whydowork.com

In case you haven’t noticed, I removed ProjectWonderful from my sidebar today. I have had no luck with it after using it for over one month. Moveover, I think that the revenue generated given the space and position it occupied was not worth it.

For 1 month, the three ProjectWonderful 125X125 banners only earned over $25. That’s a little over the price of one 125X125 banner advertisement on my blog. I also noticed that the highest bid price I got so far was only $0.80 and the lowest was $0.02. The huge range and price deviation occur because the price paid by advertisers depend on the number of bid (demand) and how much bidders are willing to pay. So even if you have a high traffic site when there are no advertisers bidding, your earnings will remain low.

Another reason why ProjectWonderful isn’t wonderful at all and why I took it off my blog today is because of the off-topic advertisements frequently shown on my blog. I know that Project Wonderful allows you to filter advertisements and approve only those that fit your blog’s topic but this means additional work to the blogger and lesser opportunity to monetize your blog. The earnings are just too meager that when you consider the time and efforts you put to keep advertisements relevant to your content, it’s not just worth it.

Other than the meager earning and the irrelevant advertisements, another reason why I took off ProjectWonderful from my blog is because it slowed the load time of my sidebar. This caused the advertisements and links below it to load very slow as well. As a result, my click through rate (Google Adsense) and page view (Links to other posts) are also adversely affected.

Lastly, since Project Wonderful requires you to install a script, it does not only slows your blog’s load time but it makes your blog not search engine friendly. If you’re considering optimizing your blog for search engines to get more of pages indexed in their seach result and increase your traffic, then you should minimize using scripts. By removing the long script of Project Wonderful, I am able to optimize my blog for search engines and give their crawlers an easier job.

To be fair, there are other websites like Entrecard.com that are making some decent revenue from Project Wonderful. Entrecard.com receives over $300 every month from Project Wonderful. I personally believe though that Entrecard.com can make more money from the space and position occupied by Project Wonderful.

What about your experience? Any luck so far? I’d love to know why you are keeping Project Wonderful despite the meager income you generate from it.

Thank you for your time.

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As the number of entrepreneurs venturing online increases, branding becomes an important element to become successful. What better way can you build your own brand and identity than by having your own distinct web design including your logo, banner and template. You can choose to pay a hefty amount of money to design firms or run your own design contest and pick the best design from various entries at an affordable price. This is where GFXContests comes into the picture.

What is GFXContests.com?

GFXContests.com is a useful service that helps connect designers to those in need of freelance design work. Utilizing a contest format you can get a logo, website, forum skin, or just about any other graphic design project done quickly and professionally at a lower cost compared to traditional design firms. The contest approach will better ensure that you get the best design considering that several talented graphic designers will compete to win. When you decide to pay for a design company, you don’t only pay their expensive prices but you are also left with fewer design options.

How Does GFXContests Works?

For people looking for designs, you need to create a contest at GFXContests.com to start receiving entries from different graphic designers. To do so, you will have to register an account and buy either a one month subscription for $10 or a six month subscription for $30. Other similar services will require you to pay everytime you start a new contest but with GFXContests, you can create unlimited contest within the duration of your subscription.

The six month subscription option is most cost effective for members who plan to host multiple contests over a long period of time while the one month subscription option is most cost effective for members who might only host a few contests over a one month period.

Read the Guidelines For Contest Holders for a complete detail on running your contest at GFXContests.com. The policies on the contest guidelines were designed to help contest holders successfully conduct contests and to protect the interests of all parties involved. You must abide by the following rules or risk having your contest or user account removed.

Why Choose GFXContests.com?

1. Cheaper cost. No commission charges.
2. Great number of competent, experienced and talented graphic designers.
3. Wide variety of design to choose from. Different concepts and ideas from different designers.
4. Host unlimited design contests.
5. Active and helpful community of graphic designers. You will certainly get entries from members.

Take a look at these threads for examples of design contests.

• LOGO - Corporate Logo For A New Software Company
• PRINT - Brochure Redesign For An Equipment Leasing Company
• TEMPLATE - Uncoded Website Design and Logo Revamp

You can find more examples at GFXContests.com. 
Thank you for your time.

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Google’s latest page rank update left Blogging Mix with a BIG FAT ZERO PR! I am both guilty of doing sponsored posts and selling text link ads so this is something I was expecting to happen. What I didn’t expect is the sharp decline of offers to do sponsored reviews from advertisers.

When Blogging Mix was still a PR-4, offers to do sponsored post was abundant. I rejected about 60% percent of them because they are not relevant to blogging or because their offer was less than the minimum fee I charge for a review. After the page rank update, I only receive about 3-5 direct requests from advertisers to do a sponsored review. Most of my bids at SponsoredReviews have also been rejected, mainly because of issues concerning my page rank.

What Advertisers Need To Know About Google Page Rank

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.” - Google

From the explanation given by Google, it is clear that Google ranks PAGES of a website not the website as a whole. Therefore, my homepage (www.bloggingmix.com) can have a different page rank to the other pages of my blog (i.e. www.bloggingmix.com/advertise/).

I understand the importance of Google Page Rank to advertisers opting for text link ads at the homepage of a blog but I don’t see any reason why advertisers using sponsored posts as their marketing strategy should put so much emphasis on Google Page Rank.

For a start, bloggers use a new page of their blog to do the review. This means, the new page does not have a page rank yet. Assuming that links on a sponsored post were made dofollow, there’s little juice that advertisers get from them.

What’s Really Important In A Sponsored Review That Advertisers Should Look For

Although Sponsored Reviews can be used for Search Engine Optimization, it works best as a tool to improve an advertiser’s blog traffic and sales. Moreover, Sponsored Reviews as a way of search engine optimization is not in accordance to the policies prescribed by Google. This has resulted to Google taking action against publishers selling links by taking away their page rank or by excluding them from Google’s result page. That’s not all, Google is also hunting down advertisers who are engaged in buying links to boost their search engine rankings. This explains why most advertisers nowadays require non-disclosure of sponsored reviews done for them.

If you take Google page rank out of the equation, what’s really important in a sponsored review are traffic, conversion rate and feedback. Therefore, when using sponsored posts as a marketing strategy, advertisers should look for blogs -

• With good traffic - Alexa Traffic Rank is a useful tool to provide you an estimate of the traffic detail of a certain blog. You can also directly request for copies or screen shots of the statistics of the blog you wish to sponsor a post from.
• That are relevant to their products - Advertisers need to make sure that the blogs doing the sponsored review is relevant to their products. An advertiser promoting hosting services is most likely to sell more when a blogging related blog does the review compared to when it’s done by a dating related blog.
• With credible bloggers - Advertisers should choose bloggers that are authority in a niche or have provided useful criticisms and suggestions to other advertisers. These bloggers are also potential clients and so their opinions about a product are valuable information that allows advertisers to improve their products.

After reading this post, do you think that Google Page Rank is still an important element to consider when using sponsored review as a marketing strategy?

Thank you for your time.

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Still looking for more review sites that will pay you to blog? Check out one of my latest finds - SnapBomb.

What is SnapBomb?

SnapBomb is a place where Advertisers and Bloggers meet. It is another review site that presents opportunities for Advertisers to generate buzz for their latest products, increase traffic to their websites, get helpful feedback from publishers and improve their search engine ranking. Bloggers, on the other hand, are given the opportunity to make more money from their blog by reviewing available products at SnapBomb.

For Bloggers

To be able to accept review opportunities, you will have to create an account and add a blog. Once you have submitted your blog’s URL, SnapBomb automatically calculates the value of your blog based on  its popularity, expertise in a field, audience size and reach. Your blog’s value will be shown minutes after registration. To show an accurate measurement of the value of your blog to advertisers, SnapBomb keeps their database updated on a daily basis.

It will take you about 4 minutes to finish your registration and right after you’re done, a list of opportunities will be made available to you. You can access it from your dashboard.

SnapBomb gives freedom to their publishers to write their own opinions about the product they review as long as it pertains to the the advertiser’s topic and campaign description. SnapBomb recommends but does not require their publishers to disclose that they are writing a sponsored post. This is favorable to publishers who are “Page Rank” conscious and who would want to keep themselve away from Google’s radar.

SnapBomb pays their publishers on the 1st and the 16th of each month through Paypal or Check. However, a minimum payout of 25$ is needed before payment can be sent out. For more information, kindly refer to SnapBomb’s FAQ.

For Advertisers

Here are a few things SnapBomb can do to help you with your online business.

• Create buzz and promote your company, events, web site, products or services all over the webs millions of blogs.
• Give your content increased visibility and gain valuable backlinks to your site.
• Get excellent feedback on your products and services.
• Create buzz and drive more people to your website.
• Allows you to target specific types of customers getting more value out of your advertising dollar.
• Help improve your business revenue.

To avail of these services, you will have to create an account with SnapBomb. After registration you can start creating your message for your website, product review and press release. SnapBomb will then match your message with bloggers expert in the category. After your message has been offered to relevant bloggers, those who support and believe in your product can start accepting the opportunity.

Advertisers can also avail of the free buzz analytics, which will give them insight into their buzz activity across the entire Internet (i.e. How good is their buzz? How do they stack up against their competitors?). You can read the Advertiser’s FAQ for more details.

That’s it for today. Thank you for your time. I hope your found this post useful. Good luck to your blog monetization.

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