Getting started- overcoming the hurdles
The day after I installed adsense to my blog, I get a lovely form-message saying that I can no longer use it on my blog. My blog is fairly new, so I added some posts that were based purely on personal experience relevant to my niche- all G rated and not plagiarized. My analytics suggest no suspicious activity or unnatural clicking. The only way I can think their problem could be was that the formatting on a lot of my posts got messed up- the editor wouldn't let me make natural paragraphs w/o adding "br br" (with of course, but if I add it to the text, it thinks I'm using html) after each paragraph's end. Naturally, I previewed my changes for each post. I also promoted a few posts on twitter, +1, and FB. That generated a whopping 90 views- totally being sarcastic about the "whopping" because I know you're getting hundreds, if not thousands per day.
This news certainly didn't help since I was already trying to figure out what to do now that Amazon.com stopped allowing people in my state to be affiliates years ago. I used to be one of their associates and made some good money. I was beside myself when I found out I could still work the system with Squidoo. I just opened my account and have earned more than $6. I know that's not much. But I haven't done the WA training on it yet. My lenses are rough, like I was shooting in the dark while taking a spin behind the wheel of a car I've never driven yet.
Not planning to weep and stay angry about adsense, I signed up for Kontera. It was a breeze. I gave them my blog's address, confirmed my email, used FTP to add the plug in, set the plug in up, and within an hour I have in-text advertizing (they say it can take 24 hours) as well as a built in social bar that appears at the bottom of the browser. I submitted my other 5 blogs for approval. They say it will take 3 business days' time to get back. Since it's the weekend, it will be Wednesday that I find out.
Conclusion:
If you have experience with adsense alternatives, I'd love to read about them. Please include likes/dislikes.
http://steffer.hubpages.com/hub/Chitika-Publisher-Network-Way-better-than-Google-Adsense
Here's a review by some user;
I've used them for a long time and they have pretty darn good customer service."
Another one:
"I have some sites where chitika has outperformed adsense for a long time. Other sites where Chitika makes no sense to have on them. It really depends on the site and if you can find good links to products that people will click on. If you can do that, and your site is related, you can pretty well with chitika.
If you are just running chitika as an generic ad placement, they tend to perform poorly, and worse than something like Adsense or YPN."
