About Steven Aitchison
Making money online – The start of a journey with AuctionAds
As most of you know I am always on the lookout to make more money with my
ultimate goal being to give up work and become a pro blogger. From here
on in I will be getting more and more into monetising the blog and my online
ventures, however small just now. This will not interfere with the quality
of the writing and the interactivity of this blog and I hope you will continue
to support me as I help people help themselves and gain a better understanding
of themselves, their realtionships and meantal and physucal health.
Every Wednesday I will be looking at ways of making money, saving money and
generally having a better relationship with money.
This week I want to look at a recent addition to the blog which is Auction
ads. I will test each money making program for a period og two months
before deciding to keep it or scrap it and I will report each money the money
I make from each program.
What is AuctionAds?
You may have noticed at the end of each post I have 3 ads from AuctionAds. Thses
ads are CPA (cost per action) ads which basically that means that if a reader
clicks on one of the ads and places a winning bid, a buy it now or registers
with eBay you, the blogger, will earn money.
One of the benefits of AuctionAds is that is does not interfere with other
programs such as Google Adsense
It is easy to set up however you do have to put in keywords to get relevent
ads to your blog or site. Picking the right keywords is crutial for
this. You can always use the free
tool from Google to help you select the best keywords. The ads will
then instantly be created based on your keywords and choice of ad style. The
ads are image and text based and again are easy to create.
The referral program seems good at a 2% referral fee for 6 months after the
user signs up
Payments are sent out on the 1st of every month via paypal with a $10 minimum
payout.
For this week only you can also get $5 just for signing up to AuctionAds if
you are already a Text
Link Ads publisher I will obviously make some beer money if you click on
the links and sign up for both of these programs and become a publisher, but
it’s free to join so why not.
Your experiences?
Let me know what your experiences of AuctionAds are. I know there are
some out there who are earning good money from it.
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Steven,
I just started using Auction Ads on my site about a week ago, and I have mixed feelings.
On one hand, they are STUPID SIMPLE to use! Just like Ad-Sense, and they can be used right along with Ad-Sense – that was confirmed by Auction Ads creator Jeremy Shoemaker.
On the other hand, although it is true that you can get things on eBay for any subject that you blog about, sometimes there are slim pickins for a concept as vague as self improvement.
Also, the ads are squashed into whatever size Ad Unit you use, and if the picture is not of the right proportions, it looks kind of trashy. And I can say that because I have these kind of trashy ads on my own site!
I’m giving Auction Ads the month of June to see how they perform, and then I will make a final decision about whether or not to keep them.
- Aaron
Thanks for your comments Aaron. I was going to experiment with different keywords and bring techy stuff into it, since all bloggers are more techy than your average person.
I know what you mean about the images being out of proportion. I will give it a shot and see what happens.
Thanks again.
Steven, I’ve tried Auction Ads for a month or so but sadly, it didn’t work out for me. The ads shown are not very relevant and sometimes they can be pretty sleazy. Probably because of this, it didn’t convert well for me.
Maybe you’ll have better luck!
Cheers, Ellesse
Somehow I have a mixed feeling as well for this. I’ve tried them on my blog but.. cost per action on Ebay doesn’t seem quite right for me, and this is the reason I removed them from my template. OTOH, though, Amazon affiliates seem a bit better.
What do you think?
I do a lot with Amazon as well. The best thing about Amazon is that they have pretty much any product that you could want to find, and they are also very flexible and cutting edge with the ways in which you can link to them.
On the other hand, their commissions aren’t very high – only around 5%. I definitely recommend using Amazon, but I doubt they will ever be a primary revenue source for me due to the low commissions.
- Aaron