Kontera is an advertising firm based out of San Francisco offering contextual, in-text ads to publishers looking to earn additional revenue from their site. Their in-text ads differ from more standard AdSense-type ad blocks, as they are actually embedded into your own text, linked to words which match the context of your entire article to an ad.
I recently began inserting Kontera in-text contextual ads into my blog articles and am testing the results. First off, I should say that Kontera has by far the best customer support I have ever experienced. Less than ten minutes after completing their online publisher application form, my phone rang — it was Lainne from Kontera confirming my application and welcoming me into the program. Not expecting to hear back so soon, let alone by phone, I was completely shocked.
After registering, I was assigned a personal account assistant who has guided me through the entire process of configuring my account and inserting the ads into my site. He also thoroughly tested my site under various platforms to reassure me that adding their Javascript tag would not break any part of my site.
So what does Kontera provide? Well in this very article, you should see certain words highlighted and double-underlined — these are sponsored links. When you move your mouse over these words, a small balloon with an advertisement appears; When you move your mouse off the link, the balloon quickly goes away. These links are automatically inserted by the Kontera Javascript code which you need to insert, similar to how AdSense is set up. They are selected by analyzing the context of your article and finding the best fit for you. That is, this is a contextual system. From the discussions with my personal account assistants, I have been told that although linked words are performed automatically, as a publisher you have the ability to block certain words from being chosen, and also can block certain sections of your page from being activated, such as a nav bar, etc.
Whether these in-text ads will produce a high CTR and eCPM, I have yet to find out. I will test them out for a few weeks and write another followup article later in the summer — hopefully with some solid results on how well in-text ads perform vs. more standard text ad-blocks. I will also closely be watching the relevancy of these ads to the articles they appear in. Google’s AdWords is so popular (and also so profitable to publishers) because nearly 100% of the time the ad displayed is right along the same lines as the page it is displayed on. This to me is the most important part of a contextual ad system, even more so than CTR and eCPM. Your readers don’t want to see non-relevant ads, and without an audience, your site is nothing. Don’t ever forget that.
For now though I’ll give Kontera a shot and we’ll see how it goes…
For people like us, looking to make a few extra dollars on the side through the Net, Ether is something you definitely don’t want to miss.
Ether, currently in beta, offers users the ability to sell any kind of digital content imaginable, easily, safely, anonymously and securely — all for a flat charge of 15%. After registering, you are given an Ether telephone number and access code and are now able to sell whatever content you wish. The most exciting and original product you can sell though is yourself. Sell what you say. You set the rate, you set your hours. When the phone rings, you’re on the clock.
Are you good at debugging computer troubles? Place your Ether 1-888 number on your computer troubleshooting website, or better yet, use one of the pre-made Ether “Call Me” buttons. How does $1.25/minute sound, or perhaps a flat rate of $50/call? All credit card processing and long distance fees are included in the 15% charge and your profits are deposited directly to your bank account.
Registering with Ether was a breeze and the user configuration menus are very clear and well laid out. Setting your account availability status is as simple as hitting a drop down on the top of the page, in a style very similar to any IM app.
To ensure that you don’t receive calls at 4AM, Ether automatically assigns a blackout time from 10PM to 8AM where your status is set to “Arrange Calls via Email” instead of “Taking Calls”. This schedule can be easily modified using their schedule editor. I have set mine to be available during the hours which are most convenient to me. I like to sleep in on the weekends, and don’t want to be called during the day on weekdays as I am at work.
Ether is currently in beta and is invite-only at the moment, however if you register your email you may receive an invite in a few weeks. I will be testing out their service thoroughly and will offer “blogging 4 profit” and SEO consulting services through their site and will report on my results.
In my opinion this is one of the most exciting start-ups since eBay. Be sure not to miss this one!
Many people have the false impression that without AdSense they will have no chance of making an income from their site. There are many reasons why a site won’t do well from AdSense marketing. For one, it might not be allowed in the program, or have been falsely accused of cheating their program, which has become a very common and quite large problem for content publishers.
The page rank of a site is determined predominantly by the quantity, and quality of incoming links a site has. If you want a way to visualize this, think of page rank as a summation of one-headed arrows pointing towards a site; each arrow has a weight, where the weight is the page rank of the linking site. Of course there are other factors involved, such as relevance of the linking site to the linked site, but that aside, this is the basic idea. You can quickly see that calculating the page rank of any given site requires the page rank of every other site linked to it, a problem solved only by those who love graph theory.
So why did we just go through that basic page rank tutorial? Because you can profit from it. If you run a site with a good PR, say page rank of four or higher, a site with a lower rank could benefit by purchasing a link from your site to theirs. When search engines re-index and see this new link, the linked site will gain a slightly higher page rank, and list higher in search results.
Text Link Ads is in my opinion the best solution for content publishers looking to sell links off of their site. Once you sign up (free to join for publishers) and register your URL, advertisers will begin to bid on, and purchase links from your site, which you have control of where they will be placed and how they will look. On the bottom of CyberWyre for example, you can see Text Link Ads which have been purchased on my site.
Depending on your traffic levels (measured by Alexa ratings) and your page rank, your site may earn between $20/link up to $200/link per month. That’s not too bad at all when you have five or six links on the bottom of your site and don’t have to worry about click-throughs. Best of all, you can have paid text links alongside AdSense ads without violating AdSense policy.
Registering with Ether was a breeze and the user configuration menus are very clear and well laid out. Setting your account availability status is as simple as hitting a drop down on the top of the page, in a style very similar to any IM app.
from 10PM to 8AM where your status is set to “Arrange Calls via Email” instead of “Taking Calls”. This schedule can be easily modified using their schedule editor. I have set mine to be available during the hours which are most convenient to me. I like to sleep in on the weekends, and don’t want to be called during the day on weekdays as I am at work.
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