There are lots of programs out there that enable you to make money from your blog or web site.? One of the newer (and more popular) services to use is Chitika Mini-Malls.? You see their familiar tabbed box with a few pics and a price comparison of a popular product (iPods, digital cameras) on lots and lots of sites across the net.? I would assume that because I see them on so many sites – someone is actually making some money using this.? For some reason – that person is surely not me.

I’m game to try just about anything once.? But if it doesn’t work – I’m the first to get it off my site and quickly switch it out for something that works.? And also realize – that any of the methods I talk about that work for me, may not for you…because how and why people click (on what) is largely determined by first the type of users that you attract, and second how well your site is setup.? Since my main site is technology based, I’ve pretty much found that my users will nearly ignore all common forms of advertising.? Case and point – banner or button image ads of any kind, on any sidebar, or the header, or the footer have gotten exactly ZERO (that’s right – 0) clicks in every trial I’ve done (over 100,000 impressions).? I think that’s saying something about what has the ability to work (on my main web site).

I also tried Chitika about a year ago – when I was getting less than 500 unique pageviews per day.? I never got a single click.? However, my main site gets over 7,000 unique pageviews per day now – so I thought I would try Chitika again yesterday. I decided to try the Chitika Mini-Mall Script (and the tag cloud) for about 24 hours, and placed the block beside my 300×250 adsense header on the top of every page in my site template.? Now, prior to this I had placed images beside my adsense block (with a one pixel vertical black border between – as google requires) – and that increased my click-through-rate (CTR) about 1%.? That amounted to about 20-30% more clicks per day overall to my adsense ads.

I decided to replace the image block with the Chitika Mini-Mall script for the day, and within the hour watched my CTR drop from 3.5-4% to 1.5%.? My CTR rate drop of more almost 50% stayed in that position for the duration of the time I tested the Chitika script, but I rode it out for the entire day just to see if I could make up the difference in Chitika money.? When the 24 hours was up this morning, I logged into Chitika and checked my stats.? It said I had 6,201 impressions for the day.? That seems strange since adsense logged almost 7,000 impressions for the same period, and was loading right next to Chitika.? It makes me wonder how accurate Chitika stats actually are.? I also saw that there were impression numbers (from 2-15) next to every single other day in November – even though I hadn’t used any Chitika script on any of my sites in over a year.? Another hint that their tracking is way off.? Anyway, for the 6,201 impressions I had for the day – Chitika says that I didn’t get a single click.? Nothing.? Nada.? Zip.? Zilch.? I guess that means that I won’t be using Chitika again anytime soon.? And the instant that I placed the images next to the adsense block again – my click through (and revenue) doubled within the hour.? I guess for my main site – it’s adsense 1, and Chitika 0.

Has anyone out there actually made any money with Chitika??? Add your comment below…