1. Ryan, first of all, what is Chitika?
Founded in 2003, Chitika is a full service online advertising network specializing in the blogospshere and the social web. Today, it engages buyers, brands and bloggers by serving interactive, user-controllable ads directly within relevant posts. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue. For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting online consumers and qualified buyers – as they are actively considering a purchase – and engaging them in relevant, brand-specific or product-specific conversations. Chitika now serves more than 1.5 billion ads per month and counting.

2. And who is Ryan Travis? People have nothing but good opinions about you, why is that?
That is because of my amazing dance moves – heh – but seriously, I’m sure there are some “not-so-good” opinions out there as well. From my end, I am 100% committed that all of our users have a fantastic experience with our company, so I try to go the extra mile to ensure that this happens.

3. How is the click value calculated? Why is it lower in the last week (last week of January)?
Click values vary from advertiser to advertiser. Since we have thousands of merchants offering millions of different products, you will always see variations in the CPC’s. For January specifically, we saw an expected seasonal dip here. Every year after the busy holiday shopping season, our advertisers “pull back” on their spending, and we traditionally see lower CPC’s during this time of year. On our end, we are aggressively working on some cool deals to combat this – for example, take a look at our brand new CPM units.

4. What is Chitika’s audit? Why does it differ so much (from 10% up to 50-60%)?
The audits are done to discount illegitimate clicks (from spam clicks, robots, accidental clicks, etc.). I have no idea what the metrics are to calculate this, but it happens on our end and then again on our advertisers’ ends. It shouldn’t vary too much, but again – if some bots spam your page on a certain month, then you will see a much larger audit.

5. Which ad units are the best money earners (eMiniMalls, Linx, RPU and so on..), in your experience and overall blogs in the network?
That’s a great question – and actually there is no single answer here – it really depends on the site! One thing I will say is that I am completely surprised at how well Linx is actually performing across the network – it is definitely a very strong product for us.

6. Do you have any tips for bloggers on how to increase their earnings with Chitika?
Experiment with different placements and ad-types (eMiniMalls, RPU, Linx, etc.) – and pay attention to your reports!!! It is very hard to tell what is working and what is not if you do not spend some time looking at your reports. The best practice here is to create separate channels for each ad-unit that you are experimenting with – this way you can see exactly how that specific ad is performing. Here’s the best part – we just released a brand new reporting system – take it for a spin!

7. Do you have ads that are geo-targeted? (not appearing in Romania, for example)
Well all of our ads are actually geo-targeted. For example – if a user from Germany comes to your site, they will see ads from German merchants appearing in your Chitika ads. This goes for any of the countries that we accept clicks from (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, UK, US).

Anyway, I decided I should give myself another chance and I have rehired me on a probation period of 3 months, to see if I am worth it.

So, to come back to the review: another blog I have read this year (the entire archive, as you might be used by now) is TylerCruz’s. I do not remember how I got there (I think from a sale mentioned on shoemoney’s blog), but the first thing I noticed when I got on his blog was his daily revenue on the right sidebar (no longer there now). It was something like 230$/day, which is not huge but not to be taken lightly, either. What was different to his revenue was that he had earned it all with direct advertising: no Adsense, no PPC, no affiliates (well, he had a very small revenue from affiliates at that point). BTW, Tyler, any reason why that your daily earnings are not there anymore?

This made me think. For the last 2 years, most of my online revenue was Adsense based, but this started to annoy me, especially since one of my sites produces something like 300 clicks/day and the ‘huge” sum of $8-10/day. And no, that site is not MFA or anything. It is a genuine site, with good traffic. And yes, on the amount of cash I could retire in 200 years.

Anyway, back to Tyler. Another thing I liked was that he was very transparent about his sites, earnings and what he does to increase his revenues. While there are no ground breaking methods he uses, just seeing them used and delivering makes you wanna start and use them.

On a personal level, I liked the guy because he used to play tournament level chess while he was younger, something I also did while I was a kid. More, we both play poker right now (he does it more than me at this point, though I would like to play more). What do you say Tyler, wanna play some chess?

I was looking around the site to remember which posts I liked best, but I realized I cannot name a certain post. One of the reasons is he writes a lot about several subject in a post and, what more, he used to write quite seldom. Anyway, I felt that his problems (like feeling he doesn’t work as much as he should and the likes) are the same problems I think about all the time. His 40 work hours/week series was one of the most funny I have read online, since I felt I was in his shoes so many times.

My advice? Read the entire blog: it is not such a big archive as it looks, and it will really make you feel what it means to be earning money from the internet to move away from your parents’ house (well, he did that and in style… he bought his own apartment in one and a half years).

Nice job, Tyler!

One more thing, for my Romanian readers and the participants at the Blogoree Workshop: we have talked about letting your readers know you want to advertise their services on your blog and I have told you about this Advertise page Tyler has it on his blog. You should use one of this on your blogs either, no matter the theme of blog. You never know who wants to buy some space on your site.

P.S.: As John Chow does on his blog, Tyler gives back links for those that review his site. While this is a good reason for a review, my review is not for that link. I really think he deserves to be read, especially by those that want to escape from the dreaded Google Adsense (aff).

Although direct advertising is the best way to earn from your website, it requires understanding and implementation of internet marketing techniques available at almost every seo website. To start with, adsense marketing can bring you considerable earnings with minimum effort. Another bundled advantage with adsense subscription is quick and free search engine submission in Google. Once everything gets settled, you’ll get many of direct advertising options to choose the best one.

After 2 months of tweaking everything I can possibly tweak on that site, I decided to quit on Adsense (at least there). With an eCPM of $1.2-$1.4, almost any other form of advertising would be better.

So, I started (yet again, after almost a year) on the road of direct ads sales and affiliate marketing. This time, done by the book: using a newsletter, a subscriber’s list, direct ad selling and so on.

While, in theory, I know a lot, practice is what kills me. I have read almost everything I could on affiliate marketing (I even made some money of it), but never followed it through. Come on, when you think of how easy was to set-up and start Adsense, why would you put all that effort in learning to write affiliate texts that should not sound like they are affiliate pitches and so on? The same is true for direct ads.

So, in the next months, I will surely start an almost new road while learning all the strings of the affiliate marketing. I will not use (for the moment, at least), CPC advertising, like Adwords or MSN Adcenter. All I will try is website marketing and newsletter marketing (when I will have enough subscribers).

More, I am testing AuctionAds (aff.) , which is starting to rack in some money (not much, a lot less then Adsense, even now, but hey…! these are money that get into my pocket, not getting out of it ). Well, the guys on DigitalPoint (including the creator of AuctionAds, Shoemoney) say that it takes some time for the auctions on EBay to finish. One bad thing for Romanians: payment only by PayPal, which means you can’t get any, for the moment (I am being helped by a friend with his account).

If you know of any other good site monetization method, please tell it here… I am more than happy to test anything I could.