People that Interested Me at Ad-Tech

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.

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.

MonetizeTraffic is a new blog devoted to the strategies and ideas to make more money from your website/blog. The site will feature reviews of advertising and affiliate programs, techniques to optimize revenue generation, and case studies. The site will rely heavily upon my experiences running a number of web properties.