Social Spark is one of the newer affiliate marketing website. They just re-designed the website and have a lot more offers.? Some of the unique features of Social Spark are:

• It is created just for bloggers.
• They offer products to promote that I can actually see myself promoting.
• Bloggers are required to make in-post disclosure of all affiliate links.

Their offers include items like personalized flash drives:

Or bring new users to SocialSpark:

I am very excited about Social Spark and will definitely be working with them starting immediately. Other bloggers that have joined SocialSpark are Shoemoeny, Neil Patel, and Chris Brogan.

Jalbum is a picture gallery managing software that allows you manage your photos on your computer.?? It also allows you to publish them online on your website. I learned about it and used it first on the Iranian Club website that I created a while ago.

Background: Previously, I also owned a wallpapers website which was making about? $600/month from Adsense. I sold it for close to $9k as I wanted to move into affiliate marketing business and growing my other websites. Another reason was that as much as I tried to comply with Google policy, some of the wallpapers were questionable. Anyways,? I sold it. The new owner has taken a new approach with the website which I would have never done which is the reason? I won’t post a link to the website.

Back to Topic: I had hand coded my previous wallpapers website. Now I think I have found a new very easy-to-use software to do the just that: Jalbum. I’m using it to create a wallpapers website and put one or two Adsense codes on it.

I will make it mostly movie wallapers and things like Simpsons wallpapers, and Windows XP wallpapers.? However the main challenge is not to make the website but to bring 10k uniques or more visitors to the website.

As webmasters, we constantly like to improve our websites; offer more features, upgrade to web2.0 design, put new content and improve the current ones. When do we say enough? When do we stop improving the site itself and start marketing it? These improvements cost money and there has to be a justification for it.

I believe for smaller websites (50k uniques/month or less) money well spent on marketing can bring much more revenue than the same amount spent on improving the features of the website. This is not to be mistaken for not investing on the website itself.

We need to set certain standards for our websites and make sure they are improved to such standards. We should not spent $1000 on marketing a website when the website doesn’t even have a unique design.

We have see many websites out there that look beautiful and work great but have little traffic and users. We also have seen many MFA (made for Adsense) sites with very bad designs that make large amounts of money.

Improve your site to a presentable level and start marketing. Make sure to market your websites to the type of visitors that it targets and can keep. If you have a Forex blog for Forex beginners market it on smaller finance forums and not on popular investing blogs or forums. Your money will be a waste as your website can not keep those visitors. It works the other way around too. If your website provides sophisticated advice, beginners wont be able to keep up so don’t market to them (even though it probably costs less).

The point that I hope you learn from this post is this:

If you own a website that is of a level 4 (out of 10) quality, it is perfectly fine. Invest money to market that website to level 4 visitors instead of improve the website to level 8. Once the website reaches level 8 you still need to spent money in marketing it before seeing true investment return - and level 8 marketing costs a lot more than level 4 marketing. So first market the level 4 website. Improve your earning from the site. Then invest on improving the quality of the website to level 5 or 6 and so on.

This way you won’t run out of cash when needing to market the website. If you do, you just might have to sell the website for much less than it is truely worth and we never want that.

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.

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.