Monetize Your Blog With In Text Advertising
A little while ago I had an email in my account from a service I had forgotten about for a long time. It was Kontera, my in-text advertising program I had signed up with in January 2009. They were letting me know that they had paid me $107.29 in USD for the advertising on my sites http://www.mybeachdecor.com and http://www.healthydietweightloss.com. WOW! Happy Day!
Then I looked back to see for what time frame this payment really was. Yep, you guessed it, it was for the time from when I signed up (January 2009) to July 2010. That makes it 1 1/2 years, or 18 months. Spread the payment out over 18 months and it means I earned not quite $6 per month with Kontera. Whoopidoo!
Well, to be honest, whilst it seems very disappointing on first glance, it is still money I earned for doing absolutely nothing extra, just by installing Kontera In-Text Advertising on my blog. So as “bad” as the payout seems, I think it’s worth adding some In-Text Advertising to monetize your blog.
What exactly is in-text advertising? Well, have you ever seen a website where some of the words are underlined, or maybe dotted, highlighted in blue, and when you hover over them you get a little window pop up with some related information? (Have a look at my site about Lighthouse Home Decor you can see it there).
What you will have to consider is whether the extra advertising on your blog will actually turn people off. If you have a very loyal readers base or customer base, it might actually annoy them if there are too many links that point them away from your site.
There are quite a few different companies out there that offer this service. Opinions on these services differ quite a lot. Some Affiliate Marketers don’t seem to like Kontera, but swear by InfoLinks, – they seem to be paying out at a better rate. There are some others, but I have not investigated them yet.
What I have decided to do is to stop Kontera for now and sign up with Infolinks. I want to see for myself whether there is a big difference in the payout and service. I remember, what I don’t like about Kontera is that you can never look back more than 6 months for your earnings. Which makes it a bit difficult if it takes you more than 6 months to earn up to your payout threshold. So after about 6 months, whenever I wanted to know the total earned in my account, I had to email Kontera and request a figure. Which was a real pain in the butt.
Both companies have a payment threshold of $50 and pay straight into your paypal account.
So, if you are thinking of monetizing your blog or site, have a think about In-Text Advertising.
I would like to know also whether any of you have experience with this, and how your success rate is/was. Which company do you prefer? Do you know of others that might be better? Let me know!
Hi Petra,
I have been using Kontera since I started internet marketing 5+ months ago now. I don’t get much traffic so my Kontera revenue from 3 websites is a total of $3.00 so far. I wish they paid a bit more per click. Most seem to be about 2cents or so. But as you say it is money for doing nothing. At the rate I’m going I might get to $100.00 in 10 years. Nice to see you posting on this site again.
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Seb, it took me 1 1/2 years to see a little more revenue of all my sites – the first few months (or years…) are very frustrating. It takes a while for the traffic to build up, but when it does, you will notice the difference. It might not take you 10 years to make $100, might only be 5 😉
I know people who have made decent money with this and people who haven’t. I am still on the fence about it. While i don’t think it looks all that great, I can see where it could be beneficial, I guess it really boils down to who is reading your blog.
I’ve been using Vibrant Media ads on my entertainment site for a few months now,and the earnings keep increasing from month to month. They offer the highest pay rate in the in-text ad business,with about 0.25-0.30 cents per click, but their click-through rate is the lowest,so you don’t really earn as much at first.
Some bloggers would be happy to make enough money to pay their hosting fees, while others dream of quitting their jobs and blogging full time. Try these advertising programs alongside content creation and online promotion to create multiple streams of income.
Personally, I haven’t used any of the in-text advertising companies as it has always been my understanding that the earnings are quite low. However, several people have told me that VibrantMedia is worth a go, and that they pay more than the others mentioned.
I may try them out one of these days, I wouldn’t mind getting a surprise $100 payment every now and then!
David, I am going to check out Vibrant Media! Thanks for the tip.
Good idea. Thanks for the suggestion. Mostly I find intext ads annoying but I may add them to some of my sites.
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This same business practice can be applied to advertising with local businesses of all sizes, not just in big cities. Treat the internet like a giant billboard!
@Tony, I am cent percent agreed with you. Using internet for the promotion will help a lot.
Regards,
Margarate
I currently use Google Adsense on some of my websites and have found it pretty easy to implement. I haven’t tried the in text advertising yet. Is it pretty easy to implement also?
Yes, very simple. After you sign up, just follow the steps they give you.
An additional tip from my side-The more content that your blog has, the more infolink text ads that will be displayed on your blog. More infolinks ads can mean more money.
Thanks its really a good post it will be very useful suggestion from you petra for how to use the Google Adsense keep it up!!!photo frames
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I will simply state that by far, Kontrera is the best in-text advertising network I’ve known. Compared to traditional banner ads, they are much less intrusive and provide a worthy alternative or additional source to your monthly ad earnings.
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I have never tested contextual advertising I do not know how this kind of advertising would perform in my site. What I have noticed in sites like Squidoo, is that many of this “contextual links” show unrelated terms for some words. For example, the world “neural” isn’t related to beauty products. I still I should give a try it might work.
I have tried Kontera and Infolinks, and I may say that Infolinks is 1000 times better. In Kontera I had almost no income, and this is why I choose to use Infolinks. They are very good as a secondary income. You may use it with adsense and chitika :).
If you want to increase the income from infolinks, you should search in google for some articles on the subject, I found some useful tips about that.
Regards.
Thanks for posting your experiences with Kontera, currently all of my sites use google adsense. are there any special requirements for using google Kontera??
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No, no special requirements as far as I know 🙂
Many find infolinks pretty much reliable than adsense. Aside from they get banned with the latter, they also find infolinks simplicity can easily fit their blog post. I haven’t heard about Kontera so I don’t really have enough idea on that…
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How do you go about linking texts to sites? I keep seeing more and more blogs advertise that way, but haven’t heard of a way to get started on it, too.
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I wouldn’t think that adding a few infolinks in your site would be a bad idea, especially if you are good writer. Whenever I’ve found myself clicking on links like that I will usually end up back on the blog to finish whatever it is that I was reading. I would think that it would be better to put the links toward the 60-70% mark of your blog since that way you already have piqued their interest in your writings so that they will also come back to finish it.
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Thank you for this tip post. A newby like really can’t decide to what type of money making idea I should deal with. My blog is just an experiment for me and I will be deciding soon to set up my own site seriously after learning all the pros and cons. I will try this one, thank you again.
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This is an good introduction for me as I am near to start my blog but I have taken URL http://www.gemsbm.com for my business of gems (Stones). I have also intention to move in the fields of affiliate marketing.
A little while ago I had an email in my account from a service I had forgotten about for a long time. It was Kotaokk, my in-text advertising program I had signed up with in February 2010. Thanks
Text Advertising is a great idea. It is beneficial for lot of website owners.
even though kontera uses intext advertising, most successful bloggers stay out. one reason is that they pay low for every impression and click when compared to infolinks. and also for the fact that intext advertising can become a nuisance for your readers if it is plenty.
Congrats to you Petra, you received over 100$ from kontera. Text advertising is really good idea and becoming more popular nowadays. Infolinks are also good to earn money. I enjoyed your post it help me lot. I will try it on my blog soon..
well…I beg to disagree intext advertising is not a nuisance at all for it can be a good source for additional revenue.
I think that Kontera’s ads are presented better when the mouse-over occurs. That’s something to consider when deciding between the two because even if InfoLinks pays more, the number of clicks is probably more important.
I agree, intext advertising can’t be a good profit source. But as it was mentioned you can for example pay for your server and it costs nothing so I think it’s worth to try.
I tried in-text advertisements on my blog before but I quickly turned them off. I think they are very annoying and misleading to my readers/visitors.
The return of investment is not so big either
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Michael, you do have a point. That’s what I am not so sure about, either. Even though it is a nice little earner, you wonder whether it actually might turn some people away from your site, and that is the last thing you want to do. I guess it’s up to everybody themselves what they want to do.
If you ask me, the money what you get even after 2-3 text posting equals to a negligible amount!
I had not tried this one yet. Might be even better than adsense as I only get very small earnings from it. Thanks!
I prefer to promote affiliates instead of using text advertising companies. I find it converts better.
“I will simply state that by far, Kontrera is the best in-text advertising network I’ve known. Compared to traditional banner ads, they are much less intrusive and provide a worthy alternative or additional source to your monthly ad earnings.”
Id agree, if your text looks for like it applies with a web 2.0 site you will get more hits based on interest because of its looks not the add alone. The article is a great instruction manual for fine pointing ever aspect of it, thanks for the info.
Hi Petra,
Just earlier I was thinking about in text advertising and discussing it with a friend of mine, I think in text advertising is great. Like you said, no extra effort and it brings good money, in fact, your earnings are absoutely great – 6$/month is a great sum of money and this sum of money will raise constantly, I’m sure about that. I am going to check about Kontera and see exactly what it is about, thank you very much for sharing this great article and Kontera!
Best wishes,
Cristian
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Affiliate marketing is much more better than adsense. What you say guys ?
I make most of my money still from Adsense….
This article has helped to understand what in text advertising is.
I have made a copy of this post and included in my resource kit. I think using this type of advertising is worth attempting as the income is only a by product of another activity
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In-text advertising is a new model of advertising campaign. It sounds ok but some customers might not have the time to read all your contents so it may be a problem.
I use banner ads and preparing for adwords. I will research on this and get back to this site.
I think things like that are nice when you have totally forgotten about them – it’s like opening an old wallte or putting on a coat and finding cash in it, but from an ongoing perspective its likely you wouljd want to have swapped out that ad with something that paid a bit better – if enough people do that then they should start raising the payout 🙂
It’s nice to see that Kontera is actually working for some.
I’ve been using AdSense for several years and it really has been working out great for me. But some say that you’ll get banned sooner or later — and that is exactly why I’m thinking of switching over to another Ad Network once that eventually happens. Might be Kontera I’m switching to in the near future, depending on if they have ads for Swedish websites or not.
/Nabil, from Sweden.
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Turns out they don’t. Guess I’m screwed once Google decides to block my account from showing ads 🙂
Thanks for the information I never thought about text advertising
The article is a great instruction manual for fine pointing ever aspect of it, thanks for the info.
Now i know what’s the purpose of In-Text Advertising. And i definitely agree, it is really annoying if there are many links that
pop up. Thanks for sharing very informative article….
I love when I receive these kinds o warnings, telling us that we received money. but in my case is with adsense.
I’ve seen very little results with intext advertising services. The revenue is considerably lower than adsense and other similar networks and they can be very annoying and obstruct the user experience.
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I’m using adsense as main ads. I don’t know if put much ads will fuzzy your visitor to read content or not.
I would not put those on the same site that I have adsense cause I think it would distract the adsense ads but how would I know when I really haven’t tested it. I still wonder who clicks those ads but on the other hand I’m way more educated about web ads than a regular reader of the web 🙂
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This is really very good and informative article about text advertising. The content was well chosen and well explained too. Well thanks for the information.
I’ve been wondering if this really will work? It’s another method of passive income that has me going “hmmmmm”, but as some of the advertising revenues drop on some of my sites this may be an option.
Can this be used in conjunction with Adsense?
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Hi Barry, this can definitely used in conjunction with Adsense. That’s what I do, anyway.
Neat blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A design like yours with a few simple tweeks would really make my blog stand out. Please let me know where you got your design. Thanks
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Hi, my theme is PrimePress – just Google it!
Really great post, Thank you for sharing This knowledge.Excellently written article, if only all bloggers offered the same level of content as you, the internet would be a much better
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i think in-text links can be very annoying. I prefer putting a banner at the end of the article, in sidebar, where they usually are, but I don’t like the idea of stressing the readers with links that they might click on by mistake..
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I have also signed up for a Kontera account a couple of weeks ago but I think it’s difficult to make decent money with Kontera.
I have only earned a few bucks since I started… Instead, I use Text Link Ads witch is much better if you ask me 🙂 The pay MUCH better for every click also !
Looks interesting! That’s still good earnings if you tell me. I’ll try out Infolinks. Since as you said it pays better. Thanks!
I was thinking about in text advertising and discussing it with a friend of mine, I think in text advertising is great. Like you said, no extra effort. | 😛
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I think ads within the text could really distract readers but some readers are intelligent enough to finish reading the content first before clicking on any ads.
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Will definitely use these to make some more money to my blog. BTW thank you for letting me know these kinda ads
Its very useful information. In blogging text based advertising is useful its my thought. But we should place the relevant links then readers also will get interest and traffic to our blog will get increase.
Thanks for your post.
In-Text advertising is really a good idea for my blog. This is becoming more popular nowadays. Infolinks can be a good way to earn money. I’ll try my luck with them. Thanks