How To Make Money Blogging With a ScratchBack TopSpot Widget

Posted on January 14, 2008
Filed Under Make Money Blogging |

You can now make money blogging by putting a ScratchBack TopSpot widget on your blog. ScratchBack has been described as an online tipping system where readers can show their appreciation for your work by leaving you a tip. In return the tipper gets to place an ad on the TopSpots widget on your blog. The ad comprises a 20 character text link and a 75 character message which is displayed when a reader moves their mouse over the link.

Despite the intent of the ScratchBack TopSpot widget, it is essentially another advertising program for your blog. But it does have a few twists.

This is probably a good time to point out the difference between ScratchBack and other programs which allow you to sell text links. The ScratchBack TopSpot widget includes nofollow on the link. This means that there is little value for search engine optimization purposes as the links pass no pagerank. This is both good and bad. It’s good if you are worried about penalties imposed by Google for selling pagerank. The downside is that nofollow links tend to have a lower value, so you’ll make less money.

An unusual thing about the TopSpot widget is the concept of Auto-Bumping. When a reader places an ad (I mean leaves a tip) they go straight to the top spot on the widget. They remain in that position until someone else leaves a tip. At that point the new tipper gets the top spot, and the previous holder of the top spot gets bumped down one position. The tipper at the bottom of the list gets dropped off. So there is no certainty as to how long a tipper’s ad will remain on your site. It might only last a day or 2, or they might get lucky and have their ad showing for a month or more.

Another oddity is that you (the publisher) have the option to delete an ad at any time and there is no obligation for a refund. This is in keeping with the whole tipping system concept. The reader was really tipping you for your efforts rather than buying an ad.

From a bloggers point of view, the main thing is that you make money every time someone places an ad. How long it stays there doesn’t concern you. In fact the opposite is true - you want a high ad turnover as that means you’ll make more money from your blog.

The TopSpot widget has a number of configurable properties:

Currently ScratchBack are paying out 90% of the value of an ad to the publisher. Minimum payout is $25 with PayPal being the only payment method presently offered. Payments are made 15 days after the end of the month.

Having said all of that, one of the best ways to make money from the ScratchBack TopSpot widget may well be as an advertiser rather than a publisher. I recently read Make Money with Top Spots over at How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Grizzly’s idea is that by finding blogs with well targeted traffic displaying the TopSpot widget (and with reasonably priced ads) it may be worthwhile finding an affiliate product to sell, buy an ad spot and make money that way. You don’t even need your own blog to make money online then.

ScratchBack also offer a blog directory where you can list your blog and find advertisers. Alternatively, you could use it to find other blogs on which to sell your affiliate products as per the strategy outlined above.

While the ScratchBack website is still a little rough around the edges (it is still in Beta), I still think it’s an interesting concept. You may have noticed I have just placed a TopSpot widget at the top of my sidebar. I have left all of the settings at their defaults and started the price at $1 (the minimum allowed) to see how things go.

Technorati Tags: Ad Networks, Make Money Blogging, TopSpots




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Comments

2 Responses to “How To Make Money Blogging With a ScratchBack TopSpot Widget”

  1. Mirjam on January 24th, 2008 2:45 am

    Hi,
    thank you for this post, seems to be quite an interesting widget with quite some different possibilities :) I think I will be running it on one of my blogs aswell and see how it goes, plus will be checking back to see how yours is going!

  2. Brett on January 25th, 2008 12:37 am

    As you can see there have been no takers yet. I can’t believe that at $1 for an indefinite period nobody is interested.

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