Kontera ContentLink vs. LinkXL - In-text Advertising Services

You’ve surely noticed that there is some advertising on Beyond the Rhetoric and while it’s far from providing any sort of full-time income, it’s nice to have a little pocket change at the end of the month to spend on Vietnamese noodles or whatever.

The mistake that many bloggers make is that they sign up for Google AdSense and rely on the big G to provide them with the entirety of their blogging income. That’s a mistake. If you want to make money blogging, you need to diversify.

Down with Kontera ContentLink?

I’ve tried out a few different advertising networks on this blog and some have performed better than others. Kontera ContentLink has been implemented on this blog for some time now and while it’s doing a little better now than when it was first implemented, it’s still making a lot less money that I would have hoped. It’s not as much of an issue anymore, but it was also a downer to discover that Kontera is not compatible with PayPerPost. Some people have also said that the ContentLink ads take away from the overall user experience.

Another issue that has come up is that the ad code for Kontera ContentLink can slow down the loading of a webpage. Shoemoney went to see how much of an effect Kontera has on the loading of a page and found that Kontera loads 68 different things. These loading issues can be terribly problematic.

The Alternative: LinkXL In-Text Advertising

As you may recall, I wrote a review of LinkXL last month on John Chow dot Com and LinkXL appears to be a possible alternative to Kontera ContentLink.

Instead of selling contextual in-text advertising like Kontera, LinkXL sells text links in a marketplace like TLA. The paid links are in-text and the thing is that they are are supposed to leave zero footprint. In this way, the paid links are supposed to look “natural” to search engines. LinkXL publishers can also choose whether to have the links as nofollow or dofollow.

In the review that I did for John Chow dot Com, I said:

Although I realize this may sound a little hypocritical, I personally find that LinkXL is too deceptive for my tastes. How you feel on the matter is up to you.

Time to Make the Switch?

Well, it’s time to be a little hypocritical again, because I am contemplating the possibility of implementing LinkXL on this blog. To maintain the best user experience, I was thinking that I would open LinkXL to older posts in the archive. This way, current readers would not be exposed to the additional ads, whereas visitors coming from search engines and other sources would.

What do you think? Should I ditch Kontera ContentLink and opt for LinkXL instead? The affiliate program is easier with the latter too (as you may have noticed).