Google Adsense for Vietnames

There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.

Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network.

The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. Enjoy!

Direct Methods

1. PPC Advertising Networks

Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.

The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).

The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

List of popular CPC advertising networks:

2. CPM Advertising Networks

CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.

A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.

CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.

You can get as low as $0,10 and as high as $10 per 1,000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).

List of popular CPM advertising networks:

3. Direct Banner Advertising

Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremost because it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.

The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.

Related links:

4. Text Link Ads

After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular.

Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not.

The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process.

Text link marketplaces and networks:

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.

Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.

In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.

List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:

6. Monetization Widgets

The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links.

Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.

List of companies that provide monetization widgets:

7. Sponsored Reviews

PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy on the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model.

Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics. Not all bloggers are willing to get paid to write about a specific product or website (because it might compromise the editorial credibility), but the ones who do are making good money out of it.

If your blog has a big audience you could also offer sponsored reviews directly, cutting off the commissions of the middleman.

List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:

8. RSS Feed Ads

With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel.

Feedburber already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.

Finally, some blogs are also opting to sell banners or sponsored messages on their feed directly. John Chow and Marketing Pilgrim are two examples.

Related links:

9. Sponsors for Single Columns or Events

If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.

This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.

Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”

Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.

10.Premium Content

Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools.

SEOMoz is a good example. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members. It costs $48 monthly and it grants them access to guides, tools and other exclusive material.

11. Private Forums

While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.

SEO Blackhat charges $100 monthly from its members, and they have thousands of them. Obviously in order to charge such a price for a forum membership you need to provide real value for the members (e.g., secret techniques, tools, and so on).

Performancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. It is called The Hive, and the monthly cost is $10.

These are just two examples. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.

List of popular forum software:

12. Job Boards

All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy Kawasaki, ReadWriteWeb, Problogger… you name it.

Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.

The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.

List of popular job board software:

13. Marketplaces

Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.

Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.

The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.

You can see an example of a marketplaces being used on EasyWordpress and on Mashable.

14. Paid Surveys and Polls

There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.

Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.

15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages

Million Dollar Wiki made this concept popular, but it was being used on the web for a long time around (check Pagerank10.co.uk for instance).

These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way.

Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.

16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors

Techmeme probably pioneered this idea, but somehow it has not spread to other websites. The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”

On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way. Considering that the monthly cost for one spot is $5000 and that they have around 6 sponsors at any given time, it must be working well.

17. Donations

Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.

Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).

A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin. This WordPress plugin enables you to insert a customized message at the bottom of each article, asking the readers to chip in for a beer or coffee.

18. In-text Adverting

In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.

Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.

19. Pop-ups and Pop-unders

Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.

If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.

Ad networks that use pop-ups:

20. Audio Ads

Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.

The company is still rolling tests, but some users are reporting to get from a $4 to a $6 CPM. Regardless of the pay rate, though, this is a very intrusive form of advertising, so think twice before using it.

21. Selling the Website

Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.

Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they most used parameter to determine the value of a website is the monthly revenue that it generates, multiplied by a certain number (the multiplier can be anything from 5 to 30, depending on the expectations of the seller, on the quality of the site, on the niche and other factors).

Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.

Related links:

Indirect Methods

22. Selling an Ebook

Perhaps one of the oldest money making strategies on the web, using a website to promote a related ebook is a very efficient way to generate revenue.

You could either structure the website around the book itself, like SEOBook.com, or launch the ebook based on the success of the website, like FreelanceSwitch did we the book How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.

Related links:

23. Selling a Hardcover Book

Many authors and journalists leverage their blogs or websites to sell copies of hardcover books. Examples include Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

While most of these people were already renowned authors before they created their website, one could also follow the other way around. Lorelle VanFossen did exactly that with her Blogging Tips book. First she built her authority on the subject via her blog, and afterwards she published the book.

List of self publishing and publishing services:

24. Selling Templates or WordPress Themes

As more and more people decide to get an online presence, website templates and WordPress themes become hotter and hotter.

On this segment you have mainstream websites like TemplateMonster, as well as individual designers who decide to promote and sell their work independently.

Brian Gardner and Unique Blog Designs are two examples of websites that make money with the sales of premium and custom WordPress themes.

25. Offering Consulting and Related Services

Depending on your niche, you could make money by offering consulting and related services. If you are also the author of your blog, the articles and information that you will share will build your profile and possibly certify your expertise on that niche, making it easier to gain customers.

Chris Garrett used a similar strategy. First he created a highly influential blog on the blogging and new media niche, and afterwards he started offering consulting services to clients with related problems and needs.

26. Creating an Email List or Newsletter

Email lists and newsletters represent one of the most powerful marketing and money making tools on the Internet. They offer incredible conversion rates, and the possibility to call people to action in a very efficient way.

Creating a big list is a difficult task though, so if you have a popular website you could leverage it to increase the number of subscribers on your list.

Yaro Starak is a famous Internet marketer, and if you visit his blog you will notice that right on top he has a section encouraging visitors to subscribe to his email newsletter. Yaro generates five figures in revenues each month from his email newsletters, proving that this method works.

List of software to manage email newsletters:

27. Mentoring programs

People are willing to pay for someone or something that will teach them and give them knowledge (as opposed to mere information). Education is one of the biggest industries in the world, and the online landscape behaves in a similar way.

Creating a mentoring program related to the niche of your website could be very profitable if you manage to structure and promote it adequately. There is a wide range of media and tools that you can use to deliver the information, from text articles to audio and video lessons.

Brian Clark leveraged the success of Copyblogger to launch a mentoring program teaching people how to build membership and how to sell content online. The program is titled Teaching Sells, and it costs $97 monthly. Sounds expensive, but they have over 1,000 members.

28. Creating a conference around the website

If your website takes off and becomes an authority on its niche, you could create a conference around it. Depending on the size of your audience, the event could attract thousands of people, and you could make money directly from conference passes and sponsors.

Search Engine Land, for instance, created a series of conferences that visit several cities on the United States and on other countries as well. The conferences are called Search Marketing Expo, and the tickets and passes cost thousands of dollars.
(By: Dailyblogtips)

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This post contains some tips for Chilika eMinimalls. I refer to Problogger for more details.

Chitika eMiniMall Sign up Process

Signing Up for Chitika eMiniMalls is pretty easy to do. Simply visit their sign up page and fill in your details. Keep in mind their terms and conditions of being a publisher which exclude certain types of sites. When you send in your application you will normally hear back from Chitika with a response within 24 hours (time seems to depend upon what time you apply and whether it is business hours in their part of the US.

Keep in mind that in signing up you are being bound to their terms and conditions that include non-disclosure of some of your earnings information (eg CTR, click values etc). Also note that at this point of their beta test they are only accepting sites written in English.

Lastly keep in mind that if your site’s readership is mainly from Asian countries that unfortunately due to a lack of Asian merchants and low conversions Chitika does not pay out for all Asian countries and the ‘auditing’ process could decrease your earnings considerably.

What sites are Chitika eMiniMalls Best on?

In my experience so far with Chitika (and from interacting with many others who are testing it) I’ve found that it seems to work best on sites that are focused upon products. Many gadget sites have signed up for eMiniMalls already but by no means are their ads limited to consumer electronics. I’ve seen relevant ads served up on a variety of sites including some focussing upon clothes, baby strollers, washing machines, jewellery and other fashion items. From what I can see - they seem to have a large supply of ads for most of the products you’ll find on sites like Amazon and Shopping.com (which is thousands of products).

Product related sites are not the only ones reporting good returns from eMiniMalls though - I know of a variety of personal and general topic blogs and sites that are reporting better than normal earnings with eMiniMalls in comparison to other ad networks that they use.

Using Chitika eMiniMalls With Adsense

Many of the questions I’ve received about eMiniMalls related to whether they can be used on the same page as Google Adsense ads. As I wrote in my review - this was initially of major concern a number of us when we first came across eMiniMalls. As a result, one of my colleagues wrote an email to Adsense for clarification. The response was that it was allowable from the perspective of Adsense to use Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page as Adsense in the following circumstances (I’m told by a YPN publisher that this is also true with YPN):

1. eMiniMalls must be made to be NON-contexual
2. eMiniMalls must have their ’search tab’ disabled IF you choose to use the Adsense Search option (update: I’ve since heard from a number of Chitika eMiniMall publishers who say that they’ve recieved confirmation from Adsense that they ARE ALLOWED to use the search tab in eMiniMalls).

This was great news as it added another revenue stream to the sites of many without compromising another important source of income like Adsense.

NB: Chitika has another ad system, called RealContext, that is NOT allowed to be used in conjunction with Adsense - don’t get them mixed up.

It is worth noting that different webmasters and bloggers have seen difference results from using Adsense and Chitika’s eMiniMalls on the one page. These results have included:

Some bloggers have reported small decreases in their Adsense earnings. This is my experience - I’ve noticed a 5-10% decrease in my overall Adsense earnings since adding eMiniMalls. Of course this is considerably less than the overall increase in earnings that the eMiniMalls have brought me so I’m willing to take this hit knowing that overall I am in a considerably better financial position.
A smaller number of bloggers have noticed increases in their Adsense earnings when they replaced one of multiple Adsense Ad units with a eMiniMall unit. This sounds crazy - bit it makes sense when you realise that sometimes less Adsense Ad units on a page can result in increase click values for some ads (thats another topic for another day)

Some have found eMiniMalls to be so well suited to their site’s that they’ve removed Adsense altogether and are just running the Chitika ads (I wouldn’t recommend doing this straight away without testing things first).

How to Run Adsense and Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page

So how does one ‘make eMiniMalls non contextual’ and thereby able to be run on the same page as Adsense?

Default Code

Chitika have just made this extremely easy - in fact they’ve made it so easy you don’t have to do anything different at all because today they’ve just changed the default of their ads to be ‘non contextual’. So when you log in and click the ‘Get eMiniMalls Code’ link and design your ads they’ll supply you with the code that makes using eMiniMalls work with Adsense without you having to mess around with adding code.

The all important code in what they give you is:

ch_non_contextual = 1;

If you’ve previously inserted code into your site it might be worth checking its in it or else your ads will be contextual.

Targeting Keywords - Rotation

So the question many will now no doubt ask is ‘if the ads are non contexual - what determines what ads will now be served?’

Good question. If you look at the code that Chitika give you you’ll notice another new line of code that comes to you by default like this:

var ch_queries = new Array(”digital cameras”, “ipod mini”, “sony playstation”, “dell laptop”);

This is the line of code that tells Chitika what ads to serve your site. If you leave it as is it will rotate four types of ads through your pages - ads for ‘digital cameras’, ‘ipod minis’, ’sony playstations’ and ‘dell laptops’. The beauty of eMiniMalls is that while these ads might pay ok per click - they are not likely to be highly relevant ads to the topic of everyone’s site - so you’re able to change them. Simply remove the words between the “and” marks and insert relevant words to your site. If your site is about MP3 players try “MP3 Player”, “ipod mini”, “ipod photo”, “iriver” etc. You can insert as many keywords as you like. This will help to keep your site looking fresh and hopefully stop your regular readers becoming blind to your ads.

For example, on my cameras site, I have changed the list to be:

var ch_queries = new Array(’Canon Powershot S2 IS’, ‘Canon Digital Rebel XT’, ‘Canon Powershot A520′, ‘Canon PowerShot A510′, ‘PowerShot SD400 Digital Camera’);

You might also like to periodically change the ads you rotate to help with ad blindness. I know of a couple of sites who are changing the keywords that they target once per week to keep things fresh.

Targeting One Keyword

If you just want to target ONE keyword do so by:

1. deleting this bit of the code:

var ch_queries = new Array(’phrase1′, ‘phrase2′, ‘phrase3′);
var ch_selected = Math.floor((Math.random() * ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];

2. replacing it with:

ch_query = ‘ipod mini’;

Targeting Titles as keywords:

One of the things that I’ve done on many of my sites is pick keywords that are pretty specific. ie instead of just adding “digital camera” you can add “canon eos 20d” and get ads for a specific digital camera. This is particularly useful on a page about a specific digital camera as it will increase your click through rate quite a bit.

One way of targeting specific words is to target the titles of your pages (if you use titles that include the keywords of your pages that is). How you do this will of course depend upon the system that you use to make your site or blog - but if you’re using Movable Type or WordPress you’ll find that both of these systems have title tags that will trigger the title for a particular post.

For example on a MT blog they line of code targeting keywords would look like:

ch_query = ‘<$MTEntryTitle$>‘;

In WordPress to target the title you’d use this…

ch_query = ‘’;

If you use another blog platform please feel free to let us know what the code would be in comments below.

Keep in mind that this will only be effective if you use titles on your site that are pretty specific to products. If you don’t you might want to consider specifying some keywords as you might end up with empty ads or very irrelevant ones.

Other Chitika eMiniMall Code to keep in mind

Disable Search Tab - There are a variety of other pieces of code that you can include in your eMiniMalls code to change the functionality of your ads. These include:

If you want to disable the search tab (and remember if you use the Adsense search function you need to) - simple add the following line of code to the middle of the code that Chitika give you:

ch_nosearch = 1;

Make ‘Best Deals’ Tab the default - Some site owners prefer to have the ‘Best Deals’ tab showing first to readers rather than the default one. To do this simple add the following code:

ch_default_tab = ‘Best Deals’;

Rotate Random Ads - I’m not sure why anyone would use this one but if you want completely random ads use the following code. Before you do remember that this will mean you get ads that have no relevancy to your site’s content which is likely to decrease your click through rate and earnings significantly.

ch_non_contextual = 1;

ch_query = “”;

Change Fonts - Cosa in comments below suggests that you can change the font of ads like this:

ch_font_text = “Arial”;
ch_font_text = “Arial Narrow,Verdana”;

Positioning Your Chitika eMiniMalls

One of the most powerful ways to increase your Chitika eMiniMall earnings is to think carefully about where you will position them. A principle of any effective advertising is to make sure the ads are seen by potential viewers. Unfortunately many site owners ignore this basic principle and place ads in positions that go unseen. Here are some good basic tips on Ad Positioning that you might want to consider. They are applicable not only to Chitika’s eMiniMalls but to other systems like Adsense:

Above the Fold - A good general rule to keep in mind is that ads that appear above the fold (or in the top half of your page where readers will see it as soon as a web page loads) perform better than ads that appear below the fold. Studies show us that many web users don’t scroll when they hit a new page - so if the ad is unsighted immediately you decrease it’s chance of being seen and therefor clicked.

In or Near Content - I find that the most effective position for most ads is actually inside or very close to the main content of your page. If the middle section of your page is where an article or posts is - the best spot (in terms of conversion ) to put an advertisement is in the middle section. Of course this may compromise your design or clutter your site - depending up the goals of your site you may not wish to do this - however in general the closer you have the eMiniMalls to where your readers eyes will be (content) the more chance they have of seeing and responding to them. A great way to get eMiniMalls inside posts is to use one of the plugins that are appearing for blog platforms (see section below).

Left Hand Side - Studies show us that on most sites that the top left corder is HOT. It is where readers eyes will naturally wander to when they arrive at your page and as a result ads tend to do well there.

End of Articles - Many bloggers find that the position at the end of a post and above comments is a great conversion place for ads. This is because at the end of a post readers are looking to click something and move onto another page that might interest them. If you have a relevant ad there you increase the chances of a click through.

Multiple Ads - One of the great things about eMiniMalls is that there are no restrictions on how many ad units you can place on a site. I would strongly advise that you do not place too many on a page - but that you consider at least two and maybe even three depending upon the design and length of your pages.

One strategy that I’m seeing many site owners take up is to place three ads per page in the following way:

Ad 1 - this is a 468 x 60 pixel ad unit that appears at the top of articles (either just above or just below the article title). This ad would be targeted upon the title as it’s keyword
Ad 2 - this ad is often a 468 x 180 pixel ad unit that appears at the bottom of an article - just above comments. Depending upon the length of your average article - this post could also be targeting the post’s title - or if you want more variety it could target and rotate some more generic product keywords that your site is about.
Ad 3 - this ad is often one of the narrow and often small ads (maybe a 160 x 160 or a 120 x 600 depending upon available space) and appears in a side bar. These ads are usually targeting and rotating keywords that are relevant to the overall site’s theme.

For more on Ad positioning you might like to read a short series of posts that I’ve previously written on the topic of Adsense Ad Positioning that mentions some of these principles.

Designing your eMiniMalls

In a similar way to how positioning your ads can impact their performance - I’ve found that the design of ads can have a major impact upon the rate that people click on them and would advise considering blending your ads into the design of your site. I’ve found by using other ad systems that ads that blend tend to do better than ads that stand out.

Chitika does not give you as many options as Adsense in this regard yet (the main difference is an inability to change the background colour of your ads - I’m told that this will be changed shortly and more adaptable background design will be an added feature soon) - but there are three ways that they give you to adapt the look of your ads.

Borders - if you have a site with a white background I would highly recommend that you make the borders of your ads white also. This gets rid of a visual barrier between your ads and your content. This is widely accepted as one of the most powerful strategies for Adsense optimisation and I suspect it works well with eMiniMalls also.
Title - the title of an eMiniMall ad is also a live link and therefore I would recommend that you choose a color that is the same as that of the majority of the links on your site. In this way you blend your ad into your page and make it clear that it is indeed a link.
Text - this is the color of the description of the products in the ad. Once again I’d recommend choosing a color that is similar to other text on your site. Some Adsense ‘experts’ also recommend making text in ads a slightly lighter color than the text on the rest of your site so as to allow the ‘title’ to stand out more. It’s worth experimenting with this and seeing how it looks on your site.

Tracking your Chitika eMinimall Results

As with all potential income streams on your site it is very important that you track your result. This enables you to see what is working and not working and make changes accordingly.

Unfortunately Chitika are yet to roll out channels on eMiniMalls. I’m told that they are not far away and I personally am really looking forward to it as they will enable us to track how an individual ad unit is going. This will give you an idea of what ad positioning and design works best as well as giving you an idea of what keywords pay best. You will be able to name each channel whatever you choose.

The channel system is already running (its just their reports that are yet to go live) and I’d recommend adding the channel code to your ads now so that when their reporting system goes live you’ll already have some data to analyse. All you have to do is to add the following line of code to your ad unit code on your site. The ‘xxx’ is where you put a name of your channel. ie I might call a channel on this blog ‘problogger left side bar’ to help me track how an ad on left sidebar might work.

ch_sid = ‘xxxx’;

Choosing keywords to target

One of the key elements to effective use of Chitika eMiniMalls is getting ads showing on your site that have a high relevancy to your content. If you’re using Adsense you will of course not be using contextual ads so this becomes a challenge. One way of doing this is to use your titles to trigger keywords - however if you’re running multiple ads on a site you won’t want them all to do this as you’ll end up with multiple versions of the same ad. As a result some of your ad units will need to have keywords inserted into them (as outlined above). How do you decide what keywords to target in order to get a good supply of ads but also higher paying ones.

The simplest way to do this is to do some research in some of the advertisers using the minimalls system. For example Amazon.com and Shopping.com have ads that show up in eMiniMalls. I’ve found that most times if I do a search for a product in those systems and find a corresponding product that if I plug in the name of that product as it appears on their sites that it will come up in the minimalls on my blogs.

I’ve also heard a number of bloggers say that if you search the ‘best selling buys’ in the different categories of these online stores that you will find higher paying ads. I’m not sure if this is the case - but there is some sense in this. In any case with the coming of channels we’ll soon know what type of keywords trigger what level of click values.

For example, on my digital cameras site, I visit the digital cameras section of shopping.com, and put this query into the list: “Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-H1 Digital Camera”

PlugIns and Tools for Chitika eMiniMalls

A number of eMiniMall users have developed tools that can be used by chitika publishers that might be helpful. These include (I have not tested these extensively so do not endorse them specifically but share them because they may be useful to you):

WordPress Plugin - This plug in allows you to add eMiniMalls to your posts in Word Press
WordPress Plugin - This plug in uses the custom fields features of WP to insert eMiniMalls
WordPress Plug in - This is like the first one but by another developer
Chitika eMiniMalls on Movable Type - MT plugins that can help MT users.

If you know of other eMiniMall plugins and tools please let us know in comments below.

Add your Chitika eMiniMalls Tips

This post is a work in progress and is from my own experience of using eMiniMalls. Every day that I use them I learn something new so will add to this page over time and will add some of the more helpful tips that readers leave in comments below - so share your knowledge so we can all improve our eMiniMall earnings.

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How do they work?

- ads pay on a per click basis. The value of the clicks depends upon the product being featured.
- left in default mode - mini-malls are contextual ads (ie they look at your content and try to find ads that are relevant with it)
- ads can be set to be non contextual and to target specific keywords (this is helpful when it comes to running them in conjunction with Adsense - more information on this below).

How Profitable are they?

The terms of using eMiniMalls don’t allow me to share specific figures but I can share the following:

Overall - I’ve been beta testing mini-malls for 5 weeks now and am very happy with them. They don’t out perform Adsense for me yet - but my overall earnings with them for the month of September is more than a quarter and less than a half of my Adsense earnings for the month (regularly readers will be able to do some sums and come up with some approximate earnings there). Take into consideration that I don’t have them running on every blog I own and have not spent much time optimizing them yet and you’ll see that they have some real potential.

Cost per Click - Very good. The first day I added mini malls to and saw the amount that each click was paying I was quite surprised. They are considerably higher than my average click value on Adsense - some days they are 5 or 6 times higher. I’ve talked to a couple of other bloggers using them and they report similar click values. This is the definate strength of mini-malls.

Click Through Rate - The percentage of people clicking on eMiniMalls ads is considerably lower than what I get on Adsense. This is a bit disappointing and is probably for a number of reasons.

Poor Optimization - This is partly my fault. I’ve just not had time to really optimize the ads properly. It is also partly because they are not currently offering channels to track ad performance on different blogs/categories/positions. As a result if I were to try to optimize the ads now I have no way of tracking the results. Channels are a feature that will be added shortly however so I’m expecting to be able to increase my CTR somewhat.
Poor Ad matching - Chitika are still working on how they match ads with content. Ad relevancy seems to be a bit of a problem on some posts. I know this because I know they have ads for some products that just don’t show up on pages where i’d expect them to. Hopefully they’ll continue to develop their algorithm and find ways of making ads even more relevant.
Lower Numbers of Ads - I’m suspecting that Chitika has a lower number of ads than Adsense to select from to run on sites using mini-malls. This means that sometimes ads can be a little irrelevant to your content which would decrease CTR also.

Let’s hope they can increase CTR in future.

Reports - I’ll emphasize that mini-malls are in beta at present so don’t expect too much in the reporting realm yet. At this stage they just update at the end of each day and give you some basic stats under the four headings of - Date, Impressions, Clicks and Revenue. These stats are what they call ‘unaudited’ - which means they haven’t taken anything off the total that they suspect to be click fraud or ‘dodgy’ clicks. They ‘audit’ you at this stage once per month (they have indicated that this will happen daily at some point in the future). I was only in the system for three days of last month but the auditing brought my ‘unaudited’ figures back by about 10% of what they were. Clicks are audited by some secret process that includes multiple or repeated clicks, traffic from bots and spiders as well as traffic coming from certain countries like China or Korea.

I’m not too impressed by the auditing feature. While I understand why its there I can see that this will be the cause of some tension between Chitika and Publishers. I’m sure Adsense has some sort of system in place that does something similar - but they are big enough to build it in as a real time feature so that publishers just don’t know what they lose. I’d rather not know the amount they take off for this than have it dangled before me to be taken away later.

I know from my conversations with Chitika staff that the reporting system will be undergoing significant improvements in the coming weeks and months.

Ad Formats - The currently offer 10 different size formats in some pretty standard sizes. I’ve recommended to them that they add a couple of new formats that I believe would be beneficial to bloggers but overall the options are pretty good. They also allow you to make some changes to the design of your ads by changing colors of borders, title and text to match your blog.

Payment - Payment is via Paypal in US Dollars at the start of every month - around 30 days after the end of the month you’re being paid for. You need to reach a minimum of $10 to get a payment.

Can Mini-Malls be used in conjunction with Adsense? - Most people I talk to about mini-malls asks this - it’s important as most bloggers want to use them in conjunction with one another.

I’ve talked to Google about this via email. The first email I got back from them said ‘no’ you can’t use them for two reasons:

They look too similar to Adsense Ads
They are contextual ads

I decided to follow the email up pointing out two things.

They actually don’t look like Adsense ads - they have a picture in them, tabs etc. I think the mistake Adsense made at first was in confusing mini-malls with Chitika’s other ads which do look very similar to Adsense ads.
You can actually disable the contextual element of the ads and plug in code that targets a specific product.

The email I received back said that they were sorry for making a mistake and that Chitika mini-mall ads can be used in conjunction with Adsense IF they are set to be non contextual.

I know of two others who have had this same conversation with Google with the same results.

English Sites only - at this point they are in beta test and only accepting Engine sites into the program. While this is sad for non English sites I guess they have to start somewhere. Hopefully they’ll widen it later at some point.

All in all - I’m pleased with Chitika’s mini-malls. They have loads of potential. I suspect (and until I get channels I won’t know for sure) that they will do best on product related blogs. They seem to serve very relevant ads to my gadget type blogs and struggle on some of my more ‘news’ related blogs.

I’ve also seen them producing very relevant ads over at ShoeBlogs (remember in the interview I did with Manolo that he said that chitika ads were in some of his better performing ads). I’ve also seen a couple of bloggers so impressed with mini-malls that they’ve ditched Adsense all together as they were able to earn significantly more from Chitika (one of these is Jeremy Wright from ensight.

As with all new ad programs I would suggest that putting all your eggs in one basket is not the way to go - give Chitika a go by all means but keep in mind that eMiniMalls are in a beta test and as with all beta tests things are being tested and tweaked along the way. There is promising signs but take your time with it.

You can apply to be a part of the eMiniMalls beta test at Chitika Mini Malls Sign Up.

Update: A couple of people have asked for more information on the Adsense/Mini-mall running on the same page thing. Here is an excerpt from an email that Google sent associates and I when we asked them for clarification about running the mini-malls in a non contextual mode.

‘Yes, you can use the Chitika products that rely on keywords selected by
you as opposed to your site’s content, on your site in addition to Google
ads.

For additional questions, please visit our AdSense Support site at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense or feel free to reply to this
email.’

Update II

If you’re one of the many bloggers who have just signed up for Chitika eMiniMalls after reading this review you might like to check out Quick Online Tips who have just posted tips on running Chitika eMiniMalls & Google Adsense on Same Webpage.

There they give code that helps you to set your eMiniMalls up in a way that is non contextual (and is therefore allowable with Adsense) but in a way that rotates a variety of ads which will help you to get a bit of variety in your ads which will help combat ad blindness.

I’ve been using this rotating ads code over the past day or two and have noticed an increase in earnings already.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the bloggers that are reporting the best successes with eMiniMalls are the ones that are targeting products on their blogs. I know I mentioned this above - but bloggers with a focus upon gadgets, clothes, shoes etc seem to be doing very well from them.

(By: Problogger).

To my blog's visitors: I have just known Chitika eMinimalls by Problogger. I have just tried to apply to Chitika, and waiting for their review on my blog. I hope all things are smooth!

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