Lotame – This company was by far the most interesting one that I talked to. Lotame provides a system that monitors activity on social network participants and then uses that data to serve ads to the users throughout their network of partners. For example, if I write a post a blog post about snowboards on one of their network partners, they record in my profile that I am interested in snowboarding.  They go out to snowboard companies and pitch them a community of users that are actively interested in snowboards. When I visit the site where I made the post or another site in their network, they will show me ads bout snowboards. Of course, these ads sell at very premium rates. They didn’t disclose their partner sites, but it is well known that they work with Multiply.com and some other big social networks. My only questions/concern with them is how big these interest groups can be. How many people do they have in their database that have actively expressed an interest in snowboards? It seems like they will need a ton of partners/data to really scale.  I will definitely be keeping my eye on them.

Prospectiv – I talk with a lot of people that want to get on the registration paths of sites that I work with. Although I haven’t been able to work with Prospectiv yet, I have always been impressed with their offerings. Prospectiv specializes in high quality co-reg offers. They are owned by the same company as Eversave, so they have access to offers from big brands that will not detract from the value of your site. I hope to work with them soon.

Shady Affiliate Companies – I am always amazed at how many companies there are that focus on what I consider to be shady affiliate areas such as work from home business opportunities, cash advance, and other grey areas. Who are the consumers generating the leads that keep these guys in business? 

Tags: adtech, lotame, prospectiv

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.

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.

Tags: affiliate, marketing, tagworld, valleywag, deadpool, deathwatch, clickbooth

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!

About Paul
My name is Paul and I run MonetizeTraffic along with a number of web properties. You can see some of them listed in the Projects box on the right side bar. I have been involved in making money on the web since I launched my first website in 1996. In addition to running my sites, I was one of the first employees of Kiwibox.com, a website for teen girls. At Kiwibox, I worked on business development, and I learned a lot about helping to run a large site. Over the years, I have also provided online strategy consulting services for a Congressional campaign and CollegeProwler, a college guidebook company. I still have a lot to learn about making money online, and I hope to share my learning experiences via MonetizeTraffic.

Contact Paul