So, I still haven’t made enough to get my first payment from ScratchBack, but I have seen other bloggers mention that they have, and for me this means that it is worth continuing to use. Thus far, I have made $20.59, and need $25 even to be paid by them.

What is ScratchBack?

Selling text links has been seen as a bad thing in Google’s eyes, and since Google is the search engine that drives most of the traffic online, many people were looking for a new way to sell text links, while making Google happy. ScratchBack came along with their JavaScripted, no-followed text widget that has slowly continued to gain more and more attention.

Currently, during Beta, which has been going on for some time now, you can earn 90% of the revenue generated by people purchasing links, and what’s even more interesting is that you set the rates.

Who has advertised here?

I added ScratchBack around the end of November and you can read my post about adding ScratchBack for more details. Since then, I have had five advertisers, each one filling one of the five spots on my widget.

I have the widget set up to only remove a link if it is bumped off the list. So if another advertiser stops by, and purchases a link, the bottom person will be dropped off the list. The great thing for advertisers is that I only get one new advertiser every two or three weeks. And so those that have advertised have had their link up for over a month and a half for only five dollars.

I wanted to issue a big thanks to each one of my advertisers thus far, by including a mention to them in a blog post so all of my readers can see their link, and the great support they have been to this blog.

Advertisers thus far include:
Blogging Cents
Post on Fire
HD BizBlog
LocLookup
Hosting Diary

Recent News from ScratchBack

People are doing some interesting things with ScratchBack, and I wanted to highlight some of that here.

The first thing of note is Zac Johnson, who has used getting a t-shirt as a value added way of getting people to add their link to his ScratchBack widget. While sending a t-shirt to those that advertise might add up to a fair bit of money, but you can be assured that he will end up ahead. The cost to be listed on his blog, and qualify for the t-shirt is $25, and your link stays up for one week.

The second interesting usage of ScratchBack is from the owner himself, Jim Kukral. He has created a widget for his video podcasts that allow people to sponsor his shows. It is $10 for a week, but if he does a video nearly every day, that works out to be less than $1.50 per video to have your link next to the content he creates.

If you have come up with an interesting and exciting way to add ScratchBack to your blog, site, service, or whatever, I’d love to hear about it. I am very happy with the way things are going with ScratchBack, and I wish them nothing but continued success.

Originally posted on January 17, 2008 @ 7:17 pm

David Beaton from Custometrics presented at nextMEDIA in Toronto while I was there, and it was interesting to see him talk about the value of content. Looking from an advertisers point of view, it can be difficult to deliver a good return on investment, especially from advertising online.

As a long time blogger, I can totally understand this. I have advertised on blogs and ended up paying around a dollar per visitor. Not a dollar per conversion or anything great, but rather one dollar per unique visitor, and in my mind that is hugely expensive.

He also mentioned how advertising budgets are usually the first to go, leaving the advertising team with little staff to find the right choices in very short schedules. He did leave some tips for advertisers that websites and blogs could do.

Here is David’s wish list for Advertisers:

• ROI
• Volume
• Price
• Risk
• Sustainability
• Segmentation
• Targeting
• Simplification
• Balance
• Optimization

If bloggers, and website owners could provide potential advertisers this type of information, it would make their job easier, and depending on the information, advertisers would be more likely to choose your site over a site that isn’t as forthcoming with information.

David also mentioned that we should all be publishing verifiable data on our user base, and traffic sources.

The biggest takeaway from his session was that the lowest price is not always the best buy, nor is the highest the worst. It is the performance that decides the true value.

Originally posted on December 5, 2007 @ 10:55 pm

As you can see, just before the end of November, I added another thing to the right sidebar of this blog that allows you to leave me a tip. It is called ScratchBack. The basic premise is that you get a link from my blog, in a prime position, without offending Google. I get a few dollars, thus everyone is happy.

So far, no one has purchased a link on this blog, and the barrier appears to be price. People aren’t really willing to pay a fair deal for a text link on a blog, especially when it doesn’t give search engine power like Text Link Ads service does.

But this is the reason why ScratchBack doesn’t aggravate Google, as Text Link Ads basically allows people with deep pockets to manipulate the search engine results through purchasing links.

Mark from 45n5.com is looking to build a more advanced system than ScratchBack currently employs, and he will also make his Google friendly by making the advertisements “no-follow”, thus the name NoFollowAds. It is shaping up to be a system that can do more than replace ScratchBack, and I am looking forward to its eventual release.

Until then, please feel free to give me a tip via ScratchBack, and sign up if you are interested in what is currently a 90% revenue share in your pocket. ScratchBack will be changing this to what is assumed to be 70% once the Beta is over)

All links in this article are referral links, and if you click them, I will have a monetary gain from them. If you enjoy XFEP.com and its content, please use the above links when signing up.

Originally posted on December 3, 2007 @ 7:26 pm

John Chow is the master of making money online, and has continued to grow his blog over the last year, and like most, I assumed it was in part to increases in his traffic, but he recently put up a post called Getting Traffic is Half The Battle where he released a graph showing that his traffic hasn’t been growing by leaps and bounds. This seemed strange to me. My brain couldn’t wrap around the fact that John had found a way to increase his income more than ten fold while having the same traffic flowing through his site.

Sure the traffic now is probably more search engine oriented than it was near the start, but that can’t account for all of his revenue growth.

If you read my recent income report than you know this blog made $27,240.83 last month. That’s a nice big increase over the $2,139.93 the blog made in November of 2006. However, what many people find shocking is the traffic the blog got in November 2006 was actually higher than the traffic from November 2007.

The above chart [on JohnChow.com] illustrates the growth in traffic (red bars) vs. the growth in income (blue bars) from November 2006 to November 2007. In November 2006, the blog received 217,876 unique visitors and 329,853 page views. This is actually higher than the 185,386 visitors and 323,572 page views it did in November 2007. Yet, the blog income was over 12 times higher. Making money online has way more to do with optimizing income from traffic than just getting traffic.

Wisely, Mr. Chow says that it isn’t how much traffic you get, but instead what you do with the traffic. John Chow has been brilliant in shoving affiliate programs down the throats of his readers and making sure to put every version of advertising front and center, while also requesting huge fees for the promotion space.

Definitely an interesting read, and one that I have had to go over a few times over the last few days, wondering how I can work harder at optimizing my own ads, not in hopes of tricking my readers, but making sure that I can eventually get to a point where I am not so absolutely dependent on a blog network for my income. Don’t get me wrong, I love working for Splashpress Media, and Bloggy Network was also a great learning experience and opportunity.

Originally posted on December 12, 2007 @ 5:59 pm