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…

*UPDATE* May 31, 2007 I’m going to leave this post up for posterity, but for those of you looking for tricks and shortcuts to ‘build backlinks’ to your web site or shortcuts to get you higher search engine rankings – this is NOT they way. You used to be able to beat the system – but no more. You can probably get away with it for a short time, and then google will impose a ‘penalty’ on your site and you will drop to the back pages of the index. Trust me – it happenned to me (for some of my other sites), and it can and will happen to you. Google now states in their quality guidelines and terms of service in their Google Webmasters Console that you shouldn’t use backlink building techniques and services like this.

How to Get Web Site Traffic

When you have a web site, the thing that everyone wants is all kinds of traffic. Usually (especially at first) the primary source of that traffic comes from the search engines – because no one knows who you are. Over time you get returning visitors, but still a large percentage of traffic always comes from SE’s.

There are TONS of things on the web that you can buy that either try and teach you how to get good search rankings (positioning to get that SE traffic), or try to guarantee to get you good google “pagerank” (PR). Let’s talk a moment about what things usually get good search engine positions (page one or two in the search engine result pages or SERP’s).

• well written content rich with naturally placed keywords
• good HTML title and description
• good page title in header (H1) tags
• some keywords and phrases in bold and / or italics
• linked breadcrumbs on the page
• search engine friendly URL / page name

Now – let’s say you did all of those things, but the topic you wrote about is one that thousands – or maybe even millions – of other pages on the Internet is competing against you in the search engine rankings for? Maybe some like “how to make a web page”. Most of the other search engines work similarly (except for directories), but I’ll use google for these examples. How does google determine what pages should be on the first page of results, and what pages go on the last? Who has the most information, what is most relevant, what’s most accurate, etc.? It would be impossible for google to know this information for everything people search for, so one of the biggest factors that is used in the google algorithm is who’s linking you! These are called “backlinks” or “reciprocal links“.
It all boils down to popularity. Google figures that the more sites that link to you, combined with the actual importance of those sites (page rank) equals where you will be found in the search engine results pages. Now let’s talk about Page Rank for a second….google pagerank is a number from 0 to 10. Ten is reserved for huge sites like apple.com and google.com. Zero is a pagerank given to brand new sites (or sites banned from google). If you haven’t experienced page rank before, download the google toolbar for your browser and enable the pagerank view. Then surf around the web, and check out the PageRank numbers of various sites (including your own). The higher the “pagerank”, the more respected authority google believes you are. Also, every individual URL can have it’s own pagerank. Meaning, www.site.com could have a pagerank of 5, but www.site.com/link.html could have a pagerank of 2.

So, if you and I had competing web pages on the topic “how to create a web page”, and I had pages linking to me with PageRank 5 and 6, and you had 100 pages linking to you that were PR 0, 1, and 2 – who’s going to come up higher in the SERP’s? Probably me. It’s quality of links, not quantity. In addition, if my page were a low page rank – the fact that half a dozen PR 5 and 6 sites were linking to me would probably raise up my PR to a higher number as well! If you had 100 sites linking you with a lower page rank, it shouldn’t bring you down, but it sure doesn’t raise your PR much either. There are of course many, many other factors that go into coming up in the SERP’s higher and that pesky google algorithm, but it’s still a widely known fact that if you have high quality sites with good PR linking to you – you should fare pretty good.

How to obtain lots of backlinks or ‘reciprocal links’ to your web site

So, how do you get quality sites to link to you legitimately? There are many ways to go about it. The oldest and easiest (and free) way to do it is to manually email sites and just flat out ask them to exchange links. This is a whole lot of work, and you might not even get a response. Also, you might find it hard to figure out who to email or contact. Another way (if you have the money) is to just buy them. There are many sites where you can do this. Just make certain to verify that the pages linking back to you actually have a good pagerank first. Do a google search for “buy backlinks” and you’ll find plenty of places that will take your money. Watch out for anything that sounds too good to be true.

You best (and least costly) bet is too find a free reciprocal or backlink service to use. Make sure that it shows you what PR the linking sites are, and browse through the listings to see if you feel they are “spammy” or not. For instance, I checked out www.linkshighway dot net and thought it was just terrible. There was no indication of pagerank for any of the sites listed in their directory, and the listings looked like some bad email spam (most of them). I’ve also used www.linkmetro for many months and I’m not happy with it either. The directory shows the PR of the sites, but it seems to be PR at the time of inclusion in the directory (not live). I had several sites listed in the directory at PR5 request links, only to find out they had dropped to zero (probably from bad linking practices). Also, the directory shows PR of sites, but when you go into the approval section for new links – it isn’t shown there. I found that 95% of the sites requesting links from had no page rank at all. And most of the pages requesting links from me were on link farm directory pages with bad (link-143[34]c.html) url’s. I hated that site – I took my pages out of the directory.

The site I still use and that works for me is www.backlinks.com. I am not trying to sell them, the service is free, and I don’t get anything at all by promoting them here. You just signup, and list your pages. Then add the code to your web page(s), and start choosing some link partners. The biggest reason I like this directory is because to list your pages – they must be at least PR3. If you have no pagerank (or low pagerank), you’ll need to start somewhere else. The interface is very full featured – and you get to all links before they go live on your page. Adding the code is just like adding the snippet of google code, and you get to change it’s appearance (if you need to) in the same way.

Do a little google work and you’ll find similar services to exchange links through. Weed out the bad ones, and post the post you find back here in comments! I’d love to hear of some of the ones I haven’t found yet!