You want to make money from your website without the risk of driving your traffic away.  Kontera has the In-Text advertising solution that pledges to:

• Not clutter your pages.
• Not trash your text.
• Bring your readers the relevancy that they deserve.
• Showcase brands that mean business.
• Keep the network clean in order to welcome big brands-meaning unique high paying advertisements.
• Maintain tight integration between your content and your users’ intent delivering record high CTR.
• Provide value to users and publishers.
• Serve fewer links per page while delivering strong campaign performance. (Also check out mediapost.com)
• Offer you a sustainable revenue stream that you can bank on.
• Bring you the premier In-Text Advertising experience.

Our unbeatable contextual technology delivers results without compromising on quality and your users.

You may already know that the year you were born is considered the year of the rat, ox, or horse according to the ancient Chinese zodiac.  What you probably didn’t know yet, is that at Kontera, we’ve proclaimed 2010 as the year of relevancy.

What does this mean for our partners?  Well, it’s pretty simple, higher relevancy means that:

• Publishers don’t sell out their users to irrelevant ad exposure and are not hurting their users’ experience. Happy users mean increased traffic, time on site, and loyalty.
• Higher CTR – as you get paid by the click, more clicks means more money for your website
• Advertisers don’t have ads served to users who aren’t interested, thus getting high conversion on their campaign

Essentially everyone profits!

Relevancy is a mark at Kontera that we take very seriously.  Our relevancy efforts start at the “story-level” targeting where we interpret the meaning of the page then matching it with contextual ads that are the most relevant ones.

One measure of relevancy is in the form of a metric called CTR.  CTR or click through rate is a frequency ratio between the number of times an ad is viewed and the number of times it gets clicked on.  Experts agree that as the net becomes increasingly more built up, advertising campaigns that were formerly effective may not hold effectiveness.   In fact, recent statistics indicate that classic banner ads carry a mere .07% CTR rate bringing further understanding to the rise in the phrase “banner blindness”.  In contrast, ads on the Kontera network are characterized by starting click through rates that exceed 10% with some campaigns reaching upwards of 14% (!).

CTR is just one measure of a publisher’s ad performance, but is one of the most honest ways to gauge user satisfaction and interest.  Many publishers  find that after testing with other In-Text ad networks, their user experience suffers and many users desert their site due to the low relevancy threshold so be sure not to compromise when it comes to relevancy.

The next time you read your zodiac sign at your local Chinese restaurant, be sure to remember 2010 as not only the year of the tiger but also as Kontera’s commitment to relevancy.

Today, we stray away from the usual talk of optimizing your Kontera In-Text ads, behind the scenes interviews, and publisher promotions to bring it “back to basics”.  We wanted to include our design experts in an effort to provide some words of wisdom about basic design elements that contribute to good site layout.  We hope you’ll enjoy the tips, and find them useful in your own site design efforts.

1)  Navigation, navigation, navigation - Menu buttons should be one of the most visible parts of any page—anyone that surfs the web knows that there’s nothing worse than a site with no “home link” or access to move on in their browsing.  After all, surfing the web should be a natural experience with smooth transitions.

2)  Functional Focal Points - Be aware of placement of the elements of each page that initially catch your readers’ eyes.  These elements; photos, videos, ads, and other elements that stand out are affectionately known as focal points.

3)  Follow Suit - Consistency is key when deciding on a design.  The best sites have “template” formats which mean that they have the same basic design elements carrying over to every page.

4)  Include Winning Text - Text can be considered just as an important “design” element as any, because it is generally what your users actually came for.  They are looking for fresh, informative, and accurate content, plus it goes without saying that Kontera pay per click ads work best on text-rich pages.

5)  Know Your Audience- A page is only as readable as the type of audience it’s geared towards.   Our creative team recommends thinking this through carefully so that you don’t lose visitors right away just because of a tasteless layout or difficult navigation.

We hope that these tips come in handy and will bring you continued web publishing success

We are nearing the end of the year, and the fall season is when we traditionally see very strong revenues and some great campaigns across our network.

We want both our large and small publishers to benefit and win as well.

Kontera “Triple Play” — Three new ways for publishers to gain extra revenues between now and the end of the year.

1. Optimize for Revenues – Take Advantage of the biggest ad spending quarter of the year. Increase your revenues by implementing our Tips and Tricks to optimize Kontera across your sites. We provide some proven techniques that will help you maximize your earnings during the end of the year and holiday season.

   Learn More ->

2. MVP Rewards – Tell Us Your Kontera Success, Win a Kindle

   We want to hear from you! We’re always interested to learn more about the publishers in our network, their experience with Kontera In Text ads, and how Kontera is helping them. Send us a link to your post or story about your successes with Kontera and you will be entered to win one of several Amazon Kindles and gift certificates that we are giving away for the best submissions. All Our MVP winners will also be featured in Kontera’s all-star gallery series of blog posts.

   Learn More ->

3. Heavy-Hitters’ Special – If you regularly receive Kontera earnings of more than $1500 per month, then we should talk! Kontera can significantly increase your In Text Advertising earnings for the October through December timeframe. There is no better way to get additional end- of- year revenues. Simply send us an email to support@kontera.com with “Heavy Hitters Bonus” in the subject line, and our team members will follow-up to get you into this exciting program.

The biggest ad spending quarter is here! Increase your revenues by implementing our Tips and Tricks to optimize Kontera across your sites.  Follow these tips and tricks which will help you maximize your earnings during the end of the year and holiday season.

• More Page Views Yield Greater Revenues: Add Kontera tags to all pages and as many sections of your site as possible, to earn maximum revenues.
• Seasonal Relevance Wins: Having interesting content that is relevant for through October-December advertising pay dividends. Keep in mind the type of advertisers that spend during this time of year. For example, a holiday season shopping guide or thoughtful opinions on the latest automotive models will probably yield greater results than planning for next summer’s vacation. Having seasonally relevant and fresh content will increase coverage, CPC, and CTRs resulting in record busting eCPMs.
• Consider Changing Link Color: New color usually makes In Text links more prominent to your users resulting in higher CTRs and greater revenues.
• Use Zone or Filter Tags: Keep our analysis and links targeted to your content and away from outlying areas like headers, sidebars, footers, etc.
• Keep it Clean: Avoid producing content with profanity or sensitive topics as quality brands avoid this type of content and our technology screens the content.
• Revisit Maximum Link Parameters: Limiting links to 1, 2, or 3 per page can hinder CTR and prevent you from monetizing to your sites’ full potential.
• More Sites: The easiest way to make more money is to add more sites to the Kontera program.   If you have more sites then let us know and we will get you additional tags.

Our top clicked Keywords list provides an interesting glimpse into what terms are in the center of attention over the past few weeks. From Finance news to best selling gadgets and hot trends, you can be sure that these Keywords will cover them all.

The last two weeks of summer are bound to spark the travel bug in all of us and people are getting restless to take one more trip before school starts again.  Cruising, flying, and luxury hotels—anything goes, and ‘Travel’ related keywords are more attractive than ever.

In ‘Sports’ it’s been a dramatic summer on one of golf’s majors – the ‘PGA Championship’ – as Y.E. Yang, beat none other than the sport’s No. 1 guy – ‘Tiger Woods’. To those of us who are looking for a different type of sporting thrills the ‘UFC’ provided a good viewing alternative to Golf.

Award winning show ‘Mad Men’ is back and it’s more clickable than ever. That said, it takes a lot more than Madison Avenue advertisers or the ‘District 9′ aliens to move ‘Vanessa Hudgens’ from her place at the top of the ‘Entertainment’ category. The 40th anniversary of the ‘Woodstock Festival’ generated a lot of click-love and what better way to bring summer to a close than by listening to some great music while wearing flowers in your hair?

Kontera’s Top Keywords Post Series brings to you the most clicked terms per category each month. For additional posts visit Top Clicked Keywords.

In regards to advertising on a page, some say less is more, while others say taking it to the max is the only way to go.  The one thing that everyone agrees on is that you should diversify your monetization methods in an effort to maximize your website’s return.

Since every site’s build is different in design, content, length/number of pages, employed monetization strategies, as well as in user feedback, finding the proper ratios of page content to ad real-estate is unique to each site.   We wanted to take the opportunity to remind you of ways to groom your site for making the most of Kontera In-Text.

If you’re employing multiple advertising methods on your pages, it is important to make sure that advertising is evenly distributed throughout the entirety of the page. Kontera offers tools to specify areas of a page where ContentLink ads should or shouldn’t be placed by telling our Java Script which text is eligible for generating links.

For example, if you have a dominant series of banner ads next to a brief section of text, you may want to avoid generating ContentLinks in that section by using Filter Tags.  Similarly if you have a text–based menu bar on the top of your page, and a large section of text below, you definitely want to use a Zone Tag to instruct Kontera to only scan in article.  As you probably know, Adsense and Kontera are a great combination, but be sure to maximize the effect of both, by spreading the ads throughout your pages.

Furthermore, upon publisher’s request, our Support Team will gladly make adjustments to link density which is essentially the number of links per 1000 words on a page.  Test to discover the optimal number of ads for your pages, once you do you’ll be sure improve both your users’ experience and your ads performance.

Many of our publishers are interested in expanding their partnership with Kontera by adding more sites to our network. As you already know, to do so, there’s no need to open another account. All you have to do is to contact our Support Team by logging into your account in the Publisher Center and clicking on the “Help” tab. We will quickly review your additional sites and create a unique tag for each site associated with your Kontera account.

Using a unique tag for each one of your sites is important as it enables us to separately track individual performance, as well as make sure that the tag settings are fully optimized to specifically match your sites’ attributes. By using the correct tag you ensure that we’ll provide you with the best and most relevant ad targeting for your site’s content niche and structure.

Say that when you first signed-up to join Kontera, you applied with your computing related blog. A few weeks later, you decided to add your forum which deals with mobile phones as well as your extreme sports site to your Kontera account. While our contextual analysis technology analyzes each page in real-time to identify its topics and main Keywords, some of the ad settings are changes by our Optimization Team. These tweaks are based on each site’s performance, traffic trends, length of its pages, content niche etc. Needless to say that by using the same tag across multiple and diverse sites will result in your missing out on the benefits of this optimization.

Having accurate knowledge of each of your sites’ individual performance is important as it provides us with a clear indication if everything is running smoothly, or if further optimization is required. As a publisher this gives you the option to customize yourKontera ads and detailed reporting. With separate tracking you can accurately analyze your sites’ metrics, which as we all know, is a well known hobby within the internet community

It’s exciting for us to see the many publishers who have started out with Kontera on just one site, growing their web presence by launching new sites.   As networks grow, we get many questions about how to properly manage multiple sites within Kontera accounts.

We’d like to take the opportunity and mention that the Kontera ContentLink tag is unique per site, not per publisher. If you are already a Kontera Publisher and would like to add ContentLink ads to more of your sites, we will generate a specific, unique tag for each one of your sites. This is important for two main reasons:

1. Relevancy- by generating a unique tag for each site in your network, we are able to optimize each tag according to a site’s niche.  This means you get better, more relevant ads for each site in your network. It is especially important if you have sites on a variety of topics.
2. Tracking- each tag represents the performance of one individual site in your network.  This way you can have accurate knowledge of each site, its performance and earnings.  This helps us as we look at your network and try to determine where and how to optimize.

To take tracking another level deeper, use the Kontera Channels.  This feature enables you to create individual reporting for particular pages or sections of one specific website.  To have detailed knowledge of a site’s metrics, you can compare the performance of one page or section to that of another.

Requesting to add sites to your Kontera network is a simple process and only requires a quick e-mail request to the Support team.  The best way to do this is by logging into your account in the Publisher Center and clicking on the help tab.  If you choose to write us from your mailbox, be sure to mention your Kontera login email.

Implementing Flash units is common practice in contemporary web design. Flash presents objects in a continuous movie format, and often includes sound as well as a high interactivity level, providing your users with a rich and more engaging experience.

We mention this since we’ve been getting an increase of questions from publishers regarding Flash and ContentLink ads. Will ContentLink ads be affected by flash units featured on a webpage?

ContentLink Ads are usually unaffected by Flash units. Still, as there are multiple parameters incorporated in each flash code, if you feel that they’re causing any irregularity in your ads’ appearance you can follow these steps:

Use transparent mode when loading the Flash unit to your HTML code. Transparent mode allows the background color or image of the HTML page that contains the Flash unit to show through.

This can be achieved by making the following adjustments to your Flash unit’s code:

1. For the <OBJECT> tag, add the following parameter: <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
2. For the <EMBED> tag, add the following parameter: wmode=”transparent”

The web provides ample resources for anyone interested in learning more about creating and using Flash, but be sure to stop by Flashkit.com, a great site that Kontera’s  very own Flash developers recommend.