Earning from Advertising Online

May 11, 2007

Not impressed with Kontera - the targeting is silly, as in the example above: I'd gladly buy Alan Rickman, but I'm pretty sure he's not for sale, and certainly not on a comparison deal!

Kontera results are therefore (or anyway) unimpressive. I'll remove that as soon as I get around to it, and see how a similar idea from Amazon performs.

I was invited to become an affiliate advertisers for two travel-related sites. One does marketing for some interesting-looking specialty tours for which visitors to my site are likely a natural audience. However, the terms of the deal don't seem fair to me as the site owner. They would pay me $2 for every person who clicks through and requests that a paper brochure be mailed. Sounds great, but how many people are actually going to request a brochure when all the information they need to decide on a tour is readily available online? I could potentially drive lots of customers to these tours, without ever getting any reward for myself. Unless and until I hear back from them with some more convincing offer, I won't be doing this (there's a banner ad still hanging around on my food entry page, if you're curious). Jun 17 - No convincing reason was ever offered for me to stay with them, so I removed the ads.

Soon after, I was invited to add affiliate links for booking.com - you'll now find these on most of my travel pages, "book a hotel in - ".

This is a much fairer situation for all concerned. I can see statistics on how many people click through and look at potential bookings, and how many of those "convert" to actually become hotel customers. I only get paid when someone actually stays: booking.com and I split a percentage of what the customer actually spends.

got any tips to share? I'd love to hear them!