Some things i learned from them is all about SEO and how to gain more traffic through search engines. With that, i enjoyed the benefits brought about by the traffic towards my blog. And with the things i learned about SEO, i also shared some SEO tips that will help improve a newly established blog.

Inspired by my recent post on How Young is Too Young?, I was contacted by 16-year-old blogger Onibalusi Bamidele who has guest-written this post. There is a…

So far, i did not earn from it because my traffic is approx. 500 a day. I can’t monetize my blog thru adsense because i was banned in the early stage of this blog.

I also realized that having a custom domain name is a must for a blog. That’s why i moved my blog to custom domain. I like my domain name without blogspot in its tail.

Today, I came across a blog that uses Kontera. I saw the word “babies” highlighted, and when I moused over, it was an ad for Desitin. Maybe that’s somewhat contextual, but when I think of babies, I’d like to think of fun and smiling and giggles and cries — not diaper rash. The same mouseover was generated for “infants” and “birth.” Again, diaper rash? Who even will CLICK on that?

I just don’t see this being useful, and for me, it was definitely intrusive. If I see a “link,” which this appears to be, I want to click on it (or mouseover it ONLY to see the URL it would be going to), not see a pop-up ad that I can’t make the educated decision to ignore.

I like the point that was made about being patient. I think if you were to interview each of those powerhouse bloggers one on one, you would discover that they all kept plugging away methodically with mediocre results until one day, one particular post got noticed. Then the whole thing started to steamroll from there. On that day, something special happened with their one little blog post. It got noticed by the right people. Then wham! All the traffic they could have ever wanted started funneling into their pages like water onto the rocks at the bottom of Niagara Falls. That one little spark ignited a smoldering fire which eventually grew to what they are today.

Actually, Kontera does have a lot of successful blogs on the network – techspot.com, macnn.com, & topspeed.com are some examples that come to mind. Kontera is the biggest In-Text network with over 15,000 publishers and 140 million unique users per month, and that includes everything from major sites like FoxNews.com and MensHealth.com to smaller sites that just generate a couple hundred impressions per day.

Tamar, regarding your feelings that In-Text ads are irritating, I realize that no form of advertising will ever be 100% embraced. However, comScore, the leading internet marketing research firm recently did a study on Kontera In-Text ads and found among other things, that we’re actually one of the least disruptive ad formats. Only 33% of found Kontera ad to be “very intrusive” compared to 63% for Interstitial ads, 53% for Video ads, 40% for Rectangle ads, and 29% for Banners.

If you factor in the “banner blindness” issue I mentioned earlier, Kontera’s performance is even more impressive, as people aren’t bothered by banner ads because they flat out don’t see them.

You can see the full results of the comScore study here: http://www.kontera.com/advertisers/research-results

The reason Kontera performed so well in the study is because In-Text is the only type of internet ad platform that’s 100% user initiated, meaning only readers who are actively curious scroll over the highlighted keyword even see any ad at all. I realize that occasionally someone will scroll over them accidently or not realize that it’s an ad, but unlike some of our competitors we always make sure our ads are double underlined, as to not confuse them with other kinds of links. By and large, the vast majority of people who see Kontera ads really want to see our ads, and our interested in the products of our premium advertisers.

Anyway, thanks both of you, for your thoughtful conversation on the issue.

Best Regards,

- Jonathan Cohen
Kontera Community Manager
Jonathanc@kontera.com