Offers
The first thing I will talk about are their offers. The reason I consider them a niche affiliate network is because they seem to specialize in insurance and loan offers. They have mostly insurance offers that range from auto insurance to burial insurance. I have done a good amount of auto insurance offers in the past and T3Leads payouts are very good. Knowing what the actual conversion process is, is sometimes difficult with affiliate networks but T3Leads makes it clear as day. They also point out average conversion rates for different types of traffic right in their offer description. If you are big into insurance offers, I would definitely suggest trying them out.

Backend
Having a great, easy to read backend is difficult to accomplish. T3Leads for the most part gets it right. There are a few complains I have though. Initially, it was a little difficult for me to find the offers. I would have liked to seen a big “offers” button right on the homepage. The reporting system however is great. It is easy to use and very quick. There are definitely some things they need to iron out in their backend but for the most part it is very well implemented. Here is a screenshot.

Payout
Generally, when you have a niche affiliate network, they are able to pay higher than normal rates because they kill one section of the industry. This is the case with T3Leads. From what I’ve seen, they pay very well for insurance offers. Just like any network, if you are pushing a large volume of leads, you have the option to negotiate a higher payout. I always suggest affiliates do this. T3Leads pays every other week by default. As with any other network if you are driving lots of dollars to them, you can request speedier payments.

Landing Pages
One of the most unique features of T3Leads is their private landing pages. These are pages you download and self-host on your own server. They come with a built in CMS and can be edited to fit your needs. This is unlike any other network I’ve seen and is very surprising. I always want to change the default landing pages offers usually have to optimize them but am never able to. Now, I can pretty much do anything I want with these landing pages. They also offer automated form creators, which is another great feature to make landing page creation easier.

Overall
Just like any other network the best way to determine if this network is for you is to give them a try. T3Leads is a niche network focusing on insurance and loan offers so if that is your bread and butter, definitely give them a try. Their updated site is definitely an upgrade from the previous version and with some minor tweaks here and there, they can become even better.

Customer Service
Before I start I would like to mention that one of the most important factors to me in an affiliate network, and any company for that matter, is customer service. Customer service includes how easily and quickly I can get a question answered or request handled. I don’t care if you make $10 per day or $10,000 per day, the affiliate should be number one priority. That being said, I recently signed up for Clickbooth and shortly after they contacted me and I was approved. My affiliate manager was quick to email me a couple starter questions (how do I usually promote offers, what kind of offers do I usually like) and from that found a bunch of great looking campaigns to run. So from my experience so far Clickbooth has excellent customer service.

Reporting System
Upon entering their reporting system, I was very pleased. It is very easy to read and displays all the data in a well-formatted page. The backend itself has a very intuitive GUI, which makes my job that much easier. Although I have not been able to send a ton of traffic their way yet, they are definitely first in line for my next big campaign.

Overall
Clickbooth has great customer service, a ton of well-performing campaigns, and an intuitive GUI. One last thing I would like to mention is their ability to keep affiliates up to date with offers and news. They have an active twitter account and blog. If you plan on using Clickbooth after reading this review, please use my affiliate link .

Right when I was getting fed up with my income from Vibrant, a Kontera account manager emailed me asking about the post I wrote 1 year ago. She said much has changed since then, and asked if I would be willing to try Kontera again. Since I was ready to switch from Vibrant when she contacted me, she did not have much trouble convincing me to switch back and try Kontera once again.

I have already installed the new code and made decent money on the first day of advertising. I got about 35 cents per click on day 1, but reporting has not updated since then. It has been about 5 days since the last day of revenue was posted. One of the major factors I look at when deciding between ad networks is their reporting. Some of the questions I ask are:

• How detailed is the reporting? (Can I see exactly click for click how much I made?)
• How frequently is data updated? (I want my revenue updated every hour, or daily at the very least)
• Does it give optimization suggestions? (I want suggestions on how to improve my campaign)

Kontera has already shown poor update frequency, but I will email my contact to see if this is normal or a fluke. Hopefully I will be making more money than I was with Vibrant, but only time will tell. I will post a follow up post in a few weeks showing either the success or failure of Kontera the second time around.

(6/21/2007) – I received another review shortly after this so I figured I would just include the linkback in this post: Tax Rebate. Thanks for the review!

First Blog Review
I received my first blog review for a linkback. I started this program about 3 weeks ago and finally someone has noticed. I have received many linkbacks from sites listing all the sites that run programs like this, but unfortunately those are not my rules and will not receive a reciprocal link.

Free Link Back
Someone finally took advantage of this great program and easy way to get a free link. Since they are the first, I will dedicate this entire post to linking back to them so maybe other people will see how easy this really is. The review of my blog can be found at chemstudioweb.com, specifically at this location. I would like to thank chemstudioWEB for writing the review of my blog, it seems like he both enjoys and learns from my posts. He also listed some of my mini niche stores, which was not necessary but welcomed anyway…thanks again.

How to do a Blog Review for a Free Link Back
The rules are very simple and can be found at: Review My Blog for a Free Linkback. The basics are you have to write a review of my blog, and link to it at least once using anchor text from the following choices: Make Money Online, Learn Internet Business, Blogging for Money, and now SEO Tips. Use any one of those to link back to my site and you will receive a link back to your site. If the reviews keep coming in slow, ill give anyone who does it a dedicated post. Thanks again Chemstudioweb.

In-text advertising is basically ads that are targeted to the keywords on your web page. Each ad company highlights specific words on your web site in their own way and when a user hovers over the word, an ad appears. You can see examples of this on my website.

I had been using Vibrant Media for months, and it was doing well for a while. Then one day I had no revenue for about two weeks straight. This was very discouraging. I then noticed that many sites were using a new in-text advertiser called Kontera. At first glance I didn’t think that Kontera’s ads looked as good as Vibrant’s, but they were popping up everywhere so I decided to give them a try.

Comparison
The first difference I noticed was that you can have many more highlighted words on each web page. I think I had something like 15 ads on a page with Kontera and the limit for Vibrant is 7. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Users might think you are being too spammy with the ads, and there is a fine line between quality content and just writing for advertisements. Some other differences obviously include the color of the underlined word, and the look of the ad. Personally I think Vibrant Media’s ads look much better than Kontera’s. Both companies I must admit have excellent customer service. They both receive my highest approval for their customer service.

Vibrant Media Ad:

Kontera Ad:

Revenue
So now the most important difference, revenue! When I started using Kontera, I was only getting a couple cents per click. I was getting many more clicks than I was with Vibrant, but they just weren’t paying as much. Let’s take a random sample of days as an example. One day I had over 30 clicks with Kontera, which made me about .40 cents. Yesterday with Vibrant I had 5 clicks, which made me over $2.50.

Winner: Vibrant Media
The obvious winner for a smaller blog such as my own is Vibrant. Kontera may be able to optimize for a bigger site much better, but I was not able to get the numbers I was looking for from Kontera. I have permanently switched back to Vibrant Media.