Chitika eMiniMalls offer a new alternative to Google’s Adsense for contextual Pay-Per-Click advertising. By inserting their provided Javascript code, similar to how AdSense works, a contextual advertisement will be generated as can be seen below in this post. Chitika offers all of the similar customizations that AdSense does, allowing you to customize ad size, colours, and even allows you to turn the contextual engine off so that it may run alongside AdSense.
From my initial experience with running eMiniMalls on the dynamically generated CyberWyre news pages, I have noticed a much higher than average payout per click however click-through rates are noticeably lower. Registration with Chitika was a breeze and I was up & running within a few minutes of being approved. Payouts are sent monthly via PayPal with a $10 minimum or cheque with a $50 minimum.
[eminimall] Example of Chitika eMiniMall in action
Configuring Chitika eMiniMalls in WordPress
Inserting eMiniMalls in WordPress is a breeze with the Chitika-provided plugins. From within the plugin, every option concerning your advertisement may be customized; This certainly saves time from re-visiting the Chitika website, generating new JavaScript code and re-inserting it, as is necessary for AdSense. Inserting the eMiniMall is as easy as inserting the text “[ eMiniMall ]” into your blog entry. A WordPress Sidebar plugin is also provided.
Using Chitika eMiniMalls alongside Google AdSense
Google has a very strict policy to not include any other competing contextual advertising system on the same page that AdSense ads are served on. Chitika makes dealing with this issue very simple. In the control panel for your eMiniMall, you have the option to turn-on, or off the contextual system as can be seen in the screen capture below.
Sites Best Suited for eMiniMalls
Chitika eMiniMalls are specifically geared towards marketing products for purchase through the Internet; whereas AdSense not only advertises products but services, and other websites as well. Due to this fact, eMiniMalls will perform best on sites which users could directly relate to the products being offered. A perfect example for this would be a golf blog offering Chitika eMiniMalls to compare prices for a set of clubs, or a new golf bag.
Overall I am very excited to be trying out Chitika eMiniMallls and will report on my successes in a few weeks. Until then, I recommend that you too check them out and see how they perform on your site as well.
Although I try to keep in decent shape, at the gym tonight I could really feel that I hadn’t been there enough recently. As I started to think back to all the times that I really was in shape, I started to notice a pattern; I would always exercise in bursts of four months at a time. Once I was in pretty decent shape, and didn’t feel the need to push as hard anymore, I would let myself coast down for a few months and then the cycle would repeat. This was no better than the person who goes on a crash diet every 3 weeks, but eats like a pig in between!
As I thought more, I started to notice this same pattern in other aspects of my life, including this site. As I looked at the traffic and income levels achieved by this site, they were at a peak when my post frequency was highest. When it reached these peaks, as you can clearly see from my Alexa rankings, it drifted downwards after each peak, until I began posting & actively promoting the site again.
It was a lesson we all learned as children: the slow steady turtle always wins the race…in the end. I am going to take this as a lesson learned for myself and keep all of my activities moving at a steady pace, whether it’s hitting the gym or writing useful articles for this site. This is also a perfect example of how blog post frequency can be directly related to traffic levels. This is a main drawback in blogs: there may be plenty of great content available on your site, but if you aren’t producing new fresh articles, your traffic will dwindle away.
When I saw traffic start to slip, I tried to encourage people to visit some of the great previous posts on this site by writing The Most Useful CyberWyre Posts back last October. This strategy certainly did work to temporarily restore traffic, although in the long run, nothing is better than fresh content.
The race is long. Just take it a steady one step at a time and you’ll do just fine.
In 2006 we saw an explosion of community-based websites; From self-submitted news sites like Digg.com, to Del.icio.us social-bookmarking, to Youtube.com videos, it is clear that the trend of user-submitted content is here to stay and will only grow larger in 2007. One way to boost traffic to your site is to create ways for your users to contribute their own content to your site. It will guarantee that there is always something fresh to read on your site, and take a whole load of work off your shoulders.
So how can you foster a community environment on your blog? There are a number of techniques you can use, some of which I’ve already tried on this site and I’ll overview the successes that I’ve had with them.
8 Steps to Fostering a Community in your Blog
1. Recognize top commentators
The main difference between a blog and a website is a blog offers the ability for its users to interact with the author and each other though comments. Comments are the primary reason why your users will return frequently to your site. I’ve recently installed the Show Top Commentators plugin into the sidebar of this site to recognize top commentators on CyberWyre. The plugin lists top commentators on the site, and links back to the homepage which they specify in the comment. This will provide a little incentive to your readers to interact more and post more comments on your site. Be careful though, as this may also encourage your readers to spam more often, or place homepage links to inappropriate sites.
Going forward, any comment posted on this site will be recorded, and top commentators will have links to their site from the homepage of CyberWyre.
I just logged into my Text Link Ads affiliate statistics and found that they have recently significantly improved their reporting for affiliates. This improved reporting has let me look into the past and see exactly where each referral came from, the date it was received and most importantly, lets me understand which affiliate links are converting well and which I should remove.
Below is a screen capture of this updated reporting.
For those TLA affiliates out there, check out these new stats and you might be surprised where you’ve been getting referrals from.
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