Chitika: A second look…

Remember when Chitika eMiniMalls first came out? They were the buzz of the blogosphere, the next big thing, the blog monetization tool that would make you forget that you had even ever heard of AdSense. That buzz, however, soon died out after problems with making payments on time, huge fluctuations between unaudited and audited reports, and the rules for what publishers got paid for changed seemingly overnight.

Many publishers have moved away from Chitika, back to tried and true revenue generating alternatives, and have not given Chitika another thought. I understand why many publishers have turned away, however, it may be time to give Chitika a second look.

Around the end of the last year I noticed payments to my PayPal account from Chitika that I really didn’t expect. I had removed the Chitika code from the themes from most of my blogs, yet I still received payments… $32 for November, $49 for December, $67 for January. I cannot just ignore that type of revenue so I had to look into where I had Chitika adds appearing on my sites.

What I discovered was that I still had Chitika ads in older posts that I manually inserted the Chitika code on before I decided to add the code to my theme. This is one time that I can say being lazy about managing my blog has actually paid off. I did eventually add Chitika code to my themes but later pulled it off. What I didn’t do as go back and remove all the Chitika ads that I had placed on my various blogs manually. Basically what was happening was that older posts that ranked high on search engines that had Chitika ads on them were converting with visitors from those search engines.

One of the greatest features with Chitika is the ability to target your ads with keywords. You can target so precisely that you can predict exactly which ads you display based on the keywords that you use. If you can find a product on Amazon.com or Buy.com, chances are you can trigger that add to appear simply by using the text from the ad as your keyword.

By triggering Chitika to display ads specifically about the keyword phrase that a searcher finds your site through, you significantly increase the chances of the visitor clicking through on your Chitika add. I am not using Chitika as my primary revenue generator (not yet), however, when I find older pages that get good search engine traffic, I try to find Chitika ads that match the search phrases and add Chitika ads to those pages after the fact. This has definitely made for a nice secondary revenue stream.

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