For some time now we’ve wanted to publish a post with marketing and writing tips for bloggers. We thought: who’s better to do it than Kontera’s Sr. Marketing Manager, Jennifer McHugh. With broad marketing and communications experience that spans from online publishing to non-profit work, Jennifer’s advice is a must read for every blogger.

Here are Jennifer’s blogging tips:

1. Pick a Topic and Stick to It- People come to your blog for a reason, they want to hear your opinion in an area of interest you’re passionate about. Whether you’re blogging about cooking, travel or shopping you need to focus on one subject and related topics to keep your readers coming back for more. As soon as you start losing focus, you’ll lose readers.
2. Keep it Simple - Your blog isn’t a place to show off your vocabulary or grammar skills. If you can, choose simple words and keep the word count down to a few hundred words. The more complicated you make it the less you’ll sound like an expert.
3. Post Frequently – Imagine if you rushed home early to watch your favorite show only to find out that it’s not on. When people visit your blog, they expect to see new content. Don’t disappoint them with infrequent postings. Pick a schedule and stick to it!
4. Link, Link, Link – There is no better way to build your reputation within your own niche than to link to other relevant blogs. Chances are they will link back to you which will help increase your traffic, improve your rank in search engines, and drive even more traffic to your website.
5. Make it a Dialogue not a Monologue - In today’s Web 2.0 world readers expect to connect and share information. Add a section to your blog for comments so your readers can participate or provide feedback to keep the dialogue going.
6. Have Fun – This isn’t just my advice for your blog, but for life in general. You should love what you’re blogging about and have fun doing it.
7. Kontera Advertising Solutions – Last but certainly not least, monetize your blog with Kontera ContentLink™ and earn revenues where your users are already engaged, within your page content. Integration is fast and simple. Once you place Kontera’s code on your page, we take care of everything else. http://www.kontera.com/ads-for-site/become-a-kontera-publisher
   

   This is part of our blog series “Kontera’s Backstage Pass”.
   Read more:

   • An Interview with Lori Xeller, Kontera’s Director of Advertising Sales
   • An Interview with Gabi Peles, Kontera’s Senior Product Manager

As we mentioned in an earlier post, Kontera’s Video Testimonial Contest was sealed and the winners announced. We received some great testimonials and we want to share the videos of all three winners with you, one by one.

Pay a visit to Randy’s site grownupgeek.com

As is the way with all good things, so has our Video Testimonial Contest come to its end. We had a fun time and it keeps getting better now as we ready ourselves to announce the winners:

We are proud to announce the first place winner of Kontera’s Video Testimonial Contest:

Narendra Sakibanda of techtreak.com

Narendra made a great, creative animation that has won the prize of $500!

Watch it here:

Second place winner is Randy Brown of grownupgeek.com, Randy won the prize of $250

Third place winner is Joanna Ramirez of consumervirtue.com, Joanna won the prize $100

You can expect to see their videos on upcoming posts on our blog. In the meantime, we’ll use this opportunity to mention that we have some incredible publishers at Kontera and that we greatly value our partnerships.

Thanks to all of you!

We are proud to have Kontera’s very own Director of Advertising and Sales, Lori Xeller, interview on the blog. This is our chance to learn a few things about Kontera’s advertisers (as well as hear a few things about Lori :-))

Originally from Phoenix Arizona and a graduate of University of Arizona (go Cats!), Lori has extensive experience in building and maintaining online marketing departments and strategic partnerships. In 2005, Lori joined the Kontera team, and all the rest is details.

Please describe the work you do with Kontera advertisers.

We work with advertisers covering all categories so every campaign is different. The first thing we do after signing an advertiser up is to determine their success metrics so we can set the campaign up properly to meet their objectives. Each campaign will have a dedicated account manager assigned to them that will help guide them through the process, choose the right keywords and creative and then ensure the campaign is a success. We work with advertisers whose goals are to reach the right demographic for their brand, drive people to their site to learn more, and of course to make a purchase or transaction.

How do advertisers begin to work with Kontera? Do you contact them? Do they contact you?

We have sales people across the US who are reaching out to advertisers and advertising agencies every day to educate them on our network. In addition to this, advertisers will find us via search, one of our publishers or word of mouth and will reach out on our website to request more information. At this point, a sales person will reach out to help them get up and running.

What are Kontera’s unique benefits to advertisers?

We have exclusive relationships with our publishers providing a unique distribution and unduplicated reach for our advertisers. In addition to this, we have a proprietary technology that allows us to read and understand content in real time. This allows us to highlight the most relevant keywords and phrases to the content at that time, and of course, show the most relevant advertiser along with it. Since relevancy is this strong, our advertisers see extremely high response rates with both click through rate and then conversions. One of the greatest benefits of all this is that we still hold ourselves accountable to our advertisers by charging only on a cost per click basis.

What categories of advertising does Kontera offer?

We cover all verticals. We have advertisers from every category including entertainment, auto, technology, and all the way to home remodeling! The nice thing about monetizing content in real time is that we can find the most relevant and detailed categories for our advertisers to be placed in. The internet has a lot of topics to cover so we are able to cover all of them (that are appropriate of course!).

How does Kontera ensure max ROI to advertisers?

As I said before, our technology provides a high degree of relevancy between the content and the ad which results in high conversion rates for our advertisers. When you couple this with a stellar account manager that will ensure your campaign is set up for success, you will see great results.

Is there a message you’d like to send to Kontera’s present and future advertisers?

To those of you who are currently working with us, thank you! For those of you who haven’t tried us out yet, come test it out. We are confident you’ll be pleased with your results.

This is part of our blog series “Kontera’s Backstage Pass”.
Read more interviews with Kontera employees.

In the spirit of Kontera’s BackStage Pass, we invite you for a visit to our San Francisco office. 

Working in Kontera is an amusing experience…this we all agree on.  A few weeks back we came up with the idea to document and share something of this experience with our partners and friends.  And so a bunch of us decided to make a video depicting a day in the life of Kontera.  We meet you online daily, now is our chance to say hello to you live…

We are pleased to be visited by Sustines Laplana, owner and writer of Selaplana.com. Sustines has agreed to tell us a few things about his experiences with Kontera ContentLinks.

Selaplana.com is a blog that covers a variety of topics ranging from technology to entertainment . Besides being a valuable source of information, Selaplana.com has been a part of Kontera’s network for a year, making money by displaying ContentLink™ ads, relevant to the topics his readers are interested in reading.

The great advantage of ContentLinks is the fact that it can be customized to accommodate any individual site’s look & feel. Selaplana.com is a good example of ContenLink inegration in terms of ad density and ContentLink color.

Tell us about yourself (name, country, profession)?

My real name is Sustines Laplana and is known online as SELaplana. I am the first and lone blogger in Southern Leyte, Philippines and I am blogging at selaplana.com and at its network of blogs. I am a graduate of BSElectrical Engineering but working as professional blogger. I have no other business, no other job but just blogging.

What can you tell us about selaplana.com? What do you cover in your site?

I have lots of blogs but the Selaplana.com is my main personal blog. It covers wide range of topics from technology, entertainment, personality, politics or religion. Some of my articles are answers to the questions, advice request, comments, criticism or suggestions sent to me via email by other bloggers, blog’s visitors and subscribers.

It also publishes results in different licensure examination by the Professional Regulation Commission here in the Philippines.

How did you first hear about Kontera?

I first learned about Kontera when I found a double-lined text with links in a certain blog in which when I put over the mouse pointer into that text, the Kontera ads showed.

Since when have you been using Kontera?

I started using the Kontera ads on February 2007.

What do you like about Kontera?

Here are a few of the reasons why I like Kontera:

- Kontera ads have higher CTR compared to other ads

- It can be used at my blogs along with the Adsense ads. Google doen’t penalize publishers who are using Kontera ads. It can even be used along with other ad networks like text link ads, sponsored posts, CPM ads, contextual ads with CPC scheme, CPA ads…

- It’s my 2nd highest earner which is next to adsense.

- The ads are relevant in the sense that only the texts within my blog-page are picked by Kontera.

- I can customize the color of the text-link to look like the regular text-link of my blog.

What would you tell other publishers who consider Kontera?

Publish Kontera ads in your blogs or websites and earn more. You have nothing to worry of about other contextual ads because Kontera does not compete with them. It even plays in harmony with text link ads and sponsored posts. It’s really a smart way of maximizing your ad-publishing income.

Thanks for interviewing here, we’re glad to hear from you and hope to see you continue to earn revenue using Kontera ContentLinks.

Welcome to another interview in our series Kontera’s Backstage Pass. In this series, we hope to achieve an inside look at Kontera’s services, products, and developments, from those who know it best, the people working day by day to push Kontera’s backstage happening.

Today we interview Neta Shaked, a Kontera Account Manager. Neta has a busy schedule but I managed to catch up with her long enough to get some interesting information on her daily interactions with Kontera’s publishers.

Please describe your work as a Kontera Account Manager.

As an account manager I monitor a publisher’s results as well as our ContentLinks™ integration on their websites. I am doing whatever possible to maximize a site’s revenue and to customize our product to the publisher’s needs.
We live in fast times, the online world is constantly advancing and websites keep developing and changing. Add to this, the fact that Kontera’s ContentLink is being upgraded at close intervals, with features added and relevancy increased.
So, as an account manager, I follow on all these changes and make sure our ContentLinks will match perfectly to a site’s needs.

What are two most frequently asked publisher questions?

One of the questions I get asked most is: “what can be done to optimize“?
I think this is one of ContentLinks greatest strengths. Unlike other In-Text ad services, Kontera’s ads are customizable. Optimization can be performed on several levels. We do much backstage work to maximize ad relevancy and configure the best ad density per page. There are also many changes publishers can perform on their own, such as changing the links color, defining the exact analysis area, and much more.

Other most common questions have to do with Kontera’s payment procedures. The answer is simple, publishers can get paid by checks, wire or Paypal. With the new Publisher Center which is coming out soon, publishers will be able to update the settings themselves and change their own payment methods with a few simple clicks.

Is there a message you would like to send out to site owners who are thinking of joining Kontera?

Yes. Don’t be afraid of In-Text. The increasing popularity of In-Text Advertising is indicating that there is a growing taste and need for it. A few years back, In-Text was very new and so, many sites felt unsure about trying it. These days we are seeing a great change as many users have grown accustomed to In-Text and view it as a helpful tool. As a result, I receive many responses from satisfied publishers who are seeing the power of In-Text as a way of making information more accessible, while serving as a valuable revenue source.

BlogWorld was an important (and fun!) event. As one the panelists, Kontera’s VP, Product and Co-Founder, Assaf Henkin, had some interesting facts to share about the online marketing world today, with a special focus on the smart ways to monetize your blog.

But the best part for us was in getting to meet many of our partners face to face. This doesn’t happen often enough in the high-speed digital world.

A well known online entrepreneur and Kontera publisher, Joel Comm, has a few words to say about his experiences with Kontera. Get ready for a short video interview:

By Mika Tal

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews exposing Kontera from behind the scenes. In this series, we hope to achieve an inside look at Kontera’s services, products, and developments, from those who know it best, the people working day by day to push Kontera’s backstage happening.

Kontera’s Product UI

Gabi Peles is in charge of the overall management of products and services that define the meeting point between publishers and Kontera. Whether in the office or outside, Gabi loves a good challenge. In his spare time you’ll often find him engaged in a favorite hobby, kite surfing; we get worried so he usually doesn’t tell us beforehand

An interview with him reveals some exciting upcoming developments in Kontera’s products and publisher services:

1. What is Kontera’s guiding principle in terms of developing a new product/service?
   We put the user experience at the center. This means that we base any product development with the aim to meet the needs of the publisher.
   This has to do with the central part of our development methods. When we plan and think a product, we make every effort to see from a user’s point of view. I believe this is the strength of ContentLinks™ and where it is crucial for us to stress our added value as a network.
2. How do you obtain information on publisher needs?
   Kontera’s network of publishers includes publishers of all sizes, from established websites to popular blogs and forums. The wide range of segmentation allows us to familiarize ourselves with different environments and subsequently to develop solutions for various publisher needs. It’s a stage for dynamic interaction with a variety of fields and the challenge is in meeting diverse needs.
3. What would you say was this year’s greatest accomplishment in terms of ContentLinks™ development?
   This year was big on relevancy- we reached new milestones regarding our capabilities of matching content with ads. I’m glad to point that our patent pending algorithm has brought ContentLinks™ to a new level of achievement. This is very exciting news since relevant ads and information are ContentLinks™’ core value.
4. What are some new plans and offerings for publishers?
   We are working to enable publishers more flexibility and greater control over their personal accounts. This will be expressed through added features and options of our ad layer. In the near future, publishers will be able to control many aspects of the product. The next stage will be to allow publishers additional features in multiple areas such as reporting, product visual features, ads, and information. This is a thrilling development that we are looking forward to set in motion.
5. What do you have to say about Kontera as we look towards 2008?
   2008 will be an exciting year. We are always aiming to refine and advance ContentLinks™, and with so many new things planned, it will surely be an interesting and creative time.

By Mika Tal

Whenever a publisher speaks, we do our best to listen and absorb. Over time we found out that it’s the best way to learn about things that work well, things that are not working well, and additional capabilities and features that could add value. We’ve received some excellent responses from bloggers who share their Kontera experiences with their readers. We liked them so much that we’ve decided to present them here:

Jim Karter: “Last month was one of my great months where I crossed $4,000 for the first time with them. I was very happy that I was earning quite good. But this month is ever better. This is just half month gone and I have already crossed $2,800, so I am expecting to make around $5,000 for the month. I have added 4 more new sites which are quite small right now and I am working hard for them to make them big. So more hopeful for the next month (November).”
Visit Jim Karter’s Post

chalacuna: “ContentLink™ Ads Kontera uses a new form of “passive advertising”. I really like these ads because they target key words in your website content and places a link(you determine the content) where it relates to the advertiser. For example, if you have a page about ’search engines’, Kontera’s script will add a link to your text with simple on-screen pop-up advertising that blends into your website. No nasty popup windows, pop-under windows, exit windows, and so on. This clean text link placement is ideal for article directories, blogs, and other content heavy websites.”
Visit Homebizniz’s Post

Enkay: “Kontera has been performing better ever since I changed the link color from being the same as a regular link on the blog. It has grown tremendously since the link color change. You should try it out!”

Happy 6 months birthday Enkay!

Visit Enkay’s Post