MySpace.com generates much buzz with affiliate marketers. I could not resist the temptation to explore this MySpace topic, but probably I am too late to the game. I am sure of that when I read guys who started MySpace game back in 2004. At that time I was not in affiliate marketing yet.

Yes, the website gets tons of traffic and it attracts a lot of affiliate marketing guys that makes MySpace a sort of linkdump where every second person tries to make you click on some affiliate link, to join some free contest, to complete some free survey… At least it is my first impression.

Yes, this is the way to promote your affiliate offers with MySpace: mass bulletins, mass comments, group posts. You get your account deleted – start a few fresh ones. You run the risk to be banned from some affiliate networks, but people accept that risk.

The steps for starting your MySpace advertising campaign are simple:

• register,
• google for myspace layouts,
• design your account and
• enter nice information about your personality.

Start browsing the place, use search function to find friends who share your interests. Or use some automatic ways to get those friends on your list:

-    badderadder
-    socialnetbot
-    friendstorm
-    etc

So, you have two options to market with MySpace:

Short-term and dirty similar to the one described above when you auto generate friends and bomb them with your affiliate offers. Get your MySpace account suspended, start again. Get your adv network account banned, join second tier affiliate networks.

Or:

Long-term. Slowly picking and adding friends with similar interests, networking in a traditional way. Do not expect much profit from this activity too soon. But I’d rather choose the second way than spamming the web site.

Summary:  MySpace is a great place to hang out. It is also a nice place to network, meet new friends and drive some traffic to your websites, but expect no wonders: it takes hard work to build a good account with MySpace – I do not doubt that.

[tags]myspace, myspace layouts, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, make money online, home based job, earn your living online[/tags]

Google is about to introduce changes to the way it evaluates landing pages across content search network:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

This news is likely to disappoint those webmasters who heavily practice AdSense arbitrage – no doubt, it will influence their earnings in a negative way.

On the other hand it should become beneficial to website publishers as they will get a better quality and higher priced ad inventory with their websites. And provide a better experience for Internet users.

Summary: This update is not the end of AdSense arbitrage and PPC arbitrage in general. The experienced webmasters are likely to be more engaged with second tier PPC engines that provide cheaper traffic and do not evaluate landing pages. The weak points of these PPC engines – inventory range and high click fraud rate.

But webmasters report of their easily achieved success with these second tier PPC engines. So this new Google update is not likely to hurt most PPC arbitrage players.

And do not forget the website publishers who generate most of their income from their AdSense earnings to run their online property.

So, it is a win-win situation for all parties engaged:

- users get a better experience,
- Google improves its reputation of the top search engine,
- web publishers get a higher priced clicks,
- PPC arbitrage webmasters shift to second tier PPC engines that provide cheaper traffic

[tags]advertising networks, cpa, adsense, adwords, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, make money online, home based job, earn your living online[/tags]

I have published a long list of advertising networks that web publishers can use to monetize their online projects.

There are three major types of advertising networks: cost-per-click, cost-per-action, cost-per-impression. Each type has its own leaders: CPC – YPN, AdSense, CPM – Casale, TribalFusion, ValueClick, BurstMedia, CPA – Azoogle, CPAEmpire, CJ, MaxBounty.

As a way to invade the tough market of advertising networks one needs to offer some unique product, say, some hybrid ad network.

Turn will announce a new advertising platform at the Web 2.0 conference. It combines CPA bidding with a wide range of user, site and ad performance analytics. The company calls itself the world’s first automatic targeting, bidded CPA ad network.

The Turn network is taking an approach that mixes cost-per-action (CPA) bidding and analysis of 60 contextual, behavioral, demographic and performance factors in determining which ads to serve and when. The company intends to do all the ad placement heavy lifting in the background so that buying ads is made supremely simple and yet unusually effective.

Buying ads in the Turn Network doesn’t require keyword selection and management. Instead, buyers identify actions they want their audience members to take and how much they would be willing to pay per time those actions are taken. That action might be a site visit, email sign-up or completed transaction.

When visitors come to a site, data about those users, contextual analysis of the site, of the ads and of every ad permutation’s success in that and related sites are all considered in determining each ad’s probability of success. That probability of conversion is then considered relative to the price being paid on a CPA bases.

The CPA bid divided by the probability of the action being takes equals an ad’s effective revenue per thousand impressions. And thus an ad is served.

Summary: The ad network approach sounds fresh and promising. At the moment it is hard to say how beneficial this type of advertising will be for advertisers and publishers, but the idea is worth attention.

If the company succeeds to provide a good and efficient service then they will take this new niche and it will be a hard task for competitors (even with brand names) to take it away.

[tags]advertising networks, cpa, cpm, cpc, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, make money online, home based job, earn your living online[/tags]