Chitika - The thinking blogger's advertising medium

Chitika ads only show up to people who have come to your site via search, and the ads served relate directly to their search terms.

You’ve just read the two most important parts of this post. If you really must, you can move on now. But just in case you missed the points, I’m going to repeat them:

Chitika ads only show up to people who have come to your site via search, and the ads served relate directly to their search terms.

Until recently I had assumed that Chitika was simply an Adsense alternative, and for all the right reasons that we trot out from time to time, I don’t have Adsense on this site:

• It clutters the look of the site
• People in this niche don’t even see the ads any more so the earnings are poor
• The ads might be for stuff with competes with my own products
• Regular readers find them annoying and distracting
• Some weirdly irrelevant stuff can come up if you use some unusual words in your posts
• Serving the ads on every page can slow down your site
• They’re hugely annoying when you’re navigating around your own site – they just get in the way

Chitika solves these problems beautifully. Your regular readers, people coming to a link you’ve sent out on Twitter, anyone clicking through from your RSS feed and even you, will never see an advert! The only people who see them will be those who have found your site via a search, and the ads they see will be based on what they typed into the search engine. There, I said it again!

Let me give you an example of how cool this can be. I have a post on here covering my road test of the Lexus GS450H. Totally off topic for this blog, but something I wanted to cover on here. It gets a lot of search traffic. If someone arrives at that post via Google, they’ll be served an ad relating to the car – perhaps a dealer who sells it, perhaps a link to the manufacturer’s site. They are far more likely to click that, because it directly relates to what they were actually looking for!

I’ve had Chitika ads on my blogs for a week now, and I’m already impressed at the click through rate. And yes you can run them with Adsense as well if you want to.

I really think these are the thinking blogger’s advertising medium. What do you think?

Disclosure: Those are affiliate links, and I will earn a small commission if you start using Chitika. If you prefer that I don’t, just Google them.

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1/ Getting a decent return from Adsense

2/ How the blogging market is changing

3/ When to start making money from your blog