WidgetBucks can work really well for you for this holiday season if you have a blog that is shopping or product-related. It’s based on the pay-per-click model, that means you get paid for each click and not when someone buys something. If you’re familiar with Chitika, it’s quite similar.

You place a widget on your blog. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Blogger or Wordpress or Typepad. Just copy the piece of code and place it in your blog template. There are no limitations to the number of widgets you can place (they come in different sizes for different locations - sidebar, top of posts, below posts, etc.) but on a site where I tried it out, two different widgets were showing the same products so I decided to stick to a single 160×600 widget on the sidebar.

Also, they say you can run it along with AdSense, but you should check with Google just to make sure.

Widget Sizes

Widgets are available in the following sizes: 160×600, 468×60, 728×90, 300×250, 660×330. As an example, here is what the 300×250 widget looks like:

Categories

There are a number of categories that you can manually select from to display products. The other option is to use their contextual targeting “smarts” to automatically select the products for you.

The categories available so far are:

• Video games
• Sports and Outdoors
• Musical Instruments
• Media
• Kids and Family
• Jewelry and Watches
• Home and Garden
• Camera and Photo
• Electronics
• Computers
• Clothing and Accessories
• Cars

How much can you make from it?

According to the site, “A number of publishers who have tested WidgetBucks are seeing a $3-6 CPM.”

Translation: If you’re getting 10,000 visitors per day, you can $30-$60 dollars a day. It’s too early at this point to point to anyone who has publicly come out to say how much they’ve made with this program since it’s still new. However, I’m sure you’ll see some bloggers report their numbers soon.

Payment Terms

This is important if you have cash flow issues. The nice thing about WB is that they pay on the 1st of the month for all the revenues earned the previous month. You’ll get paid if you’ve made at least $50 and you can opt for payment by check or PayPal. At this point, I’m skeptical about how they will filter out invalid clicks as there’s bound to be people who will try to cheat the system.

How does WidgetBucks compare with Chitika?

From my own tests so far, I see that the WB widget doesn’t reload with too many different products when you reload the page. I have it on the sidebar of a blog in the 160×600 format vs. a Chitika 468×180 banner which actually shows a different product every time I refresh the page.

There also doesn’t seem to be very many products in the inventory at the moment. It might also due to their contextual targeting code not working fully yet. On this particular shopping blog, I have different posts about a variety of products but I only see a couple of variations of the WB widget.

Want to get $25 in your account?

When you sign-up with WidgetBucks, you’ll automatically receive a $25 bonus into your account to get the ball rolling. This means you are half way to your first payout with WidgetBucks.

Sign up for WidgetBucks.

Want to make MORE money?

You can recruit other bloggers to join WB. Here’s how it works. You’ll get 10% of all their earnings for a whole year.

When you refer a new WidgetBucks user, you will receive a 10 percent referral fee based on the commissions earned by the people you refer. You?ll receive this 10 percent for the full 12 months after the new member joins. Your referral fees will be credited to your account and paid monthly, along with your commission payout. So, if you refer someone, and they make $100 in commissions, we pay you $10; if they make $1,000, we pay you $100. This continues for a whole year on all the commissions they earn.

All the more reason to join WidgetBucks now.

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