ViralBlogAds has been launched. With their launch, they are holding a small contest. Well the price adds upto be a little over $1100 value. Now this company is co-founded by Simon Emery (Developer of OIO Publisher) and a good friend of mine Colin Klinkert.

What is ViralBlogAds

ViralBlogAds is a small PPC banner ad network that focuses on simplicity. They offer high referral incomes (15% for life!) and a lottery-style “bonus fund”. Viral Blog Ads is relies on user experience. Therefore they care about what their members have to say. They run polls on the site, and also have a feedback system, so your voice can be heard.

Who is ViralBlogAds for?

For Advertisers

ViralBlogAds is a PPC banner network that allows advertisers to reach a wide audience in their niche with their banners (If you want a good looking banner, Contact me for Rates). Advertisers only pay when a visitor actually clicks through to their site. Real-time click fraud protection and statistics are also provided in the members area.

For Publishers

ViralBlogAds guarantees you related ads on your website. These will not be just any ugly looking ads, but majority of them will be creative and match your niche to target your visitors. These ads will be easy to intergrate into your template. You get paid for every valid click that you deliver! If you wish to sell ads on your site privately, they have an awesome plugin that ensures that you never have empty ad spot on your site, and at the same time it let’s you control your own ad space!

OIOPublisher

I have always recommend everyone to get OIOPublisher. This wordpress plugin, allows you to maintain the ads you sell on your website. Everything is automated, except for the ad review. It lets you choose which ads you want to display. If you are using OIOPublisher, and you have empty spots, you might want to consider joining ViralBlogAds because it will fill up your spot. Intergration is easy as well because OIOPublisher have an option where you can simply connect viralblogads to your ad system without a hassle. So get OIOPublisher if you haven’t already.

Contest

It has started on September 1st, 2008 and will run for 30 days. (Official Post)

List Of Current Prizes (Note: More To Come):

1) Provided by Adii
- 6 Month Developer Subscription from WooThemes ($375 Value)

2) Provided by Ades
- $50 and free Review on Ades Blog ($400 Value)

3) Provided by Syed
- 125 for a month on Balkhis ($40 Value)

4) Provided by Mr. Javo
- Review and 125 spot for month on Mr. Javo ($85 Value)

5) Provided by Alvin Phang
- 5 x copies of Atomic Blogging Course ($47 Value Each)

6) Provided by Mike
- 125 for a month on Mike’s Blog ($15 Value)

7) Provided by Darin
- 1 Free Website Review, 1 Month 125×125 banner ad, 1 Month Ad in MaxBlogPress Stripe and 1 Month Ad in RSS Footer ($150 Value)

There are more prizes that will be added over the course of the competition. If you want to offer a prize and be a sponsor, please email to contests@viralblogads.com and they will explain in more info. Please include the prize and value.

How you can Win?

* Add Your Website as a Publisher and then Ad The Code To Your Site!
* Have a click trough rate of 0.05% or better (this is very easy, just place the code near the top of your site)

You will then be in the running to win. To increase your chances of winning you can do all/any of the below. Post in the thread what you have done, you can even link to it (getting you traffic) and we will confirm that you did do them.

To Earn Extra Entries (each is worth 1 entry):

* Write A Review on your blog, using your affiliate link to VBA (Aff Income For You) & also link to this thread
* Digg, Stumble and Yahoo Buzz This Thread (Please Do all 3 for us to count as another entry for you)
* Follow us on Twitter and Join Our RSS Feed

Want to know the Bonus Entry? Read their full thread.

Bottom line is Join ViralBlogAds Now.

Experts continue to argue this point. Whether you should start monetizing your blog from the beginning, or whether you should wait and get a good audience first. Then you can monetize your site. I thought this was becoming too big of an issue with newer blogs, so I should put my opinions out.

Bloggers when they start are very indecisive. They don’t know when they want to monetize their site, so I will just put down some of the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Then put in my opinion.

Before we get into that, I want to take care of some vocabulary:

*Too many ads – When you have ads taking over the content. (Example). Note: He put this many ads after he was popular. Not from the start.

*Early Stages – New blog brand new. 3 months old blog = Brand New.

*Later on the road – 8 months and older.

Monetizing from the Start

Advantages

• Trust and Credibility
  Believe it or not, some people don’t take your blog seriously, if you don’t have any ads because a moderately monetized site indicates an established blog. Also your readers know what to expect from the start rather than down the road. When you have ads on the earlier stage, and you get advertisers, it builds credibility and trust with them. Those companies can later recommend you.
• Self-Motivation
  Motivation is one of those things that keeps you going as a blogger. Many bloggers get motivated by different things, but some get motivated by revenue. They keep blogging to see if they can make even more than what they make with the blog at the beginning stage.

Disadvantages

• Social Media is not for you
  As I mentioned in my post about promoting a blog, Social media was one of my #1 strategy. But you have to be careful, if you load your site with too many ads, then you won’t find social media to work in your favor. But moderate ads, won’t hurt your social media campaign.
• Some are unhappy
  You can’t really satisfy everyone. Some people might take your blog seriously because you have ads because they are thinking your blog is more established, while others get annoyed. They think you are blogging just to make money. Thats why they won’t consider you. (Once again, I think this is only when you have too many ads).

Monetizing Down the Road

Advantages

• Better Payout
  When you have a new blog, you can’t charge high fees to display ads on your blog, but with an established blog you can definitely ask for a higher spot rate.
• You know what option to take
  Analyzing your blog traffic for a good amount of time, you know who is your audience, and what they want. Then you can go right ahead and pick out the best products for your blog, and maximize your revenue. (You have to do this by trial and error if you start early)

Disadvantages

• Compatibility Issues
  When you had your first blog design, it wasn’t for the ads. Therefore, if you try adding ads in it. It might not look good. Therefore you might end up having to get a completely new design.
• Some Readers are Pissed
  Some readers feel that since now you have your blog established, now you only care about making more and more money. They are annoyed by the new ads integration. Like I said, you can’t keep everyone happy. Just go with whoever is the majority. Or just go with what you think is best for you after all it is your blog. (Usually this will only happen, if you put too many ads on the site)

Which method did Balkhis take?

I took the monetizing early method because personally, I don’t believe in the theory that monetizing early ruin the quality of your blog. I had good content on the site from the start. My ads weren’t over powering the content. I only had 125×125 buttons on one side, and 468 x 60 banner. Thats all. Nothing that was very annoying. As my audience grew, I switched different affiliate offers around. It was done through trial and error. Balkhis is a growing blog. No where near the top, but We have made good progress with this blog. If you are not putting too many ads on your site then you should be good to go from the start.

Did you see something? Google has released their version of the web browser. Name of this Google Product is Google Chrome. Google Chrome is an open-source browser. I decided what is the better way of writing this post, so I am writing it on Google Chrome, to see how it actually works.

Some of the Features it Includes

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it. (Best feature)
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar. Not very crowded with menu bars and such.
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed. It does load sites very fast.
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information (I love this feature)
• Search bar is same as the url bar, so you can type either the search term or the url and it will take you there.
• Last But most Important feature, it displays Balkhis perfectly fine

This is only for Windows user for now as it is in the beta phase, but Google said that they are working on the Mac and Linux edition.

You ask me, Google Chrome is going to run over Firefox. Since this is an open-source browser, you will see a lot of developers, releasing their versions for this product. I personally like the look of Google Chrome, much better than the look of Firefox or IE.

I am not going to say that I didn’t expect this move. I knew that Google will come up with their own browser, but I didn’t expect it now. It was a surprise to me. But what I am wondering is Will Google stop funding Firefox? Because Firefox is their #1 competitor.

How does it affect Firefox? Well if you don’t know Google have funded Mozilla in the past 3 years with the heavy amount of 180 million USD. Which account for 85% of Mozilla’s total funding. Will Google still fund Firefox?

If they decide to, they will be funding their own competitor, and if they don’t will they be going down like Microsoft?

A lot of controversial questions that come to my mind. I might be silly to make a statement like that, but that is how Microsoft started as well. They went about getting into everything and eliminating their competitors. Then they received a slap from the government which left the Microsoft Corporation suffering till this day in some countries around the globe.

Why do you think I say that? Well because google is buying out or trying to buy out all of their competitors. If they can’t buy it out, then they make something better, so they completely eliminate their competitor.

Some examples:

Google Video was owned by Google, then they bought Youtube because their brand wasn’t getting enough exposure.

Wikipedia was one of the sources that everyone used to find answers. Wikipedia used to rank high for a lot of terms, and now the pattern is switching towards Knol as Google has announced it.

Orkut is Google’s Social Media baby, and they have been trying to buyout Facebook, so they eliminate one of their competition.

Just open your eyes, and you will see. All of Google Products get a very high Pagerank in the next update they are out. They automatically begin to rank higher than other products for the keywords. For instance if I search, Webmaster Blog, top two are google webmaster blog results, and those aren’t that resourceful.

Now, another thing they are doing is mixing their products. Such as Google analytics, Orkut, and more. You just need one google account, to login to everything else. Why would people want to make separate account. Soon, I am sure Google will implement Google login system in youtube as well. That is how Microsoft was slapped because they started implementing Internet Explorer into Windows which pretty much destroyed Netscape.

If Google continues to embed one login system and interrelating their products, will they go down like Microsoft? What do you think?

That was all how one of my email read last night. This was in response from my post about 13 ways I used to promote my blog to success. Well, I wasn’t going to write about entrecard. But I realized, I need to do my finishing remarks about entrecard.

Traffic Exchange System

Did you ever hear about this one? Well traffic exchange system is a system in which you visit someone’s website, and they visit your website in exchange. In some scenarios, the ratio is 1:1 or it might 1:24. That depends on how you go about in your strategies.

Its good because it gets you traffic, but majority of that traffic is not targetted traffic. So some numbers in your Stat sheet will look good. Those will be your Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Hits. Whereas others will look bad such as Bounce Rate, and Referrals.

Yes, you will have a high Bounce Rate. Do you want to know why? Other people are doing the exact same thing. They want to drop cards on as many sites and in the shortest amount of time. So most of them don’t really care about reading your blog. They just drop on your site, because you drop back. Now there are some major disadvantages to High Bounce Rate. First, it doesn’t look good on the stat sheet. Second, it affects your Google Adsense Earnings (Decreases). Third, your Alexa will be lowered as well.

Referrals, it doesn’t look very nice if you have a ts25.com ranking at #1 in your referral list. Why? Because it is a traffic exchange site, where you can buy off your visitors. Entrecard is no different, I’ll go ahead and say it is slightly worse. Because ts25.com atleast makes the user stay on the site for a certain period of time. When a user is buying a website, they see something like that, they automatically know that the traffic is not reliable. Once you stop dropping cards, or buying traffic from any other place, it will stop. So it is a turndown for your buyers.

Next disadvantage of any traffic exchange system, is it wastes time. You will be wasting time in making your list to drop on people. You will be wasting one hour, or half hour each day to do your drops. Now out of those, you might find some new readers, but what are the chances of finding alot of new readers? None… And since you are wasting so much time on this, you won’t have time to write quality content. If I have to give up one thing, to improve my blog, than it would be entrecard not my content. Through content, I will always find new readers. But through entrecard, I can bring the readers in, but how many of those will stay?

Now, you might be thinking heck I am getting unique visitors, It is helping my stat sheet. I am not going to stop you. I will say go ahead, try it out and learn from your experience. My experience says it otherwise. Picture says a thousand words, If you didn’t get it, I would like to explain it. You can shine with the exchange for a little bit because you are lighting yourself up. But sooner or later, your fuel will be out, and you will be burned out.

If you are one of those who want to go ahead and try entrecard. I will save you some time by giving you tips that I used when I was trying out entrecard. If you use the tips that I give you effectively, and you have a decent connection then you should be able to drop 300 cards within 30 minutes once you are used to of it.

Today is Labor day in United States of America. Today is also important because today is Balkhis Sweet Monday Link Roundup. Past week was relatively good for me. I wrote some very good articles that you should check out. I will link to them in this post, also I think you should check out the posts that I have below:

Keyword and Internet Marketing

8 Reasons Why your Blog Might not Be Accepted into an Ad Network

11 Must Install Plugins for a New Wordpress Blog

What to Look for In a Blog

15 SEO Tips for Beginners

These were all the interesting ones that I found for that was written this week. If you write a good post in the week, please email me once posted. Don’t email me older posts because I won’t publish them.

Now what you should’ve read on Balkhis in the past week.

Tips on increasing website speed.

List of 11 ways you can get free stock images for your blog post.

50 must know shortcuts for Photoshop.

Now a little bit of my personal life. I will write a bigger article on my Sunday later this week. But I went rock climbing, I played basketball with two of UF Basketball team. Chandler Parsons and Adam Allen. I went on a canoe on Lake Wauberg and more. A lot of fun stuff. Enjoy your Labor Day.