Normanski

Widgetbucks’ blog deleted by google?

Saturday, April 12th, 2008 | Web Thinkering | No Comments

I logged in to my widgetbucks account to check my stats. On the news headline I clicked the lates post entitled WidgetBucks’ RPCs Rebounding - 5 days ago. I was surprised that it returned a 404 error page by google. I directly typed the url on my firefox “http://blog.widgetbucks.com/” and it just redirected to google’s homepage.

Another stumbling block for the Widgetbucks team?

Widgetbucks has started last year with all gun’s blazing and gained the reputaion of the “next big thing” after Google’s adsense. However, the excitement quickly died out as they implemented some big changes on their policies. It seems that they’re running out of bullets as I have watched my monthly revenue drop $2,000 to $2. I have heard some people saying that Widgetbucks is slowly dying. Well I just hope such is not the case. I have always believed and hoped that they can rebound again.

Venturing into the affiliate marketing world

Friday, April 11th, 2008 | Online Marketing | No Comments

The past 6 months has been and still is a roller-coaster ride. I got some good bucks from the networks that i have been using like AdSense, adbrite, widgetbucks and cpxinteractive however I’m still curious to know what lies further up the food-chain. I realized that using CPC programs, though very easy easily implemented are somewhere in the baseline of internet economy.

Thus I spent most part of the night researching for CPA networks with good track record and has a paypal payment method. After 2 years of fulltime web publishing and several lost checks in the mail, I’m now avoiding programs that doesn’t pay through paypal. After narrowing down the list of the affiliate networks I signed up to about 4 or 5 networks.

My application to most of them was declined and the common reason was that I’m an “international publisher”. It seems that these networks are trying to avoid publishers which are not based in the US (I’m based in Manila, Philippines). Yeah yeah it sucks, I’m beginning to realize the hindrances of web publishers outside the US and specially my fellow Pinoy dot-comers ( though we have our own share of advantages right?)

Luckily, I was accepted with CPA Storm. I think their support is great since the account manager which was assigned to me was very friendly and they do not reply with canned messages. I have started running some campaigns by purchasing some CPM ads and banner placement to my websites.