Matt of the new BlogHerald talks about looking beyond Adsense and refer to AzoogleAds as a potential alternative for monetizing your blog. He refers to The Forum Fix which allegedly earned somewhere in the vicinity of $45,000 a month from it.

I have heard of this before but did not really get into it because of lack of feedback from other blogs about it. Anyway, I tested and tried to sign up for the program but ran into some bottleneck like requiring a TIN, among others. And I am not sure if they allow international affiliates.

Then, there’s the CPA programs which made me a little skeptic. CPA is short for Cost Per Action which means the publisher/affiliate only gets paid when an action is completed — a form being filled out, subscription to a newsletter, or a product being purchased. This is basically similar to Amazon Associates but that only covers sale commissions.

Although CPA usually pays much better than your usual Adsense ads (say $2 per filled up form or $3 per successful subscription) the success rate is way lower. If you find it hard for your visitors to just click on an ad, how much more for them to spend 2 minutes to fill up a form? (accidental visitors have an attention span of half a second or so.)

I think this program will better fit forums better than blogs as people stay a lot longer in forums.

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