Make Money Online with The Monetizer: 04/02/08

4/2/08

How to Profit from Pranks

There seems to be a way to profit online from just about every holiday and April Fool's day is not excluded. Taking advantage of people in the holiday buying, or joking mood is a perfect way to make some money online. In fact, you could be running an affiliate program featuring ads for practical joke and prank items on an appropriate blog or website. The Prankplace.com Affiliate program is a good example of a website that lets you profit from people who like to play pranks.

Here's some quick details on their program:

- Prankplace affiliates can automatically join the Kolimbo Open Network, which will give you even more affiliate merchants to take a look at, and consider implementing on your site.

- Prankplace offers a very generous commission of 20% on any sales you refer.

- The minimum payout for Prankplace affiliate is $25, via check or to your Paypal.

- They carry over 1,700 fun, wacky and zany products to pitch. You can link to just the Prankplace homepage or a specific product page.

Here's some of the customer favorites:

While I won't launch into an all-out review of their affiliate program, one drawback I found was that they don't offer too many banners or product ads to use on a blog or website. The choices are limited, but with some creativity you could do some great gag-selling. As stated above, you can link to any specific item page, and probably rotate items on a sidebar or elsewhere on your blog to keep it fresh.

I'd say there's definitely some blogs more suited for this program than others, and it may take some experimenting. Prankplace would fit in nicely on humor, entertainment, and celebrity type blogs. You'd really have to know your audience and whether or not the pranks fit with your topics, otherwise you'd using up valuable space with the wrong moneymaker.

Check out Prankplace.com Affiliate program for more info!

And The Monetizer personally recommends the "Toilet Monster" to scare your friends and family.

Widgetbucks Announces Changes

I received the following email from Widgetbucks on April Fool's Day (no joke here). If you're a publisher with the site, it's worth taking a look at this because it involves a drop in CPC rates as of March 29th, meaning less money in your account.

Dear WidgetBucks Publisher,

This email touches on a couple revenue updates, largely around recent shifts in CPC (cost-per-click) rates and the baseline CPM rate publishers are seeing for U.S. and Canadian traffic.

CPC
CPC rates have have dropped significantly since this past weekend (March 29-30). We are working through those issues with partners right now and anticipate these rates will rise again within the next seven days. Incidentally, this drop we are seeing is not unique to the WidgetBucks network when it comes to shopping CPC rates right now; nonetheless, we're working to get those CPC rates back to their week-ago levels.

CPMs within "Hybrids"
After launching our combination CPM/CPC "hybrid" ads nearly a month ago, we are seeing a baseline .$25 CPM across the board and anticipate this to hold steady or even rise over time. We are working with a number of large ad networks to provide top brands within the CPM rotation, and currently we're seeing ads that are contextual, and targeted by geography and category, and as a result, these are remaining competitive.

A number of our publishers have updated their code to take advantage of this extra and/or off-setting revenue. If you haven't done so, we encourage you to check out this post for instructions on how to update your site code.

We appreciate the continued growth on our network and how much each of you, our publishers, do in helping it grow. Thank you for the feedback we receive on a daily basis on the blog and in emails.

Have a great day!

Check out the Widgetbucks blog post so you can update your code, if you haven't done so yet!