Can you believe this? A company that I’ve been doing a little internet work for over the last two years or so just discovered that they’ve been overpaying me by about $80 since FEBRUARY! Now I either have to pay them back to the tune of about $500 or do a ton of extra work for them to pay off my debt.

What kind of company doesn’t notice that they have a glitch in their payment system for over 6 months?

A few months ago when I noticed that my payments had increased I wondered what was up, but the site that I do work for them on had increased in rank and popularity so I thought I’d just had a pay increase. Unfortunately their system is kind of hard to get into and it’s difficult to see just how they pay for different tasks. So I don’t consider this my fault although I guess in hindsight I should have thought to question them about the payments.

This totally sucks. I hope that the extra stuff I’m going to have to do to pay off the debt doesn’t ruin my site! Argh!

BTW I’m purposely not mentioning the company name as it’s against their TOS and well I don’t want to suffer a slap from the internet gods - even though it’s not this site that is involved in the glitch.

Widgetbucks has again updated their program policy in regard to sites with a good mix of international visitors. In an email sent out earlier today to all of their members they stated:

International CPM Ads

Here’s an upcoming feature. In early December, we will start serving CPM ads to the non-U.S./Canada traffic. This will give you revenue, per impression, for your site visitors who come from other countries. This is designed to help publishers who have a blend of traffic from a variety of countries.

Our system will do the geo-location for you, determining where the visitor is coming from. Then we’ll either show the regular pay-per-click widget (to visitors from the U.S. and Canada) or show an ad that pays per impression (to visitors from other countries). You’ll see a new column, called “CPM Revenue” in your earnings reports.

So it appears that they listened to the concerns or more likely complaints of those who have a good portion of their traffic from non US or Canadian visitors and implemented this new CPM ad system.

Now hopefully they’ll do something about their widget slowing the loading of a site. I had, had Widgetbucks on my main blog Tricia’s Musings, but I only had it up for a few days before I removed it. It didn’t severely slow my page loads but I found that it didn’t load until you reached the portion of the page that the widget was located on and if you were trying to scroll past that point you had to wait until it finished loading. I didn’t like that.

On that site I had the widget code in the middle of my sidebar. I have ads near the top of my sidebars that I can’t move due to my TOS agreement with those companies. I do believe that Widgetbucks probably does best when it’s near the top of a sidebar and loads when the page is first visited. At least it wouldn’t impede a visitors ability to scroll a page if it was near the top and already loaded.

I’ve decided to try Widgetbucks on this site and a few of my other sites again to see what happens.

I’m very behind in posting on this site about all the wonderful things that I came across at Blogworld and Postiecon. I’ve been very sick - actually even before I left for Vegas my Crohn’s flared up and it got worse while I was there. Bummer! I missed a lot, but what I did manage to take in was great. I’ve actually just written about a new application called Triggit on my other site WebStyle. You might be interested in signing up for Triggit as you can add Amazon and CJ links on the fly as well as Flicker and Youtube to your posts.

What I wanted to talk about today is Widgetbucks. I’ve just finally gotten around to signing up and from what I hear that’s a good thing because sometime over the next week they won’t be as open about letting just anyone sign up.

I decided to try Widgetbucks on my main blog Tricia’s Musings in the middle right sidebar. It’s very easy to sign up (right now) and create a widget to place on your site. All you need to do is select which category your site falls into, and pick whatever keywords you’d like to have Widgetbucks use to display products from Mpire on your site and tada … you have widget code to place in your blogs sidebar.

I didn’t realize this, but right now they have a signup bonus that puts $25 into your account when you register. Since the payout minimum is $50 this means that just by signing up for Widgetbucks you’re already closer to getting your first payment.

Unfortunately Widgetbucks is changing it’s algorithm and I believe as of this week they will only be counting clicks from US and Canadian visitors. For bloggers who’s majority of site visitors are Canadian or American this won’t make a huge difference in income, however those who have a high percentage of site visitors from other countries the clicks won’t count.

As a result I probably won’t add Widgetbucks to this site. I just looked at my recent stats and only 54% of my visitors are from the US and Canada. Actually all my blogs have quite an international audience. The stats for my main blog which I thought had mainly North American visitors shows that of my recent visitors only 68% are from the US and Canada. Now if Widgetbucks would include visitors from the UK I’d have closer to 80% of my visitors clicks count.

So the moral of this story is that Widgetbucks can certainly help you monetize your blog quickly and easily but those with mainly US and Canadian audiences will do best. Still, if you want that initial $25 sign up now!

I’ve been using AuctionAds on my blogs pretty much since Auction ads started up in March, 2007.

Do you see the widget in my left sidebar? About a third of the way down? There’s photo’s of items and it says “Current Bid $” below them? Well that’s how I’m using AuctionAds on this site.

You can create vertical or horizontal widgets to use on your site. You can use them in posts, pages or in your sidebars if you’d like. It’s very easy. Plus, once you sign up you not only instantly get $25 added to your account immediately, but you are also automatically entered into their referral program so that anyone that signs up via your link gains you a referral.
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Hey did you hear that Amazon has created new and easy to use widgets? I love them!

There are several types of Amazon widgets that you can configure for your site so that you can feature various products or product categories in your sidebar or on your pages. It literally takes one minute to set up a new widget for your site.

Amazon announced their new widgets on the 21st of September, but I’d discovered them and had started playing around with them the day before they were publically released.

You can select colors, the layout and or theme to match your website.

Amazon affiliates will earn referral fees of up to 10% on these new widgets.

There are 6 new widgets - Slideshow, My Favorites, Quick Linker, Wish List, Product Cloud, and the Amazon Unbox Video Previewer.

Go explore the new widgets. They should be easy to find in the left sidebar of your affiliate dashboard.

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