When I wrote the tutorial the plugin was available for a one-off payment of $37. In the meantime the price has gone up to $47, which is still a very good deal! But it gets even better! For a limited time (only this month!) the plugin is available for as little as $25! Still a one-off payment, and you can use it across all blogs and websites that you own.

To get your discount, simply click on this image and use the coupon code Jan90-25. You’ll get the package at a nice discount for just $25, no strings attached. We can all use a discount in these financially challenging times, can’t we? So click that image and get the stuff (remember it’s a limited offer for January only).

P.S. Full disclosure: You can also use Jan90-30 to get it for $30 or Jan90-35 to get it for $35 bucks if you’re so inclined to Since these are obviously affiliate links, I would be very grateful for the extra bucks. But I’d go for the full discount if I were you!

P.S.S. I’ve been away from blogging on Scraping Pennies for quite a while again. I have not abandoned this blog, nor have I abandoned my other blog How to be an Original. Over the past couple of months I have been mostly offline due to the difficult pregnancy my wife is having. She’s been very sick (and slowly recovering now), but the baby is doing very well. Our little girl is due in May. Anyway, I’m back at blogging.

Profit is an illusion, cash flow is fact. ~ Unknown

As you know I work with a $200 budget to reach my goal of getting an income from online activities. One of the things I’m doing is monetizing this blog, but there are more ways I will be exploring. In the early stages though, you’ll want to focus on cash flow, no matter what tactic you’re using.

Cash Flow

Cash flow is a term that refers to the amount of cash being received and spent. It’s what you see on your bank statements. Money comes in, money goes out. Earnings and profit are not the same as cash flow. Cash flow is what happens now, earnings and profit are what might happen in the future. Earnings turn into cash flow as soon as someone pays you.

Cash flow is exactly what I’ll be focusing on when directing my energy to making money online. I want to see that cash coming in. I don’t want to see some virtual profit accumulating on some site, without the cash flow associated with it.

The fact that cash will flow out is a certainty for me. For instance, every month I need to pay my hosting. And every year I need to renew my domain registration. Both aren’t really expensive, but on a $200 budget, they nibble away the budget in a steady pace.

Using Cash Flow Characteristics

Some ad programs have several restrictions that hurt their cash flow attractiveness factor. Google Adsense for instance has a payment threshold of $100. If your earnings balance at the end of the month is below the $100, it is carried over to the next month. Month after month after month, until you finally hit the $100. When that happens, they wait another month before issuing a payment. If you’re in one of the countries that’s elligible for electronic funds transfer, it’s only a couple of days before the money hits the bank. If you’re not, you have to wait for the check to come in the mail and then wait before the bank decides to clear the check and deposit it to your bank account (while deducting their processing fee). From the point of cash flow not very attractive at all. Kontera has similar characteristics.

Other ad programs like Text Link Ads and LinkWorth offer better terms. Low or no payout limit, payments to PayPal in the week after the previous month ended. Affiliate programs like those offered at e-junkie or Web Warrior Tools show similar characteristics. From a cash flow perspective this is a lot better already.

And if you provide private ad sales, you get the money in your account instantly. This is what makes OIO Publisher so attractive to me, the money you charge for advertisements is deposited instantly in your Paypal account. This is cash flow heaven.

When you dedicate a part of the layout of your website to show ads, it’s worth checking out the payment terms for the program you intend to use. It could take many months before you actually see any money. For me it’s a deciding factor in the early stages, and it might even be in later stages as well.

I only mentioned a couple of programs in this article, but I’m working on a big list of programs, comparing their cash flow characteristics and more. Subscribe now and be among the first to know about that comparison.

Full Control from the WordPress Admin interface

OIO Publisher is a blog monetization suite, but they most notable part is the WordPress plugin. The plugin in is a full option ad manager for banners, text links, in post ads and more and comes with full PayPal integration.

OIO Publisher lets you manage all your ads right from the WordPress admin interface. And payments for the ads are integrated. Your advertisers can pay directly from your blog using PayPal. Directly on your PayPal account (no waiting for money, or waiting to hit a payout threshold) and on your terms. That’s pretty cool huh?

Of course OIO Publisher is not entirely free. To get full access to all features you have to pay a one time payment of $37. Yes, one time. And after you paid for it, you can use it on as many of your blogs as you want. Considering all the advantages OIO Publisher gives you, it’s really a steal!

Deciding to spend the money

Okay, so the cost is obvious: a one-off fee of $37 with an unlimited domain licence. For that price I get the following potential revenue streams:

• Private advertisement sales (banners, text link ads)
• Private paid review sales
• Viral Blog Ads (once launched)
• Affiliate program for OIO Publisher (50%)

That’s convincing anough for me. The fact that I have 100% control, get 100% of the revenue and get my income directly on my PayPal account are very motivating aspects. And a full integration with WordPress is a very nice feature as well. I’m convinced!

Wait there’s even more!

Not convinced yet? Well I said before that OIO is really a blog monetization suite, much more than just a plugin. To name some more options:

• Unsold ad places can be filled with default ads you can configure. You can use affiliate links on these for instance. Sign up for an account at e-junkie and browse their catalog, there are loads of great products there. Sign up as affiliate for the product, copy and paste the code and your first banner ad is up.
• Or you can let those empty spaces be filled by ViralBlogAds, an ad network associated with OIO. ViralBlogAds is in alpha testing as I write this, so that’s more of a promise than a given at this time.
• There’s a marketplace where you can list your blog. Direct advertisers to your blog to buy ads or paid posts, or let them buy directly from the marketplace.
• There’s also an affiliate manager available, so you can manage your affiliates that sell your products. OIO managed to find a solution to do that as well. This looks promising!

There’s probably more that I haven’t discovered yet, but I’ll sure be looking into the various options this program has to offer.

Take a test drive

If you still feel uneasy about it, go ahead and download the free light version of the plugin. It’s functional, but lacks support for the most popular advertisement forms. Or hop on over to the OIO Publisher site and take a look at the live demo. Both are a great way to do a test drive, but if you like it you’re going to want the real deal.

I’ll post an installation tutorial for the plugin, including the setup process for the PayPal integration later this week. So stay tuned! Subscribe to the feed to make sure you don’t miss out!

Advertiser Networks

There are several advertiser networks that will match advertisers to publishers (bloggers and other people with websites). They have the advantage that they have a bigger mass than the average blog on the internet and are able to publish advertisements to a much larger audience than a single blog can do.

They are the middle men. Now the term middle men may bring up all kinds of negative feelings, but that’s not necessary. Sure they get take a (large) cut of the advertisers paycheck, but they do provide the service of finding advertisers. Or of advertisers finding them, but that’s kind of like the same thing. Advertisers will not find you if you’re a small new blog, like Scraping Pennies is right now.

Signing up as a new blog

Last night I tried to sign-up for three rather well known advertiser networks:

Text Link Ads
Text Link Ads sells text links in several forms and shapes. As links in a sidebar, beneath a single post, in RSS feeds, or even within the content of a post. Google isn’t particularly fond of them, but advertisers are. So for Making Money Online it’s an interesting alternative.

Signing up was easy. The account was set up in a matter of minutes, but that doesn’t mean you’re taken into the inventory of publishers automatically. TLA reviews the submissions (mostly automatic I assume), and it didn’t take long (less than 24 hours) for the rejection to hit my mailbox. As a consolation I’m enrolled into the affiliate program. Yay! I’ve got a banner now.

ReviewMe
ReviewMe is a site that pays you for writing blog posts with reviews about blogs, products, books, services and more. You’ve got the liberty to choose what you review, so you can review the things you like and discard what you don’t. That is…if you’re allowed into the program

They let me fill in all the forms, and declined my application automatically and instantly. Not enough traffic and inbound links (that’s not surprising). “Try again in a few months.” Okay, that’s not nice! I understand it of course, but please let people check their eligibility before they fill out the forms! Or wait 24 hours before telling them like TLA does. That at least gives the appearance that you gave it some thought.

And why is there no affiliate program?

Kontera Content Links
Kontera provides a system that scans your content live to find words that they have advertisers for. If they find these keywords, they turn them into recognizable links. Hover over the links and a small pop-up appears with the site or product from the advertiser. If visitors click on the link inside that pop-up, you’ll get a share of the revenue.

Signing up here was easy as well. But they warn you beforehand that you need to comply with some (not so stringent) program terms. Again, I’m not admitted into the program instantly. They need to review my application. Oh boy. No answer yet, but I can guess what it will be.

UPDATE (2008-05-13): I actually got approved into the program. That was highly unexpected, but a nice surprise nevertheless!

The giants win…for now anyway

I did not expect that I would excite the advertiser networks with my new unknown, but soon to be very famous blog. I mean, they probably get a lot of applications like this on a daily basis.

The reason I applied for the networks so early was to report the experiences here. When you’re starting out as a new blog and you intend to monetize, you should focus on getting traffic and links. This little experiment just showed you why.

No traffic and no links, and they drop you like a brick. So it’s time to create some buzz around Scraping Pennies!