Last week, I was checking my stats for some offers I was promoting via AffiliateFuel, and I noticed that one of my steady performing offers had simply stopped converting. I contacted my affiliate manager immediately and explained to I expected to generate 40 leads with the number of clicks I sent to the offer.

My affiliate manager did a great job looking into the situation,  and determining that the offer landing page was messed up. Within a few days, I was credited with the 40 leads. I know that all affiliate networks should work this way, but I am always impressed to have a situation like this handled without any major headaches.

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.

The holidays are a great time to sit back and relax with family and of course catch up on the latest monetization ideas floating around the web.

I’ll be spending some time in the air as I head from Charlotte, NC to see my family in Connecticut, and I have downloaded a few shows from WebmasterRadio.fm that look interesting. WebmasterRadio has weekly shows hosted by some of the big players in the affiliate marketing/SEO/web business game. I have only listened to the SEORockstars and Net Income shows so far, and I always feel like I learn at least one thing from each show. You can download mp3s, so it will be perfect to fill up my ipod for the trip.

I will also be catching up on some blog reading. There was a good thread at Wicked Fire about which blogs people read. I am going to check out some of the ones mentioned that I had not heard about. I was also very pleased to see Monetize Traffic listed by a Wicked Fire member. Lately, I have been using the keep new and clip book features over at bloglines to save posts that I want to go back to in the future. The holidays are the perfect time to go back and review anything like this that you have been holding onto for a while.

Good luck getting ready to earn even more in 2007.

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.

Google recently announced their coop program. Coop lets you create your own vertical search engine and monetize the search through adsense ads on the result pages.

Your search engine can be customized in a number of ways. When you set up your search engine, you can determine if you want the engine to show results from just sites that you select or the entire google databse. Similar to adsense, you can customize the link and text colors for your search results page. You can also choose to have the search results shown on Google’s site or on your site via javascript or an ajax api. The set up script allows you if you want to show ads on the top, bottom, or side of the page.
Setting up your search engine is quick and easy. It took me about 15 minutes to set up my Example Term Paper search engine. Linking up my adsense account required entering the email address, zip code, and last 5 digits of the phone number linked to my adsense account. After some configuration, the search engine works like a charm and is faster than I anticipated.

So far, I have noticed a few opportunities to improve the service. The search box has a background watermark which reads “Google Custom Search.” The watermark disappears when a user clicks in the search box to enter text. I understand Google’s desire to brand the search box, but the watermark might be confusing for some users. It would also be valuable to see data on what users are searching for in the coop control panel interface. This would help search engine owners to understand their audience better and customize the search engine accordingly.

Overall, it is an interesting experiment, and at least worth testing. After I have some usage data on my search engine, I will report back on my satisfaction with the service.

In addition to my experiments with AdBrite and YPN, I have been running a trial of Text Link Ads. Text Link Ads is different than Adsense. Instead of showing ads based on the content of your site, Text Link Ads brokers text ads on your site for a flat monthly rate. They serve the ads on your site without redirects, so the advertiers can receive some search engine optimization (SEO) benefit from the pagerank of the your site.
After completing a brief application, my site was auto-approved by Text Link Ads. There are a few different ways to integrate the ad code onto your site. I chose to use the PHP method which required me to install an xml file on my server and include an xml parsing function in my code. Although posting the ads in more complicated than putting up Adsense, it only took me a few minutes to get everything up and running. The extra complexity is so that the ads can be shown without using redirects.

Once I had the ad code integrated into my site, I had to wait for an advertiser to purchase one of the four text link ads that I put up for sale. While waiting for an advertiser to show up, Text Link Ads shows a blank ad. It would have been nice for them to at least offer to place run of network CPC or CPA ads to help me monetize the traffic in the short term. Adbrite offers CPC run of network ads while you are waiting for an advertiser to pick up your inventory.

Three days later, I received an email from Text Link Ads letting me know that someone bought an ad on my site. After approving the ad, it started showing up on my site and I was making some money. Overall, I have been very happy with the Text Link Ads and it has been very easy to use. I have read many positive reviews of the service around the web, and it could be well worth trying out on your site.
I recently purchased some ads from Text Link Ads as an advertiers, and I will be posting the results in the future. I also think it is important to mention that they have a solid affiliate program. The program pays $25 for every publisher or advertiser that you refer. I will be doing some testing of the affiiliate program as well and posting my results here.

In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

There are 20 high level categories that you can choose from (Apparel and Jewelry, Automotive, B2B, Books-Movies-Music-Tickets, Computing, Education and Career, Electronics and Appliances, Entertainment and Social Event Services, Financial Services, Flowers and Candy, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, Mass Merchants, Professional Services, Real Estate, Reference, Sporting Goods, Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers, Toys and Hobbies, Travel) and each category has a few subcategories.

Once I set up the code, I inserted a few lines of javascript, and I was good to go. The first thing that struck me was that it took a few days for the contextual targeting to start. As I recall, Adsense was much quicker to show targeted ads. Once the targeted ads started to appear, I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps half of the ads were well targeted and the other half seemed like junk. I have been running the ads for a few weeks now, and while the targeting has improved slightly, it does not match the quality of Adsense’s targeting.

Unsatisfied with the contextual ads, I attempted to enter some content categories into the system to improve my site’s performance. None of the categories were a perfect match to my site, so I choose one that was the closest. While the category reduced my click through rate, my revenue per click nearly doubled. If your site is a good fit for one of the YPN content categories, I think that you could do very well with the program. I was also disappointed that YPN does not break out statistics by the ad category. Showing statistics by ad category and sub category would be a huge help in selecting the best categories for your site.

For one of my sites, the click through rate on my YPN ads was 68% lower than Adsense, and my CPM earnings were 42% lower than Adsense. Of course, your results may very. If you content fits one of the YPN content areas, I would spend some time testing the program to see if you can improve your earnings.

After having one of my sites banned from AdSense, I decided to test a number of alternate advertising programs. AdBrite (aff link) was the first program that I tried. AdBrite sign up is quick and painless. As soon as you are accepted to the program and place the code on your site, you can start displaying run on network ads. You can also enter tags to your site, which will help advertisers find your site. The run of network ads were acceptable, but not great. Ads relating to MySpace and educational sites performed best on my site.

I ran AdBrite ads for about a week, and my click through rate was close to ten times lower than my AdSense click through rate for the exact same space. Revenue per click was half of what I was earning with AdSense. Needless to say, I will continue my search for AdSense alternatives.

Despite my lack of success with AdBrite, I think that it could work very well for some larger sites. If advertisers are frequently asking for space on your site, AdBrite could be a hassle free way to manage your inventory. I would be very interested to hear about any AdBrite success stories out there.