The two big updates we will have rolling out after the first of the year are going to be smaller widget widths and personalize tipping “buy” pages.

Small widget sizes - Right now the only size available is 200 pixels wide, which seems to work for a lot of people, but also does not work for many blog designs. So we’re working on some smaller widgets. Right now the plan is to make them about 160 pixels wide in size, based upon our research and feedback from our users.

Do you have some feedback you’d like to share about sizes? What size do you need? Let us know in the comments.

Customized tipping “buy” pages - This means that when someone goes to tip you, and click on your tip link (example), you will now be able to add a custom message to that page, as well as an image. For example:

“My blog is all about television and celebrities. For only $5.00, you can tip me and get a nice little promotional link back on my site. Thanks for visiting www.sitename.com”

You’ll also be able to add an image to the page. More like a banner where you could up a special offer, or tip cost, or whatever you want!

As always, we appreciate your feedback during our beta. Feel free to leave a comment below, we’re listening!

Zac Johnson is one of the first ScratchBack users to use an incentive to drive more tips.

Summary: Tip Zac, get a t-shirt.

Today I wanted to introduce you to my “Top Spots”, which is an opportunity for you to advertise your service, web site or blog on ZacJohnson.com for a relatively cheap price, while getting a free t-shirt out of it as well. I currently offer a few premier advertising spots on the blog, but I wanted to be able to also offer advertising that anyone could afford, while offering a fun and unique twist to it.

What I came up with was, running the ScratchBack program and rewarding anyone willing to test it out and advertise on this blog. You can get your site or blog listed on my “Top Spots” area to right (shown on all pages) for $25 a week, and as the incentive, I’ll send you one of my new black MoneyReign T-Shirts, also shown in the pic below. To sweeten the deal even more, all advertisers have the opportunity to take a picture of themselves wearing the shirt and can get their photo and site link listed in my picture gallery section.

Make sense to us. Nice work Zac, we just tipped you and will be expecting our t-shirt soon!

Think about what you can do to help your readers tip you?

It’s really no surprise to us. We’ve been saying that Adsense doesn’t really perform that well on most blogs for years and years. Albiet, we’re still pretty happy to see reports like this.

Summary: ScratchBack is Linky Love’s top earning parter for the month.

Is ScratchBack working for you? We’d love to hear about it, and feature you on this blog. Let us know. info at scratchback dotcom.

We’ve been conducting a little experiment over the past month or so. We wanted to see how/if tipping ScratchBack users with a direct link to an affiliate site would drive conversions and sales for a product. So here’s what we did.

Over the past month, we’ve tipped close to $200 across a few hundred ScratchBack widgets all together. Some were $1.00, some were more, and we didn’t care what type of site of blog it was we tipped. Tip: Using the ScratchBack directory is a good place to look for blogs to tip.

The site we promoted was www.buytheflip.com, which has affiliate links on it to Buy.com. The payout from Buy.com is 3% of a sale, and the typical purchase price of a Flip camera is about $150. So selling one camera earns about $4.50 in commission.

So in return for our tips, we put up links that looked like this example image below. You can see one live here.

Did it work? Yes! Here’s how the numbers crunched for us.

Tips given to promote affiliate site = $200
Sales of product through Buy.com = 62
Commission earned for sales = $279
Profit = $79

Essentially, this proves that you can use ScratchBack to drive affiliate sales, if you’re smart about it.

We’re seeing a LOT of people doing this, promoting all kinds of offers like ebooks and mastermind courses. Give it a try. Try the directory to find some good places to tip!

Are you experiencing the same kind of luck we had? Contact us because we’d love to feature your story!

We’ve sorta quietly launched our new directory, or marketplace, the other day. Check it out at www.scratchback.com/directory.

Are you a ScratchBack widget user? Feel free to add your blog or website to the free directory. Adding your site or blog allows advertisers/tippers to easily find your blog based on categories, so they can tip you.

For example, if you wanted to make some tips and a get link back on some “business” related blogs, you’d go here. Now you can see all the sites/blogs in the business category, and decide if they are something you’d like to tip on.

Remember, the directory is FREE to submit your site. Nada, zip… ZERO!

Submit today!

www.scratchback.com/directory

We just had our billing team push the PayPal “send” button on our very first ever round of payments for tips generated by users using the ScratchBack widgets. Wahoo!!! Enjoy that early Christmas tip bonus everyone!

Every user who generated over $10 in tips was paid today. And we’re still in beta! Who else pays in beta???

Here’s hoping to pay even more in January! Did you get paid today? Go ahead and leave a comment if so, we’d love to hear how you felt when that money rolled into your PayPal account.

A few weeks late, but here are some fun holiday themed widgets you can use to generate more tips. You see one of them in action to the right here on the ScratchBack blog.

VERY easy to update. Just login and go to your “widget manager” and update the widget. Remember, you DO NOT HAVE TO RECOPY YOUR CODE! Just update the widget, click next and the design will automatically switch.

Change back anytime you wish.

Sometime in the first week of Dec, 2007, we’ll be sending out the very first round of payments to qualifying ScratchBack publishers. Qualifying, according to the terms, means that you’ve earned $25 in tips in your account.

But wait, this time we’re going to lower that $25 threshold to $10 for this first month of payments (maybe longer).

So any beta publisher who has earned at least $10 in tips will get paid in December via PayPal.

Time to login and check to see how much you’ve earned in tips. If you haven’t reached the $10 level, make a push on your site or blog so you can get paid!

We can’t think of a better way to give thanks on Thanksgiving by tipping some of the users of ScratchBack for their excellent blogs.

Check out this blog post, where over 100 blogs have submitted themselves as users of the widget. You can scroll through the comments and find new blogs you like and go and tip those bloggers. Most are VERY affordable tips, and can be great exposure for your own site or affiliate link or whatever.

So to those of you in the USA. Happy Turkey. And to those of you not… Happy Thursday.

Another great series of tips from DigitalKeyto.info, this time about how to make money by tipping people who use the ScratchBack widget.

Remember, you can add your site to this post so people can find it to advertise on, or browse the comments on this post for sites to tip. We will have a directory coming soon so this will be much easier.

1. Advertise your site!

There are many good deals right now since it is new. Find a site with some traffic that still has a low ScratchBack price. If the site is set to bump, you could have a link to your site for several weeks. The trick is finding a site with traffic. Manuel Viloria was the first blogger to buy a link here to his blog.

2. Advertise your spammy site.

Actually, my first advertiser with ScratchBack was a bit on the spammy side. It is a link to a page of different home-based businesses labeled Top Work At Home. While I would not want a full link to a site like this, it is no different than an AdSense ad for a home-based-business. If you have some type of site that would normally not be indexed by Google, this is a good option for getting traffic. Always check with the owner of the page first since they may not approve your link if they do not like it and you will be out your tip.

3. Advertise a product.

Almost like the previous way to make money online with ScratchBack, this is another case where you would not normally get a link from a website or blogger. Jim Kukral (who is behind this whole ScratchBack thing) is the first one I saw using this. Think of it as running an AdWords campaign without a CPC. Jim used a link ad here to send readers to a site selling a cool flip digital video camera that plugs right into your USB port to send the video to your computer.

4. Set up a business creating ScratchBack graphics for advertisers.

Similar to method number 5 of making money online with ScratchBack on your site. In this case set up a page with fees and some design ideas for designing graphics for others who need buttons to advertise on ScratchBack. Yep, you need a little know how and software, but it could be handy. You may be able to work out a deal for a discounted ad with sites using ScratchBack with images. It will help them get more advertisers too. I may start to do this myself.