Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I would imagine that it completely depends on your application but while I tinker with my blog layout I’m also considering what the best design is for different optimization routes.

I’ve recently displayed my disgruntled-ness over text-link-ads.com, mainly why aren’t they selling as well as others. I chalked it up to, after snooping the TLA listed pages, to the fact that it seems pretty random which blogs get more links than others.

Some people have commented that I sold another link, and you can see that yes it’s true. But I must confess, I sent out about 15 emails to people that I noticed bought links on other sites until I finally got one to bite. And trust me it ain’t price, I’m still at the cheapest in TLA.

But I digress….

The real reason for writing this post is to consider and look at what others do and how well they’re TLA spots are selling as well as other factors in selling more space and over all giving the professional blogging look.

The first blaring difference between blogs that sell a lot of TLA space and my blog is that they have their ads in a single sidebar on the left-hand side of the page. Some examples are Flee the Cube, Blotrepreneur, Problogger. OK, the last one really isn’t fair.

But I ask you this is there something to a single left-hand bar?

Will I gain more advertisers? does it look cleaner? I’m not sure, I’ve played with both and dig the two-bar righty but I’m no optimizing wizard and would rather not re-invent the wheel. Which brings me to the fact that b5media, weblogsinc, and Yaro over at Entrepreneurs Journey all have double right-hand sidebars, but….

They have traffic too. I like the way the double right looks. It puts your content up front and center in the viewing path but does it hurt your bottom line?

As I mentioned I’m no expert, so I’d love your opinions?

About 6 months ago I signed up for and was accepted by Text-Link-Ads. Within a month someone bought a link from me. I thought “Nice! this is going to be the easiest cash ever!”

It’s 5 months later and I still have one link sold per month. I would think this is OK because I only receive between 40 and 60 uniques a day and my PR is 5 with an Alexa rank in the 140K range, with over 700 pages indexed in Google and about 170 links showing up in Google.

Wait a Second! I see blogs that are PR 3, Alexa (which really can be shifted by a lot of factors) in the 500K and 100 pages indexed in Google, with less frequent updates than my few a week with 3-7 links sold in text-link-ads. What gives? My stats are crazy better and my placement of the links sold is primo in my eyes.

This sparked me to look into why this could be? I’ve already tried changing my category once or twice to try and boost my link sales but that didn’t help (once or twice in 6 months so I don’t think doing that has hurt me). Then I started digging around the text-link-ad categories to see if I could figure out what the issue was.

Doing this got me even more confused, I saw more and more blogs and sites that don’t have near the traffic stats and index stats, ad placement, etc, as I do nearly selling out their link-ads. Is it my domain name, my look, my layout, what the heck!

The only thing I could come up with is that my blog ranges a ton of topics and isn’t focused in on one specific topic. (But then again some of the ones I found weren’t really on any topic at all and still were able to sell a ton) But this was the closest thing I could come up with. That my visitors aren’t Niche Specific enough.

However, if you look at some of the links sold on different blogs you’ll see that a lot of the link-ads have nothing to do with their niche so that may blow my theory right out of the water. I’m also listed in TLA with my Aloha Update site which receives about 50 uniques a day and would be a great travel site to link on, PR4 300+ indexed, nothing.

Am I Text-Link-Ad Cursed? I’ll keep searching the web for answers but I’m puzzled. Is it the blog focus or what gives? Can you help me figure it out?

Although I don’t think it appropriate to tell my readers if I get payed via a pay-per-post type affiliate service, the newest launch from the text-link-ads guy(s), called ReviewMe.com has promised $25,000 to bloggers who review they’re pay-per-post program, and I was one of them.

I recieved the payment, and that’s sweet.

It’s a great service and the fact that I can give positive and negative reviews, or neutral reviews, is awesome. People shouldn’t worry about me selling out, the chance of me getting one of these rooms is probably one or two slim, but I’m ready to give my two cents!

Nice work Patrick Gaven. I’m in.

This following is a paid review of ReviewMe the new service from the same company that brought you text-link-ads.

ReviewMe is another way for bloggers to make money blogging. Some people may think being payed to post about a product is selling out but I think it’s a great way for bloggers to get paid for all the time they spend bringing their readers great content. After all, a reader doesn’t have to read every post, and hopefully a loyal reader will understand the need to make money for time well spent.

The system is super simple and you can apply in a couple seconds. Your blog is rated of course by, backlinks, pagerank, technorati rank, and that wonderfully controversial alexa ranking. If you make it in, ReviewMe automatically assigns your blog review posts a price and you are given half of what the advertisers pay them.

Probably the biggest plus side to reviewme.com over other pay per post/pay per review schemes is that you can write a positive or a negative review, and the review only has to be 200 words long. Which in the world of blogging a lot of bloggers have 200 word intros to blog posts!

I’ve signed my blog up as well as several others that are in my network of blogs for the reviewme system and hopefully will start seeing some review requests in my inbox.

I think ReviewMe.com will be just as popular as text-link-ads. The world is just beginning to see what a great tool blogs are for reaching very focused audiences. We’ll see if getting paid to post reviews lowers my regular readers but I don’t think a post here and a post there will ruin my numbers. If I, and the rest of the blogosphere keeps these types of reviews to a minimum I don’t see an issue.

OK, so digging around it seems like this is still a problem for some people. About 8 months ago there was a bit of buzz surrounding the BETA release of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Darren Rowse over at problogger.net posted a quote from an email some of the publishers being banned were recieving. It basically stated that publishers who had “too much” non-US traffic using their site and clicking through on their ads were kicked out from the YPN program.

I almost didn’t sign up when I got my invite because of this post. Why would I want to waste my time on something that people were saying was inferior to AdSense. However, I followed through with it, got my account, then got “the call” from a YPN rep asking me how I liked the program. I said hadn’t used it yet but was wondering if I could create some coding to display ads YPN ads to just US users while other ads would be displayed if the user wasn’t from the US.

I then contacted Google and asked them if this was ok and they said, “that doesn’t appear to violate the terms and conditions” blah blah blah. Great, so if you are still worried or having a problem here’s what I did!

PS this uses a wordpress plugin and some PHP, but you get the ID, you can also use some server commands that check the IP of the page viewer but I don’t think that works as well and frankly was making me mad when I first tried it out.

Anyway, the idea is this:

if (visitorIP = us){
  display YPN;
  }
else{
  display AdSense
  }

Outline

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account if you don’t have one.
2. Populate your database with the IP to Country data
3. Download the IP2Country Wordpress plugin
4. Update your code on your index.php, page.php, single.php, etc with an IF statement.

That’s it, really simple. I had a few problems here and there that I will try and address solutions to but hopefully you will go through the process problem free.

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account

Chances are if you are reading this you already have both an AdSense account and a YPN account. If you don’t though visit Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher to sign-up and get your accounts today.

Those who have the accounts should be familiar with ads and ad code so you can easily insert the code into the files mentioned below.

2. Populate your databasse with the IP to Country data

This was my most problematic part. You need to get the data from the IPtoCountry .csv file into your MySQL database. You can find the Database here and the plugin that I use for this ip2_country has a nice little tutorial about how to create the proper tables.

Create them first then upload your data search the web for how to do this or your mySQL database help file, or you can…

WARNING: I HAVEN’T HAD OTHERS TEST THIS UPLOAD SCRIPT SO PLEASE CHECK TO MAKE SURE THIS IS RIGHT, IT WORKED FOR ME BUT I DON’T WANT TO SCREW UP PEOPLE’S mySQL DATABASE. CHECK IT FIRST

If you need a .php script to do this for you, you can try out the one I used, just copy and past this into an editor, change the appropriate fields where it has

$hostname=yourhost;
$username=yourusername;
$password=”yourpassword”;
$dbid=databaseID;

save it as something.php, upload it and the .csv country list to the same folder at your site, and navigate to it via your browser and presto. You should be getting a long list of what it’s doing, it’s adding the proper info to the ip2country table you made.

3. Download and activate the IP2Country Plugin

Now download and activate the IP to Country Plugin. Should explain itself.

4. Now add code that looks like this

if (wp_ip2c_getCountryCode2(0) == us)
{
print’
Yahoo Publisher Code
‘;
}

else{
print ‘
Google AdSense Code
‘;
}
?>

Put that wherever you want your ads to appear.

As a test below you should see yahoo ads if your from the US and if you’re not you should see Google ads.

Sweet.

Let me know if anyone has any troubles and I can try and help you out or point you in the right direction.

Over the past month I have been looking for ways to optimize and integrate advertising to increase revenue. I, along with bloggers in the Network I’ve started are putting in a lot of time to generate useful and insightful content and I figure it’s about time I try and monetize that content. (Sorry to those who think ads are the devil but seldom are things free in this world)

With that said I have been looking at ways to blend ads and use advertising that would be useful to readers and not just pollute my websites. Google Adsense, the king of online advertising right now, has many ways to blend ads. A lot of people may say that doing so tricks readers into clicking on ads. That may be so but the ads that appear on my sites look helpful and I’m sure take people most of the time to useful sites.

One of the newest things Google has done is to update their Adsense for Search by allowing the results to be viewed in your site rather than taking the reader to a google landing page. Now obviously this would make people click through on potential ads more but it also has the potential to make readers more at ease with the results and search through your site a little more.

Check out what Google has to say about it over at their Adsense Blog under the post titled Inside AdSense: Search no further than your own site.

technorati tags:Advertising, Google, Adsense, Money, Making, Internet

The placement of AdSense. This seems to be a hot topic for any Internet entrepreneurial blogs. Google writes about it often at their AdSense Blog. People, bloggers, just can’t get enough of determining the proper, most click-through area, to place their ads.

Having a blog network that I will admit to posting ads on in the hopes to earn money from my blogging efforts I too spend a little time tinkering with ad placement. I am not into re-inventing the wheel so you may notice the layout of my blog network looks a lot like those networks already available. I try new things every once in a while but haven’t tried out any full on experimentation with ad size and placement.

Why would I when others do it for us?

Case in point is a great little AdSense experiment that Tom over at Nothing Ventured ran for two months on his AdSense sites. His theory was that the way he was posting ads, 3 large rectangles per post, beginning, middle, end, gave him a lot of clicks but the payout per click was low due to too many ad impressions. He decided to switch to one large rectangle at the top of the post in hopes to make more per click.

His results show that both number of clicks and cost per click decreased, a lot. He is going to switch back to the old way and report any findings he has to his readers. It’ll be interesting to see if it was just a low click through month or if blatantly plastering ads promotes clicking. Either way rock on with your bad self Tom, great experiment and thanks for publishing the article!

As I was sitting out on the waves today during my lunch break I began to think about some recent “affiliate” income that I was able to generate. It got me to thinking how great the offer is and how it essentially creates $35 for the economy.

Some of you may remember one of my first posts titled Wanna Make $25. It could have been better titled “Here’s $25 for Free” or earn “Earn 10% On an Investment in One Day.” But either way it got the point across. Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s post (surprise surprise) about offering his ING referrals through his website I thought I would do the same. Besides I was learning about affiliate income being generated through other websites and this was a sure fire way to have people make me $10.

For those of you who don’t know the deal goes like this. INGDirect.com is an online banking firm with very few physical banks anywhere. Essentially 1 per major city. Having less people and leases allows them to give back more to their customers in the way of interest. Currently their interest rate on a basic savings account is 3.9%. Better than a lot of CDs that I have seen from local banks. When you sign-up with them you are allowed to get people to sign-up through you and make some money. When the referral you acquire joins INGDirect by funding their account with at least $250, you’ll get $10 credited to your account but better yet your referral will get $25. They don’t even have to put any more money in the account and they still get to keep the $25.

Yup, the only affiliate program I know of where your customer gets payed, guaranteed.

The best part is, you tie your checking account to the savings account and transfer money between the two just like you would if you had a savings account at your own bank. It’s that easy to fun the account. You can withdraw money whenever and you can fund the account whenever. Just like your bank it takes a day or two to clear between accounts and that’s it. No fees, nothing.

Well, as I mentioned I posted that about 5 months ago when this blog first went live. Since then I have gotten 0, the doughnut, to sign-up. I had one person email me about it but no one sign-up. Then, out of the blue, on Monday I got an email from someone interested in getting an ING account but not wanting to fund their account without the opportunity to get the free money.

All I had to do was get her email address and her first and last name and send her an email from my ING account with that information and there you have it. Done! $25 for her, $10 for me, $35 of free money created.

By the way if you would like to get and ING Direct account and make $25 for free send me and email at evossman@gmail.com and include your return email address, First, and Last name, and I’ll get you a referral link as soon as possible.

FREE MONEY

Are you looking for a list of ways to monetize your blog, website, feed, email, or niche site. Well look no further. I think I have covered darn near every program that is out there. I did a bit of research and found the if you are looking for an alternative to Google’s Adsense you are going to have a hard time finding a similar payout. YPN is rumored to pay more and if you have the right impulse buying traffic chitika can make you some good money. In my findings I also found a few sites that let you monetize your email so for instance all those email lists you might keep to make people return to your site can make you money.

I have listed 40 programs below and a brief description. Please feel free to comment and ad if you wish. In searching through all the ads posts and ads search results I found that a lot of the ad services previously mentioned have been bought out by companies such as marketbanker by adbrite. Wonder if Google will buy out Chitika. I know there’s rumor of it. Anyway, I hope this list helps you out.

Google AdSense - the mother of all advertising, if you get in, tread carefully and try your hardest not to upset them. Through all my research I haven’t found anyone who said any other ad program was better than this.

YPN - Yahoo Publisher Network is Yahoo’s alternative to AdSense. I have seen mixed reviews on payout. Darren at problogger.net switched back to AdSense on his blog but kept it on other sites. This tells me it seems to be site specific, try it out and leave your feedback.

Chitika - their e-minimalls advertising is also another competitor for Google AdSense. The claim here is that they work on impulse buying. My feeling is that since it is such a large ad and only one product you need to have your content well suited for the ad type.

MSN Adcenter - a Beta version of MSN’s answer to AdSense has been launched. I’ve only heard of very few people being offered a spot in the beta test but I’ll keep you posted if I hear of earnings reports from fellow bloggers

BlogAds - this advertising company is for those that have a lot of traffic. Steve Pavlina recently joined up with blog ads and is offering a pretty top spot on his site, and MSN bought out a ton of ads last year from blog ads making a pretty big splash in the blog world.

PeakClick - this ad program is another text and banner type ad service based in Austria offering payment in EURO’s. I found one blogger using peakclick on her niche sites, check out her post about PeakClick and for updates on earnings

DoubleClick - this is another advertising company that is used by the heavy hitters like MTV.com, myspace.com, friendster.com, and SI.com. DoubleClick is used for higher traffic sites as you can see but something to shoot for!

Intellitext - this ad service is a very interesting alternative to AdSense. They offer advertisement that is hidden within your content, when a user scrolls over your text an link to an appropriate ad pops up

TextAds Dot Biz - ads look like Google AdSense ads and YPN but I don’t believe you can customize the colors. If I get more sites I may try this one out, I like the way they look.

Kanoodle - their claim to fame is BrightAds that are used to grab the users attention, which are very similar to AdSense, even down to the Ads by Kanoodle in the bottom right. They also have pop-ups that land the user on a new page when they click, definitely something AdSense should do to allow your site to still be loaded. Again their payout isn’t quite what Google can provide.

AdBrite - text based ads that pay via check, you can also advertise on some pretty big sites like friendster.com, and ebaumsworld.com which a 1 week spot will cost you $2,360.00 for a text link

AdGenta - another text link ad service focused on blogs, they allow you advertise on your RSS feed as well. I believe this service is powered by Miva

AVNads - this alternative allows you to set the price for ads on your site and they give you 75% of the sale price. You control the look of the ads that are on your site and you have the right to reject ads as well.

CrispAds - has both text and graphical banner ads, with three methods to make money. 1. you can submit your site so crispads shops you around to find specific advertisers, 2. earn $0.20 per click from your choice of keywords based on ads 3. earn 70% of revenue per click using your choice of keywords

IndustryBrains - allows you to charge a premium to advertisers and offer ads through searches, text, or graphical banner ads

OneMonkey - sell text based ads on your sites, tracking conversion rates and they claim you have control over your ad revenue unlike AdSense

Pheedo - provides payment every 30 days via paypal and allows users to show text ads earning them 65% of revenue generated per click

Text Link Ads - this program uses humans to review your site and sells space on your site for a flat monthly rate that you see 50% of.

TargetPoint - has 4 ways to earn money, adpoint - exitpoint - imagepoint - underpoint, these are kind of self explanatory but offer you interesting alternatives. They also offer better conversion rates for higher traffic sites

ValueClick - has several programs for publishers (that’s you) and advertisers. Commission Junction is one that I believe is used by EBay for their affiliate program. CJ has lots of affiliate programs that you can sign up for like EBay and could really keep you busy trying to monetize your site.

Clicksor - content based text ads, banners, popups, XML feed, and a search box. They also offer a 10% commission on referrals with a $5.00 sign-up bonus per referral. Payments are bi-weekly by paypal or check and payout is 70% using their ads with the option to earn 85% if you provide your own ad programs.

BidVertiser - claim to target the highest bidders to your site for your content, $10 payout through paypal, block unwanted ads, customize ad layout, make money from clicks.

AdKnowledge - graphical ads for your website, as well as for your email list. This is a great way to monetize that email list you use to bring visitors back to your site!

RevenuePilot - earn 60% of clickthrough revenue, and a 10% referral bonus for life! Text based ads with search results

SearchFeed - a search based site ad-on, earn money when people search and click through, or on referrals of advertisers or publishers

FastClick - similar banner and text ads with the option of pop-ups and the potential to earn up to 65% of click revenue, you need at least 3,000 page views per month, and your site has to be legitimate, claim no more than 2 previous banner ads should be on your page

YesAdvertising - accept and pay advertising from all over the world, guaranteed payout, bi-weekly payment via check or paypal, 5 level referral and text and banner ads

BidClix - they say you can use this with Google AdSense and allow you to choose your price for you ads spots and your advertisers after they choose you

AdHearUs - pay per click, 18 ad formats, content driven, multiple ads per site

AllFeeds - text ads, banners, pop-aways, that use your content and underline the words related to their ads that users can click on

AffiliateSensor - use clickbanks ads and get keyword based text ads

CBprosense - like affiliate sensor

Quigo AdSonar - basic text ads, let you specify defaults, unsure about payouts

Nixxie - they partner with Kanoodle, Miva, and Overture so I would imagine their payment isn’t that high because there are more people that the money has to go through before it reaches you.

Mirago - offering search and contextual based ads for your site

Miva - neat thing about them is that they allow you to put contextual and search ads on your 404 error page. This would be good for those of you who know how you can customize your 404 page, they also offer suggestions on how to do this.

BannerBoxes - 70% payout, you approve ads, and become a member of all the affiliate programs they have access to

contextWeb - customize ads, they claim a higher revenue stream but that seems par for the course with all these alternatives to Google AdSense

ExpoActive - choose the ads you like based on your content and change the ads so they match your layout

CoverClicks - yet another website offering an ad program, check out their site though it has a futuristic terminator feel and sound, gotta turn on the sound

The recent tumble of Yahoo’s stock shares sent the tech sector plummeting and business people worrying if advertising dollars had hit a peak. Google shares followed suit dropping like a rock by it’s largest single day loss of 8.5% or over $36 a share. With all those people out there blogging about how they’re finished working for the man and busy publishing AIS sites, it’s a wonder we didn’t hear more tones of worry in recent posts.

It seems as though everyone and their mother, literally, is starting some type of niche AIS website aimed at getting traffic via search engines and turning that traffic into money making clicks. I regularly read the following blogs related to AIS; Burt’s osCommerce, Jonathon Wold’s, jcCommerce, and, ProBlogger. All these sites discuss how click’s earn them money and the sites that are doing it for them. Burt’s osCommerce recently held a challenge to develop a niche website, launch it, and see how much money it could earn in a month. 12 people have joined and most of them are doing quite well from what I have seen, 3 have made at least $50.

Most of these sites rely on click-through traffic. Later I will get into why I think click-through traffic is going to slowly lower in value but for now I will just mention that it’s usually used on sites geared towards search engine results. Repeat visitors tend not to click through as much. For those sites like cnn.com, espn.com, and myspace.com, where visitors return often, the publishers need to use more creative approaches to advertising. Things like review spots, placement of graphic ads, pop-ups and what not. It’s like TV, you don’t click through the commercials but if you see a Coke enough times next time you might order Coke rather than Pepsi.

What’s Leading the Online Advertising Push

Besides the fact that thousands of people get introduced to some form of the internet everyday, the DVR. The only guaranteed captive audience any more are those searching web pages, sifting for knowledge and seeking out entertainment.

That simple acronym has made thousands of advertising execs come in off the golf courses and re-think their advertising program. With the advent of Tivo and now DVR for Time Warner, the Dish, and numerous other services, the public doesn’t have to subject themselves to 10 minutes of commercials per 30 minute show. I realize that VCR’s have been around for decades but they have never offered the ease of use which DVR does. There’s no comparison. What this means for advertisers is that they have to begin looking at new ways to promote products.

DVR relinquishes a viewer from being a captive audience. Even if before DVR you went to the bathroom during a commercial break or the kitchen to grab a snack, you’d still spend more than 75% of TV time watching commercials. Now with DVR you can pause live TV, spend 20 minutes getting ready to go out for the night, come back and watch a whole one hour show commercial free ending near the same time the live feed finishes. It’s about time too, I pay enough for cable TV, why should I have to sit through an hour of commercials each night. Not everyone has a DVR, this I know, but soon enough they will be as standard as cable TV, which people also thought was a foolish idea. “Who would pay for TV when I can get it free with these great big antenna?”

Advertisers need a captive audience and what better place to get that audience then online. I go to web pages and can’t help but view ads. They’re everywhere, some helpful, some annoying, but plastered all over. Contextual ads, poster ads, moving ads, talking ads, pop-up ads. Advertisers are constantly developing new ways to get their message across to a user. If I want the information on a page I have to look at ads and advertisers know that. For all you publishers this is what you want to keep in mind.

Of course there will be a new browser that blocks pop-up ads or removes ad code completely before displaying a page, but there will be ways around that. Popular pages that everyone wants to go to or has to go to, not just those search engine friendly pages, will write code that only displays if their ads are displayed. It’s the never ending battle of technology, something that the music industry has already spent a few years waging war against.

There could also be a technology that only allows you to watch a TV program if you have to watch commercials but I find this a little less likely. As I mentioned VCR’s have been around for quite a while and never raised much of a stink after their initial release into the world of media. Aside from that, the biggest cable providers, Time Warner and Comcast have already embraced the revolution and come out with a DVR service of their own. That would be a lot of wasted money on components and advertising, but, I guess we’ve seen corporate America do stupider things.

I’m not saying the 30 second commercial will go away, it has become a staple of network TV and they won’t give it up without a fight. The times where I still see commercials are when I watch live TV. Yes, TV shows will have to go back to being so good they make audiences want to be the first to see them. Who wants to be the last one to know what the heck is in the hatch on ABC’s hit drama Lost, I sure didn’t’. Sports programs are prime examples of shows that are tough to watch afterwards. Only die-hards can withstand constantly being on the lookout for a newspaper article, conversation, or email that will ruin the playoff game they just tivo’d last night.

Yes, times they are a changing and the advertisers will have to make the shift to the internet in a big way. They will have to look for those sites which create daily traffic and bring in huge amounts of repeat eyeballs and turn new eyeballs into repeats every single day. Places like myspace.com, engadget.com, espn.com, and yes, even stevepavlina.com. These types of sites, not just search engine friendly sites, are where big ad dollars are going to be spent. And since the online world is so fluid there will always be a new big player lurking around the corner. Getting someone to change favorite shows from the OC to Dancing with the Stars is pretty tough, but when they can use the click of a mouse to go from Gizmodo.com to Engadget.com without needing to be caught up on plot, there’s a whole new ball game out there. With the internet, like tivo, the content is always there for you to go back to, (unless of course you make it 2 day only content, hmm).

Click-Through Will Change

If you think click-through dollars will remain strong you are sadly mistaken. I’m not saying people still won’t be able to make a living on creating AIS sites, or having ads on their blogs. People will click when they see a link they like, it’s the nature of the internet. What I’m trying to say is that there will be more and more people seeing others making money this way and will want to join the party. This in turn diluting each niche that’s out there. Of course there will always be another niche created, almost daily, but more people will try to jump in that niche as there are more niche site builders and so on and so forth.

I will reiterate that the basic idea of a click is to earn the publishers money by a visitor leaving their site. The only real trouble with this is how do you know if those who are clicking are really clicking to view the ads or are clicking to make the publisher money. Now I know everyone believes that Google, being lord of the internet, is able to truly tell when clicks are false. How naive. And you can’t tell me that you haven’t been past some of those great sites that give you all that wonderful information on how to monetize your blogs and clicked on an ad or two saying, “why not give him/her some money, they give me great info?”

Isn’t this cheating the advertisers who pay good money to Google and Yahoo for clicks to their websites? Of course it is. Also creating click-through woes are bots specifically designed to click AdWords ads on search result pages as well as making their presence known on sites such as blogs. These click bots can supposedly be curtailed by tracking a user, in this case the bots IP address and keeping track of previous search engine activity and click through activity. With this in mind the perpetrators have developed IP masking and relocating software, kind of like phone tracing re-routers.

Now I won’t get into the why people would go through all the trouble to falsely click ads on a grand scale. Rather, I want to delve into why I think online advertising will continue to be big money and where I think it is going in the future.

Click through advertising needs a formula. I’m not talking person-A clicks 5 times on person-B’s website in 3 days, or person-A doesn’t usually click on ads about fitness so it must be false. That’s not going to solve the problem of false clicks, it will just loose money for ad publishers. Someone needs to do research such as the Google twins did for their unfinished doctorate and come up with an algorithm to successfully weed out false clicks. I’m talking something like:

IP address-A click on 2 ads from IP-address-B’s website, and was only on the click-through for 10 seconds each, and IP-A has sent email to server with IP-D and IP-B has logged into a server related to IP-D and sent email to IP-C which IP-C has a website on IP-E that writes about IP-A, therefore has a 10% chance of being associated with IP-B, therefore the click through cost of ads on IP-B’s website from IP-A clicker are 10% less than they would be for a random person such as IP-Z having no relation to IP-A, B, C, D, or E except they visited IP-B’s site.

This will open up a whole new field that some smart student right now is probably already thinking of. There are companies out there such like Authenticlick.net and adwatcher.com who offer services related to stopping click fraud. How good are they, who knows, but don’t you think Google would have bought them out or be using their software instead of fight million dollar lawsuits in court over false clicks? The battle against false clicks will be continuous and one that slowly lower the cost per click the publishers see in the end.

False clicks coupled with more and more content based AIS sites will eventually bring the click-through only monetization scheme to a nice bar tab leveler income rather than a pay the mortgage level. This is where sites that bring in repeat visitors will become the main attraction on the internet. Like TV shows, such as Lost, that bring millions upon millions of viewers every week, websites that create traffic in a similar way will become the staple of a true online entrepreneurs portfolio. Eventually if you want to make it big you won’t be able to sit idle watching clicks create buy you that new Porsche income.

The Future of Online Ads

As I was saying, the future of online advertising will switch to those people who can show they are generating repeat traffic with growth or the potential for growth. The reason Weblogs Inc. was able to sell for $28 Million to AOL wasn’t because how much they made on their blogs, it was because of how much growth they had as a company and how many eyeballs they were able to keep coming back to their pages, ultimately measured in page views. Jason Calacanis, CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc. makes a point of reiterating this in his blog within several posts. He mentions how they were able to sell key spots of their weblogs long before they ever made a million dollars a year from AdSense.

Steve Pavlina one of those lone shark bloggers out there, has just offered a top spot on his page using the blogads medium. Even he, the great leader of probably thousands of new bloggers over the past year has come to see the light that the real money in online advertising is gaining single source advertisers paying top dollar to reach your regulars. Even the six figure man himself, Darren Rose, has a post (via Arieanna Foley) about advertisers shifting money to blogs. His company B5 Media has sponsors, you can see in the left hand column. Sponsors that sought out his blog network to specifically target his repeats. My guess is on a monthly pay schedule rather than a click-through basis.

Big money in online advertising is already in sites like these that keep people coming back and will continue to shift there. The next big opportunities in online money making is in sites like HomeStarRunner.com that offer a weekly and sometimes daily show update to viewers on the internet. Advertisers will either create these sites themselves or pay others who have these sites to run their clients ads on them. Banner ads, pop-ups, prior to entering ads (those are those ads that myspace.com started to have once they were bought out over the summer, did you even notice?), will become common place among those regular blogs you can’t live without.

Couldn’t you see a company devoted to designing strictly advertising shows, like Initial D but for a Saturn. I’m sure they’re already out there, I just haven’t spent the time to look for them. Young kids will want to come back to see what sweet drift Yoshi Kaboshi did this week and before you know it they’ll be driving and asking Dad for that pimped out white Toyota hatchback (yeah I mistakenly ended up with one of those, no prior knowledge of Initial D though.)

In Closing - My Crystal Ball

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is don’t go believing you are going to sell your blog network for $28 million dollars. Unless you are building a cult following such as Steve Pavlina, Darren Rose, and newcomer Yaro Starak of course. I’m sure they could sell the ad rights for their blogs for a pretty penny. I am sure most of you AISers out there will continue to make a nice chunk of change from the thousands of sites you are creating. Hell, I’m even trying to jump on the band-wagon. All I’m writing this for is to simply offer an opinion of where I think the next swing in online dollars will come from.

I strongly believe repeat visitor sites with the potential for growth will become the standard by which people can make dollars via the internet. More sites offering the same information will be posted every single day and less revenue will be earned through click-through advertising. Create a brand, create a following, and you could be hearing from Mr. Gates wanting to get in on your Intertainment Network of Sites.

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