Chitika adds category hints to eMiniMalls
While I'm waiting for my first Chitika payment to arrive (and this is like their last chance to please their publishers who've had to endure reduced and delayed payments), I thought I'd mention a new feature they announced today called “category hints”.
One of the problems in using Chitika in non-contextual mode (which is what you want to do if you're displaying AdSense on the same page) is that you have to provide a fixed set of keywords for the eMiniMalls code to select an appropriate product. If you can't find the right keywords or there are no products that match those keywords in Chitika's database, you won't get a product showing in your eMiniMalls unit. A category hint is basically a fallback position for Chitika — if it can't find a product for the keywords you specify, it will then choose a product from the desired category instead.
While this is a good feature in and of itself, I find that the list of Chitika categories to be the more interesting piece of information. This list shows us exactly what kind of products Chitika is advertising. It's an easy way for potential Chitika publishers to see if the eMiniMalls concept will work on their site or not.
Full details about the category hints are found in Optimize your Chitika revenue using eMiniMalls Category Hints. Funny use of the word “optimize”…
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.
The greatest effect on AdSense earnings for international publishers
Quick! If you had to identify the single biggest thing that, as an international publisher, affects your AdSense earnings over time, what would it be? Here are some possible choices to consider:
- the primary language of your site
- the number of advertisers geo-targeting your audience
- the stickiness of your site
- the domain of your site (see today's posting on country-code TLDs)
Or how about:
- none of the above
I chose “e”, because it looks like the single biggest thing that affects my earnings is the US dollar exchange rate! Today I got a measly 1.12CA = 1.00US rate at my bank when I deposited the Google cheque. This is much lower than when I started with AdSense almost three years ago, look at this graph charting the CA-US exchange rates over the last five years:
This is not news, of course, and anyone selling their products to the US knows what the exchange rate can do to their results. On the other hand, it would appear that European publishers are seeing increased earnings. Here's the same chart comparing euros to US dollars:
Well, as we francophones say, c'est la vie. It'll be interesting to see how much I get from Chitika this week, my audited earnings from their program finally broke through the minimum payment barrier. After PayPal takes its graftshare off the top, I'm sure the effective exchange rate will be even lower.
Since there's nothing you can do about exchange rates, this should give you added incentive to work harder at increasing your earnings!
Speaking of hype: (we were talking about Chitika, after all) if any of you fork out the $997 for that Butterfly Marketing course I'd be curious to know what it's really all about. My take is that's it's all about building a big email list with tens or hundreds of thousands of people on it, get them all excited, and then sell them a high-priced product… wait a minute…
Are country-specific TLDs useful?
Last night, I sent an email to my newsletter subscribers about an offer that domain registrar EuroDNS was running: any US, Canadian or European resident could register up to 20 domains in the “.be” top-level domain (TLD) for free. (The offer's now over, so don't bother trying… You had to be quick on the draw, and I think they had a flood of last-minute registrations…) But this leads us directly to today's discussion about country-specific TLDs. Are these TLDs useful?
As anyone who's read my book knows, each geographic region in the world has been assigned a two-letter top-level domain, known simply as a “country-code TLD” or ccTLD. Thus Canada gets .ca, France gets .fr, Belgium .be, Germany .de, and so on. The administration of each ccTLD is left up to the government of the region. Many delegate it to third-party registrars in return for a share of the proceeds. Many have a residency requirement — you can't register a .ca domain unless you're a Canadian resident or company (see here for the full rules) for example.
There's no doubt that the “.com” domain is the most powerful domain today. It's where most people go to register their domains. You say “dot com” and people instantly know what you mean. So given the choice between registering “domain.com” and “domain.ca”, the “.com” variant almost always has the edge because:
- People understand what it means
- There's a global flavor to it — it's not tied to any specific country/region/language
- It's cheaper — often much, much cheaper
- People implicitly tack on a “.com” when they hear a domain name
Unfortunately, finding a good domain name in the .com registry is extremely hard these days. Especially if you're looking for a keyword-based domain name instead of building a brand. (There are two different approaches to choosing domain names: one is to go for generic terms, one is to build a brand. The former favors random search traffic, the latter favors standing out from the crowd.) So some registrants end up registering their domain in a ccTLD instead. But this can be problematic, because chances are that people looking for your site will end up finding the “.com” version instead. So think carefully about substituting a ccTLD when you really want a .com domain.
That said, ccTLDs are useful for many sites. A ccTLD implies a cultural, geographic or linguistic association that may be useful to you. If your site is in French, for example, anyone seeing a .fr, .be or .ca address will not be surprised to come across French content. In fact, for .fr they'll probably expect it. If you're targeting a specific locale (geek talk for a country/region/culture/language) then a ccTLD may make a lot more sense than the generic .com.
Of course, there's nothing to say that you can't use both types of domains. For example, you could register a ccTLD and place translated content on it while having your English content on a .com domain. If you're looking to monetize content via AdSense, this is a better approach than having your web server return different content for the same page based on what the user's browser says it prefers — because the ads aren't as well-targeted as they could be. Always put your translated content on different pages to ensure that the AdSense crawler sees it in all its translated glory.
I'd love to hear about any positive or negative experiences you've had with ccTLDs, so drop me a note…
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.