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The internet is constantly changing, nothing ever stays the same for very long and it’s because of this we need to change how we make money from it as well. Over the last couple of years several very lucrative ways of making money have come and gone for me and so I thought I make a note of just some of the systems that I’m no longer using.
Just in case anybody missed this reply to my question about WidgetBucks accepting foreign clicks again:-
“Hi Paul – Thanks for your post and bringing this issue to our attention. You will be seeing a public post from us shortly on some CPM changes, but here is a preview:
Last night we implemented a new Int’l CPM model where every publisher/domain is categorized for CPM traffic. Categorized CPM placements are paid higher CPM by Advertisers, so this change is intended to get you higher yield for your Int’l traffic.
The issue you/we ran into was that although new publishers over the past month have been getting categorized, all “veteran” publishers were still un-categorized and when we rolled last night’s update, we missed our step of assigning a default category to all un-categorized publishers. Without a category assignment, you got the WB CPC ad unit. All such publishers are now set to the “Unknown” Category, so you will get CPM Ads – BUT! You will want to go in and edit your widgets and your My Setting page to appropriately categorize your account and widgets to ensure proper ad types.
HINT: Matching your domain category to your widgets will ensure you get the highest possible CPM.
WidgetBucks Team”
So there you have it, if you want to earn more with WidgetBucks CPM ads don’t forget to align your site category with your advert category.
A little while back WidgetBucks started to look like it was going to become my number one income generating PPC network, then they changed the rules that meant you didn’t get paid for clicks outside of North America. It was a sad day in my house. Instead you had to make do with pay-per-impression ads that have never really lived up to the hype. My earnings with WidgetBucks since this happened have taken a nose dive and I’ve started to experiment with 2 other networks to see if I can get anything like the performance WidgetBucks were originally giving.
Is Non American Traffic Welcome Again?
I’ve just seen something unusual on one of my sports websites, instead of the usual Ringtones, Dating style ad I normally see (being a UK visitor) this morning I got the old WidgetBucks widget back. I’ve done several refreshes and asked a friends from different networks to have a look but they all report seeing the widget. Does this mean that WidgetBucks are going to start paying for clicks again or is it just a glitch in the system. I really hope it’s the first option, I’d also be interested to know what you see below?
Well I said this industry never stands still, looks like 2008 has brought some bad news already.
WidgetBucks are changing some of their terms very soon, if you haven’t already got an account with them then January the 15th is going to be your last chance to sign-up and get the $25 bonus they give to each new account. They are also using that date to alter their affiliate program, instead of the 10% for 12 months they currently offer they will be decreasing that to 5% for 12 months. When taken together these changes seem to indicate that WidgetBucks are content with the number of publishers they have and are in no hurry to recruit new webmasters, the incentive for webmasters to recruit new WidgetBucks users is now almost entirely gone.
The only good news is that I received my second payment from WidgetBucks yesterday although in all honesty this will be the last of my big earnings with them. The payment yesterday covered November and it was halfway through that month that they changed the rules and stopped paying out for non North American clicks. At the point my earnings took a hit although the change to pay-per-impression for some countries traffic has made a slight difference. WidgetBucks have been good to me but they seem intent on making life as difficult as possible at the moment, I’ll stick it out for now but I think that at the next “change for the worse” I’ll bail and try something new.
Agloco is now dead, gone, kaput. I bet all those people that really pushed it hard are feeling a bit stupid today. Not as stupid as the doom merchants claiming that WidgetBucks will be the next to go! Agloco was based on a single idea (viewbar), executed badly that never had any real way of generating an income. WidgetBucks is based on a very stable business model that works well (if not slowly for the creators) and also has enough backing (Mpire) for the development to be done correctly. It’s like comparing chalk and cheese.
The truth is that the doom merchants are bloggers, relying solely on blogs for their income. As has been said a hundred times before WidgetBucks ads DO NOT work well on blogs. They require decent amounts of product targeted search engine traffic which does not mix nicely with general blogging, no matter how specific you think you are being. The Blogosphere is not the internet, it is not the world wide web, it is only a tiny part of it. I have Adsense ads on here because they will generate an income on even the least untargeted websites, even if it’s just from affiliates bidding 2 and 3 cents. This website is not how I make my living. In general real money on the internet is made in 1 of 3 ways:-
1. Content websites
2. PPC Affiliate Marketing
3. Mail list marketing
I was watching a TV program on Sunday morning and it had a famous ballroom dancer being interviewed on it. One of the presenters asked “but ballroom dancing has only become popular recently, only old people used to dance?”. He was totally wrong, there has always been a dancing community, in their own eyes a large one at that. The truth was though that if you weren’t “part” of that community it might as well of not existed. Blogging is the same. My 12 year old daughter doesn’t blog so has no interest in them. My mum and dad don’t so have no interest in blogging but they still use the internet, they will both use Google to search for things to buy. I think we bloggers can sometimes get caught up in our own little worlds, John Chow, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker are only truly famous amongst bloggers and people interested in making money in the same way that I’m sure there are plenty of “famous” erotic blog writers out there that I’ve never heard of. Of all the people that visit my blog how many are not bloggers themselves, very few I would guess? Natural search traffic for blogs (the type of people that buy things) is a infamously low percentage compared to other types of website. There are people out there making 10,20,50 times from the internet what the more well known a-listers are making without ever feeling the need to talk about themselves or write a blog, why, because they know blogging doesn’t pay and they don’t need the ego boost. This isn’t supposed to be criticism (hell you are reading MY blog), I’m just pleading with you all to diversify, when you have been introduced to making money online through blogging then it’s natural to think it is the only way. It is these people that will hammer anything that doesn’t work for them on their blogs i.e. WidgetBucks.
WidgetBucks does not work well on general blogs, you will not get the same number of clicks that you see from Adsense. If you have product related content webistes that attract targeted search traffic then WidgetBucks ads can perform very well (I know of one medium sized publisher that has made more than $15,000 in a month with them). If you’re looking for the next idea to go belly up I suggest you look in the direction of BlogRush 
WidgetBucks are definitely the real deal, I got my first payment from them yesterday. Their terms state that they pay within 45 days of the end of the month so this payment covered the money I made from the week or so I had the WidgetBucks ads live in October.
45 days might seem like a long time but there are a couple of things that make that wait worth while.
1. They pay via Paypal so no need to worry about cashing USD cheques
2. There Paypal payment doesn’t incur any charges (unlike a lot of other services that pay via Payal)
What this means is that I earnt $783.18 and that’s what they paid me! It doesn’t sound a big deal but it’s just nice not to have any hidden charges in there.
I really can’t believe that I’ve just had to create a blog post with that heading but it’s true. In only a couple of months my WidgetBucks earnings are on the very brink of overtaking the money I earn from Adsense (and in the process becoming my biggest income earning PPC network). What is even more remarkable is the fact that I only use WidgetBucks on probably 5% of the number of pages that I use Adsense on, that’s seriously awesome earning power.
To be honest I haven’t even been keeping track of my WidgetBucks earnings, I installed the widgets on some product pages, some non product pages and just left them to it, I would have been happy with $5! Only the fact that they’ve been getting a rough time recently from some big name bloggers made me check my stats. I still haven’t managed to wipe the smile of my face.
If you’ve got product related articles and pages then I would seriously recommend that you give WidgetBucks a go, whilst they might not suite everybody’s websites (they don’t perform well on general news non product web pages) if you can find a page or two when you can match their offers to your page content then you can make some serious cash.
When I first read about WidgetBucks and the amount of hype that was going on I will admit that I was thinking twice about signing up. It seems that when the big boys get together and start to push something (ala BlogRush and DealDotCom) anything is possible and it’s sometimes hard to find the reality amongst the hype.
At the end of the day I figured I’d give it a go, after all the worst possible case was that WidgetBucks might negatively affect some of my other PPC campaigns. WidgetBucks is yet another PPC advertising platform, I suppose what makes them stand out from a lot of the others are that their widgets do look great! As a test I installed WidgetBucks ads on a couple of high traffic websites and this blog.
How Much Did I Make With WidgetBucks ?
I’d better be clear here, the websites I installed the ads onto were in no way well targeted for ANY WidgetBucks products, I was just interested in seeing what they paid per click. I opted for the MerchSense option which scans your page to find relevant ads to show, you can just select a category but seeing as how I knew they had very little for me or my visitors I just went with MerchSense. Even with my non targeted ads and a bad CTR I’ve still managed to make a few dollars with them already, add onto that the $25 you get for signing up and I don’t think it will be too long until I hit minimum payout territory. What was even more interesting for me was seeing my average CPC, it is 4 times higher than my Kontera average and right up there if not a little better than Adsense.
If I had a shopping/review based website that was suited for WidgetBucks I’d not hesitate in deploying their ads. A nice ad with a high value per click is all anyone can really look for in a PPC network and WidgetBucks seem to have nailed it.