I had been trying to find a tasteful way to monetize this blog beyond the few PayPerPost ads that come along, but the first giant company that I tried for context sensitive ads had too many confusing rules and the coding was too complicated, so I gave up on them. I think they were pretty glad to see me go, too, but I am very satisfied with Chitika so far. It was a good switch.
It took me abut five minutes to set it up and they had my blog approved within an hour. That just goes to show there is more than one fish in the sea and hopefully, more than one potato in the pot.
Speaking of potatoes, I wrote this little article yesterday:
Frozen Potatoes
I also wrote an article called Lying with the Truth.
If you were to visit either of those articles, you would see that some of the words have double underlining and if you hover over them, an advertisement comes up. Those are ads from Kontera and if people click on them, then a delightful PTW (Paid to Write) company called Triond gets paid and Triond, in turn, pays each one of its writers half of what they get. This is a good deal for Triond and a good deal for writers like me. Triond also pays its writers a commission of 10% on the earnings of people they recommend who end up writing for Triond, too. That is something new. So here is my referral link in case you would like to write some articles and earn a little Lunch Money:
$$$ Like to Write? You will Love Triond! $$$
Pays Monthly
Also new is a similar set-up that I have added to my gardening blog. Gardening supplies are expensive, so I decided to monetize that one too, but there you will start seeing ads that look similar to the Kontera ads on the Triond articles. But mine are from a company called InfoLinks.
So I went over to my Lying with the Truth article to compare the Konera Links with the Infolinks and when I came back to look at this blog, Chitika displayed an ad asking me if I were interested in "Lying with the Truth." Ingenious, I thought, but won't that scare some people?
I want to explain it here so that my readers do not feel uncomfortable. In addition to wanting to make money the advertising company wants to make the ads interesting and relevant to you. Another thing I like about Chitika is that instead of burdening me with a zillion no-nos and expecting me to regulate who views my blogs to accommodate their paying advertisers, their smart ads only show to the readers they are interested in targeting. If an advertiser specifies s/he only wants readers from Canada to click on the ad then Chitika simply checks your location and if you are not from Canada, then they do not activate the ad. That is SO much more intelligent than displaying the ad to everyone and then getting mad at me if someone who is not from Canada clicks on it.
PS: I am SO excited, because while I was writing this, someone signed up from my Triond referral link. It works!