Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Update on my use of Kontera

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Do you use Kontera to monetize your site? I’ve been using it since sometime in July on the majority of my sites and over all I’m quite happy with the results.

I have been in contact with my representative at Kontera though, because my impression stats (and resulting income) for all the blogs on my Feverishthoughts.com domain are a lot lower than I expected. I’m comparing my results to the amount of impressions I’m getting on my main website (not a blog) which probably has a few hundred less page views per day than all the sites on the feverishthoughts.com domain combined. You’d think that the Kontera link impression numbers would be about the same, but their not. I’m getting four to five times more impressions on my website than on my feverishthoughts blogs.

I’m using Lucias KonteraControl wordpress plugin to control when the Kontera links are allowed to appear on my blog posts. Naturally I don’t want them in the posts that I do for my advertisers – at least not for whatever amount of time is required by each companies TOS. I don’t think the plugin should be interfering in the amount of impressions that I get in the posts that I allow Kontera in, but something is causing there to be less impressions.

We’re trying to figure it out.

If you are using the KonteraControl plugin are you getting the amount of impressions that you think you should be? Say at least 3 to 5 links per post?





Monetize using Kontera and keep kontera out of your paid posts

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As I mentioned in one of my recent posts Kontera was interested in partnering with me. They contacted me a month and a half ago greatly interested in helping me monetize my sites using their program of content links.

I’d been interested in the program for a while, but considering that I write articles for companies I didn’t want to have Kontera bubble ads in those posts. In fact in many cases I’d be breaking my agreement or the Terms of Service with the companies that had provided the opportunity to write those articles. I also didn’t really want to have any ads in my recent posts because I’m not sure how my regular readers would react to that. I know that some people wouldn’t care, but others would just hate it.

Luckily, while I was taking my time deciding whether I’d use the Kontera ads on my sites my blogging friend Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was listening to my concerns and the concerns of others, and she got busy creating two fantastic plugins that those who do pa1d p0sts and want to use Kontera will not be able to live without! Well if they are wordpress bloggers anyway.

Lucia has created the Kontera Control plugin which lets you control exactly where and when Kontera ads show up in your wordpress blog. I haven’t added Kontera to this site yet, but when I do ads will show up in comments after two days, and in new posts after 3 days. They will not show up in permanently compensated posts at all, and posts that only require a post to be permanent and unchanged for a specific period of time, most often 30 days, will possibly have kontera ads after 60 days. Complete instructions on how to set up the Kontera Control plugin have also been written by Lucia.

Now, to exclude Kontera from certain posts you need to put all of them in a particular category. You can name the category anything you want.

Here comes Lucia again with another fantastic plugin.

She’s created the Hide Sponsored Categories plugin. She made the plugin for those that do compensated postings, but anyone could use it to hide any category. Simply activated it and check off which categories you don’t want to show up in your tags, category list, and or archives. If you are like me you don’t just choose one category for a post so no post will every be completely hidden.

It took me a while to set it all up because I had to rework some categories, but I’m now using both of Lucia’s plugins on all of the blogs except the photoblog.

I’ve been using the plugins for about a week and a half and so far the plugins are working quite well.

I finally added Google Adsense to this site

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I was up late last night working on our sites. I had never added any Google Adsense to four of our sites. Why? Well, when we’d first started them I was using traffic engines like Bl)gexplosion and Bl0gMad to begin getting some new visitors to the sites. It worked, I believe that we managed to get a few regular readers and have retained some of the early connections that I made by being very active on the various traffic engine sites.

The problem is that you can’t have Google Adsense (not on the main page anyway) of a site that’s regularly being seen on a traffic engine site as they believe that is generating false impressions of the Google Adsense ads. So I didn’t have Google Adsense on those four sites.

I haven’t been using these sites at all this year, so I finally decided late last night to deactivate, put on pause or hold, all of the sites that I’d had listed on the traffic sites I’d been using in the past. Once I did that I started putting Adsense on this site, As the Garden Grows, Breath of Life and Odd Planet.

It was kind of stupid of me not to put Google Adsense on these sites earlier since these sites tend to have the most traffic of all of our sites – well other than my website. I tried to make the ads as non glaring as possible so as not to irritate our regular readers. Yeah, it might not be quite as effective that way, but for now that’s how I’ll try it on these sites.

All of the sites also have Kontera on them now too. I’ve set it up so that you shouldn’t see Kontera ads in new posts. I tend to post several times a day on a few of the sites so for the most part regular readers should have Kontera free posts. If you don’t visit as often and you scroll through the sites to see all the posts that you’ve missed since your last visit then yes, you’ll run into some Kontera ads here and there.

I’d love to hear if you like the way I’ve set things up. I’ve tried to monetize my sites in a way that should have very low impact on regular loyal readers.

Affiliate performance

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I wrote a post recently about how I’ve added some new advertising to my sites. Well, I’m sorry to say that so far that a few of the new programs have failed to perform at all. I won’t give up on them yet. My sites had hosting problems for part of this time period after all so it wouldn’t be fair to give up yet.

The only one that’s been a really good performer so far has been Kontera. I placed Kontera on my website on the 17th and then followed by slowly adding it to my other websites and our blogs in order of their size. I’m working with a plugin and had to make some category changes in order to make Kontera work on the sites that I do paid blogging so it’s slow going getting it added to all my sites. So far it’s on all but Tricia’s Musings and As the Garden Grows.

So .. taking into consideration that it’s only been on one decently busy site since the 17th and on my husband and I’s less popular blogs for even less time, plus the fact that all the sites were down for at least three and a half days I think the fact that I’ve make around $6 with Kontera to be pretty good. It’s basically been running only 5 days (stats only go up to the 25th) without interruption and has only be on one site for that entire time period.

I’m hoping to add Kontera to Tricia’s Musings and As the Garden grows today. Perhaps I’ll do another update in a week to show how it’s done when it’s been running on all of our sites without interruption for a whole week.

Kontera will not show on my recent posts. I may not do as well with the program because of that, but at this time that’s the way I want it.

I was told by my contact at Kontera that it takes about two weeks for them to fully optimize Kontera for a site. Since I’ve been slow to add it to all our sites it might take closer to a full three weeks (my guess, not their words).

I do fairly well with Google Adsense, although I wish I did even better of course. Hopefully Kontera does just as well. This short test certainly tells me it’s better than some of the other programs I’m trying, at least at this point.

Re-invent and Improve your blog

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There was a bit of heated discussion last week on the blog of one of the companies with whom I do some pa1d bl0gging work. They used to allow people to do three pa1d p0sts per day, but they’ve dropped down to two per day late last week.

They did that in the past for a few months and it actually allowed more people to get opportunities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’ve done. True they could have notified us in advance, but it’s there prerogative to do this.

Use this time to re-invent your blogs.

Stand back and take a good look at your site with fresh eyes. Believe me, you might not like what you see.

I’m not saying that I haven’t made a few mistakes with my sites. I have. But every once in a while I sit back and take stalk of what I’m doing and I keep trying to improve how I do things.

I’m stuck at home with a chronic illness. The money I make in various ways via the internet is the ONLY money I have coming in. I must pay the bills.

If the opportunities were truly there in the first place moving from three ops a day to two would hurt all of us financially, but the ops aren’t there. Hopefully now some of us that haven’t been getting any decent ops that FIT our sites will get some.

I do have several blogs on that particular companies system but as of the end of last week I’d only done 12 ops this month. TWELVE. That ain’t much. I do believe that most of the ops that I chose to take for my sites did fit their topic/niche.

Those that have been getting their 3 a day quota per blog … were all those ops really on topic for your site? Really?

Think about it this way. If every second post on your site, or in some cases large chunks of posts in a row are pa1d p0sts (some companies allow this!) do you really think your readers are going to stick around?

Are advertisers going to seek your blog out if it’s full of ads?

Is your sites PR going to go up? – Maybe maybe not. It depends on the quality of your posts, if you’ve been taking opportunities that fit your blogs topics, and most importantly if your readers are sticking around and occasionally linking to your site or your posts.

Now that we can only take two ops per day on this one site that many of us do work for try to find posting opportunities that truly fit your site.

If you write about things that suite your blogs topics it will only enhance your blog. Don’t kill your site by taking everything and anything just for the sake of money – no matter how much you need it.

I must be doing ok with my choices.

My readership has gone up each week. Many of my visitors interact with me via the comment section of my posts. I must be doing well in selecting things to write about that interest not only me but my readers as well.

Not only has my readership gone up, but so has advertiser interest. I’m getting offers for all kinds of things from free samples to sidebar links to posting and affiliate opportunities on a daily basis. See my post about Monetizing our Sites to learn what’s been happening here lately.

Vedis gave me a very nice compliment regarding my passion for blogging and how it shows in my posts – both pa1d and unpa1d.

I’m very thankful for that comment because it gives me some feedback as to what I’ve been doing, how I’m doing and what other bloggers are thinking.

All I can really say is that I try.

I try to write about things that interest me and hopefully my readers. Whatever I’m writing about I try to make it personal by adding my own experiences and thoughts into the post. I think that’s the key factor in any post. It’s the key factor in my posts.
These are mostly personal blogs that we are working on – make it personal. Write something that touches your readers.

You can’t do that if you are writing about things that you have no experience with or that you haven’t taken the time to research well.

I want everyone to have success which is why I take a moment to share what I’m doing every once in a while.

I know people are upset about the paid blogging company that has reduced the amount of jobs that one can do on a blog per day, but really use this time wisely.

Use this time to make your blog better. If you do you’ll probably end up raising your sites page rank and then you’ll also end up increasing the amount that you can earn through your blog in a variety of ways.

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