I ALWAYS experiment with Adsense ad placements and formats. This is to counter ad blindness as much as it is to optimize Adsense as much as possible. Well in January 2008, I found that the half-banner which once used to perform pretty well on my main Adsense website started to suck major lemons. eCPM was going down the tubes and so was CTR. I decided to kill the half banner and replaced it with the large rectangle format. Now what happened since has really surprised me.

Although purists would crucify me for plastering a whole slab of Adsense on my homepage, that fella has been out performing ALL my ad blocks on ALL pages collectively. The thing is as this is happening, I've found that the bounce rate for this page has increased in tandem with the rise in earnings. Obviously people are arriving at this page, seeing this whopper of an ad block and just clicking on it. The sorry victim in all this is Kontera, which I use for all my sub pages.

Now, I expected that earnings from Kontera would dip with the rise in clicks on the large rectangle Adsense block, but it has actually crashed and gone erratic. The chart below shows my daily earnings in the last 2 weeks or so :

What was happening was unbelievable... I was starting to see earnings of 10 cents for 10 clicks or more! Now that's bad. Where I used to be able to earn an average of 15 to 20 cents per click, I've been seeing a major increase in 1 cent or less per clicks the last few months. The peaks you see in the chart above are nothing to brag about. We're talking about less than $1 here. To illustrate how bad Kontera is performing now, I have only just managed to pass the $100 mark at the end of May 2008. That's 5 months to reach $100 - an average of $20 per month or 66 cents a day! Since this has been happening over the course of a few months, it is telling me that one or more of the following is true :

• Kontera's advertiser pool is shrinking - hence the low eCPM and EPC.
• Kontera is somehow able to see my visitors prefer clicking on Adsense so they're punishing me for giving priority to Adsense (this is a conspiracy theory. I cannot prove it)
• It's just market forces at play and market forces are saying my site deserves 1 cent clicks.

Now it's not pride here. I cannot accept the third possibility BECAUSE since deploying the large rectangle Adsense block, my EPC has actually increased by almost 60%. To see if the market as a whole was weakening, I decided to give LinkWorth a try. I'll talk more about LinkWorth in a separate post later, but in the 3 weeks or so that I've been with LinkWorth, I am very pleased with my earnings so far.

So the bottom line is... I am not going to waste my web real estate on Kontera anymore. I've been patient enough. Five months is enough I think. Later this week, I'm going to convert all the pages that were once reserved for Kontera to Linkworth.

Thanks for paying for my hotel stay in Genting, but I gotta say Adios Kontera!

Following hot on the heels of Paypal allowing Malaysians to withdraw funds to our credit cards, then Adsense offering payment via Western Union, if this bit of news if confirmed, then it will be heavenly for us! Imagine not having to wait for checks to arrive and then a longer wait for them to be cleared. Worse still if you have the unfortunate experience of having your Kontera check sent around the world!

I believe that this email is authentic because the publisher information contained within it can only be known by Kontera, but like I said before, Kontera seems to be very primitive in many ways. I will post a confirmation when I receive an official reply from Kontera. Now... if they would only work on giving publishers a decent control panel that REALLY lets us control things instead of having to email them for the simplest of matters.

So let's say bye-bye to long waits for paper checks and hello to instant (well... almost) money! I looooove making money online!

Tags: Kontera, Paypal, Kontera offering payment via Paypal, Kontera ContentLinks

While their FAQ indicates that the default number of links per page is 5, you will often see more than that. So here's four methods you can use to control the number and location of Kontera links on your pages.

You can specify which part of your page Kontera can place links by using the following :

To restrict the parts of your page that you DON'T want Kontera to appear, you can use the reverse of the first method :

If you're using these methods on a regular web page, you can code the tags into the sections where you want them, but for blogs, there are a couple of ways to do it :

• You can hard code them into your posts. I don't recommend this as it can be a bit messy especially after you have hundreds or thousands or posts.
• A better alternative would be to code these tags into your index.php, single.php and category.php files. You will need to find the section where "the_content()" appears and place your Kontera tags above and below it. This means that the Kontera links will only appear within your post's text.

  *Disclaimer: I have not tested this blogging platforms other than Wordpress 2.1.

  <div class=KonaBody> < ?php the_content("&nbsp;&nbsp;continue reading ".chr(34).get_the_title('', '', false).chr(34)." &raquo;"); ?> </div>

Another (outdated) way of limiting the number of links that appear would be to specify it in the "var" line of you Kontera script :

While the method above still works, Kontera encourages publishers to email them at support@kontera.com and inform them to limit the number of links you wish to have per page. This is then set at their end, which frees you from having to mess with any code. I personally think it's archaic to do it this way, but that's Kontera for you. Let's hope they improve their user admin panel to allow publishers more control.

So there you have it. To get the most out of your Kontera ContentLinks ads, vary the use of the methods above. Happy Kontera-ing.

Tags: Kontera, Kontera ContentLinks

Okay, so what's Kontera got to do with our stay in Genting this December? Well Kontera somehow screwed up my mailing address last month and my check found its way to Senegal. After a 3 week wait, a new check arrived yesterday. Whoopee. I've just banked in the check, so the money should be in in about 4 weeks times. It will just about cover the cost of 3 nights in a World Club room in the First World Hotel.

In all the hustle and bustle of my daily chores, I forgot about this Kontera check, so when it arrived, it was quite a pleasant surprise. I like receiving checks like these.

Tags: Kontera, Kontera check, Make money with Kontera

I have to be honest... I tried to apply for Kontera a couple of years back when their pre-requisite included something about having half a million page view per month. My sites were still new at that time and that meant I didn't even bother to submit a request.

However, about a year ago (my page views for my highest site was still moderate then) Joel Comm struck a deal with Kontera. Basically, Kontera would allow anyone who was a subscriber to Joel's mailing list to gain entry. I immediately applied. Didn't know whether I would make money, but I was willing to give it a shot. No regrets.

From my interaction with my online buddies (some of whom make more money in one month than we make in a year), Kontera gives widely fluctuating results. Kontera seems to work well if your traffic is targetted. I understand from my them that blogs about general topics / family / friends etc, usually get less desirable results with Kontera, simply because you won't be using high paying keyword or attracting visitors who are in search or focussed topics based on these keywords. I can't really use HomeWithAndrew.com as a yardstick because I've yet to focus on driving targetted traffic to it. My other sites which are focussed on specific niches are doing well though.

Like I've said in previous posts, Kontera is not perfect and not for everyone, so I'll get the cons over with first :

• Used on a link or ad heavy page, Kontera can make things look pretty cluttered.
• Because you cannot fully customize how it looks, it can stick out like a sore thumb, clashing with your site's look when you roll over a Kontera ad.
• Not many features in the user admin. Many things still need to be managed with email to their support.
• As of this post's date, their stats reporting is not live. It is still delayed by between 1-2 days. I understand that this will be changed soon which is good news.

Now for the good stuff. Kontera has a couple of distinct advantages over Adsense :

Their ads are in-text, which basically means that you won't be victim of ad-blindness (where people get so used to seeing ads that they ignore them). There is NO WAY you can avoid seeing and reading a Kontera ad link because the active links are actual words in your content. When you mouse over a link, you get a short description in their pop-up which is pretty neat and looks really cool ;

Kontera complements Adsense by picking up keywords in your content and converts them to links. They fill in the gaps when Adsense gets its targetting wrong (which is quite often). Adsense generally serves ads based on what it determines your page is about. This means that if you talk about 3 widely varied topics on a page, you will likely get off-target Adsense ads as it struggles to find matching ads. However, with Kontera, you can write about 8 differents topics on one page, place competitive keywords within those paragraphs, and those keywords will be converted to Kontera links.

Does the technique above work 100%? NO. Kontera is not perfect. It is still a business entity with a profit target, so it will serve the highest paying ads, usually above the fold (top section of your content). Kontera allows you to customize your ads to suit your color scheme. This helps you blend your links to match your overall look.

Kontera's ad inventory is not the most comprehensive, so this leads to fluctuations in earnings but this also goes for every other ad program, including Adsense. For me, Kontera makes for a great supplementary revenue source. It contributes approximately 5 - 8% of my overall online income, but honestly, I don't know how it would perform if I were to use it exclusively - which I probably won't. So far, it's not in the same league as Adsense, but to sum it all up, Kontera can be a GOOD WAY TO MAKE MONEY. It's worth a try.

Apply to join Kontera here.

Tags: Kontera, Contentlink, Kontera ads, Contextual Ads, Adsense alternative

I said Kontera was a wee bit (tongue in cheek) primitive on the admin side and here's proof. Check out the handwritten word "Senegal" on the address.

Oh my. Could it be that they actually employ real people to vet the addresses? A handwritten correction to boot! In any case, I told them I wasn't thrilled with their user admin and I'm relieved that they're aware of their lacking in this department. Well at least the email I received said they were looking into it :

So, I'm keeping this check as a momento. This check has travelled almost all the way around the world to me :

But to be honest, Kontera gives me good money. Contextually, they fill in the gaps that Adsense leaves when they serve off-target ads. I can check the latest in-demand keywords, plunk them into my posts and be sure that it will be picked up by Kontera.

Oh well, there's good and bad in everything. As long as Kontera pays me good money and stops sending my checks on world tours, I'm happy as a bee. Lesson to all : make sure you confirm your address with Kontera. You have to do it by email though, because as of this post's date, their user admin doesn't have the function for users to check their addresses.

Tags: Kontera, Contextual Advertising, Contextual Ads