28 September 2007

Get paid to click Ads




Get paid to click adverts? It sounds too good to be true I suppose. But that's exactly what ClickSense does. You get paid to click the Ads in their advertising program and read the advertisers landing page for, typically thirty seconds. The amounts you get paid for clicking adverts are not large ( they get better if you upgrade to a premium account). But you can also use your accumulated earnings to purchase adverts yourself on the ClickSense system. this seems like a great way for those with a limited advertising income to make a start with no real outlay. Simply sign up for a Clicksense account and start clicking the adverts then convert your earnings to purchase adverts yourself. Of course some of the people who will click your ads will be just doing it to earn their own credits. But if you target your ads and audience correctly you should be able to earn from the percentage that do convert. Why not give it a try. I have just signed up and I will report on this in a later post. ( update on Clixsense and Clixsense affiliate earnings here)

Sell your own Ad space on your site?

I was involved in an interesting discussion on an AdSense related forum recently about the issue of selling and managing Advertising space directly on your own site.
Now to be honest my first thought was that if you are getting people wanting to buy ad space directly from you that this must be a good thing and you should jump at the chance to directly sell and manage your own Advertising space.

But just how do you calculate what this advertising space is worth? As I hadn't done any direct self management of ad space like this before I had no immediate answer to this. What struck me was that it might be possible to work out a rate by calculating what the space would generate assuming typical CTR and payment per click from AdSense being on that space. This would give you a value for what the space was potentially worth - or actually worth if you are already using AdSense on it. So just use this figure - add a bit more and hey presto you have calculated what your Ad space is worth for direct sale.

Hmmm. But then someone rightly pointed out that if this is really what the space is worth doesn't it just make more sense to simply put up Google AdSense and let AdSense take care of all the hassle of managing the advertisers, setting advertising rates and rotating ads etc? And of course they were right. It does make more sense often not to go through all the hassle of managing your own ad space and selling this space directly yourself.

In fact that is the whole point of programs like AdSense and Bidvertiser and all these other ad providers. they take the hassle out of selling your Ad space. Of course maybe ( a big maybe) you could earn more by selling it directly yourself. but think of the time that this would take. This is time that often would be better spent developing your site.

So are there any arguments for directly selling and managing your own ad space? Well it may be that you want much finer control over the advertisers that will appear on your site or that you have specific partner advertisers in mind. Possibly there are some situations like this where directly selling your own space makes sense - particularly if you can get a premium rate for the space. In most case though it probably makes sense to use AdSense or one of the other alternatives to manage this for you.

02 September 2007

Adsense in Blogspot posts

Those of you using AdSense and a Blogspot Blog may not have noticed that you now have the option to insert ads into the page structure after your posts. In the past this was only possible by hacking the template and there was no way that you could easily do this using the page elements page in Blogger.
If you are using the new blogger templates all you need to do to take advantage of this is to go into your blog edit page elements page. Then click to edit the post widget and you will see that there is now an option to add an AdSense ad block within your posts. It also gives you the ability to decide how often the ads will appear - ie after a certain number of posts.

This is an excellent facility for Blogger AdSense users and one that people have been requesting for a long time. many users will have set the options already on their blogs and may not have realised that this facility is available. If you haven't tried this way of putting AdSense ads within the sequence of you posts then I would urge you to check this out. This can be an excellent way to position your AdSense ads.

One further refinement that Google could usefully consider to this facility is to broaden this option to allow the insertion of other blocks of html/script in sequence with posts in the same way. This could make this a very versatile facility.