Click here to go to the start of the step by step instructions

The initial paragraphs provide some background information on how to make money, advert types you can use and other related information. If you just want help entering in an advert, you can skip to the step by step instructions by clicking here or scroll down to the Step by step instructions on how to add an advert heading.

How to make money $£€...

You can make money (or generate some other personal benefit) from your story by adding an advert to your profile/story/chapter. You can promote anything that does not violate our Terms and Conditions.

In general, unless you have your own products to market, we suggest that you register as an affiliate (Publisher) with an affiliate site such as:-

• LinkShare
• Commission Junction
• ShareASale
• Amazon Associates
• Google Affiliate Network
• ClixGalore
• PeerFly
• Clickbank
• MaxBounty
• Neverblue

You can also search the internet for more affiliate sites but we suggest that you review these first.

An advantage of using an affiliate marketing site is that they have a list products / services you can promote, what you will get paid for each program and they will track your commissions and pay you directly. You can sign-up for multiple programs. These affiliate marketing sites will also provide you with all the marketing information (text or/and images) you need to add to this site and start earning. You do not need your own website to do this.

As soon as you have added your an advert it will be available for display on each page where your story / chapter is displayed and can start to be of benefit you. The more times your advert is displayed the more money / benefit you can potentially receive. This means that authors who write more good stories will get more readers of their stories (and more advert views). You can even add more than one advert so that you can target different types of readers but more on this later; let us look at how you can earn money.

How you will get paid?

There are three basic ways you can earn money or to benefit from your advertising space, that is displayed when content you wrote is displayed.

• Earn money from advert views, visitor actions or commissions on the sales of products or services. There are a number of affiliate sites (see above) that will pay you to display their adverts or pay you a commission on any sales or even pay you when a visitor takes an action such as clicking on their advert or submitting a form etc. As the amount paid varies from program to program and the terms and conditions vary on each affiliate site you need to select an option that suites you (see their websites for more information and renumeration payments). You earn 100% of the income earned from this advertising that is paid directly to you from the company(s) you use (i.e. Amazon, Clickbank, Google etc.).
• Use a 'Buy now' link to sell your own products or services. If you have your own products or services you want to sell you can add a Buy now link to your own sales page. Your sales page can be any page where people can buy your products or services. In this case you earn directly from your own sales. As we do not charge you for the advertising space you get 100% of the benefit of your personal sales.
• Generate a benefit by sending traffic to your own website. If you have your own website you can use your advert space to direct traffic to your own website. The benefit(s) you receive will be dependent on your website. Your website could promote your own goods/services or provide more advertising space that you can use to promote more things. You earn directly from your sales / promotions from your website.

Factors that affect the amount you can earn / benefit from your advert(s):

• The more people who like your stories, the higher your story will be ranked and the more readers you can expect to read your story.
• The more you write the more page views you can potentially receive, so your advert(s) will get more views.
• The better (more compelling) your advertising material, coupled with promoting quality products/services and the suitability of them for your readers the more you can expect to earn in commissions or other benefits.

Our tips and notes

• With PPV (Pay per View) adverts you will get paid every time your advert is displayed, which is done automatically every time one of your story pages is displayed. Providers you can use include Google and similar companies. While PPV tends not to pay a lot per view, it does have the advantage that no one needs to buy anything or take any action for you to earn money. While the PPA (Pay per action) / PPC (Pay per click) options mentioned next can pay out more it requires the reader to take some form of action that may include making a purchase. In general well targeted PPA and PPC can generate more income than PPV adverts.
• With PPA (Pay per action) / PPC (Pay per click) / Free offers, you get paid when the visitor takes a specific action. This can be just to click on the advert, or to submit some information, or to receive a free offer (that is often used for lead generation or to promote a product or service). In general you can earn more money from properly targeted PPA and PPC than PPV marketing. There are pluses and minuses with both but you can earn you money with either. For more detailed information on commissions please visit the advert providers website(s) you are interested in using and read the information relating to affiliate marketers terms and conditions.
• You can use affiliate link(s) market the products/services of others. There are thousands of products/services you can market as an affiliate marketer. You can register as an affiliate marketer for free at companies like Amazon and Clickbank (there are lots of others as well). You will typically get 25% to 75% of the sale value. If you select a suitable product to promote you can generally much earn much more than PPV. Amazon will pay you a commission on any items that are attributed to you (your advert). With Clickbank the commissions are on specific products but the commissions go up to about 75%.
• Advertise own products/services This is a good option if you have your own products/services you want to sell. You can link to your own site and use it to promote multiple products and services if you wish.
  • You can provide a Buy Now link to your items.
  • If you have lots of items to sell you can provide a link to your own website and market as much as you want.
• Sending traffic to a website. You can use your advertising space to help send traffic to a website when a visitor clicks on your advert.
• Use combination of all of the above. You can use the available space to either provide a mixture of different things or provide a link to a website / web page so that you can add / link to as much marketing material as you wish.

How much will you get paid?

All that we can say is that you will receive 100% of the benefits generated by your advert views, we do not take a cut. If you use PPV advertising you will get paid a fixed amount for every view. For other types of advertising you will get the benefits based on the type of advert you use. Obviously the more views you get the more benefits/money you can expect, so good popular stories should generate more readers and therefore more advert views. If you are using adverts from a third party like Clickbank or Amazon please refer to their website(s) for details on commissions (Amazon commissions are typically up to 7.5%, while with Clickbank individual commissions vary from product to product typically up to 75%). We do not provide any earnings figures and only provide an advertising space that authors can use to earn money or generate some other benefit.

Different types of adverts

As mentioned in the section How to make money $£€... above there are different ways to make money.

Which is the best advert type for you to use?

• Amazon adverts / widgets This is the easiest affiliate advert type to set up as all you need to do is to enter your Amazon username ID which you can get for free at http://associates.amazon.com/. Your advert will automatically created using your personal Amazon username ID. Amazon will pay you directly based on your earnings. As you know Amazon provide a huge range of products that you can earn a commission on. While the commission is lower (typically about 7.5) than you would typically earn from a Clickbank affiliate program (typically up to 75%); an advantage of Amazon is that you will earn a commission even if your visitor orders something else from Amazon in the current Amazon session (see http://associates.amazon.com/ to sign-up for a free account or to read their terms and conditions). One disadvantage with Amazon is that if you want to earn commissions in different countries you need to register for each of their market places.
• Website/social site/blog/affiliate site. Use this if you want to send traffic to either your own site or an affiliate site or any other public website without entering any html code. Simply enter the website address and a title / description / image to be used in your advert area. Note, if you wish to use your own html code or code snipit provided by the seller use the Html code option which provides more flexibility. If you want to promote an affiliate product/site but do not currently have an affiliate product to promote we suggest you visit Clickbank where you can earn up to 75% commission per sale. There are thousands of products you can select to market as an affiliate.
• Html code This provides you with the opportunity to cut and paste marketing code snipits/widgets that some affiliate programs provide (like Clickbank, Amazon and others) or your own html code. Note, if you want to send traffic to your own website (or an affiliate site) using an advert title / description / image without using any html code, we suggest you use the Website/social site/blog/affiliate site advert option.

Selecting a suitable affiliate product (program) to promote

Typically you will get better results when you select an affiliate program that matches the visitors interests. While we do not know much about the reader, we do know that they are interested in romance, relationships and related issues. Selecting a program that is related to this can be expected to return better results (income) than something that may only be of interest to a few of the readers. Some ideas include relationship information, toys, lingerie and things relating to image (weight loss, cosmetics etc.).

Summing up

1) If you want to use the easy Amazon associates program use the Amazon adverts / widgets option.

2) If you want to use your own html code or use a personally selected Amazon associates widget or use a code snipit provided by another party; use the Html code option. It is important to ensure that if you are entering your own code snipit it is valid html otherwise it will not display correctly.

3) If you want to send traffic to a website (yours or an affiliate product) use the Website/social site/blog/affiliate site option.

Advert size and conditions

Your advert size is 315 pixels wide by 400 pixels high. If your advert does not fit into this space it will not be correctly displayed.

Your advert may not contain any content that is in violation of our terms and conditions.

You advert may not contain any flashing content which will be iritating to readers of your stories.

If you are entering in html coding it can include formatting commands but scripting commands at not allowed.

Your advert may not contain or promote anything that may be considered as undesirable or illegal.

Single or multiple adverts and profit sharing

Every author has the opportunity to either use a single (default) advert that will be displayed whenever one of their stories is displayed (subject to any filtering they set up) or to use multiple alternative adverts.

Using the advanced advertising options allows the author to provide multiple alternative adverts which can be used to provide different adverts for:

• Different reader locations. A different advert can be displayed for a specific country or all countries.
• Different suitability ratings. Suitable for all ages or others.
• Each story/chapter. Every story/chapter can have it´s own main and alternative advert(s).
• Automatic profit sharing. You can set up automatic profit sharing with a co-author or an illustrator. This allows an author to automatically share the advertising space with a co-author or illustrator from a 50%-50% share to a 90% - 10% share.

Note 1 All the advert features (size, advert types and filtering options) are the same for both the default advert and any of the advert alternatives.

Note 2 Unless you have a good reason to use the advanced advertising options we suggest you just use a single default advert. The author's default advert will be displayed whenever one of their story pages is displayed (subject to your filter settings). If you want to do automatic profit sharing or use alternative adverts for different chapters please see the Advanced advertising options section below.

Note 3 When you create main and alternative adverts you have the option to set the viewing ratio between the adverts. If you are using this for profit sharing all you need to do is to set up one (typically the main advert) so that you will receive the benefits and the other so that the other party will benefit. If you set the Alternate advert sharing to, 1 to 1 the adverts will simply alternate (50% of views will be for the main advert and 50% of the views will be the alternative advert). Setting the Alternate advert sharing to, 9 to 1 the alternative advert will only be viewed once for every 9 views of the main advert so 10% of the views will be for the alternative advert.

Step by step instructions on how to add an advert

Adding an advert - Step 1

Please note, if you wish to enter an advert as you read through these notes and the advert entry page is not currently displayed click here to display the advert entry page in a new window.

In all cases we suggest that authors start by leaving the "Display advanced advertising options" field set to "No", and then adding a single (main) advert that will be suitable for all readers. This main advert will then be displayed whenever anything you have written is displayed.

If you then wish to add additional adverts set the "Display advanced advertising options" to "Yes" and refer to the additional notes in the paragraph headed "Using the advanced advertising options" below.

Screen shot of the Step 1 (With additional tips shown and when not showing the advanced advertising options)

Setting the Advert type

If the Advert type shown is not what you want to use, select the Advert type you would like to use. If you need help on selecting this review the Different types of adverts section above.

For your first advert we suggest that you leave Display advanced advertising options set to the default No which will ensure the advert you enter will be used as your default main advert. If you wish to use the "advanced advertising options" see the following section.

After you have completed Step 1 by clicking on the Next button on the advert page, Step 2 will display the input fields for the type of advert you have selected to use. Click on one of the options below to go to the appropriate help information relating to the Advert type you intend to use.

• Website/social site/blog/affiliate site
• Html code
• Amazon advert

Using the advanced advertising options

If you are not using the advanced advertising options click here to go to Step 2.

Screen shot of the Step 1 (when the advanced advertising options are displayed).

Setting the Advert type

If you need help on selecting the advert type review the different types of adverts section above.

Select where to add your advert

When using the advanced advertising options you can provide a main and alternative advert for each of your chapter(s) and/or a general advert(s) (main and alternative) that will be displayed whenever a more specific chapter advert has not been provided.

There are various reasons why you may like to provide multiple adverts including providing different adverts for:

• Readers from different countries or
• Chapter ratings or
• Automatic profit sharing or
• Advert split testing. To find out which advert generates more income.

Main or alternative advert

For each chapter and for the your general adverts you can provide a main and an alternative advert. This allows you as an author to provide different adverts for each chapter for any of the reasons given above.

Adverts are displayed as follows

• 1) If a chapter main advert exists it is displayed unless you set some condition that is not met, otherwise
• 2) If a chapter alternative advert exists it is displayed unless you set some condition that is not met, otherwise
• 3) If a general main advert exists it is displayed unless you set some condition that is not met, otherwise
• 4) If a general alternative advert exists it is displayed unless you set some condition that is not met, otherwise
• 5) As you have not provided a suitable advert you will not benefit from your advertising space.

To ensure that you always have an advert that will generate you money or some other benefit ensure that you provide a general advert (either main or alternative) that will be suitable for all reader ratings (i.e. suitable for all ages) and for readers from all countries.

Moving to step 2

When you have selected the advert type you wish to use, where to add your advert and if you wish to provide a main or alternative advert click on the "Next" button to do proceed to step 2.

Step 2

When the appropriate Step 2 input page is displayed it will indicate where the advert will be saved. This can be a general (default) advert (main or alternative) or a chapter advert (main or alternative). In addition if you are changing an existing advert type a warning message will be provided with an option to change the input type to match the existing advert type.

Click on one of the links below to go to the appropriate step 2 section or scroll down to the appropriate section covering the advert type you wish to use.

• Website/social site/blog/affiliate site
• Html code
• Amazon advert

Step 2 for Website/social site/blog/affiliate site

Screen shot of the Website/social site/blog/affiliate site form

This advert type allows you to direct traffic to any website, social site, blog or affiliate site etc. and generates a normal text advert with a clickable title. You can also add a clickable image as an alternative to/or in addition to a text heading and description.

When a visitor clicks on the Advert title or Advert image entered they will be taken to the Advert Url entered.

The optional Advert description will be placed under the advert heading.

Step 2 for Html code

Screen shot of the Html code entry form

This advert type allows you enter some html code to display your advert. This can be html code you write yourself or a code snipit provided by the company you are advertising. For example you could paste in the html code snipit provided by Amazon to display one of their widgets. If you are promoting an affiliate program such as one from Clickbank they will normally provide you with the code required that you can simply paste into the Advert code field. In most cases affiliate programs provide a number of code snipits with a range of graphic size and type options. It is important to remember not to use any flashing images on your advert(s). If you are promoting an affiliate product and all of the code snipits generate flashing images you will either need to use the Website/social site/blog/affiliate site advert type or convert the flashing image into a static image.

When entering a code snipit or your own html code it is important to note that scripting languages are not allowed.

Using this option also allows you to promote more than one item by inserting multiple links. If you want some special code but are unable to do it yourself you can ask someone to write it for you. Normally you can get the code witten for a nominal charge.

Step 2 for Amazon advert

Screen shot of the Amazon advert entry form

If you have registered as an Amazon associate simply enter your Amazon username Id(s) into the appropriate field(s) and an advert will automatically be generated for you using your Amazon username Id. Amazon currently allows affiliates to register in a number of market places (countries), however they require affiliates to register for each market place seperatly. So to use multiple Amazon market places you need to register for the different countries and then enter the appripriate information into the fields provided. If you want to use a different Amazon widget use the Html code option to paste in the Amazon widgets code however most alternatives use flashing images or scripting that is not allowed.

If you are not currently registered as an Amazon associate, you can register here for free.

More about using the advanced advertising options

Why you should always add a default advert

Even if you use some of the advanced advertising options we still suggest you add a main general (default) advert. Your main general (default) advert will be displayed (subject to any filtereing added) whenever a story/chapter advert(s) is either not defined or it is filtered out (due to any advert filtering set).

Why we provide Advanced advertising options

We provide the advanced advertising options for authors who wish to use more sophisticated advertising options can do so. You can enable or disable the entry of the advanced advertising options in the Add/Edit Adverts page. Unless you specifically want to use advanced advertising options we suggest that you keep the advanced advertising options switched off. The advanced advertising options allow authors to provide different adverts for each story / chapter and also to provide optional alternative adverts. Using the advanced advertising options, you can target readers from a particular country or the whole world for example. The advanced advertising options can also be used to set up an automatic profit sharing between co-authors or to share the profits with an illustrator etc. Alternatives can also be used to split test different adverts or to establish which will earn you more money. They can also be used to ensure that adult adverts are not displayed to under age readers or those who have not indicated they wish to view adult material. We advise all authors not to display adult images in their adverts.

How the advanced advertising works

The site performs the following checks whenever a story page is to be displayed.

1) The site first checks to see if the author of the chapter being displayed has added a main chapter advert. If found and any author filter conditions are met it will be displayed, otherwise

2) If a suitable advert has not been found above the site next checks to see if the author of the chapter being displayed has added an alternative chapter advert. If found and any author filter conditions are met it will be displayed, otherwise

3) If a suitable advert has not been found above the site next checks to see if the author of the chapter being displayed has added a main profile (default) advert. If found and any author filter conditions are met it will be displayed, otherwise

4) If a suitable advert has not been found above the site next checks to see if the author of the chapter being displayed has added an alternative profile advert. If found and any author filter conditions are met it will be displayed, otherwise

5) If no suitable author advert is found the site will display a system advert. System adverts do not provide any benefit to other authors, so it is important to ensure that you provide a general advert that is suitable for all readers and all countries. If you are using filtering on the genaral main advert ensure that the general alternative is suitable for all readers.

About alternative adverts

When you activate the advanced advertising options, in addition to your main general (default) advert you can also add an alternative general advert and add main and alternative adverts to each individual chapter. This allows you to provide different adverts for each chapter if you wish. If you do not add a specific advert to a chapter your main general (default) advert will be used (subject to any filtering you set up). In addition you can add an alternative advert to every chapter advert and also provide an alternative to your main general (default) advert.

There are two main reasons for using alternative adverts:-

1) Alternative adverts will be used either when a main advert does not exist or it is filtered out. For example if you include filtering on a main advert (either on your general advert or a chapter advert) the alternative will be checked. For example if a main advert is filtered so that it is only displayed if the visitor/reader is from the USA then the alternative will be displayed to visitors outside the USA providing it is also not filtered out. If no suitable story/chapter match is found the author's main profile (default) advert will be checked and displayed unless it is also filtered out. If the author's main general advert is filtered out the site will check for an alternative general advert.

The second reason for using alternative adverts is to allow profit sharing between co-authors or other parties.