I love technology. Without it [the Internet], so many people I know and don’t know but know about wouldn’t be making a living on our terms. And that goes both ways; for people who have products and services who advertise and publishers of websites. Now, we have another company who creatively and effectively uses technology to deliver value to advertisers, publishers and themselves – the technology providers. Who am I talking about? Why Chitika eMiniMalls of course.
What is it? Let’s just say it’s a combination of Google Adsense and an online store’s affiliate program. You display product ads from stores and get paid by the click. But these aren’t your regular ads. Depending on the size, they contain a picture about the product, shipping and pricing information. People can even search for available deals to do comparison shopping.
I’ve only used it for 4 days and wow! I earned 3.5 times more than Adsense in those 4 days. Impressive indeed. Earnings aside, Chitika has a lot more to do by manner of reporting in my opinion. It’s ok but could be better like including channel information in the overview. Also it’ll be nice to have a way to manage your channels instead of doing it manually – maybe I missed it. Tiny annoyances nothing major.
There are two ways the ads are called. Contextually or through your chosen keywords. If you choose contextual, Chitika reviews your site much like Adsense to serve up relevant ads. But this is turned off by default. You enter your own keywords. Doing this also makes the program compatible with Adsense and honestly I prefer this a lot better. Why? Let’s see… on one online ethnic community of mine, Adsense seems to only want to serve up ads for uhm… “ethnic women” or “meet (fill in ethnicity here) women”. That is just not appropriate since that site consists of people who are married, committed, with kids and rather religious. So… using information from a poll I did once, I put keywords relevant to their interests in Chitika and am getting nice ads I think will appeal to them. This is just set up so I’m waiting anxiously to see how that goes.
The other problem I have with Adsense especially on blogs – it’s almost impossible to get ads other than blog type ads. By choosing my own keywords on Chitika I have better control of what ads get displayed that will appeal to my readers.
You’ll hear me discuss this more in coming days and weeks these are just some initial thoughts. If you’d like to try it out, I encourage you to go ahead, there is no cost involved except maybe a little bit of your time to put the links up.
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Jessica Tiffany November 12, 2005
Hi Lynette,
I just wanted to let you know, you got my vote.
I love reading your blog, and seeing everything you do.
You provide so much quality information and break it into terms that I can understand. I say keep up the great work and I wish you luck in anything you set out to do = )
Carrie Fisher November 15, 2005
I’m looking to start a blog of my own if I can make money. How does Chitika help you and have you tried Adsense? Thank you.
Lynette November 18, 2005
Hi Carrie. Yes, I’ve had Adsense for a long long time – almost when they first released the program but I didn’t put it through its true potential as an income earner till over a year ago. Chitika’s basics works much like Adsense the biggest difference in my eyes is the display method. Adsense is text ads and Chitika reminds me very much of how I used to manually copy and paste affiliate product shots/links into my blog entries. Yup. I did all that grunt work. They both pay per click and on the sites I’ve put it up, it seems like my payout is better per click. But running totals, Adsense is still better – but then again I haven’t put it on as many sites as Adsense. So… as you can already gather there are lot’s and lot’s of variables involved.
Congratulations on your decision to start a blog. It can be a lot of fun and sometimes consuming but overall I love building blogs. Yes, you can make money with a blog (or any website) but… please keep in mind that amount may not be what you expect… at least not at the beginning. It is all very do-able and there are people who make much more than their full time income in a short period of time but they either spent many prior years making nothing but spending a lot, they’re smart and know who to listen to or they are plain lucky.
If you’d like to create a side income with blogs, I recommend Six Figure Blogging. The page says it’s a live call but they’ve said they will release the recorded version soon. If you’d like to learn about Adsense and Chitika then I recommend Joel Comm’s books and courses.