While we see the headlines about thousands of new internet sites being launched each and every day of the year, it seems that more and more would be online entrepreneurs are calling it a day. The news that some are struggling will not surprise those who follow the industry but why are people calling it a day? What is the problem?
The problem with many new entrants to the online world is the fact that they see the headlines, they see the multi-millionaires driving about in their new Ferrari’s and they want it – tomorrow!
There is no other business environment which can match the internet for building up your hopes only to scupper them and leave you feeling helpless – but is it really that bad. The sad fact is that many people who join the online revolution come to the party with some great ideas, fresh thoughts and a will to win. However, too many get disappointed and leave the scene before they have given their site and business a chance to breath. It does not happen over night for 99.999999% of people, so give it time and give your new business time to breath. Make sure you don’t give you site and your early start business away for buttons!
More and more people are set to feel real pain and guilt in the future with more and more savvy online business people picking up good sites, good domains and great business ideas for “buttons”. A little bit more “link juice”, a revamp of the site design and the business you sold for a few dollars may well be the success story of tomorrow. Don’t regret it, don’t give it away and don’t lose the faith!
The chance to make a living online is there for all of us, we all just need to take a little more time and work, work, work…..the chance is yours, don’t miss it!
I don’t know if you have heard about AboutUs.org before but it’s a wiki similar to Wikipedia.org, but it’s only for web sites. You can look up any domain name you like in AboutUs.org by typing aboutus.org/sampleaddress.com in your web browser.
There are three ways to get your domain name listed in AboutUs.org:
Wait until the AboutUs.org bot has spidered your site
To find out if it’s a good deal to pay for a page at AboutUs.org I pulled out my credit card and paid. To be honest I didn’t only pay just to be able to do this review, I really really wanted a better AboutUs.org page too . A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better
At their site they offer you the following for a flat fee of $197:
Position yourself in front of more than 5,000,000 unique readers each month.
Increase your results in the search engines.
Point more traffic to your website.
Create an amazing article that will tell the world about your business.
Build strong relationships with the community.
Develop ongoing dialog about you and your business.
Generate another way for clients to find you.
I’m happy with the coach I got to help me build the page, but what I don’t like is that most of the stuff at my AboutUs.org page is copied directly from my site. Hey it’s a page about my site so it actually doesn’t matter…. Or?
The traffic they mention is not something I’ve noticed at all , but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.
So, was it worth $197?
My opinion is that it’s not worth the money, but on the other hand people spend $100 for a page at MillionDollarWiki and then you don’t get any help building the page at all. At Aboutus.org I got a coach helping me at least.
If you can build your page yourself (i.e. you know the syntax) and have the time to do it then do that instead of paying $197. If you don’t know how to do your own page and really really really really want a better AboutUs.org page, then buy this service.
Since Clickbooth hasn’t been able to approve my site in time for this review I’m just publishing my review of the signup process. Since I still after several days waiting don’t have access to the publisher functions I have decided to ignore that part of their site.
I’ve been trying to earn some money from Clickbooth Affiliate Network and I have to say that their registration process almost lost me to someone else since it’s over-kill in annoying. For example you have to fill in your phone number to receive a call with a PIN code before you can complete the registration process. They claim it’s for preventing fraud, but I can’t really see how that can prevent any fraud
Next step in the registration are the categories. Unfortunately they didn’t have that many good categories for a webmaster related web site like this so I had to go for “Business/B2B”. What surprised me where all the “Email Submit” categories they had…..
They claim they approve sites within 72 hours, but that’s not the case when I signed up. I sent an email to their support too to speed up the approval process without success. They didn’t even answer my email
From what I can see their just another publisher network for ads, but if you want to earn some extra cash you could try them out (if they approve you that is).
I just got an email from Tom Vadnais at ValueClick informing me that they will turn 10 years old this year. Here’s the email I got:
ValueClick commemorates its tenth anniversary today, representing a decade of performance and leadership in online advertising. On behalf of ValueClick employees worldwide, I would like to take this opportunity to say a sincere “thank you” for the contribution you have made to our success.
From our humble beginning in 1998 as a cost-per-click ad network, to our position today as one of the world’s largest online marketing services companies, ValueClick has always focused on delivering cost-effective customer acquisition for advertisers and robust revenue streams for publishers. Along with our dedicated team, it has been a commitment to performance by you, our advertiser and publisher clients, that has driven the phenomenal growth and success of ValueClick.
Today ValueClick operates in all major online marketing channels and some traditional marketing channels, including affiliate and search marketing, display advertising, lead generation, ad serving and e-mail technology, agency management software and comparison shopping. ValueClick brands include Commission Junction, ValueClick Media, Mediaplex, PriceRunner, Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com.
Together we have built a strong and diverse organization designed to help propel you into the future. Thanks again for your business. We’re excited about the opportunity our relationship represents and look forward to growing with you in the years ahead.
Sincerely,
Tom Vadnais
I’m also looking forward to grow with them in the year ahead, but I would rather have received a nice gift from them then just a “thank you” (with “” around ). Wouldn’t you?
One thing that’s amazing me about ValueClick is the lack of technology development from their side. I’ve been using WebSponsors.com for a few of my sites because they got great freebies and sweepstakes, but what they really need to work on is the lack of innovations. For example you have to manually select your offers, they don’t have any feed you can import your offers from like for example TradeDoubler.com got. Another bad thing is that when a visitor clicking on the ads are not from the desired country they redirect the user to another offer, but it doesn’t look like you (the webmaster) will get any commission on that sale
When WebSponsors.com where a part of Web Clients (before ValueClick acquired WebSponsors.com) they had a co-branded web site called free2try.com where you as a publisher could setup a sub-domain with your own layout Really cool since you could redirect your visitors to an up to date directory backed with free offers, sweepstakes and trials and get commission on everything. The best part was that you could set your own brand on the site so the visitors could feel at home. This service was silently cancelled when WebSponsors.com became a part of ValueClick
If ValueClick will survive another 10 years they really need to create some new and innovative like the peel-off ads from adtoll.com, a community like Entrecard, integration with webmasters blog feeds, ad auctions like Project Wounderful or maybe just ad feeds like Tradedoubler. Good luck ValueClick, you really need it if you don’t start develop your technology and your services.
There are a lot of services letting you earn some money from placing links on your web site and TNX.net is one of them.
TNX lets you as a web site owner earn money from links on your web site and advertisers can buy links to their sites from sites in the same niche. What’s different from TNX and some other similar services is the point system they use instead of cash. For showing link on your site you earn points and as an advertiser you spend points which can be sold to/bought from TNX. I have to say that I don’t really like the point system . I would have preferred hard cash instead since it’s easier to understand how much you earn/spend, but one good thing is that the $ amounts are also mentioned almost everywhere.
If you’re selling link on your site you can of course spend your earned points on advertising campaigns promoting your own sites, so you don’t have to cash in your points if you don’t want to .
Something really good and surprising these days where the registration process. It was so easy it almost scared me. No CAPTCHA, no email verification link, nothing !
Webmasters
All webmasters (i.e. people wanting to earn points) have to add a special PHP or Perl code to their pages. The downside with this code is that it’s not working on all pages on your site. You need to have the possibility to run scripts. Ok, most webmasters do have that option today, but some don’t .
You can of course ad more then one site and also add the code on more then just your main page.
I wasn’t able to find any information on how popular you site must be to earn 1000 credits, but I guess this part from the advertiser FAQ will give you an idea:
What can you do with 20,000 TNX-Points?
In case website characteristics are not important (YahooBacklinks [YB] below 500, category “Fun and Games”), then you can buy a month (in case spots are available) of static links to your site:
- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites
So from one link on a PR3 page you should be able to earn 20 000 points / 100 links * ($0.78 / 1000) = $0.156 . $0.78 was taken from the “Sell points”-page and is the market value of 1 000 TNX points at 2008/04/09.
Advertisers
As an advertiser you get several options when you create your campaigns. You select category, language of the sites, Yahoo back links and Google PR on the sites you want to advertise on. What really confused me was that when I selected only one category I got 1750 links to my site for $11.20/month, but when I selected two categories I only got 1400 links for the same amount . Anyway, $11.20/month for 1750 links sounds like a good deal to me
When I signed up my account they had 15685 sites I could advertise on in 17 categories:
Affiliate program
As most advertising networks TNX got their own affiliate program where you can earn extra points by referring webmasters and advertisers. You get 13.3% of all earn credits from webmasters you refer and 5% of all payments made by referred advertisers. The affiliate program is located here.
. A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better 
, but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.
