Do you use Chitika and Google AdSense together on your website to earn great combined revenue? Or, do you want to use them together?

Google AdSense and Chitika Premium ads can indeed be used together on your website or blog. Using both in the right combination can work together to help you earn more revenue than using AdSense or Chitika alone.

In this FREE eBook you will see how seven actual strategically place and customize the Chitika website for a successful steady income.

(more…)

Rule 1 - Only show ads WHEN the user really wants it

Or: Thou shalt never annoy thy visitors

As you know, the Chitika | Premium units only show up when Chitika is sure about user intent (because we know what search term the user used to find you). For all of your regular users who are simply browsing your site, the intent is much lower. In these cases, the Chitika ad does not show, and you are not blasting another ad into their face. Due to this, you are not annoying your users with yet another ad unit.

Rule 2 - Tell your user WHY they’re seeing this ad

Or: Thou shalt respect thy visitors’ experience

As you can see from the example below, the user keywords are highlighted in gold yellow. This is to explain to the user that the ad is about what he is looking for (Psychobabble Joe says: Since the age of 2, the human brain has been taught to pay attention to that specific color of yellow). When you respect your visitors’ feelings and intent like that, they are more likely to look at the ad and read its contents (and, of course, click on it).

Rule 3 - Only show users WHAT they want to see

Or: Thou shalt give thy visitors what they want — in a way they want it

Chitika | Premium ad units have been designed to be hyper targeted, as the ads are almost always completely targeted to the exact keyword the user typed in the search engine. And in the new Mega Unit, ads flow naturally from top to bottom, rather than left to right. “Why is that,” you ask? Its because for the last 10 years, the Internet has worked very hard to train people to read its pages from top to bottom, not left to right. With the Mega-Unit, people’s tendency to read in that fashion helps your second and third ads get almost as much attention as the first.

Put all these three reasons together and you as a publisher/website owner will get from your visitors what you really want — i.e. clicks. More clicks equal more revenue and everybody is happy. By giving your visitors what they want in an ad unit, they’ll give you what you want in return! Isn’t sharing nice?

You can get the code for the mega unit here or signup if you are not already a Chitika publisher.

Hey everyone - I want to introduce the newest addition to the Chitika | Premium lineup - the 550×250 MEGA-Unit.  Across our network right now, the MEGA-Unit’s CTR is 4 times higher than our other Premium units - so you can see why we are excited about it!  I want to answer some important questions about it here on the blog:

What is the MEGA-Unit?

It’s our newest Chitika | Premium unit, and it’s really BIG!  Take a look:

Why should you use this?

Across the board, our new MEGA-Unit is adding a massive increase in clicks and revenue:

• AskDaveTaylor.com increased his Chitika earnings from $85/month to $2000/month by adding the new MEGA-Unit to his site (Dave talks about this in greater detail on his site).

• ArticleAlley.com added the new MEGA-Unit and reports that “The result was a massive 721% increase in income -  without any noticeable knock on effect to our other income providers.”  - Adrian from ArticleAlley.com

• Couponmom.com added the MEGA-Unit to just 1 of her pages, and immediately doubled her eCPM and revenue.

How do I get it?

If you have a Chitika account, you can get the unit by clicking here, then choosing the 550×250 “MEGA-Unit” from the drop-down.
If you don’t have a Chitika account, click here to sign up.

Where should I place the MEGA-Unit on my site?

We are seeing it work best placed directly above or below the main content.  For example, you can see where ArticleAlley.com put it on this page (scroll to bottom of article).

Try the new Chitika | Premium MEGA-Unit now!

What do you think about this?  Leave us a comment below!

There are tons of different factors that determine how much money you can make from Chitika ads on your website.  In fact, all of these factors can be very overwhelming when you are trying to work on improving your earnings!

To help figure out which factors are the MOST important, we looked at 50 high-earning Chitika publishers, and narrowed down the top 4 factors that they all had in common.  By improving these 4 factors on your site, you should see a big difference in your advertising revenue [note: this exercise is using Chitika data, but these 4 factors apply to ALL types of advertising (AdSense, TribalFusion, etc.)].

Factor 1:  Traffic

Let’s face it - to earn a lot of money, you need to have a lot of traffic.  If you don’t have a lot of users coming to your site, then you probably won’t get too many clicks on your ads!

• Suggestions: Take a look at these resources on building up your traffic - Problogger, Copyblogger, Wikihow.

Factor 2:  U.S. Traffic

While having a lot of traffic is important, we can go a step further and say that specifically US traffic is ideal.  It is well-known in the ad industry that the US market is the most developed and lucrative.  Our 50 high-earners all showed more than half of their traffic coming from the US.

• Suggestions: Know where your traffic is coming from!  You can usually check this easily on sites like Spyfu.com, or in your Google Analytics (if you aren’t running analytics software yet, you should be!).

Factor 3:  U.S. Search Engine Traffic/SEO

Search engine traffic is extremely targeted, and advertisers like this.  People coming to your site from search engines are most often the people who click on ads.  And specifically to Chitika, our Premium ads will only show to this type of traffic!  Again, our group of 50 high-earning Chitika users all had over 45% of their U.S. traffic coming from search engines.

• Suggestions: Work on your SEO to bring more search traffic to your site.  Here are some great resources to get started - Problogger SEO article, Hubspot’s Website Grader, SEOChat, SEOBook (and their blog), SEOMoz (also has a great blog), and about a million other sites you can find on Alltop :)

Factor 4:  CTR (Click-Through Rate)

This seems obvious, but it is worth looking into a bit deeper.  For our group of 50 high-earners, their average CTR was 1.6%, so you should shoot to be in that range or higher if possible.

• Suggestions: To improve CTR, the most important thing is placement - check out this guide for tips.  Other items that will boost your CTR are customizing your colors, fonts, etc.  You can read how to do that here.

Still feeling overwhelmed?  Don’t!  Take a deep breath, put on the new Bon Iver album, and start with just one of the factors.  You don’t have to do them all at the same time - just focus on one of them and take it from there.

- Posted by Ryan Travis, Director of Client Services