Of all the other methods you can make money from with your blog, lead generation may be the most promising. This is an especially true if the market your blog is in is related to anything financial. Mortage and refinance leads are especially good, as they bring in tiered commissions. Your first commission will come when you generate the initial lead – which will simple entail getting someone to fill out a completely free form; this lead will earn you anywhere from $3 to $12. If this lead then goes on to refinance her home with the company in question, you could earn a windfall of several hundreds or several thousands of dollars.

The other methods you can make money from with your blog include affiliate marketing and newsletter subscriptions. Affiliate marketing generally consists of either directly signing up as an affiliate through someone’s website – or signing up as an affiliate through a third party. You will then use your blog to market this person’s products for a share of the total price. If you sell information products from Click Bank or Commission Junction, you can earn as much as 75% per sale; however, if you sell physical products, such as chairs and tables from Link Share retailers, such as Wal Mart, you will earn a 7-15% commission at best.

If these other methods you can make money from don’t sound appealing, you can always consider newsletter subscriptions. You can create an opt-in page or a “squeeze page” on your blog and offer a trial subscription to your newsletter. If you provide quality content and promote your blog, you could end up with hundreds of subscribers over time.

Other methods you can make money from on your blog include selling advertising space directly and selling site memberships that allow visitors to access certain server-side tools.

Google, Search Engines Leading the Way

Chitika broke down the top 65 referral sites across their network for seven days in September, and compared the results to the same data from seven days in July. Unsurprisingly, in September Google leads the world with 76.13% of all referrals, followed by Yahoo! (7.34%), Bing (5.20%), AOL (1.24%) and Ask (0.84%) in that order. As a genre, search engines as a whole encompassed 97.82% of all referrals, and search engines accounted for all of the top 5 individual sources.

Social Media Far Behind, Led by StumbleUpon

The top non-search referrer is StumbleUpon, classified in this study as a social network, with 0.27% of all referrals. Facebook, arguably the highest-profile social network, ranked 17th in September with 0.06%. Microblogging social network Twitter came in at 47th in with 0.02%. Social networks accounted for 0.55% of all referrals, less than the #5 search engine Ask.com sent by itself.

Changes Over Time: Bing Dropping, Twitterers Become Link-Blind

Looking at September’s numbers vs. July, it appears that several interesting things are happening: for one, Twitter users appear to be becoming link-blind. Since July, Twitter has plummeted from 24th on the list with 0.05% of referrals to its current spot, 44th, with 0.02%. At the same time, Microsoft’s much-heralded decision engine Bing has lost market share, both overall and within the search engine ecosystem. Bing in July held 5.84% of all referrals (6.35% of the search engine market). In September, that number has dropped to 5.20% overall (5.68% of search engine traffic).

As for genres of incoming links, between July and September search has seen a minor increase in its dominance, while social media has increased its share of referrals from 0.47% to 0.55%. The increases seem to have come at the expense of traffic from video sites and Internet Service Providers, both of which saw their share drop.

In all, it would appear that while social media is increasing in its ability to generate outbound traffic, those increases are not at the expense of search engines, which continue to increase their referral dominance.

Source: Chitika, Inc.

For graphs and supporting data visit: http://chitika.com/research/

Of the 92 million impressions cited in the study, approximately 1.3 million (1.5%) came from mobile browsing. While non-mobile held steady with a 0.83% clickthrough rate, mobile as a whole pulled a mere 0.48% – just over half of the average. While the recent growth in ‘smartphones’ has sparked a renewed interest in mobile advertising, it appears given the numbers that mobile Internet users are not receptive to advertising – a phenomenon that is not surprising, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions.

Of the five major smartphone operating systems – Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Palm OS, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry – iPhone ranked the worst for clickthrough rate at a dismal 0.30%. iPhone also accounted for the bulk of mobile hits, at 66%. The group which clicked on ads the most is the “Other” group, comprised mainly of BlackBerry users and a small handful of other phone operating systems (including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC).

The clickthrough rates are certainly lower than expected, given the industry’s general consensus that mobile users are more likely to click ads. However, it must be taken into consideration that this is a comparison of the same ads on different media. The ads displayed on mobile devices are the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile, rather than comparing standard online advertising with mobile-oriented ads.

While there are side issues to consider in the mobile advertising market – accidental clicks being more relevant than in non-mobile ad serving – it appears that mobile Internet users are disinterested in advertising at an extremely high rate, and iPhone users are leading the charge.

Source: Chitika, Inc.

“November is traditionally the best month for making money on the Internet and it was certainly the best month this blog has ever experienced.”

Read more

For the impatient, here is the take-away message: Digg Traffic is more than 3 times Less Likely to Click on an Ad than Google Traffic.

Read more about  Digg Traffic vs Google Traffic – A Chitika Analysis Report

The look and feel of eMiniMalls is very slick. When you click on a product from the group provided you get a slide and enlargement of the selected product image, and a corresponding slide and reduction of the previously selected product.

Benefits

• Targeted Product Merchandising: Brings products related to your site content to the visitor
• Comparative Shopping All In One Place: Users can make informed buying decisions without leaving your site
• No Manual Tagging: Products are contextually targeted in real-time to your content
• PPC: As users interact with eMiniMalls, you get paid for clicks
• Revenue Beyond Advertising: Supplements your ad revenue with interactive PPC merchandising

Features

• Targeted Product Merchandising: Products are dynamically targeted to your content
• Interactive: Offers interactive mouse-over access to oodles of product information – without leaving your site!
• Robust Comparative Shopping: Access to multiple merchants, prices, ratings, reviews, related blog material and more; informed shopping increases click-through probability
• Intelligent: Learns and adapts to focus on the products your customers want to buy
• Flexibility: Let’s you choose between automatic contextual targeting or setting the top keywords yourself

See What’s in Store for You

• Get Started Today:

Note: This blog is an independent entity from Chitika and Chitika’s Paid Listings Services