A great tip that many newbie advertisers miss out on is daisy chaining your income.  Nearly all ad networks i have worked with have the option of displaying a third parties ads if there is spare inventory.  By connecting a series of networks together you can maximise income and minimise the unused inventory.

Google adsense for example shows Public Service ads if nothing suitable is available, but you can insert a url for a third party e.g Chitika and show their ads instead.

You need to monitor the performance of each network regularly as each will have different advertisers at different times, and if applicable change the order of the daisy chain to ensure that the highest paying network is first in the chain.

I have found that this approach increases income by around 10%, and changing the order of the chain can do the same again.

Popular networks I can recommend are; Burstmedia, Chitika, bannerconnect and of course Adsense. There are hundreds to choose from.

One potential pitflaw to watch for is a minium level of views, as some networks particularly the premium ones, require a number of impressions per month to remain in their program.  The order of the chain may have to be flexed to ensure you don’t get excluded.  Remember that advertisers come and go and a seemingly poor provider can have a period of overperformance so you need sometimes to take a long term view.

721% increase in Chitika income!  Check it out!

This week we are featuring a success story of our own. Working with the helpful guys at www.chitika.com we replaced our existing Chitika Premium ad with a larger size and updated format.  Then we moved the location of the code from the bottom of the page up by about 2 inches so it features at the end of each article instead of the page footer. The result a massive 721% increase in income!! without any noticeable knock on effect to our other income providers.

This is the change in income during the first week of May 2009 compared to the first week of April 2009, it has been stable at the higher rate all month so far.

If you run a blog or other website and are looking how to increase monetization during the credit crunch then talk to Chitika.

Basically as a result of our above experience we can highly recommend doing business with Chitika. To find out more about them simply click the link here and see what they can do for you today.

We have changed our chitika ads today to a new style - they look better and fit more closely with our look and feel - earnings are very slightly better - but we like this new style a lot more so we think we will stick with them for now.

Chitika has been a success for Article Alley so these ads will be added to our network sites during April and May.

If you are interested in Chitika then click here

Google announced its quarterly results earlier today.

Google reported a rise in profits in the first quarter as it saw the benefits of a shift to online advertising from traditional media. Google reported that its online advertising rose 17 per cent in the first quarter from a year earlier.

Shows just how strong Google is as a company and the potential of the internet to grow and sustain quality advertising sites. Its amazing that Google is still able to grow albeit at a slower rate, in the UK we have seen a big decline in advertising activities across the board.

We have had a good experience with both Google’s adwords and adsense programs and strongly recommend them both to authors who are not yet signed up.

Many of our authors make $1,000’s each week through article marketing, here are some tips on how to get it right:

1) Write quality articles - with good grammar and spelling - experience shows that the better the articles the more they get synicated and read.

2) Choose a topic carefully - some topics are more likely to generate interest that others, for example an article on pregnancy is going to be of more interest to more people than one on stamp collecting.

3) The title of an articles is important as this is often used in the anchor text of links to it from Article Alley’s menus. Select a title that will appeal to readers.

4) Write regularly - the more articles you write the the more combinations of text and phrases will exist to bring visitors - more articles = more visitors = more money.

5) Always add a link to your site as a bio to each article.

6) Make sure your own landing page is attractive - better landing pages = better conversion rates.

7) Ensure you use our addthis service to bookmark your articles.

Link back to your own articles using pages on your own sites or blogs = backlinks help to boost rankings.

9) If you can use an RSS feed reader on your site to link back to your authors RSS - this feed contains links to all your own articles.

10) tell your own network of contacts to use and link to your articles.

You too can enjoy success with Article Marketing.

We are very excited to be part of the Tribal Fusion® network of publishers. Tribal fusion are a very well respected banner network provider, we have partnered with them for several months now, we often get asked how to advertise on Article Alley - by creating an account with Tribal Fusion you can advertise now on ArticleAlley and the rest of their high quality network.

If you looking for a high paying quality supplier then we can certainly recommend them.

Chitika Premium ads have been in place on Article Alley for about six months now, they are not big earners but generate complimentary income, without detracting from Google Adsense or Kontera income. They are mostly aimed at USA/Canadian traffic but with some European presence as well.

Getting complimentary income is an important strategy in these testing times, and Chitika can help.

A good feature of Chitika is that they can be run alongside Google Adsense without TOS issues, the ads are clearly different from Google ones and are therefore acceptable.

We recommend Chitika

We have using Kontera since the summer and we are please with the results, Kontera offer intext link advertising, these links are introduced through Java code so don’t cause any problems with search engines, or count as backlinks.

ArticleAlley is a very rich site in terms of content and 95% of visitors find our pages via search results for phrases within articles themselves as opposed to looking for article sites.  The ads therefore are a useful resource for visitors showing them products very closely related to their search requests.

Kontera provides:

• Increased Incremental Revenue – We were particularly sceptical on this point, but it seems that intext links have little impact on other advertising media on ArticleAlley such as Banners or Google Adsense.     
• High Click-Through Rates (CTR) – Kontera’s CTR rate seems good compared to other providers we have tried.
• Positive User Experiences - Feedback is generally positive.
• Content Monetization –Kontera’s ContentLink ads can be served on every type of website including news sites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites. Kontera’s dynamic contextual analysis lets you serve ContentLinks as soon as new and relevant content is posted.  
• Publisher Control & Customization –Features allow for control of the advert density and colors  
• Online Publisher Center – Kontera’s provides some contol feature.

Sign up to Kontera here