Low-cost Advertising Using Project Wonderful

I’ve been a Project Wonderful user for about a month and 8 days already. I used it first in my other blog to test if it can compete with adsense when it comes to monetizing your site. Unfortunately, it barely scratched the amount which adsense manage to squeeze out of my blog. One thing to note though, is that you can use your small earnings from it (instead of just taking it) to advertise on other blogs, after all it doesn’t usually take that much to advertise in this ad network. But before I go on spending my hard-earned bucks to bid for an advertising spot, I decided to do some research first.

Basically, the whole concept of advertising in Project Wonderful is to bid for an ad spot in a blog running Project Wonderful in one of its available space. (For more information about this, click here.) There are blogs that cost more than a dollar and a lot more that costs less for a day. If you’re lucky enough, you can run an ad here for $0.30 in a month. The usual ad formats advertisers use are 125x125 squares since most of its advertisers are bloggers like me who might also be using entrecard at the same time, but other size formats are also available.

From my observations of the ads running in my Project Wonderful boxes, most of them are only bidding for a daily basis which means they expire after one day. Also, a lot of bloggers I’ve come across get their ads in the network via bidding instead of the other advertising feature which is through campaigns where there will be more money involved since you’ll be spreading your ads across the network based on certain criteria (tags, maximum bid, page views, etc.)

From what I’ve read, it seems that campaigns take lesser time to set up and monitor and yields a far better result as compared to manual bidding from site to site. Of course, it all depends on the amount you’re willing to dish out which is additionally true for manual bidding. Take EZMoneyOn.Net as an example:

We advertised for about 3 weeks through Project Wonderful. We’ve manually chosen 22 sites, with ads above the fold, with enough visitors. We’ve spent about $75. Our ads were displayed for 16,387 times and our ads were clicked for 187 times. That’s a CTR of 1.14%.

Yesterday, because we had another $15 in our PW account, we decided to setup a campaign. So we’ve chosen all sites with 125×125 ads, tagged with money, with a current bid between $0 and $0.2. Our ad was displayed on about 188 sites, was viewed for about 45795 times and was clicked for about 128 times. Our campaign last until our money ended, about 13 hours. Although the CTR was only 0.3%, much smaller than in the first case, the cost per visit was much better: $0.12, compared to $0.40 in the first case.

Statistics show that is better to setup a campaign instead of choosing sites manually. But for a campaign you must have some budget, because there are many sites involved, so you can easily spend about $20/day. Between those sites there are also sites with ads below the fold, so you will not receive any click, or very few…

For the moment, I don’t think I can afford running campaigns. Perhaps, I’ll be sticking to manual bidding for now until I earn enough from running Project Wonderful ads. After some Googling for answers, I’m not able to find any tips on how to effectively spread the advertising potential of something like 10$ or less through manual bidding in Project Wonderful. In that case, I guess it’s all up to me to test if I’ll be able to get something good out of a few dollars.

Now, how to do it? I guess the strategy should be very much similar to EZMoneyOn.Net’s approach in campaign bidding. I’ll just have to do it manually with a much shorter budget. Start hunting for blogs within the $0.01 – $0.03 max bid and run my ad for 3 to 4 days perhaps and see if there will be any favorable result. Of course, I’ll have to make sure also that the blog is producing favorable page views per day and the ad box should be above the fold. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to get it done because I’ve read of some guy warning about getting a carpal tunnel’s syndrome if you do it manually due to its over tedious nature. Maybe he’s just exaggerating things.

Anyways, if you guys have any experience about Project Wonderful and running advertisements in it that you’d like to share, please leave your comment so that we can learn from each other.

By the way, here are some links to the great resources I found about running Project Wonderful ads in your blog and advertising using it which I hope will be of help to you.


4 Tips for use with Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful Review and Tips
Tips For Project Wonderful Publishers
Project Wonderful Provides Cheap, Targeted Advertising!
Does Project Wonderful Live Up to the Hype?
Project Wonderful Advertising Campaigns
Advertising Through Project Wonderful
ProjectWonderful: Advertise and make some bucks
Getting Targeted Traffic At 1 Cent Per Visitor



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