesn't lower the risk of your portfolio. It just helps you like i wrote in the last paragraph to cash in some of the existing gains or to stop losing more money.

Lowering the risk of your portfolio can be accomplished by

Investing less than 5% in a specific stock or even only in a specific sector

The reason:

If you invest your money in similar companies of the same sector it's most likely that one bad earning report or a slump in that sector will hurt the price of every stock in this sector.

Dell can be influenced by AMD or Intel's earning report in case the sale of CPUs and internal graphic cards show a decline in their sales.
Nokia can be influenced by Motorola, Samsung or SonyEricsson's sale reports and vice versa.
Different sectors move differently during a stock market plunge if you look at gold mining, car makers, technology or pharma companies.

Taking long and short positions of stocks

Long positions are good for the strongest companies in the strongest sectors and short positions should be taken for weak companies in actual weak sectors. If we look at two sectors in the last weeks you could see that the Gold mining sector has been strong but the banking sector has been weak (both are related to the Greek debt crisis).

Diversify and enrich your portfolio with currencies and commodities

Commodities and currencies will reduce the risk and the volatility of your portfolio and you can use currencies for hedging purposes, too (in case your own currency gets weaker against the $, you will gain not only the interests if you buy bonds but a monetary gain due to the better exchange rate). These trades are only for experienced traders, you really should have a certain knowledge of the circumstances for Forex, currency and commodity trading.

Adjusting your Stop-Loss limits from time to time

By adjusting your stop-loss limits you will have more of your gains left, in case a plunge happens. This money can be invested in new and better opportunities or invested in the same stock for a lower price. Sitting out a plunge can make you more nervous and it most of the times you definitely loose more money than by setting a stop-loss limit.

What are your methods of reducing the risks of your portfolio?

The six keys to a Millionaire Mindset

2010-05-18T23:58:00.003+08:00

Image by ul_Marga via Flickr

No matter if you just want to live a happy life, an extraordinary life or even a wealthy life with all luxuries available, the first thing to understand will be how we can achieve this stage in our life. The easiest way is by following other persons who achieved this a special kind of Millionaire's Mindset which lead them to become Millionaires (if they didn't inherit the money from their parents).

None of the actual wealthiest person on earths like Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or the Internet Billionaires from Facebook achieved their success without working hard in their very beginning. Their success didn't come overnight. It took several months and years until their results showed up as a success and could make cash with their businesses.

Each of the following six proven steps for achieving a Millionaire's Mindset will be explained over the next two months.

The Six Success Factors of a Millionaire Mindset

RESULTS

come from your

ACTIONS

come from your

ATTITUDE

come from your

FEELINGS

come from your

THOUGHTS

come from your

PROGRAMMING

come from your

ENVIRONMENT

By using these 6 keys in this Millionaire's Mindset series,

you will achieve not only success online (and could make big cash ;) )
you will simply live a much better life offline, too!

How to earn 900$ each minute with Goldman Sachs!

2010-05-02T23:59:00.003+08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Are you curious how YOU could achieve to earn 900$ each minute with one of the biggest banks world wide? Let's say it from the beginning it's possible!

In case you followed the business and stock market news in the last two or three years, you might know already what's the secret behind this post. If not, it will be revealed to you within the next five minutes.

Going into the year 2008, we saw big problems arousing from the housing markets which started in the USA by giving customers mortgages which they couldn't afford anymore. These customers couldn't afford the mortgages because the interest rates went up steadily each quarter from 2004 on. In 2003 many of the house owners could get mortgages with interest rates of as low as 1 or 2%. But the interest rates have been connected to the fed's interest rate's decision. Which means a rise of the Fed fund rate, gave the mortgage owner a rise of their interest rates, too.

In 2008 these interest rates for mortgages went to over 6% for many house owners. The installments had already been bigger and bigger each month and reached now their climax for these house owners. Many of them hadn't the money already months ago and tried to find second or third jobs, some paid these bills even with their credit cards (with much higher interest rates of up to 25%) just for not getting the red letter of a foreclosure of their house from their bank!

In 2008 several big banks and investment banks collapsed and got bought from other banks or got big cash infusions from the government and the FED. The collapse began in March/April 2008 as Bear Sterns - a big player in CDO's - made too risky investments without backing them up with "real" money (actually none of these big banks have backed up these bets with real money). The other big player in the CDO game is Goldman Sachs which was/is on the other side of the bet(since late 2006) and won big $$ with it during this financial crisis.

In September 2008 the government and the Fed didn't help Lehman Brothers to survive. They simply let them go bankrupt. This caused Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to change on 21st September 2008 from a Investment Bank model to a Business Bank because in this case they could receive help from the Fed and the government.

Two days later it was time for Goldman Sachs as the credit market tightened and the money supply stopped nearly to ask several investors and the government for a cash infusion of several billion $. A smart person came all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to offer Goldman Sachs 5 Billion US-$ in exchange of a favorable offer. He even gets the option for giving Goldman Sachs another 5 billion in exchange for these preferred stocks. These preferred stocks have been not only given to him and his company with a discounted price, they yield him each year with a 10% interest rate (or dividend).

10% from 5 Billion $ = 500 Million $ / 525.600 minutes (one year) = 951 $/minute

Ok, it's only possible if you have 5 Billion $ in your account ;-)

Coming back to the banks, Goldman Sachs bought a lot of these different type of mortgages, mixed them together and sold them as CDO with an AAA-Rating (as the rating of the issuer overrides the rating of the included mortgages) to their investors knowing that some of the mortgages will fail soon. Goldman Sachs even bet against its own created CDOs which led to the actual fraud claims from the SEC against Goldman Sachs.

But for sure Warren Buffet the person who closed this great deal said yesterday on the Shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha that he still stands by the Goldman Sachs transaction. But he and the Advisory board will consider another move if the fraud claims develop in a direction which wouldn't be supportable by him and for his shareholders.

What would you tell your investors when you are invested with such a massive amount of money and the stock (Goldman Sachs) already declined over 15%? If Buffet would have told that he might sell it now, the share price would move immediately downwards on Monday's trading day.

MyLikes: How to advertise in Twitter!

2010-04-30T23:53:00.024+08:00

Earn money on Twitter

Today i would have reached my 2nd payout in MyLikes (1st payment proof Mylikes) with around 3 $. I reached this payout with just one Likes which i tweeted almost everyday. You can say 3$ earned for 5 Minutes work as you can schedule one Likes for 4 days.If they still have enough funds, you can re-post your Likes again for four days and so on (with a slightly different tweet). I guess as long as their budget does not run out of funds, i might go along with them throughout May 2010 :)

What did i do now with my earnings from the 2nd "payout"?

I transferred it into a MyLikes Advertiser account. The minimum balance to advertise in MyLikes is 20$ and you just add up the difference to your earnings via PayPal or directly with your credit card.

The first step in creating a MyLikes campaign is by choosing which kind of campaign you want to start.

Since a few days MyLikes added the possibility to make a Pay-per-video Campaign. The Pay-per-video campaign gives advertisers the opportunity to let a popular Youtube member create a video and this Youtube member will broadcast it to their subscribers for the advertiser I guess it will take some days/weeks until advertiser offer this kind of campaigns.
Pay-per-Tweet Campaigns haven't been used at the moment by advertisers within my selected MyLikes categories as i believe the price is too high for the common Twitter member. The price of the pay-per-Tweet campaign is similar to Sponsored Tweets suggested price but it can't be changed by the MyLikes-member.

Only if you want to advertise with some real influencer e.g. Stars, Problogger a pay-per-Tweet campaign could be an alternative to the Pay-per-Click campaign. The possibility that fans keep an eye on the profiles of these famous members even hours or days later and click on the ad link, could bleed out some Pay-per-Click campaign advertiser ;-)

The setup of a pay-per-click campaign is easy and fast to manage like you can see in this screenshot:

Simply type in the name of the campaign (Title)
Link to the advertised website/blog/affiliate program
Select from which location the clicks can get paid (for now the choice is only between United States or worldwide)

The third step is the final step before you make the payment and then your campaign will be already live available for the other MyLikes' members to be tweeted, posted or embedded.
You have to choose the maximum pay-per-click amount (min. 0.05 $) and your initial budget (min. 20$ can always be increased in the future by adding funds). Additionally you can choose in which categories your campaign will be displayed. These settings can be changed during the duration of an active campaign (you can decrease / raise the PPC amount, add or delete categories).
The last action to do will be uploading a picture (This is the "edit campaign" screen shot, in the "create campaign" procedure wasn't the possibility to upload a picture!)

My first impression of the MyLikes campaign setup:

Only little descriptions and no introduction about minimum cost per click or minimum budget available, only after you type in a too low amount you get a red warning with the minimum amounts
No approval of tweets for influencer required if you create a pay-per-click campaign (so far i didn't see a possibility to disapprove a created sponsored Likes)
No scheduled time of the sponsored Likes visible (guess will be posted after the tweet has been analyzed)
Approval of tweets possible with Pay-per-Tweet campaign (Step 2 - additional option to choose at which time the influencer shall tweet and if approval is required)
It seems that for each new created campaign a budget with at least 20 $ is necessary as there is no delete button for your "old" campaigns

In case you would like to earn from these MyLikes campaigns, you can easily sign-up with MyLikes and start liking products or Sponsored Likes and earn for each click/tweet or video a small, big or great amount of money. In my previous article MyLikes: Make money with Twitter i explained how to start, which earnings opportunity are available and which steps you should take to succeed in MyLikes.

Earn money on Twitter

In the next few days i will write a second part about the success of Twitter Advertising in MyLikes.

Did you advertise in the past in Twitter? With which programs did you sign-up? Which campaigns have been successful for you?

Spam from support@twitter.com!! Viagra Spammer on the way

2010-04-23T23:24:00.002+08:00

Just received a strange sounding e-mail from support@twitter.com (screen shot) with the title Undelivered Message 22-318.

The screen shot looks like this

The problem is that the real link for this mysterious delayed message doesn't lead you to your Twitter account!

Be aware of E-Mails coming from support@twitter.com - They are not really from Twitter.

In Twitter they talk that if you click through to the Reported Attack Page you might get a visit from malicious software, trojans or a Viagra website will be displayed!

UPDATE: On 29th April 2010 i got a second email from support@twitter.com - with a slightly different message (You have 3 unread messages) which means you should take care - it's not over yet (the redirected URL changed, too!).

MyLikes: Make money with Twitter

2010-04-09T23:56:00.003+08:00

MyLikes is another way to get new followers on twitter and earn additional money from sponsored Likes. The company is already several months old but MyLikes offers one of the best earnings opportunities. You will get paid for each click a certain amount which MyLikes calculates after you signed up. This price is fixed until your score moves up/down. Payout is every Friday as soon as you reach 2$.

Influence your CPC-Score

To move your score, the ads have to be relevant for your Twitter audience. If you get a nice amount of clicks which might result in purchases or activities on the advertised websites, your CPC will move up after adjusting your account (done every two or three weeks). Posting irrelevant ads might lead in the future to a lower CPC for your MyLikes account.
The score is NOT depending on the amount of Twitter-Followers you have as i saw several MyLikes members (with less followers) who have a higher CPC than myself with more than 11.900 followers (mine is 0.43 $/click). It seems important, too, that you have more followers than you are following.

Become an MyLikes Influencer and win additional cash prizes for your recommendations!

Inside of MyLikes are different levels to become a better influencer. The more points you get (higher level you reach), the more often your Likes will be shown on the front page and after other members submit their Likes to the same topic.
There are several competitions running every month which highlight usually the best lists (for a specific topic - at the moment e.g. Best restaurants list and 8 other lists). To increase your chances in winning a 10$ cash prize, you should do the following actions

achieve the level of a Fiery pro (300+ points) in MyLikes, it just gives you better chances in winning one of the additional competition prizes (as they see you are active and helpful)
follow other members inside of MyLikes
recommend not only sponsored Likes (your paid ads) but what else you like (Pizza brand, Fast food chain, restaurants, movies, actors, mobile phones, computer, cars, clothes and so on), so that you can create some of the competition lists ;-)
comment on other followers Likes to encourage them to comment on your likes as well
write good recommendations for the Likes which you include in your competition lists

More opportunities to earn money with MyLikes

You can

send a tweet to your followers on Twitter,
make a blog post about the sponsored Likes and/or
put a widget with the active sponsored Likes on your blog/website (similar to Google Adsense, only the MyLikes-CPC might be more lucrative)

and get paid by MyLikes every time they count a valid click for one of your sponsored Likes!

My first payment proof of MyLikes

Is Hubze a Scam? Fishy, Fishy or How to build a big list fast!

2010-04-08T23:59:00.003+08:00

On 5th April it was time to listen again to a webinar of founder and CEO David Foster of Hubze.

Most of the points mentioned in my previous post about a possible Hubze-Scam or the new Hype in Social media turned out to become reality.
I'm wondering what you are thinking about his message and the e-mails they send us in the last week.

New customized Facebook Fan Page-Application

First, the affiliate program for their new customized Facebook Fan Page-Application is only available for you if you BUY the Facebook Fan Page Application. Referrals who signed up under your Hubze Card are not reflected as your referrals for this Facebook affiliate program.

He said, it might be perhaps connected in the future when they have finished their Hubze Card. I can only say in this case they could have linked it up directly with your username which they are not doing!

So how do they link it up in the future with no connection to your Hubze Card account now? Do you really think you would get $$ in a few months for your referrals who bought now the Facebook Fan Page Application (1. if you didn't buy it 2. Nobody gives months later commissions when they cashed it in now)?

Advertising around Hubze Cards

Second, he announced there would be advertising spots available around the Hubze Card only from members of the community which will be most likely Internet marketers. Lots of advertising for E-Books and Get Rich Schemes, Diets and so on will be coming.

Launch of the real Hubze Cards postponed

Third, doesn't it look fishy now as they announced in one of their first webinar in early March the Hubze Card will be launched for the Beta-Tester (more than 4.000 members) in the first week of April. But all you can hear and read now are Internet marketing strategies like

look for new members who shall sign up under you, it's a great and FREE program and you might earn some commissions if they will buy some of our programs in the future
sign up and buy this Facebook Fanpage Application now and start earning commissions before we sent the e-mails to the BIG Internet marketers

He even mentioned that his graphic designer is on holiday right now. Hmm, what the heck has he to do in holidays? The real big deal, the Hubze Card, would attract much more persons to sign-up, if it would be online right now (even when you have only a few social media sites available but that why it's called BETA-version!).

I forgot to mention, in this webinar David Foster said "We are not even in Beta, we are just in the Alpha-Version. We have only the Skeleton of the Hubze Card. But it looks great better than he thought it would look in the Alpha-Version".

Is the FREE Hubze Card only a marketing gag for building a BIG LIST to sell products to several 10.000 members?

I could bet in the next weeks, all members get flooded with more e-mails/webinars about new marketing programs and opportunities to sell them as affiliates (if you buy it first) instead of a further progress of the Hubze Card. It seems they use the FREE Hubze Card argument for sign-ups to build a BIG E-MAIL LIST and throw programs from their friends (he said it's one member from the community, difficult to check as you can't access the Hubze Cards :-) )

All you can do is wait for the real deal and not letting you irritating by the pitchy sales e-mails in which the Hubze Squad might promote over the next weeks several new programs!
What do you think about it as the time went by?

Is Moneza (now: Hubze) a scam or THE new hype in Social Media?

2010-04-03T23:59:00.001+08:00

Hubze is a newcomer - who claims to connect the most famous Social media networking websites & Instant messengers under one umbrella for free. Hubze has started to promote its website just by recruiting new members with the help of its members.

At the moment there are just a few webinar videos available and promotional material. The videos sound very attractive (yeah, it's a commercial, won't hear anything bad in it, mind you) to a lot of members which reflects itself in the fast rising number of members (after 1 week more than 4.000 members, after 2 1/2 weeks already 13.000 members, goal of the website owner is 100.000 members in late May).

Here are some reasons why you should kind of critical towards their website.

In the first week the name of the website was announced with Moneza, they changed it after the second week to Hubze. Their reason written in their blog was to reflect that the website is more a hub for all other Social media networking websites than a money-making opportunity without any additional information how to make money with their system (which was reflected by the word Moneza and with which they could attract 4.000 members in the beginning).
Only screenshots are available from their Hubze cards which shall include the famous social media websites + Instant Messengers (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FlickR, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and many more!).

You will find on your Hubze card the recent live status updates from your registered social media websites. The feature of Geo-targeting will be available, too (famous from Foursquare).
No word about the safety of your data if you allow them to post your status updates from these Social Media networks to your Hubze cards. We just have to remember which problems Twitter and Facebook had in the last weeks with hacked accounts, fake e-mails, trojans and virus which have been sent to us by DM or e-mail.
When i signed up in the second week, i didn't use a referral link but i still got referred to Hubze by David Foster. Only after the sign-up process i saw in the blog posts that David Foster is the CEO of this new company. This was one of the signs for me that it's not such an ethical company when the CEO tries to get as much referrals as possible in his private account. Later they told in one of the webinar videos about their Affiliate program which shall be a 2-Tier program. This means you might get a commission from your direct referral and a portion from the referral of your direct referral. At the moment this practice has stopped but he definitely got a lot of sign-ups under his name from the first weeks.
It seems more to be a website for Internet and Affiliate marketers as the founders are from this business sector and most of the comments on the blog are from those marketers, too. Another reason why you could get swamped over with this kind of persons will be because Hubze will only allow advertisement from within their community.
The question is if their calculation for their premium membership for 29,97$/month (additional a blog inside their Hubze card + Auto responder service) + for 37, 67 & 297 $ (one time fees) a fully customized Facebook Fan page will be enough to cover the costs for 100.000s of FREE Hubze cards or if they have to turn additional towards paid advertisement around the Hubze cards.
Their affiliate program could be not so member-friendly like promised in the first weeks. At the end of the webinar of 29th March 2010 Mike Healy answered to a question "who would be eligible for a commission from the affiliate programs". His answer was that it's most likely that you have to upgrade for some services to enjoy a commission from that particular service from your referrals.
This means you could "loose" a big amount of income as for the monthly premium membership the commission will be between 15% (4.49 $/month) and 45% (13.48 $/month) for the direct referrals and 5 - 9% (1.49 - 2.69 $) for their referrals (this depends how many of your referrals upgrade to premium, 45% is only achievable if 100 referrals upgrade in that particular month!).
For the customized Facebook page you would earn 10% (3.70 - 29.70 $ - direct referral) or 5% (1.85 - 14.85 $ - referral of your direct referral) of the sales prices (37 - 297$)

My Conclusion:

If they can fulfill what they promise in their video commercial by taking care of safety risks and advertisements, it could get a great website to share your status updates in ONE place & connect with a lot of new persons (and simply forget about earning a bunch of money like Mike Healy announces on his blog with 10.000 $ weekly *lol*)!

New connections & friends might be more worth for your future than a few missed bucks.

In case you like what you saw in the video, feel free to register with Hubze, so that you are one of the first to enjoy their service when they will launch their Hubze cards!

Google Adsense: How to make money off their ads!

2010-03-26T23:58:00.003+08:00

Most of the bloggers know already that you can monetize your blog in one easy step by using Google Adsense ad service. You simply register one (or more of your) blog(s) and wait some days until Google Adsense accepts your blog to publish their ads or if they (temporarily) reject it until your blog's content is within their terms of service.

After you get the approval e-mail from Google, you can start using their Adsense ads on your blogs and websites. Adsense uses Keyword sensitive ads which means Google tries to publish ads which fit to your actual blog posts or your overall blog topic. The ads which Google Adsense serves on our blogs and websites are coming from other blog & website owners, from famous brands who promote their new products / contests or from affiliate programs.

As you build up your blog posts week by week, you'll notice that there are often the same Google Adsense ads displayed when you visit your own blog. This happens because your content is relevant to their keywords which they are using in their Google Adwords campaign. Most of these ads will show you an URL to their real website (when you use the sky scraper or banner ads - the URL won't be displayed if you use only the Text link ads). On my blog there have been a lot of "Grab a free report", "sign up for my list", "new advertising program", 50 Ways to make money online! ads which include an affiliate program.

If you use now these kind of ads not only by displaying them in your Adsense ads but by choosing to join their affiliate programs (and make money off Google Adsense ads) you could make not just a few cents for the click - you could make between 2 - 50 $ (between 10% and 75% of the product price) in case the visitor who clicks your affiliate link, joins the program and buys the book or the service. Every blogger will have other ads like Mommy blogger might have the ones for baby cloths for which several companies offer partner programs with a certain percentage of the sales price as a commission or the Amazon Associate program which you can use easily inside your own blog posts when you write about certain products which are distributed by Amazon!

Most important factor to remember with affiliate links is NOT to cluster your whole sidebars with different ad banners and text link ads as they won't be always relevant to your actual blog posts. Instead you could use your affiliate banners selectively in relevant blog posts as a picture on the left/right of your blog post, between or at the end of your blog post.

You should only put certain affiliate links in your sidebars which are always useful for your visitors to see. Put other affiliate links at the bottom of your sidebars, in this case new visitors who are interested in your posts and read more than the recent one still can notice some of your affiliate links and will make you money but not annoy your regular visitors!

What's your experience with Google Adsense (earnings, success, ban, payout)?

Which experience can you share about affiliate programs, earnings and your success with them?

Stock market: These trading strategies are essential for your success!

2010-03-18T23:59:00.002+08:00

Image by Ahmad Nawawi via Flickr

The stock market is a powerful way to increase your wealth. With many different strategies out there which people can use to take full advantage of it, it will be your choice to look for the best match. Here are five major trading strategies in which every trader can find its place.

1. Buy and Hold

Most people preach the buy and hold strategy because it is simple, passive and most people can do it without much effort. How long does it really take to buy a couple of mutual funds or ETFs and forget about it after all? Because stocks historically go up over the long term this can be a relatively safe way of investing (Example: Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway).

2. Following the Trend

Another strategy which is similar to buy and hold which can be much more powerful is following trends. This strategy involves buying stocks that are trending up and holding onto them until they are no longer going up. This way you can get into stocks that are making the big moves and get out of them as they start to pullback or trend sideways. Most traders use a tight stop-loss of 5% or 10% under the actual stock prices to secure recent gains. It may sound simple, but sometimes simplicity works.

3. Short Term Swing Trading

Swing trading is the process of using technical indicators (charts, 200 day average price lines) to give traders buy and sell signals for a short term trade. The idea is to constantly monitor your positions, cutting your looser earlier and letting your winners move up in order to maximize your gains over the long term. Any trade with a profit target, a stop loss and hold longer than one day is basically a swing trade.

4. Options

If you want to leverage your gains in the stock market, traders are using options. A 10% move in the price of a stock could mean a 100% move or more in the price of an option. While option trading is very powerful and you can gain quick money even with a small bet it isn't something to start off with. The best traders only consider option trading after they have already mastered short term trading as it is a risky investment when the market suddenly change in the other direction!

5. Short Term Day Trading

Day trading has been given a bad name by professional buy and hold trader, but the truth is it can be very profitable. It even gives the stock market the fuel to trade stocks. Without day trading there wouldn't be much to report from the stock market. Any trade that was bought and sold before the end of the trading day is considered to be a day trade. Day traders may have their ups and downs, but overall they can be very profitable.

Each strategy offers traders something different. Buying and holding is better for passive investors who can't follow the daily swings and news. Day trading is better for traders who have the time and willingness to play a very active role in their investing. Risk-oriented persons will like the power of option trading which occasionally needs really strong nerves.

Learning the different strategies and experimenting with it can certainly be worthwhile and might help you in recognizing which strategy fits you the best. One way to learn it without losing money would be taking part in virtual stock market games, some offer even weekly/monthly prizes for the best performance of your "play" account!

Do you trade stocks, funds or options?

Which kind of trader are you, risky or conservative?

Which experience did you make with these/your trading strategies?

New Template and other changes on Cornymans Money-Blog!

2010-03-11T23:58:00.063+08:00

Image via Wikipedia

The time has come that changes being made on my blog and that the focus gets back to the origin of this blog like i wrote way back in November 2008 in my first blog post.

To summarize it - it will be less about making the quick buck, it's much more about the practical advice

- how to invest your money,
- how to save your money,
- how to secure your finances and
- how to earn online some additional funds part-time or full-time with your blog, online or offline.

NEW TEMPLATE DESIGNER FROM BLOGGER

Changing my template was the first step because the first Blogger template was not optimized for long articles (the articles looked always much longer *lol*).
It was an easy step, it just took me around 1 hour because Google has decided to offer now a Template Designer inside of Blogger! When you look into the choices which Blogger's Template Designer offers, you will see that in the coming days and weeks most of the blogs will look more professional and get a touch of high quality look :)

You can access the new Template Designer from Blogger ONLY in their Blogger in draft section. Simply login in like you do usually and click on Layout. There you will see the new link (last link) for the Template Designer.

And this time the Layout is no more static, everything can be changed with one mouse click!

It's a good start with 15 available Templates and Google announced that more will be added in the coming weeks

Blogger Template Designer - Choice of Templates

You can rearrange the width any column sidebars to the exact pixel,
You can make your template with 1, 2 or 3 columns,
You can choose how many columns your footer shall have,

Blogger Template Designer - Layout choices

You can change the color themes
You have the choice of 100s of background pictures

Blogger Template Designer - Background images

The best feature is you don't have to wait to watch out for the result. A preview of the changes is immediately visible as soon as choose one of the templates + background pictures + by customizing the columns. It will be only used for your blog when you click on the Apply Template-Button.

That means you can mess around with Blogger's Template Designer for hours and rearrange your widgets/gadgets, play with the color themes and so on, nothing will happen to your actual template (it's always better to download a backup of your template, just in case!)

I will be playing some more hours in the coming days with Blogger's Template Designer and for sure rearrange some items until i'm satisfied.

I hope some of you could give me additional advice:

-what doesn't appeal you on the template and what does appeal you-

-Can you read everything or are there some issues with different browsers-

TOP 3 Online money making Scams

2010-03-06T23:58:00.003+08:00

Image by Don Hankins via Flickr

Are you in need to raise a lot of money in a short time? Are you jobless and look desperately for a job? And you would like to do anything as long as you can see money flowing into your wallet?

These are mostly the questions several online money making websites asking YOU! They greet you into the world of making money online the easy and fast way! It sounds so perfect and it seems to allow you to enjoy much more time together with family & friends or even earn so much money that you can fulfill all your dreams within several days or weeks.

Doesn't this sound incredible? Too good to be true?

The truth is making money online does work.

But if it is would be that simple like just purchasing an affiliate marketing ebook or registering for the get-fast-rich schemes, how many persons around you who use the Internet already for several years would be already retired or wealthy?

If you really want to succeed on the Internet, you have to work for your own success by doing Internet marketing.

The truth hurts often, but it's the truth. You have to put in several hours daily / weekly into your Internet marketing efforts otherwise you will never make any money online.

On the other hand, if you are already giving up on Internet marketing and think that it's only a big hype, then you are also extremely wrong.

The fact is, I can show you the top 3 Online money making Scams and how untrue they are.

Online money making Scam - You can make 6 to 7 figures overnight (with payment proofs of Clickbank / Adsense / Paypal account screenshots).

One of the biggest, fattest lies! It is simply a sales pitch to bait newcomers and desperately hopeless (jobless or low-income) visitors to purchase products. Most of them will do just anything and buy everything to get their hands on more real fast 'money'. More often than not, these buyers end up losing both - their own money and their time (and deleting the spam mails which you'll get as you're on their mailing list).
Online money making Scam - Everything you need to know about succeeding on the Internet is available in OUR product

Sounds true when you read additionally the fake testimonials from recent buyers of the product but it's just a popular selling pitch to attract these desperate people mentioned already in the first Online money making Scam. Don't we know that such a product is not existent. Otherwise there would be already millions of millionaires working on the Internet. The truth is, there is no perfect product. Each product has its values that you see or buy online, but please do not allow the sales pitch to lead you to where the gurus want you to be.
Online money making Scam - Everything is automated and no effort is required.

Believe me that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch in this world. Honestly, if it is as easy as it sounds, why would anyone want to own a day job instead of having money made online 'magically'?
And in case you would own this "system", would you REALLY sell it for JUST $97? Please think twice before you click that "Buy me now"-Button!

What are your experiences with online money making scams?
Do you know of other online money making scams which are easily to detect?
Did you buy one of these get-rich-quick ebooks, programs or participated in paid affiliate websites? Have they been useful or was it a waste of money?

11 reasons NOT to trade stocks!

2010-02-28T23:58:00.003+08:00

How many persons do you know who trade stocks but should not touch them at all?

I know several persons who are my relatives, friends and from my the work with our clients in the tax accountant office who have in the end no real clue in what they are investing their money, how risky it is or how much time it needs to earn money with stocks.

Here are my personal 11 reasons when you should NOT trade stocks at all:

Afraid to lose money.
Doesn't like risks.
Being too emotional.
Need to know everything before making a decision.
Feeling not confident behind your own decisions.
Have trouble drawing your own conclusions.
Need to be told what to do or believing everything what others tell you
Awful at managing money.
Think it's an easy way to make money.
Get stressed too easily. Can't handle stress.
Experience difficulty getting over past events.
Bonus:
Make lists of why others shouldn’t trade stocks… guess we ignore that one :)

What are your reasons to trade stocks or NOT to trade stocks?

Adgitize: Merchandise - earn more points and promote your products / services!!

2010-02-17T23:53:00.002+08:00

Aditize offers a new possibility to earn points and to let other Adgitize members know about your products and services!

This could be a great way for many Etsy-Shop owners and persons who want to sell additional some of their products (ebooks, blog review, 125 x 125 ad badges, web design and so on).

Highlights:

Members who buy products can be offered a special discount and additional points in Adgitize for a 31 day period. In the beginning there three items available. The points you can receive daily are between 6 and 25 points if you buy one of the products.

The seller pays 5$ for displaying its ad for one month and gets additional 15 advertiser points (written in the detailed rules & regulations).
A small part of each sale will be transferred - after a sale of an Adgitize member has been made - to Adgitize to cover the cost of the given merchandising points for each of the buyers of the product / service.

Seems to me its a new great way to get more exposure for your products and to earn additional points for the buyer and the seller!

More information on the Adgitize blog!
Here is the Adgitize Merchandise Store and here you can get the detailed information about the Adgitize Merchandising requirements, rules and regulations!

Apology to ALL ENTRECARD MEMBERS!

2010-02-13T23:57:00.004+08:00

Real life and the hospitalization of our baby boy left me behind with my apology for the falsely accused EntreCard members!

I want to apologizes to everyone who has been accused, who read and commented on the last two posts of this blog!

ALL PICTURES HAVE BEEN NOW DELETED, no matter if real Ghost dropper or not!

Yes, indeed i published it in a hurry!

Yes, i checked afterward some members and compared with Google Analytics. It seems that on one day members didn't get counted but could click and on the other day they got counted. This must be one of the effects of cache browsing as on 9th February a new blog post was visible for everyone and mentioned in EntreCard's Blog and in their E-mail to me!

Like i mentioned in the first post about the Ghost droppers:

Everybody shall judge by themselves if this is true or not.

In my case it seemed to be true as i didn't receive any comments for the duration of the existence of the blog (5 1/2 months) from these accused member. I know for sure that other members get comments from some of these accused members, so they are NOT ALL FAKE droppers or cheater or scamming other members!

Some of the members used just in the period when i made the experiment the quick drop pages, in the past they dropped regularly on my blogs from their blog roll, EntreCard Toolbar or from the Inbox.

I didn't know that EntreCard would pat me on my back for this investigation or that they even would mention my post.
I didn't send them the link, i just wrote them -as i wanted to get the Travel-Blog reinstated- that over 60 members could drop on that blog without a widget.
As they wrote themselves in the blog that NOT ALL mentioned members are Ghost droppers, it seems non-sense for me to link to my post.
I asked EntreCard to remove the link to my post as it's absolutely not necessary - (EntreCard removed now the link from their blog!).

The real Ghost droppers who used the previous quick drop system seemed to be wiped out (or perhaps it's just me who get less of their drops).

Accusations against me who are written in the comment section of Ad Master's post that i have tried to hack in a user's account or that i'm the person who distribute the click trojan are definitely NOT TRUE!

Another accusation which i received in the previous post is related to the disabling of the quick drop pages (the commenter built one of these quick drop pages):

I think there is no one to blame as EntreCard didn't and doesn't allow to do this kind of dropping and now they took action so that EntreCard members get again REAL VISITORS to their blogs.

UPDATE:
You can read in EntreCard's help files about illegal activities which are NOT ALLOWED by EntreCard and can lead to account closing, loss of ECs, ban of user!

It's clearly stated that these actions are not allowed (since September 2008!)

Use of any automated program/script that drops for you
Any drop done through any means other than visiting the blog, and dropping through the widget found on that blog

Update End

His argumentation that we have to suffer now more often from 100% Bounce rate without this kind of cheating may be correct but i doubt that these members will put much effort in dropping cards when they can't finish it anymore within 15 minutes.
As long as you can attract your visitors to read your content and comment, you may even gain now a new reader instead of letting them just drop on the yellow box!

UPDATE:
Cheating with yellow boxes is also cheating the advertisers who wants to buy an ad as they think you get such a big amount of visitors when they compare the popularity points with other members.
Without cheating the Alexa ranking can improve as the members HAVE to visit you now!
As of now (22nd February) the effect of less ghost droppers shows that the 5 most popular blogs in EntreCard "lost" between 300 and 400 popularity points. This shows that there have been indeed a lot of members who took the shortcut to use quick drop pages.
A small loss of popularity points (up to 75 points) is from active members who left EntreCard in the last week.
Update End

EntreCard: Responses of Ghost Droppers

2010-02-11T23:59:00.005+08:00

Some words to the previous mentioned experiment of Ghost Droppers in EntreCard & the E-Mail of EntreCard:

I believe EVERYONE would wonder if someone shows up in the Inbox of EntreCard when their website would be down due to a server problem or virus.
How would you react if you would see the same amount of "Droppers" in your Inbox like i saw in the previous days (just with a purposely deleted widget)?

On the 9th February (short after EntreCard resets the drops) i wrote about the results from the 63 dropping members of 8th February in red color. So the members should have been already warned that it's an experiment to see who dropped cards even when the EntreCard-Widget is NOT AVAILABLE. But they still kept dropping cards.

11 of the accused members responded and their comments have been released now (they are mixed chronically within the other comments).

Here are some of their reasons:

One of these droppers said, using a cached Google search was his method to drop during these days as he couldn't find the EntreCard-Widget. It was well meant from him and he is doing it usually when a website is not reachable or the EntreCard not visible on the actual blog version for not loosing his Top dropper status (the user had been removed from the previous list as i saw it in my logs that he indeed came from Google).

Greetje greets you commented with an explanation on the Best travel pictures in the world blog. She uses each month the blog version from the first of the month (Browser cache) as another Dutch blogger told her previously to keep her browsing more secure.

I wonder now why do i and everyone else update our blogs/ the travel pictures blog (in the past) almost daily when now several of these accused members use old versions of my blog to drop their cards.

Anonymous (would have been nice to know who you are):

Erm... I use a cached browser? It caches sites and only updates when there is an update? You can use Google's cache to do the same thing. Hence anyone with any sense knows how to do you a favour when your site is sluggish and still manage to drop. Still this sort of slander is the last straw - to be honest many of us have invested years in dropping and I for one see this as a good time to leave for good.

My response to this - like mentioned above the blog was updated on 8th & 9th, so your browser should have loaded the newest version of my blog WITHOUT my EntreCard.

It's for sure if several members use only cached sites

we won't receive any comments and
the bounce rate from this members should be 100% as they look always at the same OLD POSTS or
is it even worse and it doesn't count as page visit as these cached blogs are not accessed directly because they are saved on their local hard disks? GRRRRRRRRR!

Is there a reason to drop on them when they treat your blog and your updates in this way?

Something like this can make you as angry as when they would be real Ghost droppers.

Other member's comments:

Laane:

Well, I think you're not seeing things the way they are. In fact,I visit your blog every day at least once, but sometimes 5 or more times.
Why? Because I adgitize too.
So I think you're making mistakes.

Maybe I should start spending whole days commenting, so you can see I'm at the blogs.

Well, I;ve been face at entrecard with so many things the past years, this can be adeed, I guess.

I just would like to know how you could drop the card when it wasn't available on the two days! This has nothing to do with Adgitize as the Adgitize ads have been available and we don't have an Adgitize Inbox.
I know you had issues with viruses in the past and you said you made yourself an own drop list after this incident (around End of September/beginning of October 2009).

Julie @ Momspective:

I was out of town the dates listed and when I travel I outsource my drops. I only drop on those who drop on me and will speak with those individuals who I outsource my dropping to while I'm gone. I visit each site regularily, comment if I can (lately I can't much due to travel and medical issues so I do suck there) and buy ads on those sites as well. It takes me 9 hours to drop on my these sites throughout the day either using the snaplinks multiple web browser opener or the EC toolbar if I didn't get enough drops using my favorites list, who are people who drop or have dropped on me while I write, email and social network so I am taking this accusation very seriously. I appreciate the information and will be sure to look into it.

You outsourced the drops of your cards? Did you know that John from Make nothing online catched Momspective Reviews last week in his experiment, too, for three days?

Paul from Hacking the Hacked

1.Comment:

Wow what a funny post, I see one of my cards on your list, and here I am commenting. I also see at least four cards of other members who comment on one of my blogs. And, I see quite a few cards from members who also use Blog Catalog, I know they use Blog Catalog because their avatars show on my BC widget after they have visited one of my blogs.

I have been thinking of leaving EC because the bounce rate from members who actually do visit one of my blogs only to drop a card and then leave, is far more harmful to my blogs ranking than someone who uses a "ghost dropper list." This post might be the straw that broke the camels back, so congratulations to you on suceedding at something might be in order.

2.Comment:

Me again, sorry but I am upset that my card appears on your fake droppers list. I follow a few members who have been quick to jump on your bandwagon through the Google friend connect widget, wich I will remove myself from now. Those that I regularly visit like The English Wildernes, I wont anymore. I am very sorry that I spent so much time on this blog the other day reading your posts about increasing blog traffic.

I am using my url/name in my comments so people can see that members on the cards above do visit EC sites, see who is making comments on my blogs for yourself.

Paul, thanks for reading some articles in the past! Sorry to say Paul, i'm sure i never visited your blog in the past. My visit and commenting today was the first time. You see a lot of the accused members at the moment in my Blogcatalog list, some appear there again for the first time after a long time. Most of them came from an alarming e-mail from their friends when i can trust some Analytic programs from Google and Live Feedjit.

UPDATE:
I REMOVED THE MEMBERS WHO COMMENTED AND SOME REGULAR DROPPERS OF MY BLOGS WHICH COULD FALL UNDER THE in EntreCard's Blog and in their E-Mail mentioned cache issue!!!

Everyone should make for yourself a picture if these members interacted with you in the past or not.

If they did interact with you, continue to support them with dropping on them.
If they didn't interact with you, it might be the same "problem" like in this case, they just use a cached version of your blog or have been really ghost dropping with the use of

a script
a bookmarked Drop-Widget link
quick ghost drop pages (which have been now disabled)

EntreCard members get scammed by these members!

2010-02-10T20:44:00.009+08:00

Like written on the Best travel pictures in the world blog, i made a "secret" test on 8th and 9th February 2009 to see who is gaming EntreCard's Dropping System.

For this test i had to remove the EntreCard widget to see if some members still are able to appear in my Inbox. I'm sorry if i caused a lot of members problems as many of you tried to search for the EntreCard-widget several times a day (it was for the best means of us).

To my shocking surprise it wasn't just a handful of members who fake drops in our inbox, it has been more than 65 members who never visit your blog.
They just use a Ghost dropper list or a program that is dropping only on the yellow drop box. With this method you can finish dropping 300 blogs in less than 15 minutes.

I decided now to show off these FAKE members who didn't physically visit your web site, so that you can decide by yourself if you still want to support them or if you dump them (no more dropping on them) to show them that WE DON'T ACCEPT CHEATERS IN ENTRECARD.

Several hours ago EntreCard deleted the Best travel pictures in the world blog from their system. But after 3 1/2 hours i got the blog reinstated and you can drop again on the Best travel pictures in the world blog!

EntreCard even wants to look now into the matter of Ghost drop lists and how to change the code, so that we members get REAL VISITORS and not FAKE DROPS IN OUR INBOX!

One list which i suspect has played the malicious part for so many fake drops, has been deleted after i told EntreCard about it and they suspended the account of this person (or warned her that it will get suspended if she doesn't remove this list).

Here have been the members who scam us regularly in EntreCard, like you can see there are a lot of TOP Droppers who actually never come to your blog but a lot of you give them even a FREE LINK each month.

UPDATE:

The Responses of the accused members have been published in the comment section a choice can be seen on Responses of the Ghost Droppers.

For the members who didn't believe me!
This is my single Dropbox of this blog which could be used everywhere to cheat on me!
EntreCard made this kind of cheating after this experiment NOW UNAVAILABLE!
So there is no more reason to display the picture of these members who used this system!

Read my apology for the falsely accused EntreCard Ghost droppers

Removed Dropaholics widget

2010-02-05T23:51:00.004+08:00

Due to my current issues with the Internet Service Provider P1 WiMax (slow connections, several reloads until widgets are loaded, commenting in forums is a pain because of the time outs) which let me do only occasionally dropping in EntreCard with one or two of my blogs, i removed my Dropaholics widget rather late :)

Will have a look that i can honor my Top Droppers in the Sidebar with a RSS-FEED as soon as the internet connection is stable again in the coming days.

Guess you came from Behindthebitblog.com and wanted to read this story but they directed you now to another post or do you like to read the Apology for the falsely accused Ghost droppers?

CMF Ads - My Network Ads suggestion - a better way for publisher and advertiser

2010-01-29T23:55:00.004+08:00

In my previous post about Network Ads i complained about the low payout for publishers and the influence of my existing campaign advertisers. After i wrote that article i thought about it and how CMF Ads could make it a successful Network ad for both parties - Publishers as well as Advertisers.

What if we just fill the empty ad slots with Network ads instead of CMF House Ads?

If a widget is already full, Network ads would not show up until one slot would be empty (otherwise it hurts the actual advertisers).

In this case, you could run the CMF House ad (if you don't like any of the existing Network ads) and earn 0 cent or you could run one or more of the Network ads and earn more than with the actual 30 day-Flat-rate solution.

Sure, this will cut down the page views/clicks for the Network advertiser by a high percentage.

In this case the ad price could be set by Page impressions 10.000/25.000/50.000 and not by a time period.
The price should be 5,5555 cents for 1.000 page views with 90% of the revenue being shared to the publishers and 10% for CMF Ads (it would equal to 50% of the suggested price).

UPDATE:
Another addition would be to expand it to a certain formula:

- For each ad slot, only one Network ad
- a maximum of 5 Network ads can run simultaneously, if you have the 5 ad slot widget
- if you have only 1 ad slot, only 1 Network ad is allowed to run
- wouldn't hurt the classic advertiser (like it does NOW) (End of Update)

Why is this a fair offer?

With the actual pricing system only members with HIGH TRAFFIC (more than 7.500 page views) and LESS ADS (double amount of available slots - 4 ads running with 2 slots or 6 ads running with 3 slots...) get a significant payout (more than 3 cents) from the Network ads because the actual Network ad price is fixed to 30 days and not to page views but the payout is calculated by own ad views/overall page views!

Most members contribute on a monthly basis less than 1.000/500/100 ad views for each running Network ad! For my Network ad this would mean you would get less than 3/1,5/0,3 cents after the payout is calculated (based on 300.000+ page views - after 80 hours i got now 41.000+ page views).

If we calculated the payout by "how many days/hours the ad was running" which would be appropriate as the Network ad is for a certain TIME PERIOD (30 days) the payout amount would look differently especially for LOW TRAFFIC BLOGS (then High Traffic blogs would earn less than 2 cents or not participate at all and Low Traffic blogs could earn easily more than 2 cents for each ad)!

With the new pricing and change to page impressions there would be a fair price to run one or more Network ads on an empty slot (when i look at my suggested price with 77 cents and i charge usually 60 cents). If the Cost/page impression would be just 5,5555 cents, you would still get 50% of your suggested price for an previous empty slot with the actual solution you get between 3 - 25% of your suggested price (depending how many ads you are running)!

And if publisher like to increase their earnings they can use with this solution the biggest widget with 4 or 5 slots as there will be a fair price for empty slots and Network advertisers will be more than happy to buy such an ad.

What does this mean for Advertiser?

Advertiser pay more (up to 100%) but the exposure on the blogs will be better because the publisher approves your Network ad while an empty slot is available. There should be a possibility to choose one or more ads which "share" ONLY THIS EMPTY SLOT (Why more ads? When one ad has reached its page view limit there is the need of another ad running immediately).

It is better to pay more for this Network ad and have a SATISFIED PUBLISHER as they are the majority who approve at the moment Network ads (with too little to earn).

Otherwise there will or are already more and more publisher who let the current Network ads pending or cancel it immediately as soon as they are queued up!

I believe Network Ads can get a success when the payout for publishers is significant higher than with the current system and if it doesn't influence the actual campaign advertiser (like it does now if you approve additional Network ads).

To join the discussion i published this article in the CMF Ads forum, too!

CMF Ads: Network Ads - bad for most publishers, good for some advertisers

2010-01-27T23:57:00.004+08:00

Yesterday CMF Ads launched Network Ads within their System. It's a new way to get your name out in the blogosphere. With a Network Ads you can advertise on over 640 blogs for a time period of 30 days and it costs only 10$ (similar to Adgitize, mostly rotating ads, just no need to click on your ads!).

Is this good or bad news for Publishers?

There are different opinions as it depends how many page views your blog gets in these 30 days, which ad price you have set and how many ad slots are available or empty! The more ad slots available, the better your "return" for each Network Ad. This said, perhaps you should choose the 4 or 5 ad slot widget from now on to earn additional from the network ads and the classic ads.
What about Ben's discussion about an Advertisement experiment
In short: Reduce your ad slots (to one for each ad network), so that the readers don't get swamped with ads (and you could maximize your earnings).
That's what i call double standard in CMF Ads because NOW you SHOULD maximize your ad slots like Turnip reminded some members in the forum otherwise you WON'T earn anything from the Network ads + classic ads (and your direct classic/campaign advertisers wouldn't get much exposure).
It looks now similar to Adgitize, the more ads you display, the higher is your share on the overall ad views of the specific Network Ad. Only that you could get paid more in Adgitize (even when you don't click and write just occasionally an article daily, you could earn 1-3 cents DAILY not within 30 days).

What influences do the Network Ads have on your earnings?

This depends how many ads you have currently running. In my case i run already 9 ads on 5 ad slots with 8.000 overall page views. The 9th ad can expect 4.500+ ad views (i guess more as soon as some of the other ads expire in the following two weeks).

ADDING ONE of the Network ads reduces the page views to 4.000/month
ADDING a SECOND Network ad the page views would be again 10% lower - just 3.600
For each additional ad the available page views would be reduced by around 200 - 250.

At the moment there are 8 Network ads in the system (including mine), this would mean my classic/campaign advertiser who paid up to 60 cents for their ad would get an immediately effective CUT of 60% in page views (from 6.000 ad views down to around 2.400 ad views) for the rest of their ad period and in the end their clicks are lowered probably by more than 60%.

WOULD YOU LIKE THAT SOMEONE CUT OFF YOUR PAID AD VIEWS in this way?
In my case, i will weed out in 3 - 7 days the ads which i have previously placed as some of them are no more WORTH THEIR money because of the extremely reduced ad views!
You can look it up in your Ad history and see how many ad views you got in the last days (divide it by the days), how many ads are running now on the advertised widget and then use this formula to see the NEW daily ad views for your ad and COMPARE if it's worth!

Ad slots/running ads * page views / 30 days

How much can you earn as Publisher from the new Network ads?

Now to the earnings estimation
The advertiser paid 10$ - 1$ is for CMF Ads and 9$ will be divided by all publishers who approved the Network ads.

There are over 600 blogs in the system: 900 cents/600 blogs = 1,5 cents (average)

What does this average price mean for you?

From the old ranking system by page views (which was ironically discontinued in early January) i remember that around 1.800 - 2.200 page views have been necessary to reach a rank of 300 out of more than 600 blogs. But this rank was just a page view ranking, not the real ad view ranking (more ads running than ad slots available reduce the ad views)!
But overall page views of your blog is not everything like i mentioned before, it depends how many ads you have already running!! And with actually 8 NETWORK Ads these page views will get reduced by more than 50%, even with a 5 ad slot widget, not to mention when you have only a 1 ad slot widget (from 2.000 ad views down to 222 ad views/month with previously ONE AD running).

Someone with 5 ad slots and 2.000 page views earns more than someone with 1 ad slot and 5 running ads and the same page views because the Network Ad would get just 20% (400) of the 2.000 page views. In the end you get less than the average 1,5 cents.

My Network Ad gets at the moment around 12.900 ad views/day (it's the first day so there will be a lot of blogs who have not yet approved these new Network ads or who will reject them during the 30 day period after reading this article!). This would equal to 387.000 ad views/30 days.

Here are real numbers from my campaign in terms of ad views of my ad on other blogs!
If you run my ad and you might get at the end of the 30 days (i will update this section daily)

2.000 ad views (daily: 67), you could get 2.000/387.000 * 900 cents = 4,65 cents,
the person with just 400 ad views (daily: 13) will get 0,93 cents and
the other member with 100 ad views (daily: 3) 0,233 cents.
To get the average price of 1,5 cents 645 ad views (daily: 32) would be necessary.

I'm curious, how much ad views did my ad get on your blog in these days?

Now lets look at Turnip's Electric Car Blog -
16 ads running (canceled mine as i'm in his opinion an attention seeking jacka$$ because i show off the negative things for publishers/classic advertisers - my tone is just more aggressive than from the other members who complain) -
480 page views - 4 ad slots = 120 ad views gives him a whopping 0,28 cent for each Network ad instead of the 2 cents which he usually charges.

Isn't that a lot of money for a 30 day? It's faster to get this 0,28 cent by clicking one more Spikes each month, isn't it :)

My advice:

Network ads might be worth the money for members who

have not many ads running and expand their widget to the maximum of 5 ad slots
have empty slots
will have empty slots in the next 12 days (this means, don't put your ads on auto-approval, let the ads pending until they get auto-approved after 12 days or cancel the ad on the 11th day or approve the ad within the 12 days as soon as you have an empty slot)

If you approve a Network ad you should cancel the Network ad when you get again a classic/campaign advertisers because they give you the REAL EARNINGS and for them each CLICK/Page view is counting (more ad views for them, higher possibility of a click, better return, might advertise again), a Network Advertiser doesn't care about your earnings (earnings from Network ads will be at least 70% less than what you usually charge).

Another tip for your CMF PROFILE!

Write it detailed in your CMF Profile description if you allow Network ads or not and if allowed how many you approve and if you cancel the Network ads when a classic/campaign advertiser buys an ad space (which just filled out the usually "empty" CMF Ad house slot)!

As soon as the first payout will take place in March (as there are several members who don't approve the ad, so it will take 42 days until payout), less members will approve the Network ads when they see that they earned less than the average 1,5 cents and lost traditional advertisers for which they charged 5, 10 or even 30 cents.

EntreCard: Another Ad Scam! In your queue, too?

2010-01-26T11:57:00.003+08:00

As i logged in my EntreCard Dashboard to see which ads have been auto-approved in the last days i came across this ad on the left side. It was paid with ECs (it's not one of the sponsored Ads!).
This is NOT an ad for a blog. This is an ad for Sponsored Tweets from Izea. It means it's an affiliate ad. If i would run this ad on my blog, you would be redirected to Sponsored Tweets Sign-up page.

It's similar to the ads which showed up in the previous month. Someone just edited the landing page and EntreCard does not check this change of your landing page!

If you see this ad in your advertiser queue, PLEASE REPORT IT to EntreCard.
So that they can delete this blog and of course you should REJECT the ad!

Tomorrow i will blog about the new feature in CMF Ads - their Network Ads for 10$ (what's good or bad about it for publishers and advertisers)

In two days i will post "Facts about Sponsored Tweets and other money-making programs for Twitter - how to be successful with these programs".

Small Adgitize update: You can already login and do your clicks, the stats haven't been updated yet but you still CAN'T renew your ad! -> follow me on Twitter for realtime updates from Adgitize's forum!

UPDATE on Adgitize is down! Official announcement!

2010-01-25T08:42:00.012+08:00

Adgitize is back again, you can do your usual blog hopping and checking your accounts - Twitter updates from Adgitize's forum are now available from my Twitter account!

At the moment renewing of your ad is not possible still "The connection was reset"-message!

3rd Update: Read the update at the end of the post + in the comments!

You can access the Adgitize website only with the Adgitize.net url BUT YOU CAN ACCESS ONLY THE BLOG AND THE FORUM (all other links will redirect you to Adgitize.com which is DOWN!).

On the forum they posted this announcement:

Just a notice to those who do not know already, the Adgitize server is currently down. We are looking into the problem now and hoping to have it back online soon. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Here is the link to this post

Some further messages from the Adgitize support and the reason why i didn't get any response to my e-mail:

Very frustrating, but no updates as of yet. Hoping that Monday morning will bring about some positive responses from our server. Again huge apologies!

And unfortunately this has knocked out our email as well, so sorry to anyone who has been trying to get ahold of us. We will respond to emails as soon as everything is back online.

Second update (my questions got answered in the forum):

Me:
Just wanted to ask what happened with the members who couldn't click?

Will you adjust the points to the points from the previous day as everyone will have lost the page/ad view points + some members their click points (important for the Preferred Publisher program, too).

My ad has expired yesterday, will the ads be extended by the time of the downtime (1 or more days)?

Support Adgitize:

We will make sure everything is taken care of for points and for the advertisers. Still trying to get this taken care of, really hoping it's back up soon. Expected it to be running again by now, very frustrating for us as well.

3rd Update - Real-Time update in my (your) Twitter account, Same happened one year ago, too?

In case you want to know the real-time development and the announcements of the Adgitize forum, simply follow me in Twitter - Cornyman.
I set up a twitterfeed which will cover all updates from the Adgitize forum, so we will never miss their announcements and our comments. It will link directly to the forum post, so you can read directly what's the whole message!

John from Ask the Blogster wrote in the comments that the "same" happened last year in January 2009. A sudden downtime - i researched it in the forum and it's true. One day earlier on 23rd January 2009 the server went down for more than 10 days.

You can read about this problem on the following Forum discussion "Login and widget problems" and a second discussion "Adgitize ads not showing up". Please don't forget the offers in these previous discussions are related to the problems at that time. Perhaps the same solution will be offered to us again (a one month ad extension) :)

Adgitize is down! What are you doing now?

2010-01-24T23:50:00.001+08:00

Adgitize seems to be down since 10 pm Malaysian time (2 pm GMT). That means i can't renew my ad which will expire in the next 12 hours and i didn't click my 50 ads too.

Additionally the ads are not displayed on our blogs which means our page and ad views will be lower than normal. Until now i can't see any message on Adgitize's Blog which would indicate how long the website will be offline or what has been the cause for this unexpected downtime. In the past Ken Brown usually informed us about this kind of interruption.

So what are you going to do today (without Adgitize)? :)

Save your MONEY - ICECOLD!

2010-01-20T23:58:00.003+08:00

Did you ever enjoy a drink with lots of ice cubes in it?
What was your feeling while drinking it?

Hmm...

it refreshes my body
it keeps me cool on a hot day
simply delicious
and so on

but hold on before you start dreaming from your next ice cold Coke, Pepsi, Sprite or Ice Tea :)

What was your feeling after you finished the glass of your chosen drink?

Too less?
So many ice cubes left?
Still thirsty - Shall i wait until the ice cube turn into water?

If you look how many ice cubes restaurants and fast food chains put in your favorite drink, you can see very fast how less worth the spent money was (if you don't get directly a bottle + a glass with ice like in the picture above).

Up to 50% of the content of your drink is pure water/ice cubes.

In case you want to save money ask the next time in your restaurant

for a bottle + separate glass with ice cubes
for less ice cubes in your drink
or for no ice cubes in your drink

Unfortunately some restaurants react already on such requests (without ice) and increased the price for ice less drinks, so take care of it before you order!

I'll go now for my own Ice Tea, bye bye!

777$- Adgitize - Ads- Giveway + Haiti Donation Challenge

2010-01-18T23:55:00.005+08:00

Let's start with the Giveaway of 111 Adgitize ONE WEEK Ads with a value of 777$.
To be part of this Giveaway you just have to write a blog post and mentioning how to enter the contest, which prizes are given away & what i will donate to UNICEF USA.

How to enter the contest:

Write in your own words why you would like to win an Adgitize ONE WEEK Ad!

If you have several blogs, you can write for up to 5 blogs such a blog post.

Mention my blog + a link to this post + for each blog post i will donate 10 cents to UNICEF USA!

Each blog post qualifies for all twelve drawings + all surprise drawings throughout the year 2010.
If you're not yet member of Adgitize you can get automatically qualified for a FREE ONE WEEK AD from Adgitize. Simply sign up using the large banner on top of this blog and be my referral!

If you like to get an additional chance to win (a second ONE WEEK AD), you still can follow Number 1 after you got your FREE ONE WEEK AD.

For each referral who hasn't advertised yet and takes the Giveaway-Offer, i will add 1$ to the UNICEF-Donation!

The advantages of a ONE WEEK AD in Adgitize:

You get FREE Traffic for one week on average you will get 350 - 500 visitors for a one week period. You can earn additional money in Adgitize when you visit 50 blogs & write daily one blog post.
Scoring between 300 - 470 points can give you between 35 and 60 cents daily when you advertise + blog hop + post daily.

The Giveaway prizes:

Monthly Giveaway of 1 ONE WEEK AD until end of 2010 -> 12 Ads (choosen by Random.org)
Surprise Giveaway of additional ONE WEEK ADs throughout the year to referral & posting participants (choosen by Random.org)

Referral Giveaway up to 99 ONE WEEK ADs unlimited time offer!

There will be three additional posts for this contest to keep track of the participants (who wrote a blog post), the winner of the monthly Giveaways and the referral Giveaway (all getting link love from this PR3 blog).

Each time 10$ in donations are reached, the amount will be sent via Paypal to UNICEF USA.
A payment proof will be shown after payment has been sent to UNICEF USA.

DON'T FORGET, you are doing a good job if you write ONE BLOG POST and getting the chance of winning more than 12 times a ONE WEEK AD from Adgitize, in exchange we help the children in Haiti with each blog post (10 cents) & referral (1$).

Inspired by Alyssa Milano's Haiti earthquake Tweet Challenge!

2010-01-16T23:31:00.002+08:00

Alyssa Milano, the famous actress from "Charmed"and one of my favorites, started on 15th January a Tweet Challenge in which she wants that corporations shall match her own donation of 50.000 $ for the disaster relief in Haiti after the earth quake which might cost 100.000 persons their lives and several millions will stay homeless for weeks or even months.

Her successful charity funding in December 2009 as she wanted instead of own birthday presents a donation to Charity: Water which was mainly promoted by tweets of her and many thousand other twitter followers around the Twitterverse, it won't take long and she can write again history with her new approach for Haiti!

She estimated 25.000 $ for her last funding but she ended up with over 92.000 $ (after a major donation by her husband).

I think it's a clever way from her to ask additionally just for 50.000 $, instead of donating 1 Million $ like Sandra Bullock and Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie have done it in the last days. Usually the smaller amounts of 5, 10 or 25$ let the funding raise much faster than the few BIG amount.
That's why the Red Cross has collected with their Text message campaign (each SMS - 10$ donation) already over 4 million $ in the last few days!

Why do i want to combine my Adgitize ad - Giveaway with Unicef Charity founding?

Something has to be done by myself and i think it's better to let other bloggers help me to get the word out of it
1. In exchange they'll have the chance to win each month a one week Adgitize ad (7$) or to get a bonus if they sign up with Adgitize
2. The victims and survivors of the Haiti earth quake get additional donations for each Adgitize referral (1$) & each written blog post (0,10$)
I was completely surprised after i tweeted Alyssa Milano about a FAKE Milano account who tweeted about the Tweet Challenge.
Suddenly i got a Direct Message from Alyssa Milano in my account, she actually read my tweet and wrote me the following message:
I choose UNICEF as Alyssa Milano is a goodwill ambassador for them and 100% of the donations will be transferred to the projects (we don't loose it to administration and so on).

At last, did you know that 10$ can give 1.000 persons for ONE DAY clean water?
This said, every $ which is donated can save lives or improve the lives of these victims & survivors.

I hope you support me by writing a blog post in the next days and raising awareness for donations and help for HAITI! (Contest post will be published soon)

Adgitize: The 7th payment proof rocks!

2010-01-15T23:50:00.001+08:00

Some days ago a lot of members of Adgitize received their payout after they reached the limit of 10$.

In my case it has been an astonishing 46.91 $ which means i got more money from Adgitize than i have paid for my 24$ ad in the beginning of December.

My real Adgitize earnings have been 29.91 $ - the difference of 17$ was achieved by 4 referrals who advertised in December. One new advertising referral contributed with 8$ and two others with 2 + 3 $, additional there is for each of the 4 referrals a 1$ bonus if they start + continue advertising in the following months.

For this and the following months i'm cautious optimistic that i can get enough earnings to reach the ad price of 14$ as the earnings have been significantly lowered from January 2010 on.

Earnings round-up (higher earnings on weekends):
200 points - 6 - 9 cents
290 points - 11 - 16 cents
300 points - 30 - 35 cents
400 points - 45 - 50 cents
450 points - 51 - 58 cents

Lucky about my achieved earnings over the last eight months, i will launch officially my 777$-Adgitize-1-WEEK-Ad-Giveaway (111 ads for 7$).

It will be a combination of Giveaway and charity funding as we all know that Haiti was hit by its strongest earthquake in its history.

I will donate 0,10 $ for everyone who writes a blog post about the contest, additionally you will have a monthly chance of winning a ONE WEEK AD in Adgitize throughout the year 2010.

For each of my referrals who will take my offer of grabbing the ONE WEEK AD (for free), i will donate additionally 1$ to UNICEF USA (as 100% of the money will go directly to the victims and not into some administration costs!).

My reasons for this kind of combination and the "rules" of the contest will be published within the next hours!

Adgitize: AdgiScore Statistics getting colorful!

2010-01-13T23:56:00.001+08:00

Today, Adgitize announced that they implemented some new features into their AdgiScore statistics.

You can see now all blogs in the account of the blog owner (in case there is more than one blog registered)
You can see a daily updated graph with the statistics of your Traffic Rating and your AdgiScore over a period of 31 days.

After i typed in my Money-Blog, i captured the following screenshot:

What's your impression of this new improvement?
And what's your AdgiScore :)?

ONE DAY without Internet - What would you do?

2010-01-12T07:17:00.005+08:00

This is a question which i had to answer yesterday as my Internet provider suspended my account for most of the day. The suspension was due to a mistake in their accounting program and our payment was not booked correctly. So they (P1 WiMax - Malaysia) thought we have been over the due date :(

After a short talk on the phone and clarify that the payment was made already last week the accountant told me that it could take up to 24 hours until the Internet connection will be restored.

ONE DAY without Internet - at first i thought IMPOSSIBLE... but after a while i came to the conclusion what have i done in the past as there was NO Internet?

With my own family and a lovely almost 11 months young boy it's different than it was 10 years ago when the Internet-Hype started to spread. There i was single and had enough time to "waste" it surfing the Internet (mainly trading stocks, warrants and options, chatting with friends and flirting on dating sites :) ).

Now there was much time left to focus completely on our boy, play with him, laugh with him - precious moments!

During his napping times we could do our house chores and have a quick read of a book and after the rain had stopped in the evening, it was time to do some shopping while my wife took care of our son.

What i missed during the INTERNET-FREE time?

Nothing (i might missed some earnings in Adgitize and couldn't post my Adgitize Give-Away yet... but what do a few cents mean in comparison to a lucky laughing boy - this time-out was worth every lost penny!)

Luckily there haven't been other bills due in the time of our suspension - i think this would have been one of the disadvantages of being too dependent from the Internet - Online banking :)

Time is Money, but Money doesn't buy you more time...

WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you had to live (unexpected) ONE DAY without Internet?

Adgitize: AdgiScore + Traffic Rating

2010-01-10T23:51:00.000+08:00

Adgitize announced today a new method to measure your Blog Rating (or Ranking) and a easy comparison with other Adgitize members (in Adgitize's blog it's called competitors but i believe we are a big family as we have to visit each other daily to reach our 100 click points). The new measurement is called AdgiScore and represents a mixture of your daily Adgitize clicking, page views of your blog and blog updates.

The clicks have the least influence in this AdgiScore and are calculated for the last 31 days.
Your blog updates (posts) are calculated into the AdgiScore for the last 31 days.
The page views are at the moment only calculated into the AdgiScore from the previous day (as more data is available this might get expanded)!
The lower the numbers of your Traffic Rating & AdgiScore, the better is your ranking inside of Adgitize!

Ken Brown's explanation for the purpose of AdgiScore (like written in the Adgitize Blog comment):

The goal for the AdgiScore in my mind is giving members an idea of how active a blogger is. Did the blogger just create a blog and hasn’t touched it for years? Or are they actively writing and visiting other blogs?

In my experience, if you are visiting other blogs you are more likely to be commenting and making relationships with other bloggers. Both of these events are huge when it comes to long term success in blogging.

Additionally there is a Traffic Rating available which shows the Page view rank in comparison to all active Adgitize publishers with ads on their blogs.

In case you want to advertise on Adgitize blogs, you can check now how they are ranking inside of Adgitize and how they interact with the blogging community by posting article and visiting other blogs (in comparison to your own rank and in a few days/weeks more statistics will be available).

The Ranking system is for everyone to use, even when you're not an Adgitize member. In this case CMF, EntreCard members or other bloggers could look up your Rating Scores before buying an ad on your blog :)

Here is the Screenshot of the new baby from Adgitize - AdgiScore + Traffic Rating with a short explanation how to use the new rating system.

In case you want to know your own blog rating you could join Adgitize now for free - The ad network with World Class Advertising on a Blogger's Budget
(Additional there is paid advertising available for 7$, 10$ and 14$ you could get 50 -80 visitors/daily).

My (old & new) referrals (who didn't advertise yet) get as Welcome-Bonus a ONE WEEK AD (value 7$) for free to start immediately with a traffic boost into this NEW YEAR 2010!

More details -how Non-Referrals and referrals who advertised already can join- about this 777$-ADGITIZE 1-WEEK-AD-Giveaway will be published on 11.November 2010.

First winner who got a ONE WEEK AD in Adgitize (left 110 from 111 ONE WEEK ADS):

Marice from Life can't wait

CMF Ads - A critical look - Part 1

2010-01-05T23:45:00.003+08:00

As we are heading now into Week 3 of CMF Ads new blog traffic option "Spikes" and several blog reviews about "Spikes" later, it's astonishing how positive some members are about the "Spikes".

Who are these members who have a positive attitude towards "Spikes"?

Most of these members are "CMF Ads only"-members with no affilation to EntreCard or Adgitize. Some of these members get only 5 - 30 visitors per day when i look at the statistics which CMF Ads provides.
Sure they are lucky to get -usually within 3 days- 50 additional visitors for 20 cents instead of spending three to five $ for different ad spaces on other CMF blogs to achieve the same result (within 30 days) if you can achieve so many clicks at all.
Some members are EntreCard members, but again with just a small portion of traffic and mostly not very active in EntreCard, as always there are exception when we talk about more than 175 spikes advertiser (Admaster and Frugal Housewife, Kitchen Retro, Virtual Dime Museum).
The other members are Adgitize members who are not advertising, so they don't get automatic traffic to their blogs. It's the same reason like in No. 1 - it's cheap traffic.
By calling it "cheap" i really mean cheap!

Looking at the numbers from my Spikes #2 and #3, especially after you strip them down into real statistics and not just the average numbers of received visitors shows a complete different picture of the visitor's quality - not like the Admin's of CMF want to tell you that they give you better visitors than EntreCard or Adgitize or that their system is better as you don't have to write an article/daily to earn points, waste time by visiting other blogs!

Spikes - 2- just 31 seconds stay (average) but from the 46 recorded visitors (60 visitors overall including the additional 10 free visitors from 29th December) only 5 stayed longer than 0 seconds!
Spikes -3- getting better after i published the CMF Spikes poll -but only 25 visitors gave their votes yet- even when there have been 50 CMF visitors?

CMF Ads - SPIKES Poll: Your experience!

2009-12-29T23:50:00.000+08:00

Today i want to know what did you experience when you bought a Spikes at CMF Ads.
Was it worth the 20 cents to get 50 visitors in around 2 - 3 days or wouldn't you buy it anymore?

What effects had the Spikes caused on your blog?

Choose the effects of your Spikes in the poll (multiple answers possible) and show us how effective the Spikes have been or haven't been.

If something is missing or if you want to add some numbers, leave a comment!

CMF Ads: My results of the SPIKES

2009-12-27T23:54:00.006+08:00

Image by hongiiv via Flickr

I tried the new feature in CMF Ads called Spikes at the Christmas weekend. It took 3 days during this time from 24th - 27th December until i received 50 "unique" visitors from CMF Ads.

Let's look at the numbers from Google Analytics:

32 from 50 visits have been recorded - which leaves 18 visits as Drop & Run visits (36%)

From the 32 visits only 43,75 % (14) have been NEW VISITS (unique)
The average time on the site from these 32 visitors has been 1:32 minutes (40 seconds more than my usual average time)
Bounce rate & Page views (can't be calculated as my code was duplicated and i just changed it to the new Analytic codes on 26th December) - therefore i bought a new spike to test it again :)
The recorded visits (32) accounted for 3.3% of my overall visitors (946) in these three days.

My Conclusion

As we usually shouldn't count Drop & Run visits because there is no real value in them, i paid 20 cents for 32 visitors (0,625 cents/visitors) who stayed longer than the average visitor on my blog.

The longer on-site time could be connected with my article about CMF Ads and the comments from CMF admins as only CMF members visited me through CMF Spikes.
We will see what happen when i don't update or have another topic as myr first article in the future.

As CMF Ads doesn't know which member visited me already from EntreCard or Adgitize the uniqueness lacks in my opinion. New visits have been just 43,75% which means there are more than 50% who visit me regularly from EntreCard/Adgitize/CMF Ads.

At the moment i believe the drop & run visits will increase as there is nothing that stops the member (like EntreCard where you have to "look for" the Drop box or in Adgitize for the next ad to click on), especially if they have already visited me from EntreCard/Adgitize on the same day!

The Bounce rate might increase as well as more and more members have already visited your blog from the previous Spikes purchase, following this the average time on the site will decrease.

Using Spikes as a permanent way to drive traffic to your blog is not the best way if you DON'T UPDATE YOUR BLOG before you buy a new SPIKES.

The Spikes will be used up during the weekdays (and after they are now established) faster than during the last few days as more and more members see this as a way to earn easily money for their advertising campaigns (DROP & RUN TRAFFIC).

Actually there are have been more than 109 Spikes member which would give you already 21,8 Cents if you have visited them (enough to self-fund a SPIKES) and new blogs are added each hour.

UPDATE:
After 4 hours i received -for my SECOND SPIKES- 10 CLICKS from CMF Ad members, only 3 got recorded by Google Analytics with an average time on the site of 0 seconds and 1 new visitor (who also didn't like to read)!
That's being said, i seem to be right that it's more for the incentive of 0,2 cents than for staying and reading the actual blog (after the blog might have been visited in the previous days)!

What should YOU DO?

Give it a ONE-TIME try, 20 cents is not much for getting up to 50 visitors who stay a while on your page.

Don't expect many comments (got 5 comments from CMF only members, the other comments were mainly given because i commented on their blog!)
Write about your experience with CMF SPIKES or a topic related to CMF members/blogger to attract them a little longer on your blog, express your views in the CMF forum :)
Members with mainly paid post may get visitors but i doubt that Google Analytics will count this visits (after a second Spikes is purchased) as the first impression of a blog counts - similar to Adgitize where many members avoid ads which haven't Adgitize ads on it themselves, members remember "bad blogs".
Buy a second SPIKES after some days not immediately after your FIRST ONE has expired!

NEW @CMFAds - Get a Traffic Spike!

2009-12-24T12:38:00.004+08:00

I just logged in at CMF Ads and what did i see a new way to get TRAFFIC to your blog! And it's a cheap way, too.

You just pay 20 cents and can get 50 visitors (0.4 cents/visitor) to your blog with the new TRAFFIC Option called Spikes.

The Advantages of Spikes

As an incentive to use this new TRAFFIC Option called Spikes the members who click on your Spike will receive for each click 0.2 cent.

That means if 50 blogs have bought an Spike (at the moment: 60), you can get 10 cents when you visit all 50 blogs. This money can be used "immediately" (i had around 5 minutes delay in recording these spikes in my funds) to buy an ad on other blogs. No longer waiting for 30 days until your first ad on your blog has finished!

As a security to get unique visitors, you can't click more than once each day on these blogs. After you refresh the page the already clicked blogs will disappear until 24 hours are over (UPDATE: or if already 50 other members have clicked on that blog it won't appear on the same day and on the following days, only if the advertiser buys again a spike!).

This system is only for Publishers, advertiser can't take part in Spikes!

The Disadvantage of Spikes

I think it will be the same like we can see in EntreCard and Adgitize with an incentive system to produce clicks (visits) for the members who bought a Spike - not only your visitors will spike but your BOUNCE Rate will SPIKE, too :)

I just clicked the 20 available spikes and that's it, you don't have to click through to another ad (like you do with Adgitize) or look for the Drop box of EntreCard. The visit may last just for a few seconds in a worst case scenario.

Conclusion

The Bounce rate seems to get a problem (for the advertisers) as i had already visited most the Entrecard/Adgitize-Blogs which have been in the Spikes list.
Perhaps i will use from now on this Spikes List as my start for dropping my EntreCards and Adgitize clicking. As it will give me the incentive of getting some cents for advertising or recovering/reducing the costs of my own spikes.
But nothing really new when you already a member of EntreCard - there you get ECs for each visit on a members blog- or Adgitize - there you get click points which convert at the end of the day in cents, too.

It's kind of a new paid-to-click opportunity with less cents than from Neobux but it won't turn into scam like many other PTC-Sites as it is funded by the paid advertisers!

For me a good opportunity to find some new "CMF-Ads only"-Blogs which i have never visited in the past!

What would you think about producing not only some traffic for these members but also giving them some COMMENT LOVE for getting some cents incentive from CMF-ADS?

After i missed out to comment on the first 20 blogs, i started to comment on all the other 40 blogs and will further comment on the newly added blogs!

We will see in the next weeks how many members will renew their spikes and how it affected their visits/bounce rates!

If you like to use this new cheap system at CMF Ads or if you want to place an CMF ad on my blog for 33 cents (between 5.500-6.500 ad views/month for your blog, 8.000+ pageviews/month), simply sign up here.

ADGITIZE ADS NOW AGAIN ONLY 14$ + Giveaway of Adgitize ads!

2009-12-21T21:55:00.009+08:00

Adgitize has reduced the Ad price back to 14$ from today on. This was announced just minutes ago.

The members who bought ads with the higher prices will get an FREE EXTENSION OF THEIR AD DURATION (Cost will be paid by Adgitize):

If you have an ad in the system today at the higher rates then we will extend that ad for 22 days for $24 ad / 10 days for $18 ad / 5 days for $12 ad. Adgitize will pick up the cost during those extra days and you won’t see a reduction in publisher payouts with the extended ads. All ad bonuses will be paid at the level of the ad price. As we progress through January 2010 you will see earnings begin to drop each day as new ads enter the marketplace at the new prices. This will be a gradual process.

The effect on the earnings is similar to the earnings in November, this time just in the opposite direction - downwards.

To maintain a healthy financial level for Adgitize themselves, the earnings from the TOP EARNERS will be cut down by 2 - 4 $.
I think this means you only can get a cash rebate of a fully paid ad when you get more than 430 points from January/February 2010 on!

More information will come as soon as Ken Brown replies to the comments or in the forum to our questions!

UPDATE:
The affiliate / referral bonus will sink to 5$ for a 14$ ad, 3$ for a 10$ ad and 2$ for a 7$ ad!
For the existing members the traffic will sink from now 88 visitors back to 60 - 80 visitors (depending if we reach again the 200 advertiser accounts level in the next few weeks).
In the last 6 hours since announcement 5 new advertiser accounts (could be more than 5 additional ads) have joined to the new ad price!

That's why NOW IS THE TIME to sign up (if you're not yet an Adgitize member) and start advertising in the days before Christmas and get a nice traffic boost (up to 88 visitors/daily). The earnings will be high until mid of January 2010, afterward they will reach the level before the November price hike. You will see a good income in the next two weeks as most of the blogger are in holiday (especially as Advertiser with a 31 day ad for 14$).

BONUS for my REFERRALS (who haven't advertised yet or didn't renew their ad in the last 6 months)

A 777$ Giveaway in Adgitize FIRST TIME ONE WEEK ADS (111 ads)

You can choose between

50% of my referral income for your FIRST-TIME AD via Paypal (less fee of 0.30 $ +3.9% of the amount = 0.36 - 0.42 $)

for a one week ad (7 $) - 1,50 $
for a two week ad (10 $) - 2,00 $
for a 31 day ad (14 $) - 3,00 $

OR

a FREE ONE WEEK AD for 7$ (gives you 60 -80 visitors/daily -> 420 -560/week + earnings of 50 - 75 cents/daily, for the week up to 5 $ for you),

If you choose the ONE WEEK AD, you'll get a gift certificate from me (valid for 90 days).
PLEASE write me a comment on this post or in EntreCard a message so that i can sent you the certificate number (after affiliate approval from Adgitize) and you can use it immediately for your advertising and test yourself how much traffic and earnings you can achieve in this FREE WEEK.

Time to read Part 3 of Adgitize: Can we RISK advertising again? to see in which areas you can increase your earnings!

Adgitize: Can you RISK advertising again? -Part 3-

2009-12-20T23:50:00.002+08:00

The final part of the Adgitize series "Can you RISK advertising again?" which will give you some tips to increase your possible earnings in Adgitize.

After looking into the reason why we lost so many advertisers in Part 1 throughout November and in December (at the moment we are at 139 advertiser accounts), mostly because of the fear that the earnings would be lower than the invested money, second reason will be Christmas time and not being able to do the daily blogging task to reach acceptable points which was discussed in Part 2 of this blog series.

Increasing the possible earnings in Adgitize!

First of all, it's NO MORE RISKY to buy an ad in Adgitize :)
The only risk would be if you really want to gain back the whole invested money and you know for sure that are not able to do the necessary tasks (write daily ONE article + visit 50 advertiser) on more than 5 - 7 days in each month.
Even when you score on some days just 300 or 310 points (60 - 75 cents) and on 5 out of 7 days between 380 - 410 points (77 - 95 cents), you can earn back the invested 24$ (~ 78 cents/daily) for a 31 day Adgitize ad.
One of the most important advices which i can give is:

Put 10 Adgitize ads on your blog divided into 2 ad groups - like you can see on my blog (1 ad group with 1 ad and 1 ad group with 9 ads). There are many other possibilities how to mix the different ad groups so that it matches with your blog template.
Publish daily articles and click daily the necessary 50 ads (or 100 ads if you're not yet advertiser), DO THESE TASKS ESPECIALLY ON WEEKENDS!

WHY WEEKENDS and USA-Holidays CAN INCREASE YOUR EARNINGS BY 10% and MORE!
Weekends are usually days where many blogger take a break from blogging and take care of other activities. This is your chance to gain extra earnings in Adgitize!

Even when you score slightly lower ad and page view points during the weekends (i loose sometimes 20 points) as less blogger are active, you still can score the full points by visiting 50/100 advertiser and post an article.

In the past i scored each weekend (from Friday to Sunday) around 10 to 20% higher earnings than during the weekdays.
And if you are active on the special USA Holidays like on 4th July (Independence Day) or Thanksgiving (last week of November) or the upcoming Christmas days and New Year, you will see that your earnings on these days will move up by more than 20% (if you score your average points, in the point range 200 - 290 it can be that the earnings move less upwards as more members slip into this tier!).

MORE THAN ONE BLOG? Creating one or more accounts, what would be better for you?

This might be a difficult answer because it depends on your time and on your ability if you can write daily a blog for each of the containing blogs in your accounts.

If you combine all your blogs in ONE ACCOUNT, you can score higher ad/page view points. In my case i can reach already 100 ad view points if i get around 180 - 300 visitors to all of my four blogs. Now that i reach 100 ad view points i can't get anymore higher.

In this case it would be a possibility to split my four blogs in two accounts. If i would do this, i would put one high traffic blog and one low traffic blog into each account so that the earnings would be the same for both account.

Advantage of splitting your account

The first advantage of splitting your account would be that you have now the ability to get TWO (2) blogs for FREE into the Preferred Publisher list which can give you up to 20 visitors daily for each blog and additional 10 advertiser points in each account.

The second advantage would be that you can advertise two of your blogs. With just ONE ACCOUNT, you can advertise two or more blogs, too, but as Ken Brown mentioned yesterday :
If one blog has been clicked by a member, this member won't see anymore the second advertised blog during his actual advertiser visits!

Adgitize: Can you RISK advertising again? -Part 2-

2009-12-17T23:50:00.002+08:00

In response to two comments of Adgitize: Can you RISK advertising again? Part 1 and the following discussion in the Adgitize's Forum i wrote the following thoughts

The comments have been about a CHRISTMAS promotion for ONE DAY (Eli) or for several weeks (John). The promotion should allow advertisers to buy the ad again for 14$!

Like i mentioned in my response to John's and Eli's comment on my blog post Adgitize: Can you RISK advertising again? Part 1 i hoped that Ken Brown won't implement a ONE DAY Promotion. (Luckily he didn't)

This will lead to the same or worse EFFECT like the LAST MINUTE ADS in OCTOBER. A lot of advertisers whose ad will expire in the next days would wait the following days until Christmas!

This would lead to a further loss of advertisers (around 5 advertisers/daily). The earnings would already fall during the time until Christmas.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ON CHRISTMAS?

After "loosing" 70 ads in the system (many have been second, third ads which won't be bought anymore with the actual prices!) -which in my opinion is a natural cleaning process- the exact same would happen again. We gain 50 to 70 (old) advertisers, some with second or third ads.

The point system gets blown up (100 advertisers points x 70 = 7.000 points) but the earnings will SINK for everyone who advertises, when suddenly 30 - 40% of the ads in the system are CHEAPER than the previous 24$ ads.

It would make the whole system worse as the old 24$ ad would expire (from the advertisers who bought a second ad) and nobody would know if they can earn again enough to cover their costs in January/February.

Who would buy an ad in the first 2 or 3 weeks of January for 24$ when you know exactly you won't get your $$ back (many members only advertise when they can earn back their invested money) but "loose" more than 30% of your invested money?

This would cause a more severe problem from mid January on and you would see that the advertiser number would drop much more than now.

At the moment is Christmas time, it should be understandable for everyone that many members have to use their money for Christmas presents or just don't have so much time during these days to invest in blogging/blog hopping.

As soon as the new year begins and the NEW PAYMENT PROOF will show the results, new (and old) advertisers will join Adgitize again as the results will be the same like in the past (20%-30% of the advertisers reach the invested amount as payout).

At the moment you can achieve with 390 - 410 points 79 - 93 cents (which covers the cost for an 31 day ad for 24$ + a small profit of a few $), even when you would achieve just 310 points on one or two WEEKDAYS/week you earn between 60 - 70 cents.

PS: Perhaps a cash rebates for advertiser who advertise continuously (or for a special time frame - loyalty rebate) would be more acceptable or like in the Preferred Publisher Program, automatic monthly subscription with a rebate (22$) or quarterly advance payment (60$) would be more attractive promotions which wouldn't hurt the overall earnings of all advertisers/publishers as these promotions would be used only by a minority.

Now i got distracted from the comments as i had other ideas for my Part 2 of this post. I will write it in Part 3 before i start the NEW CONTEST.

Over the weekend i will launch an ADGITIZE Contest, the contest will last until END OF MARCH 2010 and might have a value of 1.212 $ (depending on the amount of participants).

Image via Wikipedia

Adgitize: Can you RISK advertising again? -Part 1-

2009-12-14T23:24:00.000+08:00

Image via Wikipedia

After the month of November has passed, we headed into December and many members of Adgitize have been in fear and some in panic when the new earnings bracket will be sustainable which was "promised" by Ken Brown in early October 2009.

There have been two different kind of members in October/November. One part of the members (advertisers) have bought a Last-Minute ad in the last days of October and finished the month of November with a (bigger) profit than the previous months.
Other members believed in the earnings prediction of Ken Brown from October and didn't buy in advance a second ad (or there was simply no money available). They had to buy later on the new priced ad for 24$. As there have been -until the last week (even last day) of November- over 40% of old 14$ ads, there hasn't been any possibility to make a profit with 24$ advertisements in November.

Is advertising in Adgitize getting RISKY?

In this environment it is common that a lot of members think buying a new ad for 24$ in Adgitize is now a risky investment. Like i mentioned in the beginning there have been a lot of Blog posts of previous Adgitize advertisers which have been afraid of buying an ad (or just buying it too early).
Even in the Adgitize forum and in the comment section of the Adgitize blog there have been several members questioning about the impact of the new earning bracket and when it will be worth again to advertise in Adgitize.
These events made more advertisers cautious and we saw a big decline in available ads. Like you can see in the graph below we started with 216 advertisers on 31st October and are now on 14th December at 146 advertisers, a loss of 70 advertisers.

Click the chart to enlarge (opens in NEW window)!

Even when the advertisers are declining there is still more money in the system than in the end of October when the ad price was just 14$ (216 x 14 = 3.024 $, 146 x 24$ = 3.504 $) which is one of the reasons that nearly everyone is earning more than in October and November (if you're still advertiser or have been every time publisher).

In Part 2 i show you if it's really risky to advertise and show some new options to earn with Adgitize!

The Holiday-Contest-Winners!

2009-12-12T23:54:00.002+08:00

Congratulations to the 10 winners:

1st Prize: from this week on 31 days
1 month ad - Mariuca's Perfume Gallery
2nd Prize: effective in January/February
2 weeks ad - Just Too Little Time
2 weeks ad - Mama ASID's ENTREPOD
3rd Prize: effective in February/March
1 week ad - My Quality Day
1 week ad - Earn Money Online with Red
1 week ad - Kamila the Camel
1 week ad - Leilanie's 101 in 1001 Challenge
4th prize:
2.500 EC - My Poem
5th prize:
1.500 EC - Just a Little Zizzy
6th prize:
1.000 EC - LadyJava's Lounge

Thank you to all participants in our Holiday-Contest... the next contest will come soon!

In the next two days the ONE MONTH ads will be online and the ECs will be transferred in your accounts (the three members who made a blog post will receive the additional ECs, too) :)

Not all members who dropped cards commented on all five blogs, so i only took the persons who commented on the specific blog into the drawing.

If someone won the same prize on another blog, this prize has been put back and was chosen again for another blog.

Winner of the ad prizes should comment on this blog and give me a link to their ad image which they want to display or tell me if i can use the EntreCard ad image!

Adgitize: Secret of getting an ad paid by Adgitize + make a profit with it!

2009-12-05T23:46:00.005+08:00

Do you want to know the SECRET how to get paid by Adgitize for your own 14$ ad? If you are a member, i guess you want to know, if you're not a member, this article will help you in finding an ad network that pays you (back most of your ad price) to advertise in its network!

UPDATE: There is a promotion running until 31st July 2010 which would pay you 14,57 $ for your invested 14$ if you are an active advertiser like described below!

Additionally you will get as my referral a FREE ONE WEEK AD (value 7$) which will give you between 250 - 500 visitors/week and up to 3.50 $ earnings in Adgitize - simply sign up by clicking on one of my Adgitize ads - the easiest way to monetize your blog and to get traffic to your blog!

My payment proofs from Adgitize from July since today 5th December 2009, always more than 14$/month (including referral earnings)!

Yesterday John Lottery from "Ask the Blogster" asked me -after reading the previous Adgitize blog post with my points and earnings statistic- how i could achieve these numbers as he only achieved a maximum of 480 points with TWO running ads (three blogs registered).
Eli came up with a similar conclusion as he only owns ONE BLOG, "Business Sphere"and his highest points have been just 425 (with one ad + paid preferred publisher).

In the last six month i could achieve daily in Adgitize 440 - 470 points (FOUR BLOGS registered) which has been nearly the maximum of the points (500 points until August, 600+ points since end of August).

The Basics in generating points in Adgitize

Click the necessary amount of ads until you see 100 in the blue field under the Adgitize ads (for publishers this are 100 different ads, for advertiser just 50 ads) -> 100 click points
Publish ONE article per day (more are allowed but don't give additional points!) -> 100 article points
advertise in Adgitize for 31 days (14$ = 45 cents/day, best value!) -> 100 advertiser points
Advertising gives you the necessary bonus -as you could see in #1-, less clicking and it will double your page/ad view points in #4
drive traffic like crazy to your blog, use EntreCard and drop 300 cards, find persons who reciprocate your drop, get into the TOP 15 spot of your category and make your way in the overall TOP 15 for total exposure and FREE advertising for your blog!

Why it is important to get to the TOP 15 in your category and in the end in the overall TOP 15!

If you start dropping cards look yourself for an ad image that makes other curious about you or write the purpose of your blog into the image (be creative).
By using EntreCard's own templates you should write in a few words "what is your blog about" to attract some members (usually less members click on these cards).

Looking in my Category "Finance and Investing" there is not much competition and it would be easy to climb from 0 to 350 member visits (popularity points) with just 3-5 days dropping 300 cards.
This would give you already some exposure for the persons who are interested in this category and you would get some free visitors, just because you are in the TOP 15.

To get in the category "Mixed Bag" into the TOP 15 you have to find a good strategy with dropping and it will take time (more than 2 weeks) to come closer to the TOP 15 as there are over 2.000 blogs.

Getting into the overall TOP 15 needs time -around one month- but with the following strategies it's easier for you to achieve!

Some different dropping strategies:

Drop on the 300 most popular blogs daily as they are usually daily active and most of them are reciprocating drops.
Build friendships by commenting on some of the blogs where you drop cards.
Commenting gives you exposure and a free text link (to your blog or blogger profile), especially if you comment on the TOP 30 blogs in EntreCard (as they get over 300 visitors from EntreCard!).
Be fast in commenting = make the comment as one of the first on each blog post, more likely that others will read it and visit you, if it's NOT A SPAMMING COMMENT or just a "Great post, nice article"-comment :)
Use Google Friend Connect or subscribe to the RSS-Feed so that you get their new blog posts automatically delivered!
Drop on popular blogs in your category (even if they are not one of the 300 most popular blogs) to make them aware of your blog and your interests, share your knowledge with them.
Drop on blogs who appear in your inbox, they might be interested in your blog and come back for a visit in the following days, too! Sort out blogs who didn't reciprocate your drops (if they are NOT OF INTEREST to you).
Advertise daily in EntreCard with the received ECs. Look out for "cheap" ad spots by checking the popularity points. Buy throughout the categories and buy at least each second day one ad which costs up to 512 EC, it's worth the ECs and with more traffic your own ad price will raise, too, giving you more ECs to invest in more ads!
Reward Top Droppers (look in your EntreCard Statistics) with link love, the easiest way is to join Dropaholics as they provide you with different widgets for your Top Droppers (you can see one in my sidebar, the largest one, small ones only show the ad pictures). Some members just visit you because of being an active member in Dropaholics (even if you don't drop back on them)! They just want to be on your TOP Dropper widget!

With these strategies you can get more visitors from EntreCard to your blog but your content should be attractive, too. So that they enjoy to visit you daily or frequently every other day.

If you write your content not only for your readers but partially for the Search engines (SEO), you will gain additional free traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Use Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Facebook and/or MySpace to increase your readership even more.

The page and ad view point system, the more points you want, the more you have to work!

The page view points are calculated in a very steep way. The maximum page view points (with FOUR BLOGS!) i could achieve was 60 points (originally it's 30 points as the points get doubled if you're an advertiser). Therefore i need 2.000 page views.
The highest page views i could achieve in the past have been 2.500 but nothing changed with the page view points, so this will be really hard for myself to achieve once the 70 page view points.

But you can influence the ad view points with the number of ads which you display and the number of ad groups!

Eli for example could improve his ad view points by adding one bigger ad blog with 9 ads or two different ad groups (one with two ads, a second one with eight ads). In this case he could achieve already the five fold of his page views. At the moment he gets just the 1,5 times his page views as he only displays ONE ad group with ONE ad and a SECOND ad group with TWO ads.
This change could be worth up to 30 ad view points, on average 20 more ad view points daily!

Choose two ad groups and mix them so that you show only a maximum of ten ads

For the ad views the point system (for advertisers) looks like this:

more than 10.000 ad views - 100 points (50 for publishers)
between 9.000 - 10.000 ad views - 90 points (45 for publishers)
less than 9.000 ad views - 80 points (40 for publishers)

As i didn't get 70 points in ad views, i can't tell you if 10 (5 for publishers) points are given for every 1.000 ad views. Therefore i would need your feedback :)

Another point which you should take into account - Preferred Publisher Program

Use the Preferred Publisher Program, it gives you free traffic (in case you click already daily the maximum of ads, 100 or 50) for one blog and additional 10 advertiser points. Otherwise read my guide for the Adgitize Preferred Publisher Program.
If you want to sign up for the paid Preferred Publisher Program, the prices start from 6$/month and you will get 25 advertiser points

Some other members achieve high points, too but only with more than ONE BLOG or several paid ads/preferred publisher!

In the Adgitize Leaderboard you can find in the TOP 10 usually only members with MORE than ONE BLOG (up to six blogs - Positive Men).
I would say everyone who has on average more than 470 points has two ads running or is PAID preferred publisher with a second/third/... blog as it's too difficult to jump over the 60 page view points.

I achieved the 500 points on 2nd of December just because i started my new ad at the same day as my old ad expired.
I wanted to see if there is a big difference in earnings but it seems it's just 1 or 2 cents for each 10 points in this area (different when you jump between from 270 to 300 or 370 to 400).

These have been a lot of tips how to achieve much more points in Adgitize, most of them are free, some might take additional time each day but in the end you will get most of the invested ad price returned by Adgitize!
In the past you simply had to achieve around 400 points on average to get paid by Adgitize for advertising (+ around 2000+ visitor/monthly) now it will be around 430+ points to achieve the same effect.

Join now, get traffic and make a profit with blogging!

Adgitize: Have you heard this news yet? I guess you have :)

2009-12-04T05:28:00.005+08:00

The next quicky about Adgitize as they published yesterday a blog post about new enhancements as we are now a group of more than 5.000 members (just 100 members one year ago!) and 150 advertisers! Congratulations to this achievement :)

The new enhancement would be that you can see now on the Preferred Publisher List the NEWEST ARTICLE of your blog.

But there is at the moment a glitch in the system if you have MORE THAN ONE BLOG registered in your account and if the blog which is preferred publisher is NOT THE BLOG which will be fetch by the Feed reader at first.

This problem will hit these members

who publish only one or two articles for their blogs per day but not necessarily for their preferred publisher blog (like it is in my case with The One Minute Guide - today there was my previous article from this blog mentioned!).
who have more than one blog in the preferred publisher program as the Feed reader only takes the first written post of the day from ONE BLOG

How to solve this problem!

Go to the Contact Us link (right side at the top) and write Ken Brown a message that he should temporarily disable to display the "Last post title" for your preferred publisher blog(s) until this glitch is resolved.

But you can use it for your advantage, too! :)

Just use an attractive title and when the members look now more for the title than the blog name, you can add up some new visitors or readers for that day (even when the post is on another blog, perhaps you should link in this case to this specific blog!).

Sign up additionally for the Preferred Publisher Program (see my Adgitize Preferred Publisher tutorial) in Adgitize to promote your website as this is now a much better value when you post interesting articles (it doesn't have to cost you a dime when you use the free option for one of your blogs!)

Update for the ongoing Project: Let's see what's going on in Adgitize (earnings/advertiser statistic to proof the earnings prediction from 7th October)

I will publish this update on the weekend or when the first weekly earnings are out (9th December) and it won't be anymore a simple list which takes you hours to read and look only at hundreds of numbers like in the last one :)

As for the first published earnings day on 1st December, i can say the effect was still influenced by the old 14$ ads as they expired on that day. We saw the biggest drop in advertisers with a loss of 13 "ads" from the system to 158 active ads.
On the 2nd December there has been a smaller loss of advertiser with just 6 leaving the system to 152 ads.
In the first hours of 3rd December we dropped further to 149 ads but recovered to 151 ads.
Same for 4th December dropped by 3 to 148, guess we will recover little bit :)

Even when we lost now advertisers, the earnings are still profitable for members who can score more than 400 points daily (will improve after the weekend!) and as advertiser you get again MORE CLICKS for your ads than in November!

Earnings for 1st December with 470 points - 0.88 $ (+10 Cents profit as 78 cents/daily needed to pay for an ad)

2nd December with 500 points - 1.06 $ (+38 Cents overall) -predicted earnings have been 1.20 $ but we have 30 advertisers less than in the prediction, a good enough number for the 1st day without old 14$ ads!!

Quickies for Adgitize, EntreCard, Contest, Comments

2009-12-02T05:31:00.002+08:00

Hi, we are back from the visit of my wife's relatives in Penang and Alor Star (Malaysia) since the weekend.

Just wanted to make some quick announcements about new additions in Adgitize and EntreCard, the Holiday-Contest and my reply to comments.

ADGITIZE

There is now an option to BUY GIFTCARDS for Advertisement in Adgitize. This option is useful for contests, for "donations" or just as a gift for a blogger friend. They are available as 12$ gift for an ONE WEEK ad, as 18$ gift for a TWO WEEK ad and as 24$ gift for 31 DAY ad.

Throughout the 1st December the advertiser keep on dropping, it's a fact now that we lost over 60 advertiser since the end of October 2009. But this fact should not make anyone worry to stop advertising NOW.
I will keep advertising but change the ad in Adgitize to our All about babies and kids-Blog from 3rd December on.
In case you like to visit me after my Adgitize ad expires, simply follow me with Google Friend connect, bookmark me or subscribe to my blog :)

Why NOT stopping to advertise?
In every month there have been only 20% of the advertisers who earned back the money of their bought ad, this has been like this since i joined in April (there they changed the earnings system to the actual point system). And it will be again the same in December because of the specific calculation for each 100 point tier. In the coming days there will be less members in the 300/400 point tier and we saw already this effect throughout the last few days (Thanksgiving holidays).
Members who can score more than 300 or 400 points will have more stable earnings than the members who slipped in the 200 point tier. They have to share the same amount of money with more members.

More reasons to start/renew your ad now!

The last two days i see a sharp increase in clicks to my blog (around 30%-50% from the average 77 clicks --> 30th - 96, 1st December - 123):

one reason is that more advertisers stopped their ads and have now to click 100 ads instead of 50
the other reason less advertiser means higher chances to appear more often on the ad widgets and get surely a click!

In case you are not yet a member, you can join Adgitize today, start earning $$ and get traffic.
If you advertise as my referral for the first time you get 50% of my finder fee (9$) which would be 4,50$ via Paypal (Paypal may deduct fees of less than 50 cents).

ENTRECARD

After the invasion of sponsored ads in the last week the run for it has stopped as many members don't see it as an effective advertisement (too expensive as the 25$ just lasts for less than 5 days, less clicks if you advertise in one and the same category with the whole 25$).
When the spike of 12 sponsored ads had been reached, the 15% reserved air time was even exceeded by EntreCard, as many members experienced less clicks from their EC-based ads!

As an addition in the CAMPAIGN section, they added a new sign for EntreCard sponsors. The sign is a STAR in the ad image. It is also written in the user profile of these members.
It means the member has paid 5$/monthly or 48$/year to opt-out of displaying sponsored ads. On these blogs you will get now 100% airtime for your EC paid ads!
I saw in the last days four blogs with the star (Ad Master, SpicyBugz World, 2 of Maitri's Blog).

The Holiday-Contest

Thanks to the members who participated in this contest. The winners will be announced on this weekend on each of the five blogs!

Reply to your given comments during our holidays

I will reply to your comments in the coming days, so come back or subscribe by e-mail to the comments to stay in touch with the ongoing discussions!

EntreCard: Revealing the Secret behind the 3 identical ads in your inbox!

2009-11-29T23:50:00.001+08:00

BigDaddyRichard from Trader's Hub wrote yesterday and Eli from Businessphere wrote today about an ad that appears in many of our EntreCard InBoxes not only once but three times.
In my case it appeared three times at the end of each day (since 27th November). I think the person behind this ad drops especially on the TOP 300 blogs to get as many clicks as possible for its purposes.

Big Daddy Richard and Eli think it is a trick of EntreCard as the same ad picture appears three times in your inbox.

But the solution is very simple, no trick by EntreCard but the member tricked EntreCard and its members.
And in this case it means, the member uses THREE DIFFERENT accounts for three blogs. As i read now the comments on some of the mentioned blogs (description below), it seems he setup these blogs in the past for other persons (or under other names) but they have the same appearance (blog templates). Some are not updated since August 2008!

If you hover with your mouse over the three pictures you can see that they are linked with three different member accounts
http://entrecard.com/t/oc/54360
http://entrecard.com/t/oc/53839
http://entrecard.com/t/oc/33411

To access now the user profile you have to take the number of each link and add it to
http://entrecard.com/user_details/

If you click on these three links, you will be taken to the three "different" accounts

http://entrecard.com/user_details/54360 --> http://entrecard.com/details/142085 Software Blog
http://entrecard.com/user_details/53839 --> http://entrecard.com/details/142089 Jennys Personal Blog
http://entrecard.com/user_details/33411 --> http://entrecard.com/details/141888 Reahsblog

The Software blog seems to have a redirect to the -for all three same- targeted web site http://blogproduction.blogspot.com/

If you click on the given URL in the Blog details it takes you to the above mention Blogproduction website (without any EntreCard widget).

Have a look at the MOST RECENT POST and click one of the posts, this will take you to the REAL Blog behind the picture (and all except the SOFTWARE BLOG and ReahsBlog which you can only access by the below mentioned Blogroll listing!) have an EntreCard widget.
If you look on this Blogproduction website you can see that in the Blogroll "Jennys Personal Blog" and "Reahsblog" is mentioned (there is the connection that it's the same user with different accounts, perhaps he wants to cash-in the referral ECs as linked blogs wouldn't be allowed to receive additional free ECs and so on?)

EntreCard System is too easy to abuse!

You just have to go to your Dashboard:

Take a look at the section "Your Blog" in the middle of the page
Click on "Edit"
Change the website URL to any other website which you would like to promote :)
Save it, EntreCard doesn't look any more if this is a page with EntreCard widget (otherwise these THREE blogs would have been already deleted!).
In case we report them, EntreCard might get active and sent a message to their Dashboard to place the EC-widget on this blog within a specific time frame (24 to 72 hours)

Adgitize: Let's see what's going on now!

2009-11-28T02:06:00.006+08:00

UPDATED Weekly - I will write a summary of the previous week in Adgitize each Tuesday (after the Sunday-Earnings are published)

Since 21st November i could achieve the necessary 80 cents (for 30 day months, 78 cents for 31 day months) with points between 450 - 470, on 26st November i achieved 97 CENTS for 470 points (Thanksgiving-Holidays in USA, lower overall points) and it's getting better each day, see at the end of the post!

With 74 ads to be renewed in the NEXT 5 DAYS (until 2nd December) we could see a drop in advertisers by 1st or 2nd December to less than 150 from actually 177 advertiser.

This said it means, you really can get profitable again as ACTIVE PUBLISHER (with 400+ points and 78 cents/daily!) by buying an ad for 24$ in Adgitize and you can boost your traffic by 70 - 100 visitors daily.

I will publish this and the next month statistics about the amount of advertisers in Adgitize, so that we can see how many renewed their ads and how many left Adgitize as advertiser after their price hike.

If you like to participate, you could also share your earnings per day and for which amount of points you got this earnings. I will share them now daily in this blog post!

Highest number of Advertiser on 31st October - 216

In this number are around 20 persons who bought a 2nd or 3rd ad for 14$ (instead of renewing their old ad for 24$).

This means that it will be most likely to see in the next two weeks a decrease of advertisers back to around 200 (like the number has been on 29th of October!).

On 2nd November the advertisers decreased already to 213 (-3).
On 3rd November the advertisers increased to 214 (+1, but still - 2 in comparison to 31st October). That means there has been at least one member who paid the new ad price!
On 4th November the advertisers decreased to 210 (-4 towards yesterday and -6 towards End of October).
On average each day 7 advertisers should renew their ad (210/30 days = 7 ads expire each day)
On 5th November the advertisers increased to 213 (+3, but still - 3 in comparison to 31st October).
On 6th November the advertisers decreased to 212 (-1, but still - 4 in comparison to 31st October).

Ken Brown commented yesterday on this post and wrote that since 5th November 24 members renewed/bought ads with the new price (if you calculate this for 30 days, we would have 150 advertisers until end of November).

On 7th November the advertisers decreased to 207 (-5 from yesterday and -9 in comparison to 31st October).
On 8th November the advertisers decreased to 201 (-6 from yesterday and -15 in comparison to 31st October)
On 9th November the advertisers decreased to 199 (-2 from yesterday and -17 in comparison to 31st October)
On 10th November the advertisers increased to 201 (+2 from yesterday and -15 in comparison to 31st October)
On 11th November the advertisers decreased to 199 (-2 from yesterday and -17 in comparison to 31st October)
On 12th November the advertisers decreased to 195 (-4 from yesterday and -21 in comparison to 31st October)
On 13th November the advertisers increased to 197 (+2 from yesterday and -19 in comparison to 31st October)
On 14th November the advertisers decreased to 195 (-2 from yesterday and -21 in comparison to 31st October)
On 15th November the advertisers stabilized at 195 (0 from yesterday and -21 in comparison to 31st October)
On 16th November the advertisers decreased to 191 (-4 from yesterday and -25 in comparison to 31st October)
On 17th November the advertisers decreased to 189 (-2 from yesterday and -27 in comparison to 31st October)
On 18th November the advertisers decreased to 183 (-6 from yesterday and -33 in comparison to 31st October)
On 19th November the advertisers increased to 184 (+1 from yesterday and -32 in comparison to 31st October)
On 20th November the advertisers decreased to 182 (-2 from yesterday and -34 in comparison to 31st October) (after the new day -21th- began the advertiser dropped to 176, let's see how many renew and how this affects the earnings over the weekend)
On 21st November the advertisers decreased to 180 (-2 from yesterday and -36 in comparison to 31st October)
On 22nd November the advertisers increased to 181 (+1 from yesterday and -35 in comparison to 31st October)
On 23rd November the advertisers increased to 183 (+2 from yesterday and -33 in comparison to 31st October)
On 24th November the advertisers decreased to 181 (-2 from yesterday and -35 in comparison to 31st October)
On 25th November the advertisers decreased to 179 (-2 from yesterday and -37 in comparison to 31st October)
On 26th November the advertisers decreased to 177 (-2 from yesterday and -39 in comparison to 31st October)
On 27th November the advertisers decreased to 175 (-2 from yesterday and -41 in comparison to 31st October)
On 28th November the advertisers increased to 176 (+1 from yesterday and -40 in comparison to 31st October)
On 29th November the advertisers decreased to 174 (-2 from yesterday and -42 in comparison to 31st October)
On 30th November the advertisers decreased to 171 (-3 from yesterday and -45 in comparison to 31st October)
After 12 hours we have on 1st December only 158 advertisers left (at the start of 1st December it have been just 156 advertisers)! --> More money left for the members who gain 300/400+ points, even when the earnings will be slightly lower (around 80 cents)

0.80 $ are needed daily to get a 24$ ad paid back (in the bracket you can see, if i reached this amount!)

1st November - 500 points - earnings: 0.79 $ (0.79 $ - 1 cent less)
2nd November - 500 points - earnings: 0.75 $ (1.54 $ - 6 cents less)
3rd November - 520 points - earnings: 0.75 $ (2.29 $ - 11 cents less)
4th November - 500 points - earnings: 0.72 $ (3.01 $ - 19 cents less)
5th November - 500 points - earnings: 0.70 $ (3.71 $ - 29 cents less)
6th November - 500 points - earnings: 0.72 $ (4.43 $ - 37 cents less)
7th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.73 $ (5.16 $ - 44 cents less) less overall points give higher earnings, look out for high points on weekends!
8th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.67 $ (5.83 $ - 57 cents less) seems to be so low from the massive drop in advertisers on Sunday
9th November - 470 points - earnings: 0.67 $ (6.50 $ - 70 cents less)
10th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.64 $ (7.14 $ - 86 cents less) the decrease in advertisers affects the earnings as the "old 14$ ads" won't get renewed until 1st December!
11th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.66 $ (7.80 $ - 1.00 $ less) like the day before... not many new ads are getting bought, earnings remain like in October for the next few days!
12th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.66 $ (8.46 $ - 1.14 $ less)
13th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.71 $ (9.17 $ - 1.23 $ less) higher earnings due to less overall points during the weekend!
14th November - 440 points - earnings: 0.76 $ (9.93 $ - 1.27 $ less) higher earnings due to less overall points during the weekend!
15th November - 440 points - earnings: 0.76 $ (10.66 $ - 1.31 $ less) higher earnings due to less overall points during the weekend!
16th November - 470 points - earnings: 0.73 $ (11.39 $ - 1.41 $ less) it seems like the earnings are rising for the first time even with less advertisers!
17th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.71 $ (12.10 $ - 1.50 $ less) it seems like the earnings are "rising" as we have less advertisers/points!
18th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.75 $ (12.85 $ - 1.55 $ less) after 3 days i think we can called it CONFIRMED the earnings are "rising" despite less advertisers!
19th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.77 $ (13.62 $ - 1.58 $ less) CONFIRMED the earnings are "rising" despite less advertisers, can buy new ad for 24$ in the next days!!
20th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.77 $ (14.39 $ - 1.61 $ less)
21st November - 450 points - earnings: 0.83 $ (15.22 $ - 1.58 $ less) FIRST DAY WITH MORE THAN 80 CENTS/DAY, overall weekend points low!
22st November - 470 points - earnings: 0.84 $ (16.06 $ - 1.54 $ less) SECOND DAY with more than 80 Cents/Day, even with 5% higher overall points but weekend!
23rd November - 470 points - earnings: 0.82 $ (16.88 $ - 1.52 $ less)
24th November - 470 points - earnings: 0.80 $ (17.68 $ - 1.52 $ less) It seems 180 advertisers is the limit to get 80 cents, let's see which earnings we can score for the 25th with just 179 advertisers!
25th November - 470 points - earnings: 0.80 $ (18.48 $ - 1.52 $ less) still could score 80 cents, even with just 179 advertisers and 1.700 more overall points in the system!
26th November - 470 points - earnings: 0.97 $ (19.45 $ - 1.35 $ less) Thanksgiving holiday weekend until 28th/29th November in the USA, low overall points!
27th November - 450 points - earnings: 0.98 $ (20.43 $ - 1.17 $ less) WOW, the highest daily earnings i ever got in Adgitize since i started in April 2009!!
28th November - 450 points - earnings: 1.05 $ (21.48 $ - 0.92 $ less), the best earnings but also the lowest overall points, earnings will be lower for the next two days but still around 80 cents :)
29th November - 460 points - earnings: 0.97 $ (22.45 $ - 0.75 $ less) USA back from holidays, overall points growing again, same will be valid for tomorrow!
30th November - 470 points - earnings:0.84 $ (23.29 $ - 0.71 $ less)

EntreCard: Facts about Sponsored ads!

2009-11-27T05:49:00.006+08:00

Like mentioned in the previous post about the first sponsored ad, we got this week a real invasion of sponsored ads (up to 12) from members of EntreCard. Yet there are still no advertisers from outside the blogosphere who wants to promote their products in the EntreCard network.

And there are good reasons for those Outside-Advertisers and EntreCard-Members NOT to spent a part of their budget in the EntreCard network

25 $ is good for only five days FULL EXPOSURE in the whole EntreCard community, for a targeted campaign it's depending on the amount of blogs and activity in the category (10 - 30 days).
For one month you would pay 150-200$ but if EntreCard members recognize there is NO CARD TO DROP or you DON'T drop back, the clicks will get less and less but the ad is paid by "automatic" ad views NOT for each click! The result will be disappointing over a longer period (more than one week!).
Goal of the ad campaign is to get more visitors (clicks)
EntreCard promotes the price of 25$ with 40.000 (over all categories) or 20.000 ad views (one targeted category).
The information Eli from Businessphere and Chinaren about their Click-through-rate is in my opinion more than disappointing for this 25$ investment.
You can get in these four - five days around 450 - 600 clicks, depending on the amount of sponsored ads and the approval of your sponsored ad by the EntreCard members.

In comparison to Adgitize -where you get "on Auto-Pilot" monthly around 2.000+ clicks for a 31 day ad for the price of just 24$ - the EntreCard-Deal is TOO EXPENSIVE especially when you see the 1-week-ad in Adgitize for 12$ which give you on average 77 clicks/daily = 540 click/week!
EntreCard "promises" EC-based ad price raises up to 2.000%.
This promise is just fulfilled if you have an ad price of 2 or 4 ECs!
Like we see/have seen on the actual sponsored ads which are in the TOP 15 most popular blogs (EZGreatLife, Businessphere, Seek No More, SpicyBugz World, The Junk Drawer), there was just a slightly higher ad price to achieve (from 1.024 to 1.536 or 2.048 EC) which is the normal price hike after a weekend (when the ad prices are always lower!).
Strangely the ad price went up for most of them as the sponsored ad has expired :)

You should think twice when you buy an ad on one of these sponsored ad members.
As i said, the ad usually runs just for five days (the sponsor has the possibility to pause the ad, too, and run it hours, days or weeks later again as long as there are remaining funds!).

If you buy there an ad, the ad price should be lower than 32 EC, otherwise the traffic surge has stopped already when your ad runs and in case the member didn't drop back, your investment might be worthless.

What's positive on sponsored ads in EntreCard?

If you are for a few days not available for dropping your cards, you could buy your sponsored ad to maintain your position and your ad price in EntreCard or ad/page view points in Adgitize (but like i said, it's expensive).
You could reach immediately many blogs without spending tons of ECs to advertise (success is around 1,5% of the ad views give you clicks for all categories and 3-4% for targeted category ad campaign), some of them could become regular readers!
You can pause the sponsored ad (after you deposit the 25$) and start a new campaign hours, days or weeks later (they write about a 30 day period when the deposited money should be used), suitable for low-traffic weekends!

UPDATE 29-11-2009:

EntreCard marks members who have opted-out of sponsored ads with a star in their ad picture (if you look in the campaigns), i saw two or three blogs today (SpicyBugz World, Maitri's Blogs)!

What's your opinion about Sponsored ads in Entrecard? Are the sponsored ads acceptable or not?

As advertiser have you been satisfied with the results?
Is it worth the investment or would you say, i learned my lesson? :)

Join the Holiday-Contest now!

2009-11-27T03:07:00.001+08:00

Sticky post (read below for my new interesting articles):

All you have to do is... just drop your EntreCards on one or more of the our mentioned blogs and make ONE comment on this Holiday-Contest post for having the chance to win FREE Advertising on Cornyman's Money-Blog (from 19th to 27th November).

The prizes have a worth of more than 200$, you can see them on the above mentioned link. If you do a blog post about this Holiday-Contest, you can get some free ECs, too.

How to get more referrals + EntreCard's new inflation!

2009-11-26T06:21:00.002+08:00

I wanted to write some more tips how to get referrals and about EntreCards new fight against their EC inflation.

I guess, it's just time to write a short summary of both topics now before i will go on holidays (this post was pre-written on 19th November).

Getting more referrals for your programs:

There are a lot of programs in the internet and offline which allow you to earn additional income by referring other members to these programs.

The best way to get referrals is

write honest reviews about the programs
show the advantages and disadvantages of the programs
in case you get incentives, you could give a partial kickback to your referral
show off your payment proofs

More about this points will follow after the holidays (on the weekend).

EntreCard's fight against the inflation!

I hope everybody reads the blog in EntreCard and buzz's on the Dashboard :) Then you know that you can "earn" a lot of ECs by referring new ACTIVE members to EntreCard.

Now it's 800 ECs that you can get instead of the previous 300 and on TOP the new referral will get 200 EC as starting capital, so that they can see immediately the effect of advertising.

Will there be a great impact by advertising with just 200 EC?

In case you use it for the 2 EC-Blogs, the new referrals might get disappointed, if they use it for 32 - 128 EC-Blogs it will look much brighter but then the ECs are already used and they have to be really active, so that YOU get your 800 EC :)

Now, with 200 new ECs in the system (virtual money from hot air!), EntreCard is driving itself more and more into the inflation and ad price bubble. By giving away 800 EC to the old members it seems that they are really in need of new MEMBERS, MEMBERS and again MEMBERS. I mean not really members... as we are their AD INVENTORY.

The real purpose of this new EC inflation!

It's not about the benefits of the new members (as they have to work to earn new ECs each day). It's really just about getting more ad space for their own survival. The same is valid for their 50% discount on buying ECs. They make this offer just because they need money, yes!

But on the other side, they wanted to get rid of ECs in the system by giving less ECs to the users (remember the only 1 EC-policy for the dropper which started on 1st September). Sure, if you give less it's more likely that someone will BUY ECs.
I wonder if really someone did buy (i read from two or three persons that they did as they re-joined EntreCard in the past) for a price which is not really valuable for the return you get.

Quick calculation:

Buy 4.000 EC for 12 $

my average ad price 1.024 EC (max click one advertiser got once: 90, if it went bad: 20 clicks)

3$ for one day exposure x 30 days = 90 $, i guess for a one month ad on this blog i charge 20$

A NO-GO for serious advertisers!

There are cheaper methods to buy ad space on my blog.

Look on my sidebar, there is LinkShowOff for 2$ (Eli's Businessphere link is there since July, if someone else buy now, he would drop out of the list as he is the fifth one... so the 2 $-investment would be good for 5 - 6 months).

Or use CMF-Ads for at the moment 0.33 $ for 30 days (but you share it with around 20 other advertisers), in December the price will go back to 0.60 $ (which means more exposure for the advertisers, as there will be less who want to pay this price).

Tomorrow a new article will follow about the way the new sponsored ads in EntreCard are working and if they are worth their money!

Adgitize: Week III after the ad price hike! It's getting profitable!

2009-11-24T18:00:00.000+08:00

This is the Adgitize report for Week 3 after the ad price hike from 14 to 24$ and we see now daily improving earnings, especially when you can score more than 300 or 400 points.

Ken Brown from Adgitize pointed out in his new blog post that even the members with just 300 points can get now earnings of more than 50 cents daily. In October these earnings have been just around 40 cents per day.

Why the Adgitize earnings rise now faster and you can get profitable from this week on!
For this statement we have to look at the overall points and to the number of advertisers.

Until Sunday, 22nd November, the advertisers dropped to 181 from 216 on 31st October. The "loss" of 35 advertiser means that there has been for the first 12 days in November less income from the new higher ad price.
But as most of the lost advertisers (or better to say ads) have been ads which have been run as "second, third or forth" ads - mine second ad was for this Blog and my first ad (for the Baby-Blog) expired already on 6th November - the OVERALL POINTS decreased daily since 12th November and now we are already back to the average points from October with a daily range of 120.000 - 135.000 points!
Now to the statement "Why the earnings rise faster these days", even when we seem to loose advertiser there are still four to six advertiser who renew or buy a new ad each day (previous month there have been 6 to 8 renewed ads daily). The advertiser who didn't renew or let their second ad expire earn less as many of their points drop now between 25 - 180 points daily.

Members who have been in the 400 point tier could fall now into the broader tier of 200 - 300 points with earnings of just 15 - 22 cents instead of 70+ cents. Most of these members will loose between 5 - 55 cents daily.

But as old ads with 14$ drop out of the system - they contributed with 30 cents (as Adgitize keeps 35% of the ad price) and new ads with 24$ (or shorter period ads with daily higher cent contribution) join the system we see now 50 cents flowing in the system. Additionally the PAID Preferred Publisher Program with prices from 6 - 8 $ / month gives an extra of 13 - 17 cents daily. Some of the previous advertisers might have made a move to this traffic (up to 25 visitors) and point (25 points, 10 for the free option) generating option.

As long as we don't loose more than 100 advertisers by end of November 2009 (which is in my opinion impossible), we will have stable and growing earnings from this week on and many members will see during this week but especially after the next weekend earnings are published (for 27-29th November) that you can score the necessary 80 Cents for a 30 day period (78 Cents for 31 day period) with 400 points or even slightly lower points.

With 450 (21st November) and 470 points (22nd November) i achieved already on this weekend 83 and 84 Cents, you can read it daily updated in my Adgitize earnings and advertiser report or in the picture in the middle of this post.

Now it's again THE TIME TO BUY ADS to BE THE FIRST WHO PROFITS from the NEW and IMPROVED EARNINGS and a HIGHER PAYOUT ALREADY IN NOVEMBER.

If you are NOT YET A MEMBER OF ADGITIZE, feel free to join now and

get 4,50 $ via Paypal for your first ad in Adgitize from me (after purchase and acknowledgment of Adgitize, usually in the first week of the following month)

As of Sunday, 22nd November, the Leaderboard stated

40 members in the tier above 400 points (average earnings: 70 cents = 28 $ daily),
75 members above 300 points (average earnings: 50 cents = 37.50 $ daily),
79 members above 200 points (average earnings: 18 cents = 14.22 $ daily)
157 members with more than 100 points (average earnings: 2,25 cents = 3.53 $ daily)
more than 4.400 (!) members with less than 100 points (average earnings: 0,1 cent = 4.40 $ daily).

From this data we can see that only 8% of the members are actively involved and the other 4.400 members are just here for the view. Further can be said that only around 115 members get guaranteed monthly payouts while the other members have to wait 2 or more months for achieving the payout amount of 10$.

JUST IMAGINE WHICH IMPACT IT WOULD HAVE IF THE REST OF THE LEADERBOARD which score less than 100 points daily (around 150 members), would start clicking ads from day to day! Each advertiser would get between 30 and 80 clicks more daily and more advertisers would join the game!

I hope we can show the non-members and the "retired" members that it's again MUCH MORE WORTH to be an ACTIVE MEMBER in Adgitize as it's too easy to achieve 200+ points daily with just ONE ARTICLE and 100 clicks (which may take up to 40 minutes), with FREE TRAFFIC for you if you click regularly and with even more TRAFFIC if you join our advertiser group for 24 $ (BEST VALUE!) which gives you 31 DAYS exposure for your ad and more than 2.000 visitors monthly + you get a big CASH REBATE AS Active Publisher, so the 24 $ won't hurt you as you even could score a PROFIT like me (and many other members) in the last five month (my ADGITIZE payment proofs) and this month will be again a profit of more than 10 $ (after deduction of the OLD 14$ ad price)!!

New facts about EntreCard :)

2009-11-22T04:59:00.000+08:00

Do you know everything about EntreCard?
I don't! :)

Or do you just drop your cards with the EntreCard Toolbar and don't look anymore on the EntreCard homepage or in your Dashboard for new "improvements"?
Then you miss something :)

I usually investigate some of my programs when i'm kind of bored or if i have too much time left :)

That's when i found out that you can stalk your favorite bloggers in EntreCard. It's very easy to do this and the information can be important for your own decision, especially if you want to advertise on one of their blogs :)

If you look in your EntreCard Dashboard there are a lot of tabs, one is called News feed. I thought it's about EntreCard's own news or blog posts but it's way better. It's about your favorite bloggers.

I can see

who they added as new favorite blogger (and probably drop on them from now on)
on which blog they bought an advertisement for the coming days

How can you use these information?

With the favorite news, you know if they drop on the same blogs like you, which in case you advertise on this blog can lead to clicks from your own favorite bloggers (this would be good in case you didn't drop on them because of holidays or if you exceed the 300 drops).

With the advertisement news, you know when the ad might run (+/- 1 or 2 days). So you could time your own ad on their blog in case they bought one of the expensive ads on the TOP 30 blogs or if they bought a lot of inexpensive ads. In this case you can be sure there will be a traffic surge on their blogs and your own ad could get much more clicks (usually most of the ad clickers drop their cards from ad to ad).

What's the friends feed all about?

It's the next tab in your EntreCard Dashboard. There you can find the previous posts of your favorite bloggers, it's like Google Friend Connect. Only difference is it's not necessary completely chronical as EntreCard seems to fetch the posts every second day. So you could see one or more posts of one blogger at once and afterward is another blogger with an earlier post. But i guess this doesn't matter :)

It's good if you have been on holidays and want to see a quick update of your favorite blogger's articles!

EntreCard: The first real sponsored ad!

2009-11-21T03:59:00.004+08:00

Now it's there or is it there already longer - the first real sponsored ad in EntreCard. I didn't click on it as this would give the owner of the ad already free traffic :)
but like i said in a previous post or comment to my post:
It's very clever from EntreCard to hide the sponsored ads in the menu of the Dashboard and not like in the past show them publicly beside the regular EntreCard ads.

UPDATE (ONE DAY AFTER THE LAUNCH OF THIS AD and three more joined):
EntreCard promotes now additional in the blog sponsored ads as there are now a few advertisers who try this service. As of now i saw that this ad is an EntreCard-Blog in the category "Graphic Design". The ad price is now 128 EC (don't know the price from yesterday but i guess it was significantly lower). Seems like EntreCard uses this ad price as example for their prediction that your ad price could jump up to 2.000%.
I'm not sure if it would be worth for you to pay 128 EC when you got in the last five days just 142 visitors (less than 30 per day).
On my blog there would be around 10 - 15 ad views for this paid ad and another 10 - 15 ad views for the other 2 or 3 ads.
This means for the TOP 30 popular blogs, there might by up to 450 ad views/daily. Looking at the TOP 300 blogs with 120 - 450 visitors daily we would get around 2.000 ad views/daily for this sponsored ad.
At the moment i guess it's around 75 - 100 visitors that you can get per day as i looked just now after i discovered the ad one day ago. Will look tomorrow again, where the popularity is now and see if it raises now faster above the 200 mark.

There are now EIGHT SPONSORED ADS IN THE SYSTEM, you might have a look and judge yourself who can be disabled :)

How many EntreCard members look daily in the sponsored ads if there are new ads to uncheck?

Adgitize: Did you criticize or promote me?

2009-11-18T23:41:00.005+08:00

Hello Chris from Roezers Rants,

i just read your new comment on the Adgitize blog "Decision Made!".

I'm happy that you mentioned my nickname "Cornyman" and that you like my "Recommendations on how to use Adgitize the correct way".

It's a pleasure to know that you read carefully the blog posts in Adgitize and it seems you also read my Adgitize posts in this case.

My name was mentioned once in an Adgitize blog post "Adgitize gaining market share in Blog advertising". There Ken Brown took my quote about his fantastic and fast growing ad network as a reason for his new blog post.

I added once a link to my blog in the forum, so that the Adgitize members could take part in the survey about "Will you renew your ad?". This poll is now located in the sidebar for easier access!

Another time i commented on the blog post of the "Open Question about the Advertiser Only" and put a link to my blog as i wrote an analysis about this topic. Nothing wrong with it as it's related to his topic and could enhance the discussion.

Now the big question will be - does your comment hurt my traffic in the next few days or do you "accidentally" promote my blog with this comment?

Everything that i did with my Adgitize posts is for the public, most of my readers/visitors are already Adgitize members.
NO, i don't steal a lot of referrals from anyone with my posts. There are hundreds of blog posts out in the blogosphere which published their Adgitize payment proofs and referral link each month. It's a big "fight" for referrals if you mean this (with stealing) and the blogger who can promote it in the best way may be the winner of some referrals (which is another idea for a new blog post in the coming days!). Only that my referrals are more likely to be publisher and not advertiser

Perhaps it's about the frequency that i post at the moment about Adgitize (several times a month in the last few weeks), that makes you so worried?

Yes, this can influence the decision of some readers/visitors who are NOT yet members of Adgitize.

But as you can see, i talk about the actual side effects of the Adgitize ad price hike, not a topic that non-members want to read if they shall decide to sign-up or not. I write honestly about what happen to members and encourage them to stay or become advertiser as this will be again a great opportunity in December.

If i would chase just for referrals, i could use a language that is more persuasive and just report that i get since 10th of November 20% more traffic (ad clicks) from Adgitize than in the first week of my advertisement.
Sounds good, too! But would be just half of the truth as the earnings didn't improve yet in the way it was predicted!
Members who doesn't want to loose money, would loose money in this case and just because i would get 9$ for their first ad and give 50% back to them (if they knock on my blog with a comment), doesn't mean i have to pressure them with wrong facts to buy an advertisement!

I would like to get with my readers in a dialogue or discussion but therefore the reader has to make a comment on my blog. In this case i could have responded to your questions or suggestions.

Somehow it sounds for me that you have other "correct ways" how to effectively play the Adgitize-Game and in case you want to share them here with us, i would be happy to discuss them further with you and my other readers!
I just showed my experience how i achieved 20$ each month (excluding referral earnings!) with Adgitize if you are a very active publisher with several blogs (which won't be achievable for me in this month as i'm not able to click for the next days).

I started this blog around 1 year ago, with the intention to help other visitors finding information about interesting programs, investments and ad networks and to keep them away from Scams!
When you look at my first posts, it's also a guide about myLot - a money-making discussion/forum program- and how to increase (double or triple) your earnings with some little steps each day.
The same is valid for all other guides which i wrote and will write in the coming days, weeks and months.

Adgitize: Week TWO of the ad price hike!

2009-11-17T23:31:00.000+08:00

Now we reached already the 2nd week in Adgitize and publisher/advertiser don't see yet a real improvement in their earnings. The major cause for this is that over 10% of the previous advertisers dropped out of the system (and many second ads are still running for 14$ until 1st December 2009).
Today as the points/earnings have been calculated, the advertiser count saw a low of 189 but recovered since then to 191. This means a further loss of 4 advertisers or ads compared to 15th November and a loss of 25 advertisers compared to 31st October!

In this environment we can't see the expected earning estimates. I doubt that we might see them even in the first week of December. 802

The reason:
Like i wrote in a previous post, the earning estimates are based on 180 advertisers and we should drop below this level (by end of November) as it's still unsure for many members if they can get back their invested money in the following weeks.
Most of them won't buy an ad so early and CHRISTMAS is also knocking on the door :)

Is the "Advertiser ONLY" option the solution for more advertisers/higher earnings?
Some days ago, Ken Brown published a new blog post and asked the members if we would like to have two AD OPTIONS as he saw from three comments on his price hike blog post that some members just advertise without any/much participation in Adgitize (mainly no clicking and/or no Adgitize ads are displayed on the landing page).
I pointed out that if you want to save money (18$ instead of 24$), you could do it if you want to advertise your Etsy Shop or other business related websites.
For everyone else it's a no-go because you loose all of the benefits of a regular advertiser = Advertiser PLUS (advertiser points, click bonus and page/ad view point doubling). You would just earn 30 cents or less depending on your traffic with more time needed for clicking again 100 ads! This would end the month with just 9$ for your invested 18$.

Another disadvantage for Advertiser Only could be (if they don't show Adgitize ads) that they don't get as many clicks as advertisers who show Adgitize ads on their blogs. I'm one of these members, too, who DON'T like to click on the ETSY Shop and other Adgitize ads which have no further Adgitize ads.
If i click on them, then just when i finish Adgitizing with the last few clicks but this means i don't really look what's on this website!

This seems to be one of the experiences which you still can influence by voting on Sharkbytes Blog "Just Throw Money" - How do you click Adgitize? (opens in a new window)

I just saw the decision is already made --> There will be NO ADVERTISER ONLY option.

What i think can be criticized on Adgitize!
In my opinion it was wrong to predict an earnings estimate which can't be fulfilled in the beginning of November. Everyone was/is looking for these numbers but as of now, we are far apart to see it.
Adgitize should have considered that many members will buy a Last-Minute ad and that this will affect overall earnings and in the end minimize the available advertisers (and funds!) until the end of November and even in December!
Most of the members don't have the funds for buying an ad (especially first timers!) and "loose" their money when in previous month everyone who was an active publisher could gain back the invested amount.

Sure, like you can see in my Adgitize earnings/advertiser statistic post, it won't be a big loss (after 15 days i earned 10.66$, double it and it would be 22+$) if you can achieve more than 400 points. But not many members can achieve 400 points daily.

At the moment only 44 members can achieve daily 400 points on average and just 121 can achieve more than 300 points which means these members will get a guaranteed payout each month as they can reach 10$.

For these members the loss will be daily 5 to 15 cents higher than my earnings. But i just can say today, wait until the last week of November starts on 24th and you will a more positive effect of the ad renewals.

Take care of the number of advertisers from 30th November - 3rd December, there you can see how many of the old 14$ ads will be renewed again or if they give up.
In case they give up, you would have a more valuable ad for the 24$ as you will get much more clicks for your ad and your earnings will be acceptable from the first week of December on (not necessary the earnings prediction from Ken Brown but more than at the moment!)

I can't update this series for Week THREE as i'm on Holiday next week, i will update it immediately when i'm back (in the last days of November). In this time my statistics are also not updated but i guess they will be affected "negatively" as i won't earn the 100 click points ;) But i will get a new perspective how much/less i will earn, when i only achieve 200+/300+ points for some days.

You can take part in our Holiday-Contest from 19th November - 29th November :) and win on each of our blogs which you visit ad space and some ECs.

What's your experience with CMF Ads - SPIKES?
	Good traffic
	Poor traffic
	lower bounce rate than average
	high bounce rate
	don't stay long on my blog
	stay longer than other visitors
	no comments
	some comments (1-5)
	more comments (6-15)
	not many new visitors
	many new visitors

pollcode.com free polls

Will you renew your Adgitize ad?
	Sure
	No
	Perhaps

pollcode.com free polls

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