BTW, if you only know of Google AdSense as a monetization model, then you should continue to read this post.

Besides using AdSense on my network of sites, I am also monetizing a few of my sites with other traffic monetization models such as Kontera, Bidvertiser, Advertlets etc.

As I looked deeper into my revenue statistics among the few monetization models in place on my network of sites, I realised that many of the clicks are going from my AdSense into the other monetization models, particularly Kontera and Advertlets. One interesting thing to note is that I am having more clickthroughs on these programs than I got from AdSense itself.

For example, I am experiencing at least 200-500% more clickthroughs on Kontera than AdSense on a single day itself (for many days). However, take note that this higher CTR does not necessarily equate to higher revenue from Kontera in comparison to AdSense. The reason being the PPC for Kontera is generally lower than that of AdSense (can be really low for Kontera!). I am sure most of us can understand this since Google AdWords is so competitive these days in terms of keywords’ bid prices. Nevertheless, this is good news for AdSense publishers because they will be getting more $ per click.

If you ask me for justifications as to why this is happening, I only have the possible deductions below:

1. Many people are already used to seeing Google AdSense ads all over the place, and are starting to ignore them. And trust me, some people who are aware of publishers earning revenue from Google whenever they click on the Google ads, will not click on those ads.

2. Because of the different way Kontera is rendering their ads on a web page, many online visitors will be curious to click on those ads and see what comes up for them. Also, when you monetize with Kontera, your ads can be appearing all over the web pages based on advertisers’ keywords and your readers can be seeing Kontera’s ads on any part of a web page (this maximises visibility of the ads although sometimes it can be a little irritating). In comparison to AdSense, your visitors will only see the Google ads on those strategically-placed locations on a web page (which many visitors have learned to visually ‘ignore’).

I do not want to make this post too lengthy. So I will cut my story short and offer you one tip to immediately increase your profits online this month:

If you run a popular forum online, go and apply for Kontera now and monetise your forum(s) with Kontera. Once you are in and properly setup, you will be basically monetizing all your existing and new forum contents immediately, and the best part is: your contents will be created by your users and not you.

Kontera is free and easy to implement too. Just copy and paste a piece of code onto your web pages and you are ready to start another new stream of online revenue. BTW, Google AdSense and Kontera can run concurrently on the same web page without violating the Google T&Cs.

So, good luck and remember to subscribe to my newsletters, or RSS feed, or social bookmark my site if you love to see more updates from me!

If an online business or web site owner is seriously about what he is doing on the Internet, he should carefully take the following into consideration.

1. Own your domain name
Technically, a domain name is where people locate you on the Internet when they are looking for you. Marketing-wise, a domain name is your branding.

As you market and promote your Internet business or web site, you are branding yourself on the Internet. Think of the hugely successful web sites in the world such as Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Ebay, MySpace, Youtube. They are all very well known, established brands on the Internet. If you are tempted to create your online presence using free resources such as free hosting, free email or free 3rd party services like blogger.com, I would suggest to you that you should not.

Domain name is cheap these days, you can register one for yourself for less than USD$10 per year all over the Internet. You can get a domain from godaddy.com, hostway.com, namesecure.com etc.

Branding is very important if you want to succeed online.

2. Paid Hosting
A lot of people took up the offer of free hosting from service providers like Yahoo Geocities, GoDaddy etc. In exchange, these service providers insert their own advertisements into your web site and often than not, they also impose very limited bandwidth on your web site. If you have slightly more visitors to your web site, you will realize that the traffic restrictions on your web site will start to kick in, and your visitors will have problems accessing your web sites. This is something that you do not want to see.

Web hosting is an extremely competitive industry globally. For consumers, these are good news for us because prices have been driven so low to less than USD$10 per month for a generously, huge amount of bandwidth, email accounts and bandwidth etc. Instead of paying thousands to buy, install, maintain a web server, you pay only few dollars a month for the professionals to take care of everything for you, including supporting and ensuring that your Internet business or web site stays up 24 hours a day!

In fact, these days, some web hosts even give you free advertising credits with search engines, free web site templates and other freebies when you sign up for an account with them. You can find one of the reliable and value for money web hosting company that I am using at:
http://www.donaldlim.com/go/webhosting

3. Web Site Design
In the past, you have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a web site designer to create a web site for you. Today, anyone can create a very professional Internet business or web site in under one hour using free software that you can download on the Internet. And the best part is you do not have to be a technical person to design your own web site.

Take for example, an extremely popular, powerful and free open source software known as Wordpress. WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. You can download a copy of the software at http://wordpress.org.

Follow the instructions to downstall the software and you will be up within 5-15 minutes.

Wordpress is famous for its 5-minutes installation, hence it should not be too difficult for you to set it up, even if you are a newbie.

The default installation of WordPress comes with some default themes for you to choose from inside your Administration panel under Presentation menu. If you wish to look for more free Wordpress themes to be used on your new WordPress installation, you can go to http://themes.wordpress.net

Just download the free Wordpress theme that you want to use and upload them onto your FTP server under the WordPress theme directory. For details, please refer to the documentation that comes with your theme.

If you are fast, you can get your new site up within 30 minutes or less. If you want to get started even faster, easier, then you can use the web host which I am recommending at: http://www.donaldlim.com/go/webhosting

This web hosting company supports Fantastico on cPanel (the control panel for your hosting account) which allows you to install WordPress within a few clicks of your mouse.

However, if you prefer learning and designing a web page from scratch but do not have the budget of a few hundreds dollars to buy Dreamweaver or Frontpage, you can download this free open source web site builder software at freenvu.com

4. Paid Autoresponder
If you want to keep in constant contact with your mailing list or your web site visitors, you will need a way to keep in touch with them.

There are many ways to do so but one of the most effective and popular way is via email. You can collect email addresses from your visitors, and send your messages to them on a periodical basis, to keep them informed of new updates for your Internet business, or web sites.

You can make use of an autoresponder service to help you automate the process of handling subscription and un-subscription of email addresses from your mailing list, to schedule email messages to your list, to send email broadcast to your list via a mass emailing. The best part is you can also personalise your email messages to your recipients and track the deliverability and open-rate of your email messages through a centralized online system.

One of the most popular autoresponder services on the Internet can be found here:
http://www.donaldlim.com/go/autoresponder

5. Internet Traffic
There are countless ways of driving traffic to your web site. There are free ways or paid ways. There are time-tested and proven ways as well as new ways that are constantly popping up on the Internet, especially with the evolution of the Internet. There are also online or offline methods in which you can drive traffic to a web site.

Some popular ways to generate traffic will be via blogs, forum, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, article marketing, video marketing, Pay-Per-Click advertising, TV ads, direct mailers and emails etc. (See my other blog posts on how to generate free traffic to a web site)

6. Traffic Monetization Systems
Now you have everything you need to be in an Internet business. However, the most critical component that you must have is the systems/mechanisms to convert your traffic, mailing list, site contents, expertise etc into money, into cash.

Without this, all the costs involved in getting your domain name, hosting, autoresponder, traffic etc are all losing you money. You need cash and you need enough of those cash to make yourself profits in order to sustain your Internet business and make yourself some good money online! The primary aim of being in business is to earn money, earn profits!

There are also many ways for you to monetize your Internet business depending on what you are doing for your Internet business. You may be selling something of your own, selling someone’s else product via affiliate marketing, building enough traffic and convert those traffic into cash using traffic monetization systems like Google AdSense, Bidvertiser, Kontera and Chitika etc. (See my other blog posts on more information about these traffic monetization systems)

Kontera’s ContentLinks are contextually relevant keywords discovered in real time on a publisher’s web page that are automatically turned into a link to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from one of Kontera’s thousands of advertisers.

Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Advertising solution lets you monetize your content in real-time, enabling an incremental increase in ad revenue by providing a new source of untapped ad inventory that does not compete with the other ad programs running on the site.

ContentLink also creates a valuable user experience by serving relevant and informational ads that match the user’s interest and frame of mind.

At the core of Kontera’s patent-pending technology are a set of proprietary algorithms that enable publishers to maximize their revenue and earn higher Click Through Rates. Statistical text analysis and clustering methodologies are used, combined with semantic analysis procedures.

Kontera’s platform, proven and optimized, on thousands of web pages over the last 7 years, facilitates the analysis of each web page in real-time. Keywords and topics are then extracted and ranked, and then instantly matching to the advertiser’s most relevant text ad.

The greater relevancy between the content, keyword and text ad made possible by Kontera’s proven technology increase the publisher’s revenue.

ContentLink provides the following features:

Instant Implementation
High Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Increased Incremental Revenue
Positive User Experiences
Untapped Sources of Ad Inventory
24/7 Customer Service
Online Reporting
Editorial Integrity
Content Monetization
Publisher Control & Customization
New Publisher Value-Added Functionality
and more…

Are you looking to increase your advertising revenue? Then Kontera enables you to take control of your advertising operations and increase your ad revenue with Kontera’s comprehensive advertising management solution.

Implementation is also very easy. When your sign-up with Kontera’s ContentLinks has been approved, you will be given a piece of code and you only need to paste it into your web pages and Kontera will start to serve ads on your web site. The implementation is exactly similar to Google AdSense or Chitika’s eMiniMalls as well.

Signing up as a publisher is free! You can visit http://www.kontera.com to read more about ContentLink Private Label Publishers Solutions.

With Google AdSense, it is also a way for web site publishers to provide Google web and site search functionalities to their site visitors, and at the same time, to earn some money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

Google also provides many useful tools for their publishers to increase traffic, provide smart analytics, or add interactivity to their web sites when you are accepted into their program, for example, Google Analytics.

So, how does Google AdSense work and how you can make money using Google AdSense? The concept is simple, if you go to Google.com and do a search for something, most of the time, you will see some “Sponsored Links” that appear on the top or right side of the screen that are relevant to what you have just searched for. Advertisers basically pay Google to display these ads and they are charged a pre-determined amount every time their ad gets clicked by an internet surfer. This is known as the Pay-Per-Click advertising in the industry, also known as PPC advertising for short.

With the Google AdSense program, your web site will also display these same, sponsored ads on your site, just like on the Google search engine, and you can get paid for it by Google for visitors’ clicks. Every time a Google ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser. Once your account reaches $100, you’ll receive a check in the mail.

The Google AdSense program is free to join, and it combines pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression advertising – meaning that you get paid for valid clicks on the ads on your site or search results pages as well as impressions on your content pages. You will need to have a web site in order to apply for AdSense. (If you need a professional web site, check this out. You will get a free domain name with unlimited domains hosting with this! If you need help, contact me via this blog and I will show you how you can create a beautiful, professional, designer web site within 1 hour even if you do not know any technical skills like HTML! What I am going to show you have put some freelance designers out of job! :P)

If you already have your own web site, you can also implement AdSense on your web pages immediately after you have been approved by Google for the program.

Google will review your application and follow up with an email to you within 2 to 3 days of your AdSense sign-up. If you are accepted into the program, you can log in to your new Google Adsense account and get the HTML code to insert into your web pages. This is a very simple procedure to do so, hence do not worry about the technical implementation of the program on your web site.

However, I have a tip for you. Build up some contents on your web site or blog first before you apply to Google AdSense, if not, they will likely decline your application. Also, just for your information, there are some people who earn a 5-6 figures income from Google every month just from Google AdSense alone!

You can sign up for Google AdSense using the banner link below:

Will you be interested to put an Interactive Merchandise Kiosk onto your web site and get paid for per click onto your kiosk? Does this sounds interesting to you?

Chitika’s flagship product, eMiniMalls, brings any product promotion to life on the Internet.

With Chitika’s eMiniMalls, you can provide your users with relevant content and comparative shopping information without even leaving your web site or blog! You can choose from thousands of products to feature on your web site – from mobile phones to baby strollers.

eMiniMalls enable a convenient, non-intrusive and interactive shopping experience for your audience on your web site. Geo-targeting in U.S., Canada, Europe, New Zealand and Australia means that you can now display localized merchants, products and prices on your web site.

Chitika’s intelligent coding learns and adapts to emphasize products your viewers are interested in buying, bearing in mind that as users interact with eMiniMalls, you earn PPC revenue from Chitika.

This is another great traffic monetization system for your web site to give you an additional source of extra income.

Sign up today via the banner below now:

With Web 2.0 being the trend in 2007, there are many new ways for any publishers, also known as web site owners, blog owners etc, to turn their precious traffic into cash.

This instalment of the series “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic”, we will talk about one such model known as the BidVertiser.

BidVertiser is actually a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Traffic Monetization System. Basically, you insert BidVertiser’s PPC ads into your own web site and when your visitors click on an ad, you get paid for every visitor that clicks on an ad.

BidVertiser enables you to make as much as possible from your advertising space, by letting advertisers bid on your ad space. They pay monthly, either by cheque, or instantly through PayPal with a minimum of only $10 payout.

BidVertiser will always display the highest bidders on your site, assuring the maximum revenue possible at any given time. It also gives you a simple point-and-click tool to help you customize the layout of the ads to fit your site’s look and feel, in order to retain the high quality of your website.

BidVertiser enables you to filter-out any unwanted ads. Prior to your own filtering, each ad has to be pre-approved by BidVertiser’s editorial team. This mechanism gives you a peace of mind with regards to the ads displayed on your website.

You can use the Publisher Center from BidVertiser to generate detailed online reports to monitor your ads performance, including the number of page impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and the total amount you’ve earned.

This is getting more and more popular with online publishers! You can join them today by signing up using the banner below:

What are you waiting for? Join the tens of thousands of web site publishers to start making money from your Website or Blog with BidVertiser!

If you do not monetize your traffic, you are leaving money on the table!

You can view and/or download the report at http://donaldlim.com/downloads/googlemoney.pdf

If you like it, please leave your comments here.

Thank you

Because the Google ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your web site (or matched to the characteristics/interests of the visitors that your web pages content attracts), you finally have a way to both monetise and enhance your content pages to make some money from Google online.

It is also a way for web site publishers to provide Google web and site search functionalities to their site visitors, and at the same time, to earn some money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

Google also provides many tools for their publishers to increase traffic, provide smart analytics, or add interactivity to their web sites when you are accepted into their program.

How does it work? (more…)

Do you know that you can make money on the Internet legally? Do you also know that you can actually make money online even if you DO NOT have any product, web site or mailing list? Sounds impossible, but it is true and many people are doing it without you even knowing! And why should you believe me? Because I have already tested it and made a few hundreds dollars online without my own product and mailing list! If you want to see my cheques, please contact me and I will be happy to show you!

OK, let’s get started!

So, you have heard of “word-of-mouth” marketing I believe? If not, then never mind, let me explain to you in simple terms. Assuming you saw the movie “Spiderman 3″ and you liked it so much that you started telling every single friend about it to go and watch it. So, your friends did but what do you get in return? Does the movie company pays you for referring each of your friends to go watch “Spiderman 3″? You and I know the answer, the answer is ‘NO’.

Now, the Internet has a proven business model, similar to what the offline world called the “word-of-mouth” marketing. The online world called it “affiliate marketing”. Basically, you get paid by a company for referring a buyer to buy their products and/or services. For example, Amazon is using this affiliate marketing business model as well. When you put a banner on your own web site and someone clicks on your banner to go directly to Amazon’s web site to buy a book, Amazon will pay you for referring that buyer. It is that simple!

There are countless of such affiliate programs on the Internet and you can sign up to be part of such affiliate programs. Some of these affiliate programs will impose a fee for a person to sign up as an affiliate. But MOST of the affiliate programs will allow you to sign up for free and start promoting their products/services.

Also, I must let you know that some of these affiliate programs pay you recurring commissions for referring a customer to them. So, you just need to refer a customer one time and get paid a lifetime as long as the customer remains a customer with the company. This is especially true for companies that provide services to the marketplace.

In my opinion, this is the easiest way to start making money online even if you are a newbie. How much you can earn from affiliate programs will depend on many factors including your own motivation, the selection of good affiliate programs, how creative you can be with your marketing etc. But one thing is sure, you can make money online using affiliate programs.

One of the best affiliate marketer in the world happens to be Ewen Chia, a Singaporean, who was recently featured in the local newspaper The Sunday Times. Ewen has quietly made millions in sales on the Internet in the past and now he is out to teach average individuals like you and me to make a living online. I have been to his events a few times in the past and this humble guy knows what he is talking about! If you want to learn affiliate marketing, Ewen is the guy to go to!