Project Wonderful: easy way to put advertising spots on your blog

I recently joined Project Wonderful. Project Wonderful is an advertising network. You install the Project Wonderful widget on your blog. This widget hosts several squares of advertising spots. How many squares you want, the size of the squares - that is up to you. How do you make money from Project Wonderful?

Project Wonderful - how does it work?

Most advertising affiliates work with click-through rate or some other means of measuring traffic to determine your income. Project Wonderful determines your income from the amount an advertiser is willing to spend to advertise on your blog.

Advertising is sold on daily basis. The amount of money an advertiser is willing to spend acts like a bid for that advertiser. The highest bidder wins, and his ad is displayed on the square.

Each square may have individual bids. Bids pay for daily advertising, regardless of traffic and regardless of clicks. Highest bidder wins, Project Wonderful takes a percentage and you get to own the difference!

This is a wonderful way to generate income, if you'll pardon the pun. You can adjust the minimum amount you would like advertisers to bid on your site. My advice is to keep this initial value low - no more than $0.01 or $0.02 for a site that gets less than 50 hits per day.

Installing Project Wonderful

The Project Wonderful widget is a javascript widget. For those who use blogspot, follow my simple how to ad internet marketing programs to your blog guide.

The steps involved are as follows:

• sign up for Project Wonderful


• once you are a member, sign in to Project Wonderful and click on 'My Ad Boxes'


• way at the bottom of the page, you will find a link 'create a new ad box'. Click on it


• adjust the amount of rows and columns you would like in your widget. You can also set the size of the ad squares you like here


• grab the code, and put it on your blog


• it might be a good idea to upload a custom 'your ad here' image. Just ensure that the custom image is the correct size. In my case, the 'your ad here' image of my main blog, The Necro Files, is 125 x 125 pixels. I made my images with The GIMP. The GIMP is small, cheap and relatively easy to use. You can also use it on Microsoft Windows. Try it!

Advantages of Project Wonderful

• the minimum payout is only $10


• you can earn as little or as much as advertisers are willing to bid per ad


• once you have an account, you can advertise on other Project Wonderful widgets too

Drawbacks of Project Wonderful

The only drawback I can think of is once you have a widget on your blog, you can't adjust the minimum bidding amount while there are active bids. This is not really a disadvantage. It makes sense not to adjust the minimum bid while you have ads running. The only way you can do this is by stopping all the ads - which I don't want to do because those ads are already paid for.

Fortunately, you can easily add another Project Wonderful widget to your blog! I left the minimum bid at $0.00 for a widget with less than optimal visibility, and added a new widget with a slightly higher minimum bid.

Simple, fast and you can earn from day 1.

How To Add Internet Marketing Programs To Your Blog

In a previous post, How To Monetize Your Blog, I introduced the ways I use to monetize my main blog, The Necro Files. These include mainly advertising programs and affiliate marketing.

This post deals with using affiliate marketing.
I will give you a step by step guide in setting up one of my affiliate programs, namely BidVertizer.

Affiliate Internet Marketing Programs I Use

You will note some of the following ads on The Necro Files:

• Google AdSense ads


• BidVertizer ads


• ShoppingAds

If you want to sign up for any of these programs, just follow the links and see if you meet the requirements.

How do you put affiliate program links on your blog? I use Blogspot for hosting my blogs, so simply use the Blogspot authoring environment.

Using Blogspot To Display Affiliate Links

1. Sign up for your chosen affiliate program. In this case, it is BidVertizer.


2. Get the code from your affiliate program. Bidvertizer uses JavaScript code.


3. Add the code to your blog. In Blogspot, this is made easy because you add a new HTML/JavaScript widget and paste the code in there.


4. Publish your blog and you are done!

Adding Affiliate Code To Your Blogspot Blog

Even with a well-designed interface like the Blogspot dashboard, it is sometimes confusing for new users where to click. I made some screenshots of the procedure for adding affiliate code to your Blogspot blog:

1. Sign in to your Blogspot account.


2. Click on Customize.
   


3. Click on Add a Page Element. You need to click on this in the section where you want your affiliate ads to appear.
   
   Also note that you may need to adjust your browser settings to allow Blogspot to show you pop-ups.


4. Click on HTML/JavaScript.
   


5. Paste the code from your affiliate program into the Content text area.
   
   You do not need to supply a title, but it does make it easier to edit the code later. If you don't supply a title, the widget will just indicate it is HTML/JavaScript.


6. Click on SAVE CHANGES.
   


7. Publish your blog and you are done!

It's that easy.

Beyond Affiliate Marketing

Realistically speaking, affiliate marketing offers you about 1% of your traffic in click-through. The reasons why this is so low is that affiliate marketing links are often impersonal, readers can identify the ads easily and avoid them and often the links are irrelevant to the personality of your blog.

We can conclude two things from this lesson:

• you need to generate traffic to your blog


• you need to diversify sources of income on your blog

You generate traffic by marketing your blog. We will deal more with marketing your blog and diversifying your sources of income in future posts.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

Useful Internet Marketing Links

• Four Ways To Make Money From Single Blog Post Pages


• Ten Alternatives to AdSense.


• Wikipedia page on Affiliate Marketing.

Working on content for your blog

This post is about filling your blog with content. Writing is a skill that you need to learn. You don't need a degree in a language, but you do need to communicate effectively.

What To Blog About
This may seem superfluous. You obviously have something to share with the world, otherwise you wouldn't be blogging.

My main blog, The Necro Files, started because I work in retail. I have many reviews I had written for customers as a guide. I am very passionate about my CD and DVD collection, so writing about it comes naturally. That's a very important ingredient - passion! The other important ingredient is knowledge - blog about something you know.

• blog about something you are passionate about


• write about what you know. This is an important writing tip. It goes for fiction too. Best-selling authors like Stephen King and John Grisham emphasise this point.

Something idiotic you will note about metablogs is that they tend to have the same content. See what Pro Blogger posts. Google the topic a day later, and chances are you would get 10 hits, all with exactly the same content. This reeks of retardation. You have a brain. Use it. Do you let someone carry you, even if you have legs that can walk?

I was apprehensive about starting another blog about blogging, since there are so many around. One thing I can say about my main blog, The Necro Files, is that there aren't many like it around (for better or worse!). Which brings us to the next point:

How To Blog About It
What I recommend is that you find a Unique Selling Point (USP) for your blog. Being passionate about what you are blogging about makes it much easier to blog about it. Where there is a will, there is a way. Finding an USP for your blog does not help so much to find content, but it does help to set your blog apart from other similar blogs.

This does not mean you need to be completely original. Just add an edge to your blog your readers will not be able to find anywhere else. An USP should lead to a unique reader experience.

• write with passion. Find a topic you are passionate about for your blog.


• find an USP for your blog


• learn how to write for the Internet

In the next post, I will deal with how to write for the Internet.
The next post assumes you already have somewhere to blog and you already have something to blog about.