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Its been a month since I removed Kontera from one of my sites – 17th March to be precise. In place of Kontera I placed Infolink ads from 2st March. It’ll be almost a month and I thought it’s be great to document my transition from Kontera to Infolinks in the form of a review.So how did I discover Infolinks ?
I had joined Kontera from a very long time – ?21st Oct 2008. I thought that Kontera was the only in-text network and I really felt lucky when I was approved.
Now Kontera has minimum payout of $100 and when I passed that I thought I’d submit my payment information when I reach $200. It was a nice added income and complimented the AdSense income nicely without affecting it. It was COMPLETELY passive.But then I started checking my Kontera account regularly to predict when I’ll reach my payment threshold and it was then that I noticed that Kontera’s earnings were going downhill. I thought it might be due to recession as it had some effect on my AdSense too. But after asking a few blogger friends I came to know that these days Kontera was not showing relevant ads and their eCPM was also too low for their ad space. The eCPM that Kontera was paying me wasn’t anything close to what it did a few months ago.?
Why did I join Infolinks?
One option that constantly echoed my ear was Infolinks. Great. I thought. I atleast have an option. I applied to Infolinks on 21st of March after talking to a lot of Infolink publishers. To my surprise I got in the very next day, that is, 22nd of March. I jumped right away as I couldn’t wait adding the I Infolinks ad code and see how Infolinks fared against Kontera.
Adding the Infolinks code to my blog was EASY!
Now, Kontera has a WordPress plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs. You just drop in your publisher ID and you’re set. It was easy! I do coding but I want to keep things as simple as possible and I always prefer plug-ins over meddling with the code. But Infolinks sent their 1-minute Integration with the approval email. Its a 2-line code that is to be inserted before the closing BODY tag (?</BODY>?) in HTML.?
Infolinks 1 Minute Integration
How to Add the Infolinks code to your WordPress blog?
- Login to your WordPress blog
- Click on Appearance to expand it.?
Go to Appearance and then Editor
- Click on the Editor link
- Click on the Footer.php template file on the right?
Go to Footer
- Find the?</BODY>?and place your code before it?
Closing BODY tag
- You’re done!
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While the 1-minute Integration is the default ad settings that Infolinks provides, you can customize it to meet the needs of your users and website. For this you’ve got to login to your account. So it wasn’t difficult at all to integrate the code into your website. If your website has a template just follow the same tutorial above to integrate it. You don’t have to make any changes to your website and it is completely legit to use it with AdSense – so you can have both in-text ads as well as AdSense on the SAME site!
One thing that I like about Infolinks is that their ads load faster than Kontera ads. They also have larger inventory and target pretty long-tail keywords so the perceived relevancy increases considerably which in turn increases CTR and hence earnings! Clearly, as far as I’ve seen Infolinks beats Kontera in earnings anytime. But as of late I’ve seen some significant fluctuations in CPM rates that Infolinks is paying. I suggest Kontera to increase their inventory as well as relevancy. With Kontera my CTR was 1.5% at best and with Infolinks I’ve already reached 2% which is good considering that you receive 25% more clicks for the same traffic.
Some interesting stuff about Infolinks?
- Infolinks has NO minimum requirements! This means even if you’re launching your site today you can apply.
- They have the??Infolinks Highest Revenue Share Guarantee? -?which means more money for you!
- You can easily get approved within 24 hours.
- You can get your earnings either through PayPal or Bank Wire, the former is FREE while the cost for the latter is $25
- Almost all of my blogger friends that I know of are making a transition to Infolinks from AdBrite as well as Kontera due to high overall revenue.
Conclusion
While Kontera and other in-text advertising solutions have been great for a long time, its time to move on in favor of higher earnings for the same amount of traffic. It shouldn’t be a pain because Infolinks has the highest revenue-share guarantee and there are NO minimum requirements.
I think Infolinks will be great even if you have AdSense on your site. It won’t affect your AdSense and will only compliment your earnings. ?And if you don’t take their word for it – you can test it for yourself with this small JavaScript code that splits your impressions 50-50 for?Infolinks?and Kontera -
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var konaPercent = Math.round(Math.random()*100);
if (adPercent <= 50) {
? ? // Kontera ad block
} else {
? ? // infolink ad block
}
</script>
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1957:?The respected BBC news show?Panorama?announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop. It accompanied this announcement with footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in. Many called the BBC wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC diplomatically replied, “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
1985:?Sports Illustrated?published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the “art of the pitch” in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the “great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa.” Mets fans celebrated their teams’ amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and?Sports Illustrated?was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.
1962:?In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station’s technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular color broadcasts only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.
1996:?The Taco Bell Corporation announced it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell was housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed, a few hours later, that it was all a practical joke. The best line of the day came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale. Thinking on his feet, he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold. It would now be known, he said, as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
1977:?The British newspaper?The Guardian?published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The?Guardian‘s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer’s terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.
1992:?National Public Radio’s?Talk of the Nation?program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, “I didn’t do anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.” Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon’s voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.
1998:?The April 1998 issue of the?New Mexicans for Science and Reason?newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0. Soon the article made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly spread around the world, forwarded by email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by physicist Mark Boslough.
1998:?Burger King published a full page advertisement in?USA Today?announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”
1995:?Discover?Magazine reported that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had found a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin,” the article quoted her as saying.?Discover?received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.
1976:?The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
