My Thoughts On Infolinks In-Text Advertising

There are many different types of programs bloggers can use to monetize their websites. The problem comes in finding the right one for you since every website has its pros and cons which will affect how it monetizes. One of these programs you can monetize your website with is Infolinks which are deemed the market leaders in in-text advertising. Infolinks sounds great. But, are they the best program to use on your website? Here are my thoughts on Infolinks.

For those that do not know, in-text advertising is a form of online advertising which plants links throughout your content that relates to the content. This tends to provide a high CTR since traffic click on the link without knowing it is a link.

Of course, I have experimented with Infolinks and found a few things good and bad about the program. The first thing I found is that it looks great on my website. Infolinks allows you to customize how the links appear in your content, so it is unobtrusive – the amount of advertising space I saved meant I could concentrate more on a better theme for my website not optimised for Adsense.

As well as this, Infolinks have expanded their advertising units not to just in-text links but also banners in the background, tags at the bottom of posts and more. If you chose to use all of them at once, your website would look awful. But, one or two implemented together and you could be on for a winner.

However, I am afraid this is the part of the article when it all goes downhill. Here are my main concerns with Infolinks:

• The CPC for each click is ridiculously low. I managed to gain a CTR of around 10% which is staggeringly high. But, each click was worth literally 1-2 cents which means, in total, I never earned more than  a dollar a day. Compare that to Adsense, well, I would have earned way more than a dollar a day.
• The adverts are not relevant enough. Instead of relating the advert to the whole of the content on that page, I find that the adverts Infolinks display are only related to the text that has been linked to. Therefore, if you have content about horse riding and mention hurdling, instead of knowing it is about hurdling with a horse, Infolinks would show an advert for, let’s say, running spikes.
• Since the links are in the content, confidence with your traffic will decrease because instead of the web user thinking they will click onto a different page on your website, they will instead end up at an irrelevant advertiser’s landing page. Your pages per visit will decrease.

Infolinks seems like a great idea and a great program. But, the truth of the matter is that one of the most important aspects about advertising programs is how much they make the blogger and, from my experience, Infolinks struggles to make more than cents because of the low CPCs. Maybe one day the average CPC will increase. But, until that day, I think I am going to stay away from them.