As you know, I started using Chitika to monetize my blog about a week ago and promised a review after leaving on the blog for a while.

If you haevn’t noticed yet, I have taken the Chitika script out of the blog. It was not successful on this blog. There were couple major problems with it and it was making enough revenue to compensate for those problems.

In the entire 9 days that I had Chitika on the blog, I made $1.66 which is about $0.18 a day - Not good. I make better than that (about $1 a day) from adsense.

My blog might make more money with Chitika when I will have more posts and visitors (obviously), but there were major problems with Chitika. Mainly the fact that it considerably slowed the website down. Pages were loading 3 or 4 times slower when Chitika was running and that alone will deter my visitors and subscribers. The ads were not exactly user friendly either. I would consider those pop-up boxes (when hovering over links) on other websites annoying. I expect nothing less from my visitors either.

So long story short, Chitika is not what I am going to use to monetize Nima Heydarian blog. However, this doesn’t mean Chitika can’t work on any websites. I have seen screen shots of over $100 a day revenue.

One of the first directories that I started was Nima Directory. It uses phpLD and has a custom made template. I spent decent deal of money and time improving and marketing it.

In the beginning it returned the investment very good. At one point it went up to Pagerank 4 and was makeking close to $1000 a month on it. However, similar to many other directories Nima Directory was dropped by Google. Almsot all of its pages were (and are) listed on Google. However it did not rank for the term “Nima Directory“. Google also dropped the directorie’s pagerank to zero.

This act of Google was widely assumed to be a penalty for rapid link building (sponsoring many templates, buying many sitewide links, etc). It was during the same time that Google started penalizing websites for selling or buying text links.

After Nima Directory lost it’s position and some rankings I stopped working on it much. I was really hoping that Google would take the penalties away after a short time and I would be able to get the directory back to it’s good position. That has not happened yet!

So I decided to test what I had seen some of my friend do. I redirected NimaDirectory.com to NimaDirectory.net. I don’t expect my Pagerank 4 and full Google ranking to come back before next Google update. However I do expect to be able to start building the ranking without the penalty affecting it.

Right now Nima Directory has a free submission option which also offers deep links too. This will be the case until there are 1000 listings on there - so take advantage of it while it lasts.

I will post updates on this matter as time goes on as to whether this strategy was successful or not. Feel free to post your comments or experiences in this matter as well.

I just purchased / revewed some domains on Goddady. I found a coupon code to get 10% so I thought to share it with you guys. Here it is:

Godaddy 10% Coupon: “OYH1″

Yesterday I was looking around the internet for ways to monetize my blog. I came across Chitika. They are a fairly large advertising network for advertisers and publishers. I filled an application and received the acceptance email today.

So I’m in -  and as you can see I am using Chitika on this blog now. Chitika pays Paid Per Click (PPC). Once you put one of the ad scripts on your website, it will show relevant ads / text ads and if a visitors click on those, you get paid based on how valuable the clicked keyword was. The interesting thing about Chitika is taht it can integrate into your website without having to show seperate ad boxes for it.

There are 6 different options for how you can integrate Chitika into your web pages.

1- Search Engine Chitika Premium:

It provides a search box on your web page and user can search for what they are looking (on the web) without leaving your website: Here is an example of how it works.  This to me seems like a good option for a search box in directories.

2- eMiniMalls:

Direct product promotion. A box which the a relevant product to your web page’s content will show up. Here is an example of it. I don’t like this option much as it makes the web page look bad and primitive.

3- Multiple Product Units:

Simple the same as eMiniMalls with just more products. Here is the Multiple Product Units example.

4- Linx:

Linx is what you see on my blog. The script automatically detects targeted keywords in the content of the web page and hyperlinks them. Once a user hovers over the link a box with more information about the product appears. If the users click on the products link the publisher gets paid.

5- Whitespace Ad:

As the name implies, the ad will appear in the white space of the page.  This ads only show whenever large whitespace appears when viewing your site on high resolution monitors. When visitors click on the ads, the publisher earns money. Here sare some screenshots of how it would look like.

6- Chitika For Parked Domains:

Used for advertising on parked domains. Here is the example of it.

I will post updates of how succesful Chitika is on my blog and any pros and cons that I find out about it. One thing that I have noticed already is the fact that my web pages take longer to load. So that is one negative side to it.

I just added 3 new great plugins to the blog. I have also added them to my Wordpress Plugins on This Blog post.

Here are the three new wordpress plugins:

1 - Related Posts Plugin: This is a great plugin that works out of box and doesn’t require you to edit yout tempalte. There are a lot of related posts plugins out there but I found this one through Matt Cutts blog.

2- Wordpress Stats

3- Sociable: Shows bookmarking links below each post.