TOP FIVE posts of July 2011

Image via WikipediaThe most read posts in July 2011 have been:

1. Twitter: How to be followed, retweeted and mentioned by a celebrity!
2. Get a FREE Make Money Online Training Package!
3. Adgitize: The secret of getting an ad paid by Adgitize and make a profit with it!
4. Supporting a good cause while searching the web!
5. Sponsored Tweets: How NOT to make money off Twitter advertising!

Have a great time (re-) reading these posts!

CMF ADS: Infected by a superbug!

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

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.

Make money with Twitter: Be a magpie or not?

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!

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!

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:

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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!)
   
   
3. 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

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?

MyLikes: How to advertise in Twitter!

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?

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

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?

Google Adsense: How to make money off their ads!

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?

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to sign up for a Google AdSense account? (earnblogger.com)
• iAd Will be Apple's Response to Google AdSense? (teabreak.pk)
• What is Google AdSense? (earnblogger.com)
• AdSense Ads in Google Buzz (crazzycool.blogspot.com)

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

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

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.

CMF Ads - A critical look - Part 1

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"?

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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).
   
   
3. 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?

EntreCard: Facts about Sponsored ads!

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

1. 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!).
   
   
2. 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!
   
   
3. 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?

1. 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).
   
   
2. 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!
   
   
3. 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? :)

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

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!