When it comes to monetizing websites, you should never rely on just one source of income. The logic behind this is obvious and if you haven’t heard of this concept by now, you really should start looking at using multiple different publisher programs to earn more money from your websites - (Check out my recommendations here if you’re looking for a few ideas). If your main revenue source starts to decline and you aren’t using other revenue streams it can be disastoruous so if you aren’t doing this now take the first step and start to use more than one publisher program on your websites.

While utilizing multiple different publisher programs on your websites is important, I’d like to take it one step further. You should also always be consantly experimenting with various publisher programs that offer the same type of advertising solution. In this case, I’ll be offering up some numbers on two different in text advertising programs. After running Kontera’s Content Link on one of my forums for several months I decided to try another in text advertising option - Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt. After negotiaiting my way into Vibrant Media’s program, I finally got the ad code installed on my forum a little over one month ago. But before I get to the numbers from Vibrant Media, I’d like to show you how Kontera performed on Dec 10th to Jan 10th:

Not that great huh? For 17k impressions it made just over $5. However, it’s important to note that 7 days into the above time frame I set the ads to only display to guests because I felt they are too intrusive for members. Either way, you can see why I wanted to try out a different in text advertising option to see if there was anything else that could do better than $5 in a month time period even though it was only on 17k in impressions. Here are the results from Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt program:

(Thanks for the misspelling of my company name by the way)

Wow this one did even worse! I logged into my account after running the ads for three weeks and saw that there were 0 clicks! Are you kidding me? I actually emailed my account rep over at Vibrant Media to see if there was a problem with the ad code and he assured me that there wasn’t. He ended up changing the link colors from the blue that matched the color of the links on the site back to the standard green but this didn’t do much to change the outcome. I wasn’t generating a ton of impressions, but it’s funny that for displaying close to 60,000 impressions the ads were only clicked 3 times!

Now that I’ve finished running IntelliTxt for a month, I may try out AdBrite next. I’d really like to find an in text advertising option that performs better than Kontera or I may just remove in text advertising completely because it already only accounts for a very small portion of the chunk of the pie. What I’ll probably end up doing is keeping the if conditionals to only display the in text ads to guests anyway though. It’s also important to note that while Kontera’s Content Link made more money than Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt on my forum it may be the opposite for you depending on your website’s niche, demographics etc. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to increase your online income than you must experiment with a wide variety of publisher programs!

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