Are you accepting paid reviews or ads with offers that are lower than you think you deserve? You probably are, I am. Why? Because we need to make money to survive and if it’s a choice between accepting low price ads or not getting anything at all, we tend to lower ourselves. Advertisers are going to try and get as many people out there for the lowest price they can. They don’t care that you have two kids, a mortgage, a dog with health problems..

Paid To Post
If you’re selling paid ads or reviews on your website you will need to take into consideration the time you spend on the review and how much your time is worth. Depending on your situation in life you may feel you’re worth more, but let’s start with minimum wage. If minimum wage is $5.25 per hour you know that you shouldn’t get any lower than that. Think about the amount of schooling you’ve had or your writing style to decide if you’re worth more. Personally, I feel like I’m selling myself short if I accept any less than $10 per hour. If you decide that you’ll accept nothing less than $10 an hour for your writing, then take into consideration the worth of a link on your website and how long that link and review will remain on your index page. If it will be pushed off by tomorrow, you should consider it to be lower than if it stays on the index 2-3 days.

Moving on to the review, there are a couple of things to keep in mind here as well. First, would be the amount of time you spent on the review. Not just in writing it and planning it, but also researching it and interacting on the website. Even if you enjoy the website and go deeper into it than you normally would, you are experiencing their website and your time is money. If you discuss the website with someone else to gain perspective, consider that time as well. Second, consider any images you made or entered into the review. Images in the post have had a better success rate for many paid posts and advertisers will usually pay more for this.

Optionally, you can consider any costs you have. If you need to make a video for the post, you’ll consider the cost of your camera. You may also consider the cost of your computer. If your computer costs $1200 and it lasts for 3 years, you’ll want to make back $400 each year. If you do 100 paid posts per year (1 every 3 days) you would want to add $4 into the worth of those paid posts. By this login you could also consider the cost of your internet and a percentage of your electric bill (if you’re not already writing them off in your taxes).

Banners, Adverts, Etc
Adding a link, banner, or advert to your sidebar takes minimal time, so the worth of this link is determined differently. I’m talking about just ads, not pay per click or affiliate links. Many sites out there will help you, such as Text Links Ads, by reviewing your website and higher or lowering the amount. They sell the ads for you so they’ll have a pretty good idea how to keep them selling.

If your website has 1000 unique visitors per day and a following of the same 10 people who comment, you can expect a fairly nice amount. One of my friends who uses Text Link Ads had numbers like this and she was making about $80 per ad, selling 10 ad spaces. That’s $800 per month. Of course, keep in mind, you’re going to lose some of it in fees. If you go through a place like Text Link Ads they’ll take some fees, and if you accept them yourself via Paypal there will be fees involved with the transaction.

However, those are text links. If you’re selling an advert or a banner spot, you can expect more. The advantage to image based ads is that they can grab more attention and they can be animated, to get more of their message across. They’re also much larger than a text link. A banner or advert will be worth more than a simple text link, but they will be more of an intrusion. Make sure to consider the quality and relevance of the link/ad before accepting it.

Relevance is more important than people may think. On this website if I had a choice between a banner ad for diapers and a banner ad for computer equipment, it would be an easy choice. The diaper ad would have little chance at survival on a site like this. You want to choose a good balance between bids and relevance, because a non relevant link will not continue to advertise on your site and the relevant one may not still be there for you next month.

Please feel free to comment if you’d like to add to this.

Affiliate links can be a great money making resource, if used properly. You want to keep in mind the type of visitors that will be coming to your site and what they’re looking for while they’re there. There was a while where TBW had ads for Lane Bryant, which has clothes for plus sized women. Is this what the readers of TBW were looking for? No.

I’m working on a website about products, services, and issues relating to my generation. On this website I’m going to review products, like MP3 players and clothes, anything that would be appealing to my generation. So one of the services I have lined up is the Amazon Associate. Basically I can log in to my Amazon Associate account and link directly to the product on the Amazon site. If you buy from my link, I get a commission from that sale. These products relate to my blog niche and therefore will earn me a higher likelihood of revenue. This is the same basic idea Google’s Adsense has, by giving you targeted ads.

My suggestion is to take a look at the affiliate programs and ads you currently display on your site. Ask yourself, “Would my visitors be interested in this?” If the answer is now, or it’s not a high earning ad/link, you’ll probably do better to replace it with something else.

I’m working on a resource list of affiliate programs which I intend to release shortly. If you would like yours to be considered for the link please contact me.

It appears Google is done taking away Page Rank and they’ve decided to give it now. Other popular sites have gone up, as has The Blog World. My own mommy blog, As A Mother, has gone from 0 to 3. Not the most impressive number, but it opens a lot of doors for me.

Congrats to those who now have Page Rank, some of us were all waiting a long time for it.

I had a post I was planning about page rank and how some sites have gone down. But yesterday morning I got an email from another webmaster who mentioned that her page rank went down again, as well as other “big” sites, and even The Blog World has dropped.

It seems common sense to me that Google Page Rank is based on the incoming links and the quality of their website. This means if you have 10 sites with a page rank of 5 linking to you, you’re better off than if you had 100 sites with no page rank linking to you. Right? So some of my friends are going around and commenting on sites that don’t have “no follow” to try and go up the ranks by getting more linkbacks. This helps with the quality rating on your site, but it doesn’t help with Google’s Page Rank. Why?

Well, if you pay attention to the page rank on the comments/entry pages, you’ll see they have none. So your site has just earned 100 links from 0 Page Rank websites. Is this good for you? No. It is technically a “vote” for your website, but when there are a lot out of nowhere it starts to become a negative vote.

So now all the major sites have gone down in page rank. I have a theory on why this is happening. Google didn’t update their Page Rank back in July and now people are dropping like mad. It seems, to me, that they’re trying to raise the “quality” of the page rank. I think they’ve caught on to what everyone is doing and they’re adjusting it to make it so that those that are purposely trying to get page rank aren’t any more special than those who have earned it.

Has your page rank gone down? What effect has it had on your site?