To refresh your memory here is basically how the program works:

The program is basically an advertising revenue sharing program, similar to Adsense, but with a cool twist. With this you place keyword text links that you choose right on your website. You can choose high paying keywords if you like, but for my test I chose keywords I know my readers are actually searching for. When a visitor clicks on one of the text links, relevant ads are then displayed right on your website. The site owner then earns money each time a user clicks onto an advertiser’s link.

Here is how the text ads looks on our website MiraMesa.com.

So for the past 2 weeks the site has been averaging between 200 – 300 visitors per day, with about 75 – 80% of that traffic coming from search engines. Below is the earning’s chart which shows you exactly how much the site has earned with this traffic monetization system so far.

As you can see… not the greatest numbers ever, but not the worse numbers either. If the numbers stay like that, we will ending up earning a little over $20 for the month from those ads… which really isn’t too exciting.

We have decided to let the ads run through the rest of the month, and after that take them down, as we can earn more money selling banners ads to local merchants in that same spot.

Here is a list of the pros and cons we have come up with so far:

PROS:

1. I REALLY like the ability to choose our own keywords, as we could choose all high paying keywords if we wanted too. We didn’t for this test, as the blog is an extremely focused niche and we didn’t have a lot of choices, but I could see where it could work very well on some other sites.
2. I also like the ability to display the ads anywhere and anyhow we like. You could display several keywords like we did on that site, or you can just add a text link in a post and that would work as well. The display flexibility is very cool.

CONS:

1. It is not available in all countries, and many of the countries where it is available… they seem to not have a large ad inventory, so not many ads (if any) display. So a website that gets a lot of worldwide traffic, I don’t think it would be too good a fit.
2. Unlike Adsense where you can login to your account and see how your ads are doing every hour, and get a very detailed report… that is not the case with this program. The report information is very limited (as you can see above), plus the report is always 2 days behind. So if I login today (which is Thursday), I will only see my commissions through Tuesday. I really don’t like that!
3. The earnings per click do not seem to be that great either. The problem I think is… this company is using another company (Hotkeys.com) for their backend system and both of them (at least) have to take a cut of the commissions before it gets to us. I believe with Adsense you are only sharing your commissions with Google (but I could be wrong).

So for the time being (for us), the Cons outweigh the Pros… but that might not always be the case. The company is very new and as they grow… they might be able to fix everything that I have listed in my Cons section. If that happens, I would absolutely recommend this company.

As you noticed I never mentioned the name of the company. That is because they are still in Beta Testing mode and it is not available for everyone to use yet.

If you would like to test out the system yourself, send me an email and I will put you in touch with the owner. The only requirement is your site has to average over 300 visitors per day to be considered.

One of the good things, as well as one of the bad things that happens when you run a business (online or off) is you get contacted by all sorts of people trying to sell you on something… either a must have product or service of some kind.

Well yesterday I was contacted by this guy offering me to beta test their new traffic monetization system. To be honest I really wasn’t too interested, but I checked them out anyway. Since this site is about making money online, I figured I should test out as many different ways as I can to make money online and report back to you guys if they work or not.

The program is basically an advertising revenue sharing program, similar to Adsense, but with a cool twist. With this you place keyword text links that you choose right on your website. You can choose high paying keywords if you like, but for my test I chose keywords I know my readers are actually searching for. When a visitor clicks on one of the text links, relevant ads are then displayed right on your website. The site owner then earns money each time a user clicks onto an advertiser’s link.

When I was asked to test this program, the guy was hoping I was going to test it on MakingMoneyOnline.com, but this site is very new and not much traffic comes from search engines. It gets some, but not a lot and I know programs like Adsense get a lot more clicks from people coming from search engines. I think the reason is they are already in a clicking mood, but I am not sure. I just know that is the way it works.

Now on the other hand, we do have a site that gets a majority of it’s traffic from search engines. That would be our community website MiraMesa.com. You can see in that pie chart that over 82% of the traffic comes directly from search engines… which seems like the perfect site to test this traffic monetization program.

Now implementing the program was pretty simple. Once you sign-up you have to list the sites that you plan to use it on. Since I originally wasn’t planning on testing it on MiraMesa.com I had to wait a couple hours until it was approved.

Once approved it was fairly easy to set up. You need to create your text links for whatever search terms you like. I just went into my Google Analytics and I looked for what keywords people were using to find our site and I used several of those, and then I threw in some more that I knew people would be interested in… like Mira Mesa Real Estate, Apartments, etc…

That’s a screenshot of the text links that we are using on MiraMesa.com. I have them displayed right on the top of our sidebar so it is one of the first things people see when they go to the site, so we are hoping they get a lot of action, but we will have to wait and see.

The one other thing you have to do to make the system work is create a search results page. Unfortunately it is not setup to work with WordPress yet, so I created a simple html page with basically just a header and then inserted the code that they provided and uploaded to my server. That was it. It is not beautiful or anything, as I just wanted to get it up, but it will work for this test. If it ends up being profitable I will make it look much better. You can see what the results page looks like below.

So does it make any money? I have no idea as I just installed it… but I will let you know in a couple of weeks. I can definitely see it having potential, and I have a few niche sites in mind that I think this will do awesome. I am not sure if it is the perfect fit for all blogs… but I will know more after I run my test.

He did show me some examples of other sites that are testing it and they are actually what sold me on trying it.

• http://workathomecommunity.com (keywords right under the header)
• http://www.totalhair.net (keywords in top left navbar)
• http://www.backyardchickens.com (keywords above the Adsense ads in footer)

If you are interested in testing this out too, send me an email and I will put you in touch with the owner. To be accepted your site needs to be getting a pretty good amount of traffic, otherwise they will probably not accept you. It is still in the beta testing stage so they are not ready for the whole world to sign-up just yet.

So what do you guys think of this? If it ends up paying well, do you think it is something you would consider adding to your site?

*** UPDATE AFTER READING FIRST FEW COMMENTS – PLEASE HELP *** One thing I have found from people not living in the US is that very few ads appear and more often no ads appear at all when someone clicks on a text link. Can you do me a favor and test a couple for me and let me know in the comments section what Country you live in, and if any ads displayed. You can just click on these 2 keywords… Make Money from Home and Mira Mesa Real Estate. I would think Make Money from Home should produce results for everyone as that it has worldwide interest… so I am interested to see your results. I do not want you to click on the ads… I just want to know if people outside the US can see the ads.

THANKS!