Chitika — All Malls, More Money

19.4 Chitika — All Malls, More Money

Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page.

You will notice the difference in your revenues though.

Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eye-catching and attractive

Fig. 19.4 Chitika’s eMiniMalls. Smile!

The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image.

Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself.

That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.

Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads

together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together.

One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too.

You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.

Fig. 19.5 Darren Rowse’s photography blog shows the way to mix AdSense with eMiniMalls.

In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad.

Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.

If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase.

If you don’t qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages.

These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.

I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.

Fig. 19.6 Chitika’s ShopCloud$ offer a new way of earning for clicks.

Want to get signed with Chitika? Easy! http://www.adsensesecrets.com/chitika.html

All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income.

Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...