The Official Launch of The Sensely Adsense Optimized Template Theme For Blogger and Wordpress
Adsense loving bloggers take note. If you’re looking to make money blogging and you’re on the hunt for just the right Adsense Optimized Wordpress or Blogger Theme, Sensely’s newly released Adsense Optimized Theme is a must see. Although there are many free adsense optimized themes available on the web for free download, the majority of them are buggy eye-sores that ruin the user experience, and don’t really take into account the technical aspects of what really makes adsense perform. Sensely’s adsense theme package comes with a lot of extras and customizable options but it’s also got a (low-range) premium theme price tag. So why pay for this theme? Here’s a quick review of what you get for the money.
Make Money With Your Videos Today: Dump YouTube And Upgrade To A For-Profit Video Sharing Community
Although many of us are waiting for YouTube to finally announce the launch of it’s community profit sharing program, it’s probably not a good idea to hold your breath. If you’ve got tons of great video content just sitting there on your hard drive and you’re itching to make a buck by doing something with it, there are a couple of YouTube-like alternatives that will pay you money for your content. Check it…
Earn 5$ Per 1000 views on Metacafe
The first site on this list is Metacafe. The site has a rewards program based on the number of times your video is viewed by visitors. There isn’t much fine print here. It’s as simple as it gets. The more your videos are watched, the more you get paid. Under their current program, you’ll earn $5 for every 1000 times your video is viewed. There’s only one catch. Similar to a lot of affiliate programs and Google’s Adsense program, you don’t get paid until you hit the $100 minimum payment threshold (approximately 20,000 views). While it might seem an insurmountable hurdle, any YouTube video fan knows that 20,000 isn’t that hard to do if your video catches on. Good quick videos can be incredibly viral and a low budget video shot on a home camera can generate millions of views over its lifetime. Take this video of Freddie “the YYZ Guitar Hero” on YouTube, for example. Since October 2006, the video’s been viewed on YouTube over 5 MILLION times. In a profit-sharing program like Metacafe’s, this video would have earned….ummm…carry the two…… $25,000 to date (and counting).
Hold on, we’re not moving on just yet. There’s more. If you have a website but don’t have any videos of your own you’ll be able to get in on the action pretty soon. Metacafe is about to launch an affiliate program for publishers where you can easily embed videos into your website or blog (YouTube style) and get paid based on the number of views. It hasn’t been officially launched yet, but you can check it out on their affiliate page.
My Top For-Profit Pick: Revver
Revver, although similar, has a slightly different revenue model to Metacafe. In my opinion, this could be A LOT more lucrative than Metacafe’s basic per-view program because Revver’s publishing tools make videos 10 times more viral. Here’s how it works… Users still earn money based on the number of views a video gets. However, instead of paying per view and leaving the content as-is, Revver inserts advertisements onto users’ videos and pays them a 50/50 share of the profits from those ads. The more viewers a video gets, the more money you get. Here’s where the program really gets good…when you upload a video to Revver, in addition to attaching an ad, they also attach unique tracking technology to the video. Revver ads can be served like YouTube on ANY blog or site, anywhere on the Internet. Since ads are attached to the video itself and dynamically served wherever your video travels, there’s no restriction on how your videos are distributed. The more people email your video, post it to other websites or download it from P2P networks, the more money you could earn. Consider that for a second. Now we’re talkin!
One last thing on Revver - For Bloggers and other Wordpress users, Revver’s got their own plugin for video publishing within posts and sidebars. How…ahem…convenient.
Beating Google To the Punch: Flixya’s Embedded Adsense Ads
This one’s worth mentioning for historical purposes, but I think it’ll probably be phased out soon. Flixya is a lot like Revver in that is shares ad revenues on a 50/50 basis with its users. However, instead of using their own ads, Flixya uses Google Adsense to serve ads into video pages. Although they beat Google’s recent adsense-for-video program (fed by YouTube) to market, Google’s Adsense for video program is now available free to all adsense publishers as of a few months ago (which you can see in the right sidebar of this site). Publishers under Google’s adsense for video lets you keep 100% of the click revenue and it works seemlessly with Adsense serving related content in classic Google style, so I don’t see Flixya being a real player in the for-profit video sharing arena for very long. I thought I’d acknowledge it though. ;-).
Bidvertiser Announces A Pay Per Click Advertising Solution for Feedburner Feeds!
Finally someone came up with a solution to monetize Feedburner Feeds outside of Feedburner’s Ad network. Feedburner’s internal ad network kept a lot of smaller blogs out of the game by requiring a minimum traffic count, so this should generate a good buzz with small blog owners. When Feedburner announced it’s up-coming integration with Adsense a few months ago and then didn’t offer its publishers a way to actually deliver Adsense ads within the feeds themselves, a lot of people were disappointed. I definitely was, especially because the solution that they did offer when it was finally released just embeded Adsense ads within your posts on your blog, which only takes a simple do-it-yourself quick fix at the bottom of your singlepost.php file. This morning, Bidvertiser Announced 3 distinct solutions to this problem and they should do really well with them. All of them allow you to keep your current feeds and feed counts. Here they are.
- For Wordpress users that DONT use Feedburner, the new Bidvertiser Wordpress Plugin allows you to seamlessly embed the Bidvertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.
- For Feedburner user, there’s a solution that allows you to embed the Bidvertiser Ads in your current Feedburner address, without having to change more that the original feed field.
- Here’s the feed solution for Blogger/Blogspot users.
If you’re new to Bidvertiser and you’d like to start monetizing your feeds with PPC ads, you can get started by signing up for your free account
Profiting From Your YouTube Videos
You may be wondering whether there’s a way to make money with video content on YouTube. The honest answer right now is “kindof”. At present, YouTube is strictly a free video sharing community and members should expect to upload and share their content without any anticipation of a profit. YouTube currently makes all of their profit from ads on their site, and there is no real mechanism for users to generate revenue directly from the videos that they upload. But that’s all expected to change soon.
Affiliate Marketing 101 - What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Did you know that you can make money simply by promoting other people’s products online? Affiliate marketing is where you earn commissions by referring visitors from your website to a merchant’s website. A merchant is any individual entity or company that sells products or services online. Yahoo, eBay, Best Buy, and Overstock.com are all good examples of merchants with affiliate marketing programs. These companies have all set up programs that you can apply to directly on the web to become an affiliate. As one of their affiliates, a merchant will pay you commissions to promote their products and services online. Affiliate Programs are everywhere these days - almost every major company doing business online has one. And best of all, signing up is free, which means that you never have to spend a dime in order to make money. Sound good? Then read on.
Book Review: The Adsense Code - What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense, By Joel Comm
Before I dive into the pros and cons of this book, I think it’s important to acknowledge how significantly the book has impacted the way thousands of Internet publishers use and understand Adsense. At this writing, the book is just over a year old and it has been heralded as an instant classic in the growing world of Internet marketing. After making the New York Times best sellers list in 2006, The Adsense Code firmly established Joel Comm as an authority in the world of contextual advertising. Regardless of what I say in this post, the numbers tell the story. This book was a hit. Here’s why.
Although countless millions of websites run adsense ads, very few sites actually generate enough traffic to really see large, consistent adsense earnings. When web site traffic is low, infrequent and unpredictable, it’s tough for site owners to see how small tweaks in the placement or configuration of ads on a page affect click rates and earnings. This makes maximizing your adsense income difficult. But big numbers don’t lie. When a website is getting large amounts of consistent traffic, small changes in the way ads look and where ads are placed can make a big difference to the number of clicks they get.
What follows is a quick summary of my main income streams from blogging. Before you read it though - keep in mind that every blog is unique in how it can make money. Some of the following income streams will work on some blogs a lot better than others - the key is to experiment with as many as possible and see what works best for you.
Despite not using it here at ProBlogger any more (here’s why) I continue to use AdSense with amazing effect on my other blogs. I have them all set to show image and text based ads and find that 250×300 pixel ads work best (usually with a blended design). I don’t have much luck with their ‘referrals’ program but their normal ads work a treat and continue to be the biggest earner for me. 
Chitka continues to be a great performer for me on my blogs. They work best on product related blogs although their recent announcement of their Premium ad unit is exciting as they now offer ads with a non product focus that I’m hearing great conversions on (I have one reader who is getting $28 CPM on this ad unit).Chitika offers a range of ad units that I experiment with. I find their eMiniMalls work best and that Related Product Units are also good. Their Shoplincs product isn’t performing as well as it once did for me - mainly because I’ve been promoting it less and have driven less traffic to it. Over the time I’ve been using Chitika they’ve now earned me over a quarter of a million dollars - I can’t recommend them enough! 
Private ad sales directly to advertisers have continued to grow over the last few months and as a result they’re now my third highest income stream. I expect them to overtake both Chitika and AdSense in the coming months. This includes ad sales of the 125 x 125 ads here at ProBlogger as well as a campaign or two at Digital Photography School. 
I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs - most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own. These include - - Digital Photography Secrets (a camera technique series), Pro Photo Secrets (a great photoshop product) , Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program (about to open the doors again), SEO Book (Aaron’s legendary resource) and the excellent Teaching Sells course (which just continues to grow in what it offers to it’s members in terms of content). 
As I wrote recently - Shopzilla has really impressed me with how it’s performed over the last few weeks. It’s actually doing well enough to debut in this list at #6. The ads are similar to Chitika but the click values have been higher for me to this point. They don’t offer quite as many options as Chitika does in terms of types of ads but for a new ad network there’s definitely promising signs. I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop!
The job boards here at ProBlogger continue to grow each month in the number of advertisements that are being bought. This enabled me to invest most of the money that they’d earned a while back into getting a new back end for the boards and to redesign them. It hit me today that the boards are now bringing in around $1000 a month in revenue which is pretty nice considering that they are so low maintenance to run. They also offer a service to readers and add value to the overall blog. 
Another newcomer to this list is WidgetBucks - another ad network that ProBlogger readers will be familiar with. 
I also play with a number of other ad networks. Some I run as tests to see if I should review them here - and some are just advertising that run in the background on some of my smaller blogs. These include ShoppingAds, Feedburner RSS ads, Vizu (a poll advertising system), Kontera and Bidvertiser. Together these don’t add up to major earnings for me - not because they are not good, but because I don’t use them heavily (a blog can only run so many ads on it).