I have been working with HydraMedia for a few months now, and my experience so far has been very positive. Their biggest selling point in my mind has been their strong affiliate support. My affiliate manager April is very easy to get a hold of via email or IM and she always has been able to answer my questions. The support at some of the other affiliate networks has paled in comparison to Hydra.

Positives

• Affiliate Support. My affiliate manager is in regular contact via email and IM, and she has been very proactive about suggesting offers that will work well for my methods of offer promotion.
• Variety of Offers. Hydra has a nice mix of free offers and credit card offers. In total, they have close to 1,000 offers. Their payouts are usually competitive with Azoogle and other CPA networks. I have also been impressed with the fact that they seem to have a few new offers every week.
• Net 15 Payment. Their prompt paypal payments have been excellent so far.

Although I have been very satisfied with the service, there are a few Opportunities for Improvement:

• Too Many Email Only Offers. It drives me crazy when I find a good offer only to see that it is for email promotion only.
• Reporting Functionality. Their reporting leaves something to be desired. You can only create reports on all activity for a given day range and you can not run reports for a specific offer. I usually end up just exporting the reports to a csv and then manipulating them.

Overall, HydraMedia has been great to work with, and I highly recommend that you give them a try.

Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy - An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

Ringtones Experiment - BlueBobbo got tired of reading in all of the forums that the ringtone market is saturated, so he decided to run a test PPC advertising campaign. The results were surprisingly positive. I love test like this which dispel common myths. It just goes to emphasize that you would always be testing.

As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

• It’s Easy. You can pretty much set it and forget it. Most of the parking services have landing pages with high click through rates, so you will not have to spend any time optimizing the site.
• Works with any domain.

Disadvantages

• Unless you have a huge domain portfolio, the parking services will take a sizable chunk of the revenue.
• For some domains, you may not be able to come up with relevant keywords that will pay well.

I have had some good luck with both DomainSponsor and Sedo. There is also a post over at WickedFire recommending a few other domain parking services and DNForum has some great posts on reviewing parking services.

2.) Redirect to Affiliate Programs. Recently, I have been experimenting with redirecting some of my unused domain names to relevant affiliate programs. For example, on CollegePower.com, I wrote up a quick little PHP script to redirect visitors to one of five scholarship programs on Azoogle and HydraMedia. I have also tried this with a few typo domains that are very well targeted to affiliate programs. I am currently redirecting Blinkco.com to the ringtone offers on Blinko.com. I am not yet ready to discuss my results with this technique, but I certainly see some potential here.

Advantages

• With well-targeted affiliate programs, this can be more profitable than parking services.
• With a simple redirect script, you can test multiple affiliate programs/offers on one domain.

Disadvantages

• Not all domains will have an affiliate program that is a good fit for it.
• You must remember to change up the site if the offer that you are running expires.

3.) Domain Resale. One of the best techniques I have used to monetize my unused domains is to resell some of my holdings. After I sit on a domain for a year or two, I usually consider reselling it if I will not start using it within the next six months. When selling my domains, I have had success using DNForum, Webhostingtalk, and Sitepoint forums. If you find the right buyer, you can get a good price for your domain. For example, I have sold techcoupons.com and webhostinglab.com for a few hundred dollars each. This was a huge return on my initial investment.

Advantages

• Lump sum of cash upfront
• Reduces your overall domain portfolio which can be good if your unused domains distract you from focusing upon your mains sources of revenue.

Disadvantages

• May require some time investment to find interested buyers.
• Obviously, you can no longer use the domain after you sell it.

4.) Build an Automated Aggregator Site. I do not have much experience with this, but I have seen unused domains monetized by setting up blogs that republish (scrape) RSS feeds from other sites. The scrapper blog is then loaded with Adsense and affiliate programs. I am toying with the idea of doing this on TheKnicks.com.

Advantages

• Ability to build audience and repeat visitors
• Potential for multiple revenue streams (ex: Adsense and affiliate)

Disadvantages

• Limited traffic from search engines because you will be penalized for duplicate content.
• Will take some time to set up site.

A domain name portfolio can be a great asset to an Internet marketer. I encourage you to build up that portfolio and continue to not be afraid experimenting with different monetization techniques on your domains. Even if your unused domains earn just enough to cover your annual renewal fee, you will be ahead of the game.

While browsing Valleywag tonight, I noticed a post about how social networking site TagWorld may be headed out of business. The scary thing is that they are still running an offer on ClickBooth that pays $.80 per signup. Over the weekend I was thinking about a few ways to promote this offer, but I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole now.

This is just another great example of how publishers should always do some preliminary research on a company before promoting offers. Myself and countless other publihsers have been burned by this in the past, and there is no shortage of  shady affiliate marketers. Be safe out there.

The first week of 2007 is coming to a close, so I thought it was a good time to provide some links to help you get motivated for earning more in the new year.

One of the blog posts which helped me to get into the right frame of mind was Quadzilla’s You are the CEO. In the post he emphasizes the importance of viewing yourself as the strategic leader of your company, even if your company is just you and your computer. This means you should:

• Focus your limited time on the high value tasks in which you specialize.
• Have other lower value resources do mundane task (ex: get a personal assistant in India).
• Automate tasks as much as possible. If coding is not your specialty, I always recommend sites like RentACoder.

For some additional motivation, you can check out the 2007 goals of ShoeMoney and EarnersBlog. As for my goals, in 2007 I hope to:

• Increase company revenue by 20%.
• Increase my frequency of posts to this blog (2-3 posts/week).
• Improve the SEO on my core sites (20% increase in search engine traffic).
• Continue my experimentation with PPC advertising
• Write an ebook to promote an affiliate program

Good luck in 2007!

In the forums, I came across a leaked link to the new Adbrite Video Beta page. The system looks very impressive.

Key Features:

• An embedded player where Ads are shown in a text bar on the top, and float down in a pop up bubble that is 60 pixels high.
• The player has built in sharing capabilities similar to youtube, except when a video is shared the visitor is referred back to your site.
• Others can embed your video in their site, and the player will show your ads.
• You can provide a logo to be placed in the lower right corner of the video.

Depending upon the payout rate, this could be a great way to monetize a video site. I could see sites like break.com being all over this. It will be interesting to see if people rip videos down from youtube using a tool like keepvid and start niche video sites with Adbrite video ads.

This is a step in the right direction to monetizing video content, and I will be very interested to see how the service develops.

Hat tip to Jon from WickedFire for posting the link in the forum.