Linkworth, who I wrote about a couple of weeks back, have recently updated their control center in a bid to make things easier for people to work out what on earth is going on there. This comes as a welcome relief, but the site is still plagued with confusing names that will likely baffle newcomers.

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.

Tags: Monetize your blog by Angel
5 Comments »

Why does everyone insist on installing the “buy me a beer” widget. No matter how you dress it up (buy me a coffee, buy me a cup of tea, buy me a coconut) it looks silly on almost every blog. Out of everyone who has had it installed on their blogs, how much money have people made from it? Anything? No?

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.

Tags: Monetize your blog by Angel
3 Comments »

I keep coming across blogs that use The News Room as a way for monetizing. Don’t do it. The News Room, while offering a potentially decent amount of money, creates an ungodly experience for your readers, particularly if its services are overused. The way The News Room works is that you browse news stories (text, videos and images) and “mash” them, which means you grab the code and stick the story on your blog in a post.

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.

Tags: Monetize your blog by Angel
4 Comments »