Is your blog filled with “Your Ad Here” titles with empty space all around it? Honestly, WTF?

As part of our ongoing WTF Blog Design Clutter article series, let’s look at people’s attempt to inspire advertisers on their blog, and where it falls down as a design element.

The empty ad space that sits there with the note “Your Ad Here” isn’t very inviting. In fact, it’s just wasted space. If there are no ads there, then there is a lot of wasted space in your blog’s sidebar. read more

If you are a reader of Performancing you might have already seen the announcement last night of the new Performancing Ads service.

Some highlights:

• Open to all publishers big and small
• Book your own ads for free
• Gain free traffic through the “exchange” program
• Recurring commission from affiliate referral program
• and of course buy and sell ads!

If you have a space in your blog then this is at least well worth a try. In fact as a publisher I much prefer these sorts of ads over Adsense and I will tell you why… read more

As we continue with this series on blogging jobs, it’s time to look at the income a blogger can make by blogging for pay.

The skills and qualities a company or blog owner is looking for from a blogger are extensive, far beyond just writing abilities. As with any freelance job, determining how to put a value on the time it really takes, and the costs associated with the time and production, is really hard when the real cost is in time, not materials. Bloggers should be paid for the time as well as their expertise and abilities. Are they? This is a problem that has been around for a very long time. How much is your time worth?

For many decades, professional editorial writers found a compromise on the time/value issue with payment by the word with a restriction on word count. I often was told, “We’ll pay you a dollar a word up to 1,000 words maximum.”

This meant the magazine, newspaper, newsletter, or other print publication had space for one thousand words that needed to be filled. Going over meant changing their magazine or newspaper design structure. Giving them less meant I’d be paid less, but somewhere in the middle was a compromise for both of us, usually in the form of me setting a minimum fee I was to be paid, no matter the word count, such as “I want $500 minimum for 700 words and a dollar a word thereafter.” If the article came it at 400 words, I would still be paid my minimum. If it crossed the 700 word mark, at which point I should have been paid $700 for a dollar a word, that’s when they have to start paying me the dollar a word rate. It wasn’t the best, but the companies felt like they were getting a deal and for the most part, I covered the minimum I needed to pay my rent and eat.

Here is a chart for the various traditional writer’s pay scale based upon a dollar amount per word. The more experience and expertise, the higher the fee per word.
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In “Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?” we talked about what jobs are out there and what blog owners and companies are looking for when they hire a blogger. Blogger Jobs: How to Apply For a Blogger Job? covered how to apply for a job as a blogger, with some good tips on what to do - and not to do. Today, I want to look at a very serious issue: How much are they paying bloggers to blog?

The issue of the blogging pay scale is very important, not just because I’m one of the workers in this new industry who expects to be able to pay the rent or meet a mortgage, but also because I represent the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people who want to make money blogging.

In a NY Times article on the blogging sweatshops by Matt Richtel (Print Version) the description of people of one of the hottest jobs in the world has writers churning out mass volumes of content working around-the-clock to make enough money to survive. It’s called blogging.
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This is good news for everyone running a website sporting ads. Ad management is tedious, and that’s where software like OpenX comes in, your very own ad management tool. The problem is, it’s a bit too much for most of us. I don’t know if the upcoming WordPress and Drupal plugins will change that, but it is a good sign that they are looking for testers for them. We will know soon.

TechCrunch reports that Technorati’s rumored blog ad network will launch today at 9 am PST. At least that’s when we’ll be let into the Technorati Media website, 401 password protected at the moment.

The company has been testing the new sales product with a number of partners, including BlogTalkRadio, BlogCritics, BlogCatalog, BlogTV, Technabob, GPSMagazine, GeekAlerts and NerdApproved. CEO Richard Jalichandra says these blogs reach a combined audience of approximately 17 million unique monthly visitors.

Michael Arrington writes that Technorati Media will sell ads on CPM basis, and that revenue shares are negotiable. For now it’ll only be big heavy hitter blogs, so your recent launch will probably have to grow a bit before applying.

It’ll be interesting to see if Technorati Media will open up to smaller publishers as well, and how well it will stand against Federated Media, or Six Apart’s venture for that matter. More on this as it evolves.

TechCrunch reports that Technorati has secured another $7.5 million in venture capital. The report also states that Technorati is due to make an announcement this week, possibly about the rumored blog ad network. More sometime this week, then.

Blogger is the latest blog platform to get support for Kontera in-text ads. This from a press release that just pinged in my inbox:

“There is no reason bloggers shouldn’t be earning ad revenue from blogging – that’s why we’re launching the ‘One Click’ solution for Blogger.com,” said Kontera Director of Product Management, Mr. Gabi Peles. “With Kontera’s new ‘One Click’ solutions, bloggers with minimal or no technical skills can implement Kontera on their blog and define where and how the ContentLink In-Text Ads will appear.”

“One Click” being their solution to add the ads, using plugins or similar. The support for Blogger follows the WordPress plugin we’ve reported on previously. There are also plugins for Joomla and Drupal. Actually, you could add Kontera ads to a Blogger blog previously too, but not in a One Click sort of way.

Update: There’s a post on the Blogger widget up!

Chitika’s Premium Ads offering will be available across the whole b5media network, being “over 350 hight quality websites and blogs” according to the press release. Naturally, both parties are happy with the partnership deal.

Having already proven to deliver a significant boost in overall revenue for untargeted ad placements, the Premium Ads program is being adopted throughout the b5media network. “We found Chitika’s Premium Ads relevancy coupled with the high CPM yield to be uniquely suited for our entire network” says Jeremy Wright, CEO b5media. “The most interesting aspect of Chitika’s new Premium ad program is that the ads will only show up when there is a targeted and relevant offer to the user, which in turn helps deliver higher ad revenue for us.”

Only showing relevant ads is a good thing, in my book.

BlogRolled.com is a new service to buy and sell text links on your blog, but without any scripts and therefor hard to track for Google. The idea is, of course, to nab a piece of the Text Link Ads cake, since it’ll be hard for search engines to slam down on you buying and selling text links when there’s no script to analyze.

That’s right, no script. If you’re a blog publisher, and someone buys a link in your blogroll, you’ll add it manually, and be paid a flat fee per month, or similar.

What do you think? Will Google tackle this as well, and find a way to penalize sites using this server, or is the TLA 2.0?

Hat tip: John Chow