When it comes to monetizing a web site or blog, you have a lot of options. In the last monetization post I wrote, I covered a few different methods, which ranged from promoting yourself as a brand, selling your own product and also through contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is a hot trend lately, as site owners are moving away from the idea of adding banners to their sites that will take up more web site, and potentially lower the user experience. One contextual network that has been on the rise and making a name for themselves is INTENTclick.
How Contextual Advertising Works
As you read this post, you will truly appreciate the power of contextual advertising. Right now your focus is within the text of this article, and should there be any links within this text, they would be much more likely to grab your attention versus any banners or text links outside of the main content. The concept of contextual advertising is to create text advertising links within your content, which means they are right in the face of your readers, but also relevant at the same time.
Think about the success Google Adsense has had over the years, but instead of taking up the big banner ad space that Adsense requires, contextual advertising is placed within your content, allowing site owners to maximize their site space. When someone clicks on a banner or link from Google Adsense, the visitor will leave your web site. This is not true with contextual advertising, as the link will usually spawn in a new window. Which not only means you will keep your current site visitors at your site, but you will also be making additional revenue at the same time.
Just like Google Adsense, most contextual advertising networks will pay their site partners on a cpc (cost per click) basis. Some networks also back out their earnings on a commission basis, but in the end, you still see a cpc average in your earnings report.
While all of this may sound amazing and complex (and it is…), it’s actually quite easy for any web site or blog to get setup and running with contextual advertising. Many of the contextual networks will provide you with a simple line of code that you can add to your web site, or a nice wordpress plugin for any blog owners. You will also have access to a wide selection of options which include changing contextual links colors, underlining, how many links to display, and more. This way you don’t have to worry about people confusing regular site links versus contextual ad links.
What Sites Will Contextual Advertising Work on Best?
As much as I would like to say contextual advertising solutions will flood your pockets with a nice monthly recurring income, that simply isn’t the case. Depending on the type of web site and visitors you have, you will see a big difference in click through rates and earnings. Here are three examples:
An education or technology web site will earn more revenue per click with contextual advertising, versus a recipe or cooking based web site. This is simply due to the fact that education and technology advertisements are higher end and they are spending a lot more money per click.- A web site or blog with a webmaster or internet marketing audience will most likely experience a much lower click through rate, as the readers are already familiar with how advertising works on web sites, and will know a contextual link versus a regular link.
- Review, resource and shopping web sites will experience the highest click through rates and overall ecpm earnings, simply because the visitors to these web sites are already in a buying and researching mode. These site visitors are looking for relevant links and looking to click.
What is INTENTclick, and Why Do They Matter?
Now that you have a good understanding on what contextual advertising is, and how it may work with your web site traffic, let’s get back to INTENTclick and how they can improve the revenue generation on your web site.
If you asked a bunch of online marketers bout contextual advertising, many of them would probably be familiar with the name “Kontera“. INTENTclick is actually an exclusive performance network driven by the Kontera brand network. Kontera has established themselves as one of the premier advertising companies online, and have exposure across millions of web sites, many of which you already know.
So why does INTENTclick matter and how are they any different from Kontera?
If you’ve ever worked with Kontera or contextual advertising, you already know how their content based advertising works. INTENTclick is run off that same concept, except they are focused on higher end advertisers and content rich web sites that can drive high volume and results. If you’ve ever found success with contextual advertising or simply looking for a new revenue source for your web site or blog, you will want to give INTENTclick a try.
Think about it for a second… is there anyone from your past, maybe a client, friend or even someone who is jealous of your success, that could potentially damage your name or brand online? In the end, all it really takes it a few high end and well established web sites to start posting negative reviews and content, that can rank really high in the search results and do some damage.
Now that you have an idea how reputation management services can improve rankings, search results and how people can search for relevant information on a company, the best question to ask is “Do reputation management services really work?“. As you can see from the case studies mentioned above, they clearly do work, as the average person is most likely going to look through the first page of results to make a quick decision on whether or not they want to use a recommended service or company.
Now as I mentioned earlier, the average employee sends 38 emails a day… If you only send around 27 emails a day, that’s still over 10,000 emails a year! Using a system like Wrap Mail can dramatically increase your business by putting your brand and advertising right in the face of your customers. If you were to only convert 1% of the people reading your email, with the additional branding and links within your wrapped email, that’s an extra 100 leads. Depending on your sales or lead generation, this could actually be much higher.
I didn’t learn this lesson by reading books, and I didn’t learn it because I made a mistake that affected my brand, or anything of that nature, it was simply a matter of time and experience. If you’re reading Zac’s blog now, there is every probability you’ve been following him for months, or years, now and that you follow him because you see him as a go to expert as far as blogging and affiliate marketing is concerned–that doesn’t mean he is the only one talking about affiliate marketing online, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t other affiliate marketing blogs. It’s really simple; Zac has built a brand and has been able to gain your trust. If Zac should recommend a product now and a brand new blogger to the affiliate marketing space does the same, I’m pretty sure that for every one person that buys through that new blogger, five will buy through Zac – it’s that simple, there’s no magic formula, it’s only a matter of time.
This was one lesson that took me some time to figure out, but it is also one of the best affiliate marketing lessons I have ever learned from my blog. It might be stressful asking product creators for coupons, or to be looking for discount codes for products you promote, but truth be told, using coupons to promote affiliate products might mean the difference in you making $100 or $1,000. I used to find it difficult to make product sales even after spending a lot of time trying to write the perfect review. I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong, until one day, I accidentally promoted a product with a coupon, and I saw sales go through the roof. I used this technique to promote medifast products on my blog, and it worked. I used this same technique to promote nutrisystem products, and it worked. I also use coupons to promote a lot of other products on my blog, and the results have been stunning.
I used to be someone who reviewed products with the hope of making a lot of sales the same week I reviewed the product. I poured all my efforts into promoting a particular product, and it is sometimes saddening to only make a sale or two after all those efforts. What I didn’t know was that those reviews were a long time investment – those reviews I did months, or years, ago that nobody found started bringing in traffic from search engines, and I now make more sales in a week than I made in the month I reviewed them.
This lesson was also learned as a result of the 3rd lesson above. Not that I initially expected to get a boatload of traffic to my review page a few months after doing the review – in fact, I have even stopped thinking about some reviews I did, only to start noticing traffic come in day by day, months after the product was reviewed. After taking a look at my analytics to see where the traffic was coming from, it was one major source I saw: Google!
I keep on hearing misconceptions from new bloggers about how making money from affiliate marketing works. A lot of them will say they only need to get a lot of traffic to their site and, boom; they are already making tons of affiliate cash. I used to think the same way, but time proved me wrong.
