Digital Point has opened up a Chitika Forum for discussion around eMiniMalls. It looks like it will be a pretty active forum and one I’ll be participating in. My id over there is Oziii if you were wondering.

By the way – just saw Jeremy posted about his eMiniMall earnings – $700 for the month of October is pretty good seeing as his blog isn’t a product related blog. Congratulations mate.

Good news for those of you who are a part of the Chitika eMiniMalls affiliate program with Chitika today providing 10 banner ads to help you promote their program. They come in a range of sizes from the small through to larger ones. Here’s a few:

Chitika have updated their blog with some interesting tidbits:

- they’ll be releasing referrer buttons shortly

- they’ve pointed to a page that has a range of the types of products that they have stocks of ads for here

Also on Chitika eminimalls news – Alex has been writing some interesting Chitika eMiniMalls tips on his unofficial Chitika site. Two of the interesting ones are:

- Chitika Daily Keyword Rotation – this javascript code rotates different Chitika eMiniMalls keywords on different days of the week

- Chitika Keywords from Visitors’ Searches – this one will serve ads depending upon what people have come to your blog searching for. ie if they arrived on your blog after searching Google for ‘MP3 players’ you should get served ads for MP3 players.

I’ve not tried either of these tips – but they look useful.

Chitika have completed their audit for their eMiniMalls (aff) month of September. I’ve just checked my figures and am happy to see that the audit has only decreased my earnings for the month by less than 10% (less than last month).

This should mean that those who earned over the minimum of $10 for September will receive their payment via PayPal in the next 24 hours or so (update: payments will be made 31 October). Those in countries without PayPal will get checks once their total hits $50.

One of the improvements that Chitika has been talking about recently has been a more seamless and quicker statistics package. I’m really looking forward to the day that they implement some of the following:

• Real Time Stats (or at least stats that update throughout the day)
• Real Time Auditing (the wait until the end of the month to see what you actually earned is something that many publishers will become frustrated with – if they could actually make this ‘real time’ so that publishers don’t see the difference between audited and un-audited figures they would probably do themselves some favors)
• CTR, eCPM, click value (including some of these stats might be handy. Publishers can work them out for themselves – but it’d be nice to see at a glance how one’s sites are performing in these ways from day to day)
• Dynamic Stats (ie to be able to view a month at a time, last 7 days etc would be handy – at the moment to know your september earnings for instance it has to be totaled by hand or copied and pasted into a spreadsheet)
• CSV files (the ability to download an Excel file with a variety of different reports would be very handy)
• Graphs (it’d be great to see visual representations of earnings and where they come from)
• Channels (I’m predicting the week they implement channels will be the week I can increase my eMiniMall earnings by 10-20%)

These are just some of the things on my Chitika eMiniMalls wishlist when it comes to their statistics – what would you want when eMiniMalls come out of beta?

One of the more common complaints that I heard about Chitika’s eMiniMalls is that publishers are unable to change the background color of the ads. This made it very difficult for publishers with any other color background to their blog than white.

In the last couple of ours this changed and Chitika added the ability to change the background/tab color by using the following code.

‘ch_color_bg = “#CCCCCC”;’

Publishers can either insert this manually into posts or use the eMiniMall code maker to do it.

I’ve also been told that the engineers at Chitika have been working on getting rid of a few bugs that were meaning the ads struggled to be shown on some browsers. The word is that they are now much more compatible on the latest release of firefox and other browsers. This could lead to better CTR if you have a significant amount of readers using such browsers.

Good news for those of you who have been waiting for the Chitika eMiniMalls (aff link) referral program to go public – today it went live.

Now if you refer a new publisher you stand to make 10% of their audited earnings for the first 12 months of their use of eMiniMalls.

I’ve been using the affiliate program for a couple of weeks now and it’s been working out quite nicely.

To be a part of the affiliate program you need to sign up yourself as a publisher and you’ll automatically become a part of it and get your own referral statistics.

The only downside of it is there is no second tier referral program – but beggers can’t be choosers.

Thanks to all of the readers here who have signed up via my affiliate links. I know many of you have gone out of your way to do so as a way of showing your support to ProBlogger.net. I hope that you find them to be as helpful a tool as I have – don’t forget to check out the eMiniMall Tips post I wrote last week which I’m hearing has helped a few Chitika publishers double their income.

On a related side note – I’m seriously considering naming my firstborn after Chitika (Chitika Rowse?) with the earnings they’ve been helping me achieve this week. Even without the referral earnings it’s consistently doubling Adsense revenue and with the holiday season coming the mind boggles at where it could all end up mid December.

A Guide to Getting increasing your income from Chitika’s eMiniMall Advertising program.

Since my initial Chitika eMinimalls review and revelation of earnings from Chitika’s eMiniMalls my inbox has been full of questions on how to use eMiniMalls effectively. As a result I thought I’d write a guide to using Chitika eMiniMalls to refer people to. I hope this is helpful. Feel free to add your own tips in comments below.

Chitika eMiniMall Sign up Process

Signing Up for Chitika eMiniMalls is pretty easy to do. Simply visit their sign up page and fill in your details. Keep in mind their terms and conditions of being a publisher which exclude certain types of sites. When you send in your application you will normally hear back from Chitika with a response within 24 hours (time seems to depend upon what time you apply and whether it is business hours in their part of the US.

Keep in mind that in signing up you are being bound to their terms and conditions that include non-disclosure of some of your earnings information (eg CTR, click values etc). Also note that at this point of their beta test they are only accepting sites written in English.

Lastly keep in mind that if your site’s readership is mainly from Asian countries that unfortunately due to a lack of Asian merchants and low conversions Chitika does not pay out for all Asian countries and the ‘auditing’ process could decrease your earnings considerably.
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Readers who have been trying out Chitika’s eMiniMalls will no doubt be aware that on 7 – 8 October they had some issues with their statistics. They reported in the stats area:

‘On October 7th and 8th our reporting system experienced an intermittent outage for a few hours. The problem has now been rectified. Due to this outage, you will notice that the stats for October 7th are missing. The stats for October 8th might also be slightly deflated. However, please be assured that we will make every effort to reprocess the stats, calculate and compensate for any lost revenue. We thank you for your patience and support while we iron out the reporting issues. Thank you.’

I’ve had a number of emails from readers asking what I could tell them about this outage and how they would be compensated.

As I have not formal association with Chitika (I’m just a publisher like the rest of us) I thought I’d approach my contact there for an official comment. This is what they responded with:

we had some log issues on the 7th and 8th.

There are two aspects to this:

1) Revenue: For this, we will compensate people in a “very fair” way. What is a “very fair” way ? Something like taking their revenue from their best day in the month or something like that

2) The actual stats for analysis: Some people are running tests and would like to know what happened. This is less of a priority.  If we cannot recover from the log issues, the stats for the 7th will remain blank. And the stats for 8th will remain deflated.

So there you have the official word for those of you concerned with those two days.

I would add that it’s worth keeping in mind that if you’re running eMiniMalls that you are participating in a beta test which means that while the product is working well that there is the risk of some instability from time to time.

I’ve been getting quite a few excited emails from readers who have signed up for the Chitika eMiniMalls that I reviewed last week. There has been a lot of positive feedback so far from those who I’ve referred over to the program with some people earning some significant money from it so far (including ‘Rachel‘). There have also been a few (less) emails from bloggers who have failed to see them as effective.

The most common question that I get asked by readers about the eMiniMalls include:

• ‘How do the money from eMiniMalls compare to earnings of Adsense?’
• ‘How much money do you earn from eMiniMalls?’

(update: the third most asked question is ‘how do I increase my earnings?’ If you’re asking this you might also like to check out Chitika eMiniMall Tips for increasing earnings)

I’ve resisted talking about specific figures of money earnt to this point because I wanted to clarify with the Chitika people whether I was allowed to do so. Today I just got confirmation that it’s ok for me to talk about daily earnings figures but not CTR, impressions etc. The reason I want to talk about this is simply because I really believe in this ad system – as you’ll see from the figures below – it’s had a pretty amazing impact upon my earnings and I’d like readers here to have the full picture of what the potential to earn money with it is.

So let’s look at yesterday’s earnings for me with both Adsense and Chitika were. Update: due to Adsense terms (that I misread) I have been told that I cannot reveal my daily Adsense figures but only gross payment figures (monthly totals). So I’ll do that here instead of a daily figure for yesterday. You can pretty much work out what the Adsense earnings are from the figure if you know how many days are in August! All I’ll say is that yesterday was a bit under August’s average.

Adsense earnings for August – $15,849.73

Chitika eMiniMalls earnings Yesterday – $702.45

Let me follow the figures up with a few statements of qualification:

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