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Tuesday

Context Links - Amazon Contextual Advertising

On Tuesday, Amazon released its beta contextual advertising program for publishers.

Read the Context Links FAQ first and please note that you will have to join Amazon Affilates in order to take part in the beta test.

Similar to Kontera, Amazon's contextual ad. Context Links, places the ads and corresponding pop-up windows within the web page. Products are displayed based upon relevant keywords.

Publishers ad a few lines of code to their website html with the tag and wait for results.

I quickly added Context Links to Need Money and did not see results right away. I think this is because my copy is not as Amazon keyword friendly.

If your blog is about electronics (PDA, cellphones, laptops, processors and USB drives) or books by specific authors, for instance, Jim Collins or Jeffrey Gittomer, you might see some directed ads on your site.

Regardless, Amazon has been the oldest and one of the best affiliate sites on the Internet for nearly a decade. It is worth taking a look at Context Links.

Thursday

Monetizing your blog or website is easier than you think.

Until recently, most of us only used Google's AdSense. It is easy to setup and the reports are simple to understand. Even if your site received only a few clicks a day, at least you stood a chance at making a few dollars a month off of AdSense.

However, with the rule changes at Google which now allow other contextual ads to be used with AdSense, the gate is wide open for several other monetizing programs.

I currently use a variety of programs on my websites. The success is really determined by the type of website, visitor and keywords.

Let's take a look at Kontera.

Kontera is a contextual advertising program which means ads are based upon the keywords found on your website. What nobody has clearly explained (at least not to me) is that keyword and contextual advertising works best on dynamic content, like blogs.

Unlike http://adsense.google.comwhich places ads in a separate location on your site, Kontera takes keywords from your website, creates unique hyperlink advertisements with the keywords which then link back to other websites which pay for the clicks.

With Kontera, the ads are embedded into the words of your posts. And since the ads look like normal hyperlinks (except they have two lines underneath, rather than the standard one), click thrus can happen at a higher rate than they might with separate ad copy.

Like AdSense, Kontera's payouts are based upon keyword popularity and possible monetization. So a keyword like soccer will probably not pay as much as a traditional higher paying keyword like credit, insurance or debt.

I have Kontera running on several of my websites and the CTR (click thru rate) varies. In my experience, blogs which focus on consumer products (electronic or cell phone reviews, for instance), see a higher CTR than a blog on poetry, nature or feelings - simply because there are more keywords which describe products.

Kontera is worth a try for your blog and sign up is easy.

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