When John Chow provided an offer that allowed many smaller blogs to receive approval for an account with Kontera, I naturally jumped at the chance to add another potential revenue stream to my toolbox.
Initially, I submitted a request to add Kontera ads to my personal finance blog and was approved immediately. Shortly after receiving approval for that site, I decided to add this site to my account and opened the door to monetization on this site.
Is Kontera Right For Your Blog?
As you will likely notice, Kontera is no longer running on this site and that is because I just wasn’t seeing any results. In the time I had the ad code installed, I was receiving impressions but there were not any clicks.
However, my personal finance blog has a more focused niche topic and the Kontera ads are converting fairly well on that blog. While it isn’t anything to get too excited about just yet, it has provided another source of earnings that can continue to grow. So why is Kontera converting on my personal finance blog but not this blog?
Two Keys To Kontera Success
In my opinion, the reason that my personal finance blog has had success with Kontera while this site has not seen a single click can be summarized by my two keys to earning income via Kontera:
- Niche Blogs: It seems that you are more likely to receive Kontera conversions when your blog has a more focused topic or niche. My personal finance site deals with tips and advice on how to eliminate debt and become financially independent, whereas this site bounces around with a little less focus and contains a wider variety of topics.
With a specific niche blog, it appears that Kontera performs better as the keywords that are selected seem to be more relevant to the focus of the site. When the focus of your blog is more random, Kontera still does a good job of selecting keywords but the consistency does not present itself from post to post.
- Type of Audience: Closely related to the focus of your blog, I believe another large factor that will determine your success with Kontera is the type of audience that visits your blog.
This site has an audience that is mainly made up of other bloggers that simply enjoy blogging and are looking to build a community, as well as learning how to make money online to become a Dot Com Mogul. Unfortunately, this type of audience often looks right past the advertising on a blog and focuses on the content and dialog with comments. For purposes of blogging, that is fantastic but for purposes of making money it is not.
My other site has an audience that is typically looking for a particular subset of information. Given the more focused topic on that site, readers often arrive at my site with the intent to read and/or learn about specific subjects. The Kontera ads play into that focus nicely as the ads are often displayed on words that are relevant to the information the user is looking to find.
Before adding Kontera to your site, think about the type of audience that is most common at your blog. The reason behind why people are visiting your site will go a long way towards determining how successful you will be with Kontera.
Should You Install Kontera?
In the end, I would recommend that you give Kontera a trial run on your blog even if you may not have a focused niche blog or your audience may not be suited to clicking on advertisements. However, just be prepared that you are likely to find more success if you satisfy the two keys that I have described above.
Through my experiementation with Kontera on both of my blogs, I’ve learned that it does not seem to be a good fit for this blog but has been steadily growing on my personal finance blog.
Kontera can be a very powerful tool in your blogging toolbox, just be sure to evaluate whether it is the right tool for the job.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for the tip. I’m strictly adsense myself. But, as Wendy said (I came from Wendy’s blog), we all need to diversify..
Great post!
Thanks for stopping by via Wendy’s blog and for the kind comment!
AdSense has been my main earner on my PF blog as well but Kontera is starting to fit in there nicely. With proper diversification, you can really start to increase your earnings.
I agree that a niche blog will most likely give you a better Kontera result. Still, I have it up in my ‘random’ blog just cuz it doesn’t really bother anybody (I have it blended in using the same color as regular text) so why not have it up?
Kelly, you’re right that it doesn’t really hurt anything to keep the Kontera up. However, I just realized it wasn’t going to do much here (at least not right now) so I removed the ad code.
I’ve yet to read much about how Kontera determines price per click but I didn’t want to risk having the impressions from this site impact the earnings on my PF blog.
Have you had much success with Kontera on your site?
Hi Derek! I had been wondering about Kontera for my own blog, but I noticed others were not too overwhelmed by it!!
However, I think it falls into your two categories, so I’ll give it a trial run and see how it goes! Thanks!
Melanie, FWIW I certainly think your site would be well suited for Kontera ads. Given the focus of your site, I think you should be able to generate a nice CTR.
It doesn’t hurt to give it a try, just be sure to monitor your traffic before implementing it and after. That way you can watch to see if it impacts the number of visitors as well as how many of them are actually clicking the ads.
I’m not even sure how I got here. But Kontera post was near and dear to my heart.
I’ve had the Kontera ads from the very first day John Chow arranged them for us (small publishers). And they were losing money for me. The day I installed Kontera my AdSense and Chitika CTR went down significantly. And I estimate that I lost $100+ in April due to Kontera. So I dropped them at the end of April and was ready to make a post why.
Until I received the enquiry from Kontera asking why I dropped them. I told them about all the reasons and the way I feel they can remedy them…. And they complied to get ne back …. Now I can have their ad open in a new window and they semi promised increased CPC.
So I learned one thing from this story. If you’re unhappy. Tell people about it!
Staska, thanks for sharing your feedback on Kontera. That is good to know that they took the time to request your feedback and have worked with you to make the situation better.
The use of Kontera hasn’t really had an impact on my AdSense earnings so far, although I am nowhere near the level of $100+ per month to even lose yet. 😉
Wow, I’m impressed with that story – it’s so true, people can’t improve the problem unless they know about it!
i agree with you. it appears you need to write about
credit cards, real estate, make money online, burn fats and craps to get good paying ads both this includes all contextual ads including google, yahoo and oh yes, this one kontera! so, i guess, everyone should start blogging on those topics where the money lies!
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