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A somewhat different approach to pay-per-click advertising is offered by an entity called Bidvertiser. Although it is difficult to fit Bidvertiser into one of the neat little slots of types of search engine, it does offer another way to participate in pay-per-click advertising where you, the advertiser, have more control than normal in where your ads appear.

Bidvertiser is a subsidiary of Bpath, established in 1997 as an international services provider for websites. Bpath’s approach to business is to develop and offer private label website functions for leading web hosting and domain registration providers. With more than half a million webmasters in its network (over 80% of whom are small business concerns), Bpath offers international solutions that may fit the small business model in the United States.

Bidvertiser is called an “onsite bid-per-click” option that is a “3rd generation bidding-based marketplace connecting web publishers with advertisers.” As such, its main concentration is on linking together advertisers who wish to become involved in partnerships, affiliateships, or referral-type programs.

However, it does offer a bid-per-click process that is rather unique. Most every aspect of the model for advertisers who wish to place pay-per-click ads on the Bidvertiser network is standard, except that the advertisers themselves choose which websites they wish their ads to be place on. As they describe the process, “Place your ads on sites of your choice, set your pay per click pricing and pay only for clicks you receive.”

Sounds easy and simple, and it is easy and simple to set up. Advanced tools are included, such as auto bidding to adjust your cost per click to just 1 cent above the nearest competitor, but for the most part, the offering looks fairly standard and not as robust as other search engines in its league. However, it does offer international advertising in a well-developed online marketplace, especially for France, so if your target audience is international, it is worth investigating.

However, user comments are generally not very favorable about Bidvertiser. It is difficult to find postings citing a great experience with this search engine, but quite a few comments about being disappointed in the conversion results and general experience. This is not uncommon with smaller search engines, and particularly with one that is striving to serve an international marketplace at the same time.

It is an interesting concept that appeals to a lot of advertisers — being able to choose which sites they want to bid to have their ad on — but until their available sites become more numerous and varied, it will be difficult for Bidvertiser to be one of bPath’s leading ventures.

1.  widget bucks widget seems to load slow:  I’ve heard this from many different people.  The fact is yes when widget bucks was first launched it was a little slow.  When I first loaded it I noticed this as well.  Since then new code has been issued and my widgets now load in about a 1.2 seconds.  Still not ideal.  You want it to load right away.  It’s my hope that over the next few months widget bucks works on this a little more and gives us widget that loads a little faster.  Overall I feel the load times are exceptable for the sites I have it on.

2.  widget bucks has a low CTR:   for the people that have been saying this I have to ask what kind of site do you have it on?  All the sites I wass able to track back to comments were not product related sites.  Not one of them.  If you have a widget showing cell phones and other electronic devices on a social site about health care then of course you will have a low CTR no matter what kind of ad placement or traffic you have.  If the ads are not relavent to the content on the site then the readers will not be interested in your ads.  In those cases I would never put widget bucks on that site.  Use Adsense or a CPM program.  Kontera is another great one for text based ad links.

3.  My earnings are fluctuating before they are finalized:  As per the TOS when someone clicks on an ad you are given an estimated CPC.  Untill the CPC turns black it will fluctuate.  I have noticed around a 10% decrease from when my clicks are in red and when  they are in black.  I can say after all is said and done on the product based sites that I run widget bucks on I make around 1/3 more with widget bucks then adsense.  This is just my results and only after close to a month of tracking.

4.  Has anyone been paid yet?:  This question I see all over. The answer is NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!  I’m tired of seeing that question.  read the TOS.  You will be paid 45 days after the end of the first month you reach 50 dollars or more.  The program just launched in early OCT so know one will see a check until mid December. I can say I do not like waiting the 45 days but that is just because adsense pays after 30.  Most affilites don’t pa until 60-90 days.  I have many CJ products I sell and my sales always get extended and from the date of sale till I get my check is normally around 60-90 days.  Once you get going you will get a check each month so I really don’t see a big deal here.  I do like the payout is only 50 dollars.

All in all only you can decide if widget bucks is right for your site.  you can always make a small widget and throw it on a site to have a space filler or a little bit of graphics going. I would have to say that for the majority of sites out there widget bucks is currently not a good fit.  As the company grows they should have 100’s of more categories and products.  Once this happens it will become more and more popular.  Hope this helps a few of you out there.

I am sure that many of you have come across Traffic Swarm
and have been wondering if this type of advertising
actually works. Well from what I read Traffic Swarm has
over three hundred thousand members and for them to have a
membership that large one would think that it would work.
Why else would so many people join a system that does not
work? From what I have read on various forums people have
varying success with this system. Some claim it does not
work at all while others have success that varies.

Traffic Swarm mainly works for sites that promote business
opportunities. So if you have a web site that promotes a
mlm opportunity or you market a course that helps you get a
business off the ground then you can use this. If your web
site is not related to this at all I suggest you do not try
to market with Traffic Swarm as you are very unlikely to
succeed.

Now let us look at the small things that you need to get
right for Traffic Swarm to work. First you need to write a
very good advert. Test different adverts with different
headlines and then choose the best performing advert. I
would also recommend that you sign up as a pro. The main
reason for this is that you get 2500 monthly credits and
when you surf you get a lot more credits which can equate
to over 2000 extra credits a month. Then you need to load
at least 20 adverts into the system. Also track and test
your squeeze page as you need to have one that draws
attention. Using this method you should collect at least
one lead every one to two days.

I would not recommend Traffic Swarm for a beginner. The
reason for this is that the system does work, but it
requires you to put a lot of effort into it to get it to
work.

Twitter is a simple site that answers the question, “What are you doing?” In my opinion, the idea is too simplistic to make a site about it. Apparently others disagree. There are tons of users. People flip out when Twitter goes down which seems to be occasionally. You have a limit of 140 characters per post. This keeps everything slim. All links are converted to tinyurl links to save you characters. I have gained a few followers and they all seem to be pretty nice people. I like how you can respond to what other people are doing. You can ask them questions, whatever you want. At first I thought it was stupid. But now that I’ve done it for a few days it is almost like a journal. It helps me remind myself of things that I have done. It’s pretty neat.

If you enjoy blogging or keeping an online journal, then Xanga may very well be the best social networking site for you. It got its start back in ‘98 and many of us have had a profile on the site at some point or another.

Xanga has definitely come a long way, in that they now host blogs and profiles from around 40 million users worldwide. They’ve expanded their service to include video and audio uploads, as well as images, as the ‘older’ Xanga didn’t have all of the features we’ve come to expect from social networking sites.

• Xanga Mobile – Have the latest updates from your favorite members sent directly to your mobile phone.
• Eprops -Let someone know you’ve enjoyed their blog post!

We definitely applaud Xanga for maintaining a loyal following and sticking to its roots-blogging and journaling. It’s a great way to meet likeminded individuals who have something to say! The free version of the service does have advertisements, but you can opt to pay for upgraded accounts, such as Xanga Premium, which will cost you $4 a month. Hey, if you don’t like ads and want more customization features, this is a small price to pay! Customer support via email sent us a friendly and personalized response, unlike the ‘canned’ responses we’ve grown accustomed to with social networking sites.

Linkreferral.com provides an affordable alternative to search engines and banner ad campaigns. By joining, you will be included in the site’s member directory which is visited by a community of over 130,000 members and thousands of outside visitors on a daily basis. You’ll have the opportunity to receive valuable feedback from visitors of your website, network with your peers, and give your opinion on other websites in the directory. It works because it’s free, fast to register, easy to implement, and has no risk at all. By registering, you’ll benefit in several ways, which includes having your webpage listing indexed more quickly, improved search engine rankings and SEO optimization, and indirect search engine traffic via linkreferral.com.

Google AdSense, Google’s advertising program that lets webmasters display ads from Google’s extensive list of advertisers, has taken the Internet by storm. Through this successful program, unobtrusive text-based ads are served in member sites, who then earn a commission every time someone clicks on the advertisers’ links.

At this point in time, the jury is still out on whether this program will continue to enjoy its initial success. That is why, through this article, we want to give you some highlights and insights on how the Google Adsense program has worked for us, one month after we signed up for it, so that we can use it as a checkpoint for future analysis.

Why is Google AdSense so Popular?

Google AdSense uses Google’s proprietary PageRank™ search technology to deliver ads that are highly relevant to the content of a page. Google’s engine will scan through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will then serve ads that are relevant to the page’s content.

Running Google AdSense is simple and straightforward: Google gives you a snippet of HTML code that you can paste in the desired location on your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you upload the changes to your server.

However, Google AdSense’s main claim to fame is that, by displaying text-based ads, it is able to deliver much higher click-through rates than traditional graphic banner ads.   As usability studies have widely shown, users are already conditioned to ignore banner ads (or anything else that looks like them). As a result, banner ad click-through rates have dropped below a dismal 0.5% (in other words, it takes 200 page views, on average, to get someone to click on a banner ad).

By using text based ads instead of graphic banners, Google has been able to overcome banner ad blindness, delivering click-through rates that are much higher than the industry’s average (some put the figure around the 1.5% mark).

How much can you expect to earn by running Google Ads on your site?

The pay-off per click varies widely depending on what each advertiser decides to offer, based on the profitability of their products and their expected conversion rate (percentage of clicks that deliver a sale). Google is not saying what the average pay-off is nor how does it share the revenue per click with their AdSense partners, but how much you will earn per click will really depends on the topic and the product being advertised.   Products with profit margins of $3.00 for the advertiser will probably give you a smaller pay-off per click than a product with a $300 profit margin.  Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going to you.

So, just for the sake of giving an example, lets say that your site receives 1,000 page views per day. At a 1.0% click-through rate and $0.50 pay-off per click to you, in a 30-day month you can expect to make:

1,000 x 30 x 1.0% x $0.50 = $150

The more traffic your site has, the more clicks (and the larger the pay-off) you will get.

Will Google’s AdSense continue to be successful?

This is the big question, and nobody has a definite answer yet.

On the downside:

• The program will most likely face strong competition from other search engines in the near future.
• The proliferation of text based ads could make users “text-ad blind” the same way as they have already become “banner-ad blind”, causing click-through rates to drop.
• There is always the potential for abuse, since some unscrupulous program members may violate the program’s rules and click on their own ads, inflating the advertisers’ click-through rate and forcing them to decrease their pay-off per click.

On the positive side, I believe that Google AdSense’s success is not only due to the fact that they deliver text based ads instead of banners, but because those ads are served by Google. The credibility and brand equity that Google enjoys is huge, and I expect them to continue to beat other search engines and advertising networks that may eventually jump on the bandwagon.

However, it is reasonable to expect at least a slight decrease in click-through rates and pay-off as a result of the increased competition.

For tips and tricks on how to maximize the return of your AdSense program, you can read The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense, by William Charlwood, the complete step by step road map for making and maximising your income from Google’s AdSense program.

Further reading:

Aaron Wall’s Google Adsense Review

 Suite101.com is extremely hard to be accepted into  and then they also offer some of the lowest compensation amounts.  The site is good for those who really like a challenge but it was not for me.  The following review sums up the average suite101.com experience.  

Suite101.com is another revenue sharing, paid-to-write site (PTW), similar to Gather and Helium. However, the terms of agreement at Suite101 so favor the company and deprive writers of revenue, I’m giving it a big thumbs down.These PTW sites work by placing ads on the pages and sharing whatever revenue is generated with the authors. The exact percentage is often hard to determine, but it definitely favors the website owners. The real advantage to a blogger is that by posting material on multiple sites you can drive traffic to your own site.And that is where the fault in Suite101 lies. Other sites allow duplicate posting. You can post a article about Tom Cruise’s latest movie on your website, Gather, Helium, Xomba, Hub Pages and Thisisby. Suite101 demands exclusive writes to all your content and does not except previously published material.For exclusive rights to original material, they pay $1.50 per thousand page views. One writer posting on the sites forum said he had 100 articles that received 34,000 page views in a month. Fifty-dollars a month for all that work. Ridiculous! Had he sold those articles to Associated Content, he would have received anywhere from $4 to $50 a piece. AC also pays a performance bonus of $1.50 per thousand page views in addition to the upfront pay.I recommended selling non-exclusive rights to AC, then posting the same article to to Hub Pages and Xomba. Both those sites alternate showing Google Adsense ads with their account code and yours. The fairest revenue sharing model for making money writing online. I wrote this article on Associated Content for Hub Pages. It has received 193 page views with my Adsense account code, making $2.50. That’s about $10 a thousand views for comparison. 

I was going to write an indepth review of helium.com myself, and as I was browsing through helium and reading other people’s reviews. I stumbled upon the following, it is the most complete and accurate description of helium that I have come across, I’m not trying to take credit for or am I claiming the following review as mine, it is just very informative and I think everyone should have a chance to read it.

Advantages: A site where you can write about anything that takes your fancy.

Disadvantages: Poor quality of some articles that need weeding out.

I have been on review sites for what seems ages. I enjoy them. I also enjoy diversity, and sites don’t come much more diverse than a new kind of site, where instead of producing reviews, a member produces articles. Joining up is simple, and upon examination of the site, what I found was a refreshing change from the opinion sites that I have previously belonged to, in that they offer members the chance to air their views on all kinds of topics, and it is more an information database than a product review writing site.

Looking through the existing categories, which range from Arts and Humanities, and stretch through to Sciences, Lifestyle, Finance, Jobs and Careers, plus a very wide range of what they label ‘channels’, it really is not hard to find areas where your expertise or areas of interest lie. You can literally write articles about anything at all, and they really do not mind if you articles are cut and pasted from sites where you have already posted them. What they are looking for is quality articles, though how do you define quality ? Judging by many of the articles on the Helium database, the site is in its early learning stages. There are numerous poor articles. By introducing better articles, you can actually make a fair bit of pocket money from the site by writing about subjects that interest you.

Like all opinion sites, plagairism is against the rules, though copying doesn’t seem to be rife on the site. Other rules include never putting your name in articles or signing them in any way, and the reason for this soon becomes apparent, when you start to explore how the site works. Typing articles in capitals is also not permitted, and articles that aren’t stand alone, and do not make sense read singularly are something the site needs raters to find, in order to remove them.

Rating other people’s articles.

On most sites I write on, the ratings are very clearly defined, and you know who has rated you, or at least which members. It’s never really mattered to me that much about who rates me. What I always wondered was how you can produce a site with a fair rating system. We argue the toss about ratings not being shown to people before they cast their vote, and that seems rather a good idea, thus members rating without any kind of peer pressure, although what Helium devised is very clever in many ways, though a disappointment in others. Let me try and explain. When you are in between writing articles, you simply press the rate button and away you go, rating one article in a category against another.

All you are asked to do is judge which is the better of the two and by how much. If you really do not have a clue on the given subject, you have a neutral button, and pressing this takes you onto new articles. You also have the option of flagging articles that don’t meet the site criteria, which means that they are drawn to the attention of the administrators.

Whilst I really do like this system of rating and its anonymous nature, what happens is that until unsuitable material is taken off the database, you can be presented time and time again with the same articles. This is slightly tedious but if you bear with it, seeing the same articles doesn’t actually mean that your rating is serving no purpose.

Earning on a day to day basis.

When another member adds an article to an area where you have written, the neat thing about Helium is that the articles in that subject are then put forward again for rating. Since your earnings depend upon both rating and public reads, what that means is that your article is capable of producing ongoing income, instead of just being part of the stockpile of articles on a site, and I really do like this system.

Help on site.

There is help on the site in the form of a forum, and members are able to post their concerns and pretty much get answers quickly. The only problem I see with a forum such as this is that as new members join, so the same questions get asked over and over again. There is also a fun area in the forum where members can converse. This is the only area of contact between members. There are no guestbooks, although members can put email links into their profile page.

Earnings.

It’s pretty hard to work out what the criteria for earnings is. It certainly earns me more than Ciao as a site, though not as much as dooyoo, since one thing it lacks at the moment is any kind of award like the crowns or diamonds, though what it offers does compete very well long term. Whereas on other sites, my review is posted, read and rated, and then tucked away to gather dust, Helium’s site workings mean that old articles can still earn money on a day to day basis if they are of reasonable quality.

When you reach 25 dollars, you can have a payout made through Paypal, which again is very tempting to me, since it means I have instant pocket money to spend on things I want to buy on Ebay. Neat !

Invitations.

Another area that offers members a possibility of earnings is that you are offered 5 per cent of all the article earnings of anyone that you invite. That offers great earning potential.

Overall views.

This is one site I enjoy very much. It doesn’t yet pay me as well as a site like Dooyoo, though long term, could. It takes a while to get used to the site, and areas I feel are particularly frustrating are where you introduce a new category, as each of these have to be activated by staff and they can sit in the pending area for weeks. I like the opportunity to just jump in and write something spontaneouos. When I rate, if I see that the articles in an area are particularly weak and I have something more to say than is being said, often I jump in and write an article, and since these are active areas, inevitably it is very quick to get a paid response to your articles.

I think the site has a huge amount of scope and really could provide a very useful database of information. I have posted commercial reviews over to the site in appropriate areas. For example there are areas for film, music, and also areas that deal with specific areas of software need, so was able to post software reviews.

For anyone just starting out, I would say give the experience a couple of months before writing it off. They need all the good articles they can get, as they are a relatively new site. Good quality articles do move up the scale, and do pay, and now that I have established myself as a writer on their site, can say that I enjoy logging in and seeing the movement of my earnings, which, in the first month, I found disappointing. Stick with it, and it actually does pay.

It’s also a very good site for creative writers as well as factual ones, and there are many areas of scope on all kinds of topics. I enjoy logging in, and find it rewarding and enjoyable. Another contrast I like is that the site is about articles, both writing and rating, and the anonymous factor works well for me, meaning that ratings are unbiased.

I enjoy it very much.

Summary: An experience unlike any review site I have ever experienced.

Article link http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/helium-com/1045437/

Can I afford to work from home? That is a question that I have heard from time to time, and truth be told, I do not rely entirely on my business as my sole source of income. There are many factors that you need to consider before even attempting to go into a home based business. While I’m sure there are many people who are able to survive on just strictly freelancing, I’m offering a more realistic view. The money that I make online is not that much; all in all it’s just about enough to cover the cost of my cell phone, cable, and internet bills. But I think a few minutes of sitting in front of a computer and working for myself and at my own pace and then having that extra money coming in works out just fine. You can put all of your time and effort into working from home for yourself and I’m sure that the prospect sounds great, but all in all there are not that many legitimate ‘work from home’ solutions out there. Over the next few days I plan to branch out and review some of the better ways that you can work from home and be able to make a little money, stay tuned.