culturekitchen | fresh dissent served daily

Help us bring a different kind of traffic to our site

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It's Sunday morning. Imagine you are in the church of culturekitchen. Now imagine this is our collection plate.

Let's talk about money.

Believe it or not but we don't make more money with more traffic. We make more money with more people going into the advertisers sites through our ads.

I have been tracking for the past few months how Google handles the CTR (click-through rate) for this site. Unfortunately, with Google I have no control over what I can charge for advertisng. They impose the click-thru rate on the site. How do I know they are pricing click-thrus on our site? I have a widget running on Firefox that allows me to track the CTR for Adsense.

I have noticed that we get penalized for getting more traffic but not more click-thrus. Yup. If traffic goes up, then Google reduces the amount per click we get. So for example, we were doing more than $1/click last month. We have 50% more traffic this month, so they've downgraded our CTR to $.060.

Now, you have to understand : I am not asking you to endlessly click through their ads. I will actually get thrown out of the Google Adsense program if I request that from you. It is explicitly state in their Terms Of Service agreement.

What I am asking you to do is something a bit different; especially since, if traffic does increase, I can charge more money through our BlogAds.

At BlogAds, we set the price. The more traffic one of my sites gets, the more I can charge for advertising.

Do you get the conundrum? On the one hand, more traffic but less clicks looses us money from Google Adsense. Yet more traffic translates into higher adspace pricing through BlogAds.

So what I am asking you to do? Help us increase the quality of the traffic to our site.

The more you comment, the more internal traffic gets generated in our site. After commenting and interacting in the site, remind yourselves to visit a sponsor.
If you really, truly believe in our work, please tell your friends to not just come to the site, but visit our sponsors as well.
If they liked what they saw, ask your friends to join our site by sending them an invitation. In the process, you earn points not just for sending the invitation but for each friend that joins.
The first person to have 10 referrals join our site and earn each 50 points, will get a $50 certificate to our CafePress store.
On that note, do you need some good material dissent to give out as gifts for the holidays? Buy your gifts at our CafePress store. And if you have any design ideas, contribute them for our store.
One more for the gifts: Do you do most of your Christmas shopping online? Help us create an Amazon.com Xmas Shopping list. I have to brainstorm this one a bit more, but basically, you would be using our affiliate code to buy products from Amazon.com. That way we will get a commission on all your purchases.
Many of you have blogs. If you have not done so, please add us to your blogroll --and in order to make it easy for me to put up your blogs on our blogroll, make sure you go to your account, click on edit and then add it in the section that is called ... ahem ... Blogroll.
As you can see, I am experimenting with a Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Program. If you have a Google Adsense account, add your publisher ID to your profile page. 10% of all traffic your content contribution generates on this site will go to you. You will also get 5% of all the content contribution generated by members you have referred using the invitation form.
It's not much given we are dealing with cents. But if we get enough people participating with good quality readers or "traffic", at the end of the year you may end up with a nice little bonus courtesy of culturekitchen and it's blog network.
Notice there is a section there called "Location Map". Help us map out our members by adding your coordinates to the map.
Eventhough most of my readers at The Daily Gotham know where I live, I have still chosen not to use my exact address to pinpoint my location. What I have done is to use GoogleMaps coordinates to approximate my location. Use the tools found at this geocoder site, to find the coordinates that best suit your location needs.

Why is this helpful? It will help us identify advertising opportunities outside of the United States.
Many of you either own companies or work at companies and organizations with advertising budgets. Please promote our blogs to your organizations' ad buyers. You can also help us by telling us what information we should provide to you to ease your effort.
If you have a blog, use me as a referral to join BlogAds and join one of the ad networks I manage. I get a 5% for the work I do for BlogAds. The BlogAds networks I manage are :
I will write about this extensively on a separate post. Just keep in mind that all the work I do will benefit us both even if we don't get the ad buy immediately.

My putting together the Feminist Bloggers Network raised the profile politically and professionally of many of the bloggers on that network. The value of these networks is to aid people looking for "the feminist bloggers", the "culture bloggers", the "colored progessive bloggers", etc. etc. Do not underestimate the power of my networking I truly believe it has helped a lot of people.
Last but not least: If you really, really have the urge to make a donation to us, use the following button:

And :rock to you in advance.

There are many ways you can help increase the value and quality of our traffic, not just the quantity. Please help us on our commitment to serving fresh dissent daily.

Mojito Molotovs and Coronas will be served at the end of the year Cheers