The Four-eyed Journal » Monetization

Entrecard now selling credits

jhay — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:30:19 +0000

It has finally arrived, those who are tired of dropping their Entrecards on the millions of blogs out there wishing there could be an easier way to earn more credits can do so if they have the cash to spare (and I bet die-hard users do) by buying credits directly from Entrecard.com

Option to Buy Credits is here
Finally, the long awaited option to buy credits has arrived. While dropping is by far the most popular option to get credits, if you wanted to launch a massive campaign, there is no way you could get the credits you needed quickly by dropping.

So now, on your dashboard, you will now find a link to “Buy Credits”. You can also use this link:

http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits

Where does the credits you’ll buy come from? The answer is quite interesting and can be read on Entrecard’s blog:

To this end, it wouldn’t serve you well if we just generated credits out of thin air and sold them. You’ve worked hard for those credits, and in a sense we don’t feel we have the right to undermine all the time you spend with us by cheating our own system. So, the answer to the long awaited question, is you. We buy these credits from you.

The way it works is we purchase the credits from trusted members of the community. We’re going to secure about 20,000 to 40,000 credits each day to sell by purchasing them from these trusted members who’s earning methods can be validated and approved through our system, and who’s blogs are top-notch. We will not buy from anyone who exhibits suspicious activity, and we will not buy from anyone with a sub-par quality blog.

Our economy is very delicate and must stay balanced at all time, and we would like to take a moment to assure you that this action will serve only to increase the value of the Credit, and create more value for our members who are interested in generating revenue by selling their credits.

So this is how Entrecard plans to monetize their service though they haven’t mentioned if they take a cut from the buying and selling of credits. Still, it’s a brilliant idea in which both Entrecard and EC users will benefit. All those time spent bloghopping and EC-dropping will finally yield more rewards.

A delicate economy

EC users can buy limited amounts of credits a day using PayPal. I just bought 1,000 credits for US$9.50 and when I returned to see if more are available I saw this message:

* Please note: A maximum of 1,002ec are currently available for purchase using paypal. If there are insufficient credits left today for your purposes, please try again tomorrow – credits are generally added daily.

A well thought-of scheme if I may say. This whole new system depends on the hard working EC users continuing to visit other blogs to drop their Entrecards. Brilliant!

Your $2 tips for a 7-day site-wide link

jhay — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 05:26:20 +0000

Thanks to blog-overlord J Angelo who posted about ScratchBack at The Blog Herald, I’ve finally found a cool and great ad/tipping system to use here on The Four-eyed Journal.

What is ScratchBack? It is best summed up in J Angelo’s own words which goes:

[It] basically allowed people to send small amounts of money to a publisher in exchange for a text link or image.

Sweet! Now anyone who’d enjoy reading this blog and would like to give me a tip can do so and get something of great value in return! Link love!

See the widget on the sidebar right below my most recent posts? Send me a $2 tip and you’d get one spot for the link of your choice on that list. That link will stay live for a full seven (7) day period and would be visible all throughout this blog. For both our convenience, the transaction is handled by Paypal. Awesome isn’t it?

It is a good way to sample how advertising would be like here on The Four-eyed Journal. If you get happy, you could extend the link placement for another 7 days for just $2.00 or you could sign up for a regular direct advertising deal where both of us would be happier.

ScratchBack is Jim Kukral’s latest project to test the concept of micro-tipping and whether it is a viable option for bloggers to get extra help or little rewards for their efforts.

I’m sure you’d be interested in this service as well. First it was EntreCard, this is the next one.

PS
Advanced thanks for the tips!

The Ubuntu Cds are awesome! But where’s my TLA check?

jhay — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:40:46 +0000

One of my strongest and most reliable source of income from blogging is selling links via Text Link Ads. Ever since I sold enough links that sent me $100 checks blogging has become an even more rewarding experience and investment of time and energy. The TLA checks helped me a lot in getting through school, maintaining my PC and a few extra new shirts every now and then.

One of the draw backs of being paid by check is the long delay caused by shipping. A bigger drawback, risk even, is that there’s a great chance that the check be lost in the post or stolen by someone familiar with how advertising sites are paying their publishers.

In my case, it takes an average of three weeks before my TLA check is delivered to my home. So if my earnings for the previous month was posted at the start of current month, the check itself would be in my hands near the end of the current month! A delay of almost a month is something I got to live with and somehow, I did.

However, for this past month of November, something has happened to me for the first time. I expected the check for my October earnings to arrive anytime soon during the last week of November when instead, the package delivered to me was my 10 CDs of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The TLA check however, has still not yet arrived.

It’s really surprising as three weeks had already passed and still no TLA check. What’s even stranger is that the Ubuntu CDs arrived too early based on my past experience of ordering the free CDs. By my reckoning, Ubuntu CDs take almost two months before finally arriving here at my residence. So I was really surprised and amazed at how the new Ubuntu CDs arrived so soon. Not more than three weeks when I made my first request at the Ubuntu site. Big props to Canonical for the speedy delivery of my Ubuntu CDs! But TLA people and more importantly the folks at the local post office, where’s my TLA check???

Two days ago I sent an email to TLA regarding this and requested that in case they would send out another payment, better do it via PayPal which is safer and a lot faster. Just a few minutes into writing this post today, their response finally came.

Thanks for the email. I am sorry to hear that you are having trouble receiving payment. We are able to cancel the check and re-issue it via PayPal, however, our bank hands down a $30.00 stop payment fee for all cancelled checks which we are forced to hand down to the publisher. If you would like to accept this fee, and have payment sent via PayPal, please let me know, and we will go forward with cancellation.

$30.00?! That much to cancel a check?! It may be not that much for the big earners but for small-time bloggers like myself, this is already quite a lot.

Having no other choice I decided to just give in to this seemingly unfair policy. With this experience, I’m starting to really have second thoughts in opting for my earnings to be sent via regular mail. Thank God PayPal is fully functioning now in the Philippines. All I need now is to get that EON Card from Unionbank in order to withdraw the money.

Postal Office folks, may God bless you all! As for the other TLA publishers, have you suffered the fate as I? Fellow blogger Aja Lapus has. Let’s just hope this wouldn’t happen again soon.

To my readers; do the ads alienate you?

jhay — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:25:55 +0000

Bryan @ One Man’s Goal has an interesting post about one of the oldest yet crucial issues about blogging; monetization.

He starts the conversation by asking the question:

Does monetizing your blog alienate readers?

There were lots of good points raised by bloggers from both sides of the fence. Bryan gives his reaction to each which is good as it tends to balance things out. He also gives a summary of the arguments against blog monetization;

Most of the arguments made against site monetization have to do with honesty. We all know a few dishonest people, and I can guarantee weâ€™ll run into a few more. Some bloggers are like a crooked used-car salesmenâ€¦ theyâ€™ll say anything to make a buck. This gives the rest of us a bad name, just like the honest used-car salesmen out there.

Others say that the ads are simply un-appealing, and that they would prefer to see a nice and clean site with no advertisements as opposed to one that has ads shoved in every pixel of free space (Iâ€™ve seen thisâ€¦ IT HAPPENS).

Valid points really, but there’s a middle ground to all of this and as I commented in that post;

Everyone has to eat, buy new underwear once in a while and some still go to school. So earning a buck or two from your effort of maintaining a blog will be well worth it.

Besides, the famous blogs still carry ads on them, some of top blogs even takes ages to load completely because of the ads on them, but people still read them. So whatâ€™s the point of turning away from blogs that do have some ads (not too much of course)? Because after all, and I believe we all agree on this that content is still king.

I’m on the same side as Bryan, obviously from the comment I made, the current state of this blog and its history. I’m pro-monetization and have gone through almost every monetization scheme out there. Why do I do it? Why do I become, as Bryan puts it; an honest used-car salesman?

Expounding on the comment I made, I come from a lower-middle class family. The only reason I was able to start college at the Ateneo only to move to De La Salle University is because of my loving and hardworking grandparents in the US of A. I owe a lot to them. But that’s just for the tuition, the rest of the other school expenses are shouldered by my father, and I’m telling you this is where reality and hardship kicks in. So growing up in this situation I’ve realized that I need to do something on top of getting good grades and that is helping with getting me through to college.

Sacrificing school just to get a job momentarily was an idea I prepared to put into practice but was adherently opposed by my family. So the option left was getting those on-the-side jobs or ‘sidelines’ that would help me earn something that could lighten up the load on my family’s purse.

Since I’m a geek, a Left-leaning geek at that, plus a theater arts worker cum aspiring writer, blogging served another purpose; not just a tool where I could write to help people realize what a dump the Philippines is and that we should do something about it, but something that could help me earn my keep. Hence the monetization of this blog. (Quite a long disclosure wasn’t it?)

But like Bryan, I now have standards which in summary:

In the remote chance that companies would like to advertise here, if their product or service won’t be of great help to us then no to those crap.
No more over-advertising. I use to cram every pixel of free space on this blog with ass-loads of ads from different advertising systems but not anymore.
No pop-ups, no interstitials, no bandwidth-heavy flash ads that will jump out at your face and scare you away.

However, I don’t know if these standards of mine are really being effectivel implented here. That’s why it’s time for an ‘open-forum’ if you think I’m violating my own standards or you have any suggestions to help me out do share them at the comments thread below. I might even throw a surprise gift for each of you.

Kontera In-text Ads can’t be run with AdSense (Updated)

jhay — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 15:50:50 +0000

I’ve been running the fancy In-text ads by Kontera since last month and I must say that the ads can be quite effective since they are right inside the content/posts on my blog, the prime hot spot for ads. The ads that pop-out like clouds from the double-underlined words bring in really relevant and targeted ads to the readers.

Right now I’m quite pleased with the results I’m getting with In-text Ads despite the low (as of the moment) traffics on this site, however, in the back of my mind I was quite concerned whether it was completely okay to run the In-text Ads by Kontera along side with Google’s AdSense. The facts that Pinoy problogger Abe Olandres of Yugatech.com has just recently implemented In-text ads in his blog and his comment that it’s okay to run it alongside AdSense gave me some assurance.

But just to make sure of things, I decided to e-mail the AdSense team two days ago and asked if I could run Kontera’s In-text Ads alongside with Google AdSense. I recieved their response last night and it has confirmed the worst. The answer of the AdSense team to my concern was crystal clear:

According to our program policies, Kontera ads may not be displayed on the same page as Google ads on your site. However, you are welcome to display those ads on pages of your site that do not include Google ads.

So there you have it folks. Contrary to what I and Sir Abe believed, Kontera’s In-text ads cannot be run on the same page as Google’s AdSense. So now I have a little dilemma. I want to keep both AdSense and In-text ads running on my blog because I do earn something from both of them, but now I have to make a decision that I find a little difficult: ‘Which ad system to dump or relocate to other parts of my blog?’

In my mind played the following thoughts and scenarios that helped me arrive at a decision.

2.) Remove the In-text Ads, cancel my account with Kontera and stick to the AdSense + AdBrite combo, and the Linkshare affliates of course, to monetize this site and help along with my online expenses (such as paying for my lsjp.org site). It means that I have to keep on learning about ads and seo optimization to increase my earnings and this blog’s ratings.

3.) Relocate the In-text ads to the index page and remove the single link ad unit by AdSense located there. With this, I get to keep both ad systems but again, I’m having second thoughts that the pop-up nature of In-text ads may annoy visitors and readers away from my index page. Then again this concern is somehow overshadowed by the fact that most of my current traffic comes in via RSS and organic search results which by-passes the index page as they are taken directly to the individual posts in this blog. In this context, the potential of earning more from In-text ads would decrese because of the abovementioned phenomenon.

Like I often say, ‘decisions…decisions…decisions.’ Alas, I did arrived at a decision and I chose to go for the third option of relocating the In-text ads to the index page, I just have to take the risks and bear with the percieved consequences. Or, I’m thinking positive now, since the In-text ads are quite effective, they may even prove even more effective and efficient because it has the index page all to its self. On this note, I leave things as they are now; AdSense inside the blog posts while In-text out on the index page, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Update

I recieved the Google AdSense Team’s reply to my second inquiry which contained the additional information given by Sir Abe (Yuga) regarding the sites that run Kontera In-text Ads and Google Ads on the same page and the supposed assurance from the Kontera Representatives that the two ads system could be run on the same page. Again, the message from the AdSense team is as clear as a bell. Here’s the portion of their e-mail that says it all:

Regardless of what representatives at
Kontera may tell publishers, AdSense program policies do not currently
permit publishers to display both AdSense ads and Kontera ads on the same
pages.

There you have it, no In-text Ads and Google Ads on the same page people. So clean up before you get banned from AdSense but you’re willing to take it and switch to Kontera for your monetization needs. Tough competition isn’t it?

Lastly, I recommend everyone who reads this article to also read Dave Starr’s comment below, it brilliantly summarises what needs to be said and done regarding this issue.