I guess I’m switching back to intelliTXT come June 1. I’ve been running Kontera’s content links since the middle of the month and while the experience has been much better than a year ago, performance is still not close to that of intelliTXT. In fact, it’s about half and that’s with a significantly larger percentage share by Kontera. It is somewhat disappointing and probably cost me money this month but without doing it I wouldn’t really be able to judge the differences. Both services from a publishers perspective work the same. The adcode is similar and implemented the same with both systems. Each has the ability to target certain areas and exclude certain areas. On the back end however, it’s my understanding they are very different with the biggest difference being how each system targets keywords.

It’s been interesting seeing how the two companies dealt with me the publisher and the situation. I can’t complain about either as I fully expected intelliTXT to drop me but that didn’t happen and I’m not saying I won’t use Kontera in the future, nor am I suggesting they aren’t a viable advertising resource. I do think however, they still have a bit of catching up to do as I saw a number of adlinks that simply said “loading” never pulling in any kind of ad. Much of that I think was due to the fact my sites are forums where lots of pages seemed to get overlooked, but on the blogs targeting seemed to be pretty good.

The goal of this test was two fold. For them it was to gain another publisher and for me to make more money. My loyalties lie with the service that’s going to pay me the most money, plain and simple without me having to worry about it. I ran intelliTXT for 12 and half days in May and ran Kontera for the remainder of the month, on the same sites, in the same manner. There’s still one day of stats to collect but I see no reason to think it will change much.

Kontera: 288,812 impressions - 1,268 clicks = $120.59 (5/13 to 5/30)

IntelliTXT: 234,519 impressions - 2,641 clicks = $328.49 (5/1 to 5/13)

If your only gauge is who generates the most money then I think it’s pretty clear. Going into this I made it clear I expected a certain CPC level because from day 1 with intelliTXT it’s been rock solid, much like Adsense and there was the expectation that it would take 8-10 days to get there as the Kontera system “learned” how to target keywords on my sites. I was fine with that because the expectation was in the end more money. That’s failed to materialize and only one day actually surpassed the CPC expectation, most of the rest fell way short. The CTR was also about half what intelliTXT was. Why this is I’m not real sure, but I’d guess it has a great deal to do with a particular niche and the ad inventory each vendor has for that niche. In my case, the bulk of my traffic related to celebrity/music and intelliTXT definitely seemed to cover that better. If I had a high traffic site in a completely different niche I’d certainly try it out to see if there was indeed a noticeable difference but I don’t have one and I don’t like spending a lot of time working on a system. Either it works or it doesn’t and for me Kontera still doesn’t. Had I not already been privy to intelliTXT I can say I would have been very impressed with the progression Kontera has made over the past year. That said, for me, it’s about making money and at this point in time, it’s in my best interests to stay with intelliTXT, at least for my entertainment related ventures.

Something I think they need to work on that will improve the system is targeting. I was not at all impressed with it and the fact it has to take so long to “learn” what to target I think is a problem. Even 8-10 days is too long and truth be told, that could pose a problem for any forum because the nature of the content is so fluid the rules would constantly be changing from post to post. This is less of a problem on a blog or static site so I can see how a forum could fair less with this system vs. the other one.

Overall I’d have to say that compared to other systems I’ve used, Kontera is definitely a viable resource for any site owner. I think intelliTXT is so rigid with their requirements to get into the program because they know their system just works. For me, it’s like comparing Adsense to YPN, they’re sort of close but not really. If your a smaller publisher and can take advantage of some of the offerings that are floating around to get into the Kontera program, I highly recommend trying it out. Like I said, I think with them especially, a lot of it has to do with niches and inventories and over time they will most likely equalize.

If I were to give intelliTXT an A, I’d have to give Kontera a B maybe a B+. The rep I worked with was cool about everything and they really tried. In fact, he’s still trying and Kontera has some cool things in the pipeline that I may check out in the not too distance future.

Jason and wife Kelly are bloggers who are in the market to make money online and have offered a link back from their site to anyone who reviews their blog. On the surface people are going to say this is another John Chow wannabe, which I find rather silly. The fact Jason uses the same theme (so do I, guess I’m one too) and blogs about making money online doesn’t necessarily make one a Deciple of Chow, however, I can think of worse things to be know for. For those that don’t like the MistyLook theme, come up with a better one and we’ll all switch to that. I digress.

Ja Kel Daily dot com is mostly Jason’s personal blog, I gather from reading he grew tired of the same old same old with celebrity blogging which Kelly seems to have a good handle on at Ja Kel Daily dot com celebrity and fashion gossip. I find this a rather interesting use of domains where jakeldaily.com goes to Jason’s blog, www.jakeldaily.com goes to Kelly’s. The only question I have about that is how does it affect PR and is it even a concern?

Jason’s into Ferrari’s (I’m down with that) and hopes to one day buy one with money he’s earned online (I’m down with that too) and his blog offers some decent insight into ways to accomplish that goal. While it may look similar on the surface Jason’s topics cover a semi-wide range of relevant topics like direct advertisements by keyword analysis, increasing traffic with blog carnivals (something I’ve looked at but never explored), as well as other site reviews, the blog differs with discussions from Jason’s personal experiences and this is the real value of any blog about making money is it not?

I recommend you subscribe to Jason’s feed, while not every post may strike your fancy I’ve found more than a couple of nuggets of value in his writings and I’m sure you will too.

I found this puppy via a reference Darren over at Problogger made to a post listing another blogs favorite plugins. Aaron who writes for Technosailor posted a list of his favorite plugins designed to “make a blog sticky” and most are the ones you expect to see on every list, except this one. I’ve never seen it before but after checking it out I decided to play around with it a bit.

It’s called Landing Sites and it’s a nifty little plugin that captures visitors coming from search engines and adds a blurb to the post giving them a little hello and presenting them with related posts that might be more specific to what they were looking for or might also interest them. Similar to the related posts concept except as we all know the search engines aren’t always specific and this little gem could easily give your readers more than enough reasons to hang around or come back again. Best of all, of the three plugins I tinkered with yesterday, it worked with WP2.2 without issue.

To see it in action follow this search link adsense forum tips then find the link for Reality Wired (if we’ve moved you’ll have to hunt for it). Follow the link back here and you should see the plugin kick in.

The question is, how best to utilize this? Leave it at the top of the post? Replace the “Related Posts” at the end of the post with the results. It definitely needs some styling and I’ll be playing with that, but what do you think? Beginning of the post or end of the post to make the biggest impact?

I suppose it’s the mentality of any Adsense newbie nowadays that they’ll be banned for the slightest thing, the least of which is clicking their own ads given the amount of paranoia out there about it and while we all should, not everyone reads or understands the terms of service. It’s also been a standing order among the “in” crowd, whose advice is the defacto standards about such things, to contact Google anytime you just happen to accidentally click your own ads.

When I was a newbie I emailed them once or twice when while developing a site layout I’d click an ad because the browser hung or something, just to be safe and everytime their response was they’d already tossed the invalid click. This told me they were much smarter than I assumed and over the years has given me a bit of confidence in their decision making and frankly, computers & browsers are stupid. It’s entirely in the realm of reason to think that a click in one spot can result in a delayed click in another spot because the PC decided to lag or the browser did or something and if I really thought that stuff would get me canned from Adsense, I might seriously entertain finding a less stressful replacement.

If you’ve been around the block a time or two then you know that while this is a serious issue it’s also one that can be out of your control and the paranoia that’s surrounding it has got to cause the Adsense support team tons of wasted time. If your a newbie or one that’s just too dense to realize that every click is costing someone money there are tools that do a much better job of “testing” who is advertising on your site. The Adsense preview tool being chief among them, although I’ve found this tool to be less reliable than this approved method. While the preview tool will show you a sampling of the ads that could show on your site, it doesn’t show you all the ones that are and that can be frustrating if your trying to nab the url for the ad you just know is an MFA site.

As they say, things happen and accidentally clicking your ads will happen eventually for one reason or another so stop stressing over it.