Fresh and Niche

Having made a good amount ($1,000+) in about five months, from Voxant Newsroom ads embedded in my blog, I consider it ripe to help others on the things I do, to generate this level of income. My only sad concern is that very few of our Voxant partner publishers ever visit this forum to actively read or participate.

I found out that being a news content syndication system, it would thrive to be current and fresh with the news, I discovered that some of my visitors even thought that I was the writer of those news, so they come frequently to read them, apart from reading my blog posts. Voxant is even more ‘hard-working’ than 80% of bloggers, because many are ‘lazy’ and don’t update their blogs with fresh content daily.

I also discovered that when you embed news that match your niche, you would have great impressions. for example, I am a telenovela Blogger. When I embedded a content on “UGLY BETTY”, the most popular American telenovela, I had great impression for over two weeks.

So for now, Fresh content and Niche are two of the secrets of the game.

I have a question about promoting others to embed form my site. How does one do it? I have told them to hit the embed button on my site then try and past or control ‘V’ onto their site but, can’t get it to work. If I tell them to go directly to Voxant and sign-up, there is no referral fee. Does anyone know how this is accomplished.
Thanks,
Gene

Gene, I have not been successful with referrals. I have gotten only one since June, and that, a very poor one. If the bulk of your visitors are readers/consumers, and not bloggers/publishers, it is natural to have few referrals.

For me, there is no way I could know if the embed button works, since I cannot click my own ads. I simply concluded that the bulk of my visitors were readers and not publishers, that was why I have almost nil referrals.

Somebody from the Voxant team should teach us the tricks of getting more referrals with Voxant

Philomena, I tried to use the embed button from one of the videos on my site using a friends computor. Could not get the embed button to work. Tried to cut and paste, did not work. So, I have asked ‘support’ to tell me how to it. How I think it is suppose to work is the ‘referral’ person gets a video from you or my website and places it somewhere on their website. Then they go to Voxant and register their e-mail address. They get the same payment you and I would get because they are not a ‘publisher’. However, because the oringinal video they placed on their site has your or my code, the Voxant system can tell this website also has an ‘referral’ person. That is how I think it is suppose to work. Now, to figure out how to do it?

It is my thought that good income can be attained here. The key is the ‘referral’ system. If it works and a website has good traffic that believes in the honesty of the website owners, there is a pretty good chance they might take a chance of tring to make some income from the embeding process. However, unless the website gets good traffic, it is not worth it. They will only get frustrated seeing the low return.
Thanks for the reply,
Gene

Philomena,

Fresh and niche are the secret sauce to making money with Voxant – that’s for sure. We follow gardnersdaughter.blogspot.com and all talk about taking a trip to come meet you as we are all huge fans of your work! Even our CEO has visited your site!

That said, you have a great point about referrals. I’ll let you in on a secret. We launched in April and nothing has gone how we expected?!!? It’s been great and we are very successful, but the way we set things up doesn’t always match up with what users want – I guess we tested with the wrong guys.

For instance, with referrals, we wanted to encourage a viral network so we pay you when someone embeds a story they saw on your sight. Sounds great, but what we find is that most publishers would rather refer people to join Voxant and get paid for their referrals in the form of an ongoing percent of their downline revenue. Do you agree?

Also, instead of paying a percent of rev share, we wanted to pay a flat fee, to make it easier for people. But in some cases we are paying people who have sites we can’t monetize because they don’t have original content. So we are rewarding sometimes behavior we don’t want in the network.

Anyway I’m going to post a thread on this very topic. I’d like to hear more from our users (many of whom I’m sure are lurking on this forum!) about how we can change our payment system to make it reflect our greatest value to our publishers, content providers, and advertisers.

Thanks for being such a loyal participant,
Angela
- Voxant Marketing

Wow, Angela.

I am flattered by your remarks and revelation about the high-caliber visitors to my ‘telenovela love garden’ from the Voxant leadership team.

First, please count me in for the test-running, I wld mail you later today about my interest.

Second, We must be frank to address the continuos fluid of changes on the internet. Thank God, Voxant is not an Ad network, it would be easier for her to appreciate some blunt truths.

Organisations like TLA (Text-Link-Ads), made a mistake by basing their metrics on parameters that are, at best, some delusions. I have nothing against Alexa ranking, it has been a useful (though weak)tool for me.

The reason why Google Adsense was so successful was because it embraced liberality in her approach and partnership with publishers and content providers.

I know blogs and forums in Nigeria that have awesome traffic which the Alexa tool would never capture. But Google did capture and strangely rewards such sites, without relying on the Alexa “jaundiced” tool.

Johnchow.com is reputed as a guru in making money with blogs and also by Alexa tool as 2,300 while nairaland.com is reputed by the same Alexa as 34,000. The truth however is that nairaland has page views and unique visitors that quadrupled johnchow.

Nairaland made some thousands bucks from Google Adsense monthly but johnchow struggled to pass the $1,300 mark monthly, before he scrapped Adsense. Yet Johnchow.com earns between $8,000 t0 $12,000 monthly from TLA and ReviewMe.

The changing trend on the internet is from the so-called emerging market. In 12 months between September 2006 and September 2007, Africa’s population of internet users doubled from 20 million to 43 million users. The dark and ignorant continent is awakened, and that, with hunger for knowledge and content and its associated web pleasures.

In 5 years (2001 – 2006/7), moblie telephony (gsm), leaped from zero to almost 50 million in Nigeria, making Billions of dollars in revenue for the 4 gsm companies, and from a supposedly poor and poverty-ridden population. That is the kind of changes we should look out and factored into our calculation.

Herein lies the success of Google in capturing the needs of this awakened new internet community, and channeling them to the advertisers. Herein also lies the failure of WidgetBucks.com and Shoppingads.com What Alexa failed to capture, Google succeeded in embracing and befriending.

My point is, if our goal is to capture original quality content, we must look beyond the metrics of Alexa and even Technorati. There are many crude talents out there with original content who would never have ‘emptied’ that content on the web but for the liberalism of Google’s blogspot.

I would speak more on these issues in a personal mail to Voxant leadership. I have, like many others filled the survey recently sent out on these issues, but many other questions are left un-addressed in that questionnaire.

Philomena – we all respect your opinion here so definitely email us if you have more ideas. I’ll make sure the right people listen. All your thoughts about ad networks and how we measure sites are being passed on to our vice presidents with my recommendations.

Philomena and Angela,

You both provide great sources of information, and thank you for posting them in this forum.

I’m just starting out in making money via blogging and internet, and stumbled across Voxant several months ago.

Working with an associate of mine, we worked with Xanga to allow us to even post Newsroom content onto that social website. Now it’s allowed across the xanga platform (still some adjusting to work with them on…but it’s allowed – nontheless.

for an example: http://www.xanga.com/edlives

However, due to the slow load of the feeds – it’s best if I keep the posting of content to 1 or 2 at a time on the main page.

Becuase of this, I tend to use blogspot to keep my feeds.

In regards to referrals, I understand where you both are coming from.

I haven’t even begun promoting newsroom the way I want to, as I’ve been focused on other things.

However, I would suggest a flat fee reward system to start. This would be a minimum “thank you” fee. I would also suggest to add onto that, a % reward…this would also be minimal…but would be an incentive to not only have people be referred, but also “engaged” in the process of promoting content.

For example:
person A joins voxant, and promotes content by posting, etc…
person B comes across the content, likes it, and posts it on his site. (this is the current methodology as I understand it). Person A would get rewarded for the views that person B generated on their site.

now, taking it a step further:
The same person A joins voxant, promotes content and voxant, etc.
Person B like the content, realizes that he could make money, and joins. Person A gets a “thank you” for a new referral. Maybe $1, as an example.

keep stepping forward….

Person B decides to expand his audience, and works hard at it.
Person A would receive a % of hits that B generates (let’s use 1% as an example).

1. of hits video feed? # of hits video feed?
   1000 or $4 1000 or $4

Person A would get a thank you for referring person B – $1
person A would also get a 1% bonus due to person B’s work – $0.04

So, person A would receive $5.04 and person b would receive $4

This, ofcourse, is a hypothetical situation, but there would be two forms of incentives is my point. One would encourage people to promote newsroom content and more people to join newsroom….this would be a one time “thank you” referral system.

The other would be an on-going monthly bonus, as an added incentive.

Either way, flat or %, anything would be better than what it is now (which is ok…but rather limiting).

Also, the ability to be paid by paypal would significantly reduce the “paperwork” of check’s, and also make promoting Voxant for referrals easier.

I’m no programmer, but an analyst. By doing something of what I just put together, and also putting paypal into place…

On one hand, it would reduce the “check’s to print”, postage to mail the checks…

On the other hand, it may increase the number of members of voxant.

hmmmm…increased content posted, increased exposure for advertisers….increased revenue…..

possible win-win?

feel free to include me on any test-bed too.

Just a thought.

I have been finding that the content from my site and the content from the feeds have been prrtty good. I run a political social network. Sometimes There will be an off video like a news vider about a gravel truck on the Mike Gravel page. But overall I am pleased. The feeds have only been down 2 times and they have been very short timeframes.

check out let me know if you have any suggestions.
www.electionu.com
www.electionunews.com

Travis

I have a question, is the content search engine friendly. Will the search engines see actual content and not just the javascript code?