For those who are new to ad servers, OpenX is an open source (free) software which you can use to take control of all your online advertising at your websites, blogs and optimize the advertisements to maximize your earnings.

In other words, if you are a blogger & not using an ad server such as OpenX, it is quite possible that you are earning much less than you actually could!

How to win one of the books?
You should write a short blog post (200 – 300 words) with a backlink to OpenX guide book. You are free to choose a topic similar to the following suggested ones.

Topic #1: What is online ad server?
Topic #2: How do(would) you optimize ads on your blogs to earn more?
Topic #3: OpenX features

It is a first come first served contest. The first 3 bloggers who publish the post on their blogs will get the books. So, come here & add your comment with link to the published blog post.

Due to shipping costs, the books will be shipped to bloggers from only US & EU countries. Winners from other countries will get e-book version instead. So, the contest is actually open worldwide.

p.s : You can even make money with this best selling IT book if you are also a member of Amazon associates affiliate program. Just browse to one of the suitable Amazon links and get your link with your Amazon ID and spread the love, enjoy your commissions from Amazon !

OpenX book at Amazon.com

OpenX book at Amazon.co.uk

• OpenX Ad Server & Geotargeting

Geotargeting briefly is the process of showing ads relevant to the origin of the visitor. I will provide you an example to show the importance of using it on your blogs.

Suppose a small Amazon products review blog gets 10,000 impressions monthly and here is the distributions of page impressions according to visitor originating country.

US : 5,500

UK : 3,000

France : 500

Germany : 500

Others : 500

Without geotargeting optimization, a UK visitor would see the banners and links to Amazon US website. Eventhough, some of these people click on Amazon.com affiliate links, this would bring you nothing. Zero. The reason is simple. Amazon US does not ship most products internationally and UK visitors would not buy from US because there is Amazon.co.uk for them.

Geotargeting Solution

In an optimized website, we should show Amazon.com links to US, Amazon.co.uk links to only UK visitors, Amazon.fr to France etc. This way, we will use every page impression beneficently.

OpenX Geotargeting

OpenX allows to show banners in the system according to Geotargeting. It is very easy to use it. Plus, you can achieve it on multiple blogs without changing any template, HTML code for wordpress, blogger installed blogs. All is achieved in a central management screen.

You can learn more about what you can achieve with OpenX by reading OpenX Book.

You can read the reviews about OpenX Ad Server Guide at Amazon as well.

Here is the official website to OpenX where you can download and install OpenX Ad Server free.

Overall, OpenX is effective, open source solution, ever written to maximize ad earnings on the websites, blogs!

OpenX Review

• Blog Contest: 3 Free OpenX Ad Server Beginner’s Guide Books