Angel, as a current TLA publisher I wanted to send you a private invite to our first ever CPC ad program called ShoppingAds! ShoppingAds is a cost per click ad product powered by the major shopping comparison sites. SA allows you to display relevant merchant offers in the form of an image and a text description to your audience and every time a visitor clicks on the ad, you get paid.

I followed the link and tried to sign up right away. I was, apparently, already a member. As it turns out, this looks to be a joint venture between Auction Ads and Text Link Ads, but the difference between this and Auction Ads is that you are paid per click, an average of $0.20 they say. Also, the ads aren’t going to auctions; they’re pointed at online stores, so you don’t need people to buy anything to make money.

As with Auction Ads, you select an ad block, customize the colors and then choose the keyworks you want to target. I think this service shows great promise because it doesn’t rely on conversion like the ailing Auction Ads. As you can see, the ads look quite swish and I’d except a high click-thru rate with a bit of tweaking.

I’m going to jump right in and replace Adsense with Shopping Ads on one of my blogs because I like the idea of getting paid per click. It will be interesting to see how Shopping Ads does competing head to head with TTZ Media.

I’ve been promoting five main affiliate services on this blog and others. They are Text Links Ads, Review Me, Pay Per Post, Linkworth and Bidvertiser. Not all of these perform as well as each other.

For me, by far the best affiliate program I use is Text Link Ads. The appeal of signing up for Text Link Ads is the ease with which it is possible to make money. I use Text Link Ads on a few blogs, and every time an ad is sold on my behalf it’s easy money. Even easier money is the $25 you get for referring someone who signs up to use the service too.

Text Link Ads is incredibly popular and there are always new bloggers out there who can benefit from joining. As an advertiser, Text Link Ads offers an easy way to buy links on other blogs. It’s a complete package.

Another good performer for me is Bidvertsier. Bidvertiser is a popular Adsense alterative that offers the same kind of service, but with $10, Paypal payouts. I use Bidvertiser on one of my blogs and I like the service because you can choose which ads you want to show up. You also get to select your niche, and so providing you don’t write about an obscure topic, you can get relevant ads served up to your blog.

The affiliate program with Bidvertsier is great because when you refer a publisher, you get $10 when they make their first $10. Then when they make their first $50, you get $40. With advertisers, you get $5 when ad advertiser spends $10, and $20 when an advertiser spend $50. You only need to hook up a couple of decent publishers and advertisers before you start to see some Paypal coming in.

The other three services I mentioned, Review Me, Pay Per Post and Linkworth, I’ve had far less success with. The problem with Pay Per Post isn’t getting people to sign up; it’s getting them to actually write that first post so that you then get your $15 referral payment. I don’t see why anybody wouldn’t sign up for Pay Per Post because new publishers get a guaranteed $20 for their first post at the moment.

Review Me I can understand because it isn’t as easy to make money with if you are new to blogging. Linkworth, on the other hand, is a great service and one that I highly recommend for both publishers and advertisers. The affiliate program has the potential to be a big money spinner, paying you $50 for each person you sign up who goes on to earn $100. Getting people to sign up can be tricky, though, because Linkworth’s service is a little confusing. To overcome this problem, you could write a guide to Linkworth like I did.

There are heaps of affiliate options out there and anyone can make money from them. I’d start plugging affiliates right away, even before you have a lot of traffic.

My two free blogs are rolling over slowly, and another blog will be up and running once my freelancer start submitting content. I started a personal journal too, with the intention of bringing it up to speed and writing paid reviews for it.

One thing that I’m working on is seeing if it is possible to buy a dropped domain with high Page Rank and quickly turn it into something that can make money. I’ll have something to say about that in a couple of months or so. I’m also experimenting with buying existing websites. Although this costs money, the potential is there to make a lot of money without too much work.

For now, I’m close to my second $1,000, and its coming. Slowly but surely, it is coming.

So what’s in it for me?

Once you’ve got your sites in there, you have a number of ways to make money with your blogs.

Linkads

This is like Text Link Ads. You set a price for sitewide links and links on specific pages. Advertisers then contact you. There is also the option of selling rotating links.

Linkpost

As before, this is like Pay Per Post, except you wait for offers to come in. You set the price for each of your blogs and then advertisers find you. I have been offered posts through Linkpost already, but none of them are worth my time to accept because they are way off topic.

Linkintxt

This is still a cool thing. You sell links based on keywords in your blog posts. It’s not exactly revolutionary, but you get to set the price for each keyword.

Linksura

I didn’t notice this one before they remade the site. Linksura offers “single-url rotating ads”. What that means is that you place a single text link ad somewhere on your blog, and the anchor text changes with every page view, thought the url remains the same.

Linkmura

Another new one. Multi-url rotating ads this time. Both the anchor text and urls rotate. Seems like a bit of a gimmick.

LinkBB

This time you’re getting billboard ads.An advertiser writes a page of content with links that you then publish on your website. This is like Linkpost for people who don’t run blog software. For a blogger it’s not that useful.

Linkpack

This is a way to sell links on multiple blog in package deals. It’s not a bad idea in theory, but I’m unsure why you’d sell multiple links to the same person unless your blogs are about identical topics. It would also mean you make less money.

I’m not particularly impressed with the new Linkworth design because there is still no emphasis on making it clear exactly what is being offered by the company. That aside, there are some decent money making opportunities for bloggers hidden away in there. You earn up to 70% of the revenue you generate, which over time could mount up to a considerable sum.

In July, John Chow made $114.33 from his buy me a beer plugin. Before you start to think, “Well, that’s a lot of money”, you need to remember that the people who buy John beer are the people he’s helped out in some way. John also has thousands of readers. Unless you are really reaching a wide audience and you are helping people, who in their right mind is going to give you money for nothing? It just doesn’t make sense.

Small-time bloggers are making themselves look silly with this unproductive plugin that makes them appear as desperate as promoting the fact that they have two RSS subscribers showing on Feedburner.

If you met me in the street for the first time, introduced yourself, chatted to me about yourself for ten minutes and then asked me for $5 so you could buy a beer, I’d think you were insane. If people have enough money to be giving out donations, they aren’t going to be giving it away to anybody.

Create a respected service before you start asking your readers for money, or at least offer some incentive if you absolutely must do it.

The News Room offers $4 per thousand views of a video feed, $3 for a video story, and $1 for a text story or image. For sites you’ve referred, you get $1 per thousands views of a video feed and 50 cents for everything else. Not bad, but the news stories are so ugly and make a blog look hideous. They don’t blend with anything in a template and make your site look cheap.

The screenshot above is of a blog that has “mashed” a The News Room text story. You can see how ugly it is, and notice how on my laptop screen the story is wider than the space designated for blog posts. What do you think your readers will think when they see that? The videos are even worse, often starting on their own accord and taking time to load, which is frustrating for people like me who are on a slow Internet connections.

Here is an example of a video news story.

Not the prettiest thing is it. Using The News Room to monetize your blog is like spending $100 on a car shine and then driving through a football field in the rain. Am I off the mark? Is The News Room really not that bad? Tell me what you think. It is not a service I will ever utilize though.

I signed up for Linkworth and was immediately confused by the interface. At first I couldn’t even decipher what it was I had signed up for. Linkworth is like a number of the top money-making services rolled into one. The confusing interface will likely be enough to put some people off, but if you keep digging you can find some useful tools.

Once you’ve signed up and been taken to the main control panel, you’ll probably be scratching your head at what all the terms mean. Every time I clicked on something it didn’t take me to where I thought it would. Eventually I clicked on “Products” and found the two services that money-making bloggers will be interested in: Linkintxt and Linkpost.

Linkintxt is a way for bloggers to sell keywords and phrases in their existing content as links. Linkworth crawls your pages, finds keywords, and then you set a monthly price for those words. You add each of your blogs individually and the keywords Linkworth suggests are those that advertisers are currently purchasing in the market.

Once a keyword is sold you are given a piece of html code to add into your content. It sounds a bit fiddly, but if Linkworth can sell your keywords then it would be worth doing. The problem comes with being unsure how to price your keywords. I have mine priced around $5 and will wait to see if anybody picks them up.

Linkpost is like Pay Per Post. Once again you have to set the price per post, and then you must wait for advertisers to make you offers. It’s difficult to judge how big Linkworth is and therefore how quickly you will be offered paid posts, but if you are signed up and have your blogs submitted for Linkpost and Linkintxt then money could start to come your way. Better to have your options open than not, right? WorldofAngel was submitted and accepted within one hour.

I’ve used my affiliate link in this post. For each affiliate you sign up you receive $10 plus $5 of the affiliate’s revenue for as long as they use the service. Payments can be collected by check, wire, direct deposit or Paypal, with a minimum payout of $25.

Linkworth is not a big-money spinner but it’s an easy way to sell text links within your existing content in a way that won’t disrupt your readers. I’ll report back on the paid postings as and when they are offered.

I’ve seen a few blogs that use Auction Ads. Auction Ads is a simple ad service that advertises eBay auctions in an ad unit. You can choose your keywords, select what size ad unit you want, and customize the colors. I’m not convinced of the virtues of Auction Ads for a blog like mine because it’s isn’t based on being paid for the number of clicks you generate. You can have all the page impressions and clicks you like, but if you don’t score any conversions (ie if nobody buys anything or signs up) then you don’t make any money.

I haven’t seen many bloggers who have used Auction Ads to make much money. It’s difficult unless you’re blogging about a specific product-related topic, like mobile phones or computers, for example.

Pro Blogger had this to say about Auction Ads:

Traffic is going to be a consideration too. CPC programs like AdSense pay out each time there’s a click on an ad so there will be income even with small traffic. CPA ads like Auction Ads will payout less often because they require the reader to DO something (buy, register etc). As a result I’d expect to see less conversions with these ads – a lower percent of your readers will actually convert to dollars.

So if you have decent traffic on a product related site this might be a program to try. It could also be worth setting it up as the ‘alternate ad’ for your current AdSense and/or Chitika ads.

It doesn’t sound too promising, but Million Baby Boomers earned $75.56 in 33 weeks using Auction Ads. I like to think I could earn that and more with a clean layout and decent, uncopied content.

At first I considered running auction ads on my front page in between all of my posts. I implemented the ads in that way and didn’t feel convince that people would click, let alone buy something. For a start, the banner ads have images that are way too small to discern what the product on offer is. I took a note from Desi’s blog and added an Auction Ad block to each single page, just above the comment box.

By doing this I was able to have a big enough block so that people could see the image. I’d like to minimize the clutter on my front page, and having Auction Ad banners between all my posts just wasn’t cutting it.

I’m not expecting to generate big bucks from Auction Ads, but until I can get accepted by something like Chitika, and until my blog will be approved by websites like Pay Per Post and Review Me, I may as well try what I can.

I was surprised and pleased to come across a blog post over at www.mybloggo.org, a blog like mine, but in Malaysia instead of Thailand. The author there uses a company called Advertlets to display ads on his page. The ads themselves look a bit ugly, but when the blogger posted his earning my eyes lit up… and then dimmed down again. After a month he had earned RM272.38, which is about 2,700 baht, or $80. Advertlets is a Malaysian service, but it looks like anyone can join. I assume all checks are mailed out in Malaysian Ringit, but it didn’t say on the website.

So he earned $80 in his first month, but most of that was from a paid review. The paid review was the first review offered by Advertlets, and was only open to bloggers in Malaysia. The second paid review available is only open to bloggers in Singapore. Neither of those helps me.

As for the ads themselves, they have a variety of sidebar ads, banners and squared banners. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you’ll see one of their square banners. It’s only displayed one ad since I put it there (some seafood restaurant). In a month, apart from his paid review, Mybloggo earned about $7 from his ads. That’s not especially promising.

At the moment Advertlets works on a cost per thousand impressions rating. The thing is, they don’t tell you how much that is. They are a new company and promise to add new features and more ways to earn soon. If you’re a blogger in Singapore then sign up now because you could earn some serious coin for the review (up to S$128). Otherwise I’m not sure if Advertlets is worth having. It is an Asian alternative to Adsense, but they need to give bloggers a better impression of what they’ll earn.