Andy Coates Blog

Lately I have noticed the amount of keywords which has been linked to in my text by Kontera has been coming less and less. If you don't know what Kontera is here is a quick rundown. Kontera is a contextual advertising program which once you have signed up and embedded the code in your blog certain advert relevant keywords are double underlined by Kontera. Each time someone clicks on one of these links you are paid a few cents for the click and advertising on your blog.

Earnings from Kontera hasn't been great when you compare it to the amount of traffic my blog has been getting, Adsense earnings have slowly being going up whilst Kontera earnings have been quite frankly mediocre. Looking around the blogosphere I've seen a few posts popping up now and again about Kontera and the low earnings compared to other schemes. There could be several reasons for the slow decline in the number of links being displayed, advertisers drying up, different algorithms being used or even not being able match keywords to content but I guess its impossible to know we can only speculate. Ive used Kontera for just over a month and have mad money from it from day one but now after my traffic has more than doubled I am still earning the same amount per day now as I was a month ago, go figure!

Amazon to the rescue?

Recently Amazon have begun their own contextual linking advertising scheme, the implementation works exactly the same as Kontera by adding a piece of code into your script and it links keywords to products. The main difference is Amazon's scheme is a pay per action program meaning you will only earn money if a reader actually buys something form Amazon through one of your links. This is great for product review sites but probably not for your average blog though next time I do review a product I may implement it and see how it go as I already link to products manually through amazon associates. Just for experimentation purposes I'm going to use the Amazon Context links code in this post to see how it looks (dashed underlined links) and to make sure it works OK as there has been talk of teething problems with the script.

Alternative to Kontera?

Doing a quick search for Kontera alternatives brings up a paradox of results, when I do a Google search for "Kontera alternatives" the alternative which comes up in the results is Kontera, lol! There are alternatives on the market such as Intellitext which i have just signed up for and will hopeful be trying out in the next few days so I have something to compare Kontera with. Intellitext is not the only alternative and I'll be looking more in depth at the others next week, until then watch this space!

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to buy me a gingerbread late! mmmm!