After one just one week, I’ve decided to dump Project Wonderful. Why? Because it wasn’t working for me. My blog title is ”Trying To Make Money Online” not ”Setting Fire To My Money 24/7”. I like the whole concept of project wonderful, you bid for ads on other peoples blogs, and other people bid for ads on yours. What I didn’t like, was the fact that I was paying anything between $0.02 and $1 for an ad spot, and I receiving virtually no hits from the ads I was placing.
Another downside for me was the fact that I wasn’t selling all of my ad spots. If I set my minimum bid to $0.01 they would fill. But if I raised it up to $0.05 to help cover the costs of the ads I was buying, I would scare everyone off. I’m not saying my blog deserves to have all of its ad spots filled, but If I’m going to struggle to break even or gain traffic, I don’t see the point in participating any more.
Maybe I should stop been such a Ebenezer Scrooge, and spend some money with out trying to make it back? First off, I do know that at some point, I will have to purchase ads to help drive traffic to my blog. But, as I mentioned before, I was placing ads and not generating any traffic what so ever. I even made my 125×125 as pretty as possible lol. Anyway, I’m not here to support the ProjectWonderful community (or should that be Entrecard community?) by purchasing ads just for the sake of it , I’m here to make a profit and generate some new traffic to my blog. If I was getting visitors off the ads I purchased, then I wouldn’t really care about filling my blogs ad spots. I probably wouldn’t even bother selling ProjectWonderful ad space. Because I don’t mind paying for something that works.
I think the main problem with ProjectWonderful is that nearly all of it’s users are Entrecard users, and people are basing their minimum bid price on there Entrecard status, not on the important things such as, unique visits per day. And I don’t mean entrecard people ”dropping their card” visits. 
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March 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Hrmmm interesting. I saw so many Project Wonderful Ad Blocks on Entrecard sites that I went and signed up. However… maybe I won’t pursue it now. thanks for the info.
March 11th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
If you’ve already signed up, I would give it a try. Start by offering you ad spots for free, then once they’ve filled up, set a minimum bid price of $0.02. If that still attracts ad buyers, raise up by a few more cents over the next week.
It might work better for you.
March 11th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
This is an odd criticism of project wonderful, mainly due to abandoning the widget after just one week. For small blogs like mine it is really an ideal ad tool, in fact I expect that my widget will be able to pay for hosting costs this month, although it did take a couple weeks for the spots to generate anything over 2 cents. I have not invested a single cent of my own money and have had a couple successful ads run on sites that I targeted for my niche. Plus they have more options than the standard 125×125 ad that the entrecarders use, did you try any of those? Also you made a huge mistake by setting a minimum, a lot of advertisers use the campaign tool to search just for .00 cent minimums, but set a higher maximum and end up out bidding each other. As you mentioned in the post a lot of entrecarders use Project Wonderful and are willing to give lots of helpful tips in the forums on how to successfully use Project Wonderful.
I’m curious as to what you would suggest as an advertising alternative to project wonderful, that generates more hits (not including entrecard).
March 12th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
My experience of PW was a bad one. I’m not saying PW is a waste of time, your story is proof that it can work. I’m not saying everyone should dump it either. I was giving an account of my own personal experience, I really don’t see the point in wasting my time and money on something that is only bringing me 2 extra visitors a day.
Maybe If I put some more effort in to it it might work, but I can’t see that happening. What more can I do? I already had winning bids on lots and lots of PW widgets.
What would I suggest as an alternative? I’m not really sure. Because PW didn’t work for me, I’ll guess I’ll carry on with EC and blogcatalog. These 2 bring in quite a lot of traffic. I’m also receiving quite a few search engine hits now. I guess working on my SEO would be a wise choice too.
Anyway, I’ll take your advice and try PW on another blog I own.
Thx for the comment
April 25th, 2008 at 7:53 am
I’ve try for 4 days, no result yet. No single bid. Bad for me.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:09 am
How high have your priced your ads? Try offering them for free to start with, it’ll get them filled.