Last Day Of The WidgetBucks Sign Up Bonus

To day is the last day of the WidgetBucks sign up bonus. All new bloggers and web site owners that sign up will have $25 credited to their account.

If you’re not familiar with WidgetBucks yet, here’s the typs of thing you can add to your site with one line of Javascript that they generate for you so all yo have to do is copy and paste it into your site.

The video below is a screen capture of some ads running on one of my sites and shows you how eye catching these ads are compared to standard banners and text ads.

You can sign up here

Filed under: Online Advertising , WidgetBucks

Last Week To Get Free Money

The WidgetBucks offer of a $25 sign-up bonus closes in a week so sign up now and have $25 added to your account immediately.

You can get more details at their site or in my previous post.

Filed under: Online Advertising , WidgetBucks

WidgetBucks have reinstated their $25 sign up bonus

The WidgetBucks advertising network are celebrating their first year in business by offering $25 to people that sign up to publish ads on their site or blog. The offer applies to any sign ups in October done via their anniversary page.

This is a really smart move on their part as new sign ups are bound to have positive results over the next 3 months as we approach, Thanks Giving, Christmas and the January Sales. This is traditionally the busiest and highest paying time for most advertising sectors.

Their product based ads for items such as consumer electronics should be your best option at the moment and last month WidgetBucks introduced new categories of ads that cover travel offers as well. So WidgetBucks are an excellent choice at the moment.

Whichever advertising networks your using you should start to see your income go up as competition hots up for those top spots. And remember to have a good mix of ads on your site and change your placements depending on the season and to keep your regular readers interested.

WidgetBucks payout after you have accrued $50 so you’re already half way there. Sign up via their anniversary page now and good luck.

Filed under: Online Advertising , advertising networks, christmas, sales, thanks giving, WidgetBucks

Dear WidgetBucks… Let developers and designers everywhere view their own widgets

So it’s the end of the month and true to their word, WidgetBucks have extended their pay per click network to most of Western Europe. Before the extension of the scheme, if you were placing their advertising widgets on your website and you were outside North America, then you would see a replacement banner ad rather than their more lucrative animated product adverts.

While it was always possible to preview the ad widgets in your WidgetBucks account, it didn’t really help with actual placement on your sites. So now us folks over here in Europe can see our ads as well, as WidgetBucks intended them to look.

But what about those people still outside the list of approved pay per click countries?

Advertisers like WidgetBucks surely gain a lot of business from web designers and developers living outside of Europe? And of course they are usually responsible for creating more than one site so if they find WidgetBucks a good source of income, they’ll place them on many sites.

So Dear WidgetBucks , how about the option to put the Javascript that we drop in to our web sites into debug mode so that we can see the ad as it is meant to be. Of course any views and click when in debug mode would have to be disregarded, but I’m sure it would increase take up of this scheme.

Another alternative would be to allow the widget to be displayed if the request came from localhost.

Any one else have any ideas about how this could work?

Previous WidgetBucks Posts

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, WidgetBucks , australia, cpc, ppc advertising, WidgetBucks

WidgetBucks Now Available For UK, Western Europe by August

On Monday I wrote about using WidgetBucks and WOOThemes as a possible alternatives to Google’s AdSense referrals scheme when it shuts down in August. Today, WidgetBucks announced that they will at last be extending their pay per click scheme to the UK so widgets now showing UK pricing.

WidgetBucks In Europe

Example of A WidgetBucks Widget showing UK pricing

This is perfect timing as it gives them an opportunity pick up new publishers in Europe. Even better news is that the widgets will be also be available in much of the rest of Western Europe in two weeks time. So by August, WidgetBucks will generate pay per click revenue for site owners with traffic from Western Europe and North America.

This is a significant step forward as previously if a visitor to your site was from outside North America the widget was replaced with a traditional ad and you were paid based on the number of impressions. Now visitors from the UK and soon Western Europe (full list below) will see the much more lucrative widget and revenue from WidgetBucks should start to increase.

Just to be clear, how you are paid and which ads are displayed does not depend on where you are based, it depends on where each visitor to your web site comes from.

Breakdown Of Countries Applicable for WidgetBucks

Visits from the following countries currently trigger pay per click widgets:

• USA
• Canada
• United Kingdom

Visits from the following countries will trigger pay per click widgets from August (2008):

• Belgium
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Sweden

Visits from the following countries will trigger CPM ads and pricing:

• Australia
• Austria
• India
• Ireland
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• Puerto Rico
• Singapore
• South Africa
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Arab Emirates

If you have a site that you’d like to monitise then check out WidgetBucks here.

Filed under: Benelux, Online Advertising, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, europe, GBP, referrals, sterling, WidgetBucks, widgets

Alternatives to Replace Google AdSense Referrals Income

At the beginning of the month, Google announced that they would retire the referrals section of AdSense. For existing referral ad publishers, this means that any AdSense referral code will cease to generate income for them at the end of August.

It’s all part of Google’s restructuring after the merger with DoubleClick. Unlike previous changes to Google’s advertising plans, this hasn’t been met with a great deal of opposition from web publishers as it generated very little income for anyone.

But if you were using referrals ads to get your readers to sign up for things like Google software bundles or AdWords then you’ll soon have a bit of space freed up on your site and may be looking for alternative options to just adding another block of AdSense ads.

My Alternatives To AdSense Referrals

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different affiliate schemes out there and which one you choose will be dependent on the type of site that you run. I have a few monetised sites (oooh, don’t ya just hate that word) on the web and here are two advertising schemes that I use that have shown positive results so far.

The first is Widget Bucks. I’ve written about them in the past and if you are running a product based web site or technology focused site that has a lot of traffic from North America then this one is certainly worth a try. They produce very eye catching widgets that are simple to place on your web site and can be formatted to a whole range of sizes. The reason that I mention North American traffic is because their current payment model is pay per click for ads displayed to visitors in North American and per thousand impressions for visitors outside of the USA and Canada. [UPDATE, pay per click now extended to Europe]

Widget Bucks is starting to prove itself by making a small a daily income for me, but not not in the way I first expected. The bulk of my income from them has actually been created as trickle down referral income from ads placed on other people sites. When you display ads on your site, there is a small tag-line which promotes the service and anyone who signs up via this link then becomes one of your referred customers and you receive 5% of what they earn for 12 months. The 5% comes from Widget Bucks not from the person placing ads on their site so their income is not reduced.

You have two options for placing ads. You can either select a category of ads such as laptops, cameras, GPS accessories etc or just go down the contextual route and let Widget Bucks figure out what ads to place based upon your content.

WOOthemes WordPress Theme Club

The second suggestion is a new site called WOOthemes which is backed by some very well know designers and I’ve included it in this post because although it is very new, it has shown very good click through rates so far and it looks very promising.

WOO is run a WordPress theme club, offering access to a selection of really top notch WordPress themes for between $150 and $375 dollars depending on the length of your subscription. When you sign up to the club, you receive all of the current themes and they guarantee at least one new theme every month.

The themes come with good documentation and they are created by well know designers who have good reputations to maintain so the standard of the themes should remain consistently high.

Affiliates receive 20% of any new sign-ups, but the real strength of the scheme is in the opportunity to earn continuing fees from people that renew their subscriptions.

So if you have been using AdSense’s referral products there are plenty of good alternatives out there and you may as well start replacing your referrals codes before they are retired in a few weeks.

Finally, if you have been using AdSense referrals and the data is important to you then make sure you download the report information after you replace your ads as the referrals potion of AdSense reporting will no longer be available from October.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Reviews, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, referrals, themes, WidgetBucks, woo, wordpress