Having done just about all I could do to optimize my blog for banner advertising, I’m now setting my sights on contextual ad links.  There are a few networks out there for this type of advertising, but Kontera is one of the larger ones that’s been around a few years, so I signed up for them the other day.

You’ve probably seen these links before, as they are usually depicted by a double lined link, which pops up a small ad window when you hover your cursor over it.  Since I don’t use any underlines for links on my blog, the ad links here are denoted by one line instead.  That should help reduce the link clutter while still keeping the ads distinguished enough from normal links.  So far, it looks and loads pretty decently on my site, so I’m happy. 

I may continue to shop around for an alternative network though (such as Infolinks), since Kontera has a few caveats that annoy me.  For one, if you want to block certain keywords from converting into ad links, you have to email them.  If you want to block certain advertisers too, you have to email them.  If you want to limit the number of ad links that show up on a page, yep, you have to email them.  In addition, the ad links don’t always spread out evenly enough on a page, so one post might theoretically contain only one link, while another post contains over 20.  Three years they’ve been around you’d think they’d improve on this by now, but oh well.  If they pay me well enough I won’t complain, especially if I see ads like this:

Heh. 

That’s probably due to my blog not being completely analyzed yet for optimization, but still, that was funniest thing I’ve seen all day.