Over in the Azoogleads forum at DigitalPoint, an interesting exchange sprung up between Shoemony, a well known super affiliate and JP the owner of the MaxBounty affiliate program. The post starts out innocently enough when a user asks if Azoogleads would be a good place to find ringtone ads. Someone replied that MaxBounty has a ringtone offer paying $13.90 per lead. Then Shoemoney jumped into the thread and said that MaxBounty is a bad company to work with and one of his friends way not paid when he drove a large volume of traffic to MaxBounty via PPC search traffic.

The thread then took an interesting turn when JP from MaxBounty came in to defend his history of paying affiliates on time. Shoemoney later posted a recap of the thread on his blog and stated that he still thinks MaxBounty sucks.

I have only done a little bit of work with MaxBounty, and my experience has been positive. I also know that JP has been an active and upstanding member of the webmaster community for quite a while. I remember seeing him frequently post of the GeekTalk forums years ago when I was just getting started. I would be curious to hear about others’ experiences with MaxBounty.

A key learning for me was how JP mentioned that affiliate networks often broker their deals out to each other. I always suspected this, but I had not seen it written anywhere. He mentioned that MaxBounty currently brokers out a few offers from Azoogleads, but they do most of their ads directly with publishers. I wonder what portion of most affiliate programs’ offers are brokered from other networks.

My previous post on Adsense Tips was popular, so here are a few more quick ones.
QuickOnlineTips has a good post about the best Adsense plugins for wordrepss. The plugins of most interest to me were:

• Adsense Beautifier - Adds attention grabbing images next to your Adsense ads. I have seen a few people claiming this technique helped them to double their Adsense CTR. The program puts a border between the images and the ads, so that you are in full compliance with the Adsense TOS. You can check out the plugin at use if you check out the post pages on EarnersBlog.
• Adsense Deluxe - Allows you to place Adsense ads into your posts. The script allows you to easily change the style of all of your ads and have some control over the placement. On MonetizeTraffic, I experimented with a similar plugin (Adsense Injection), but Adsense Delux appears to give you more control.

Darren over at ProBlogger has some good advice on how to improve the relevancy of Adsense ads. This can have a huge impact on your earnings. On my Example Term Paper site, a few changes to the meta tags and titles quadrupled my YPN earnings per click.

One of the most interesting portions of the article deals with section targeting. You can insert special HTML comments into your site to tell Adsense which portions of the site to emphasize/ignore when determining which ads to show. I have not used this feature, but I could see it coming in handy for some sites.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment in my Adsense Tips series.

Bluehat SEO has a great idea up on how to make $100 per day. He proposes creating some free screensavers and packaging them with the software from ZangoCash. Zango pays $0.45 per user download, so this could add up pretty quickly. The post very clearly lays out how you could get this up and running, and how to promote the site.

I probably will not be jumping on this anytime soon. Zango has a relatively shady past, including an large fine from the FTC. The idea is good for stimulating further thoughts. In the comments of the original post, people bring up some other good ideas such as putting URLs for sites with PPC ads on the screensaver.

Have you ever wanted to give a domain a test drive before you sunk $9 into buying it for a year? Pool.com just released a new service allowing you to do just that. With their new Catch & Release program, you can register a domain name for 4.5 days to test it out for $.20. A $250 deposit is required to use the service.

Big time domain companies have been doing this for a while. In April, Bob Parsons of GoDaddy fame wrote an expose on the domain name add/drop grace period on his weblog. The add drop grace period allows a registrar to grab a name and drop it within five days without paying for it. According to his data, the vast majority of domains (up t0 92%) are registered and then dropped within five days. Registrats are grabbing the names, testing if they can make any money from landing pages with CPC ads on the domain, and then dropping the unprofitable names.

If I had some more time, it would be an interesting experiment to spend $20/week to register 100 domains. On each site, I would put up a landing page from someone like domainsponsor.com, sedo.com, or make my own landing pages with CPC ads. I would also put the domains up for sale on sites like dnforum.com to try and flip them within the 4.5 day window. If the domains had some traffic, I would hold onto them and work to monetize them for the next year. Between the ads and flipping the domains, I think that it could add up to a nice little business.

With Text Link Ads recent acquisition by MediaWhiz, I thought that it would be a good time to revisit my initial Text Link Ads review. As I have used the program more and more, I have a few additional observations. Initially, I made four text links spots available for Text Link Ads to sell. All four slots are full now, and I just chose to make two additional text links spots available.

My biggest complains are related to Text Link Ads pricing. My site is currently priced at $20/link. I think that it should be priced higher, but you can not do anything to increase the price. I am hoping that after I sell out the additional two ad spots, Text Link Ads will know to adjust the price of my ads to the demand.  With a $20/link list price,  I receive $10/link each month. Text Link Ads’ 50% commission seems a bit high to me, especially considering that AdBrite takes only 30% commission.

The program has been very easy to use, and overall I have satisfied with the results. I will continue my test for a little while to see if my pricing improves. Keep an eye on this blog for more on my Text Link Ads experience.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few Adsense tips that are worth sharing:

• Using Images to Increase Adsense CTR - A user on digitalpoint forums quadrupled his Adsense CTR when he placed related images next to his Adsense ads. The thread gives an interesting view of the before and after layouts. In order for this to be in compliance with the Adsense terms of service, you have to have a border around the images or a line separating the images and the ads. I will not do try this on MonetizeTraffic, but I could see using it on some of my other sites.
• Adsense Tips Forum Thread - Another digitalpoint thread where members share some adsense tips. I really like this YPN optimized layout mentioned in the thread.
• Adsense Order Matters - A blog post from the Adsense team at Google where they explain that the first ad in the HTML code of your site receives the highest paying advertisements. Therefore, you should try to put the ad space with the highest click through rate first in the HTML of your site.
• Using the Competitive Ad Filter to Eliminate MFA Sites - A good post about how you can enter the URL of known Made For Adsense (MFA) sites into the Competitive Ad filter in Adsense to prevent the ads from being shown on your site. These ads are usually low paying ones where the landing page features a slew of other Adsense ads. Eliminating these from the ads served on your site should help to boost your earnings.

I am always on the look out for good Adsense tips and tricks. If you have some good ones, feel free to contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Update: The Adsense team recently put up a blog post clarifying their position on images next to ads. According to their post, it looks like they are strongly against placing images next to ads. They provide a number of examples of what is against policy, and they are even against images with a border between the image and the Adsense ads. This will pretty much kill the usefulness of some of the Adsense plugings that I wrote about in my Adsense Tips: Part II post .

Webmaster and bloggers will continue to innovate and push the limit around Adsense placement. Just be careful with images because Google has now clearly come out with their stance.