pay per click
Case Studies
Throughout this book, I’ve been explaining all the different ways that you can optimize your site and boost your revenues. In this chapter, I’ve collected some examples. All of these are real sites that employed the techniques that I describe in this book to make more money. I’ll talk you through them so that you can see exactly what they did, why they did it — and how you can do the same.It can take some courage to make your ads the most important thing the user sees when he looks at the page, but that’s the approach that JourneyAustralia.com takes. You can’t miss these ads! They’re right above the fold and slap-bang in the middle. They’re the first thing the reader sees even before he knows what the site is about.Note too the picture right next to the ad unit. That helps to keep users’ eyes in the ad zone, but you have to be very careful doing that. Google’s ban on “misleading” images is vague enough for them to act on any picture placed next to an ad unit any time they want. That doesn’t mean they will but you don’t want to give them an opportunity. JourneyAustralia.com seems to have found the right sort of image to use. If you’re not sure about your image though, it’s best to leave it to one side. The strategy of placing an ad unit in the middle of the page though is very simple. It’s about as subtle as a slap in the face but it can be very, very effective. Do you have the courage to try it?Few sites do a better job of integrating their ads with the text as FreeAfterRebate.info. The ad units have lost their borders, the text matches the text of the content and the background color is the same as the background color of the Web page. The content itself is short as well. In fact, it looks a lot like an ad! That’s a great strategy to use. Instead of blending an ad unit into a Web page, you can create content that matches the ad unit. I’m not sure whether this is what FreeAfterRebate.com did but there’s no reason why you couldn’t do it. First, you’d decide on the format of your ad units, then you’d create very short articles that follow the appearance of those units. Because you wouldn’t be able to include much more than a headline, a sentence or two of text and a link, you could really only use this strategy on pages that discuss products, or home pages that offer teasers to longer articles. Look too though at the way this site uses an image. Instead of placing a picture right next to an ad unit, FreeAfterRebate.com puts it above the ad unit. That’s another great solution to copy.Gifts-911.com Gets Emergency Treatment With Multiple Ad Units
The most Adriana Copaceanu’s site Gifts-911.com had made in one month was $31.19 — not much more than a dollar a day. She put a main ad unit above the fold, a second unit at the bottom of the page and an Ad Link unit on the right. After making the ads more prominent and adding more of them, revenues doubled the following months and reached as high as $200 in the month after that! That’s was so simple. It’s a great example of how just a small change in AdSense can yield massive results. Could Adriana do more? Probably. But this is a pretty good start!
Check out Gift-911.com at www.Gifts-911.com.FireFox Plugin Reviews — Getting Your Clicks Faster
This blog offering tips and reviews for users of Firefox also has some pretty good examples for users of AdSense. Just see how long it takes you to find the ads in the screenshot below. Do you notice how you just don’t spot them right away? But as you read the content — and it’s great content — you just can’t miss them. Again, the ad unit’s text and background colors match the design of the blog’s content, blending the ads in perfectly. And by placing the ads inside the articles, users can’t help but read them. There are a couple of other things to watch out for though. First, the referral button is right in the middle of the article. But it’s an article about Firefox so that’s likely to get a lot of clicks.The second thing to look at is the fact that this blog also uses Kontera’s ad system. All of the links relate to Internet terms — the topic of the blog — and by just moving the color up a tone from the color of the content, they stand out and look inviting. That’s a great mixture of ad unit blending, referral buttons and contextual ad systems that can bring great results.
OffshoreBankingCentral.com Brings Home The Bacon
One of the great things about optimizing your AdSense ads is that with a little bit of thought, you can really come up with some very clever ways of blending the ads into the page.It’s easier to do this with some ads than others. Leaderboard text links, for example, can be very useful. A lot of people turn their nose up at horizontal text links. They think that because they’re so small not enough people will see them to click on them. While vertical link units can be easily integrated into a list of links, there’s no good place to put a horizontal unit. That’s a big mistake. OffshoreBankingCentral.com shows just how powerful a well-blended horizontal link unit can be. This site has two sets of ads: a vertical ad unit on the left separated from the rest of the page with a gray background (I’d be interested to know how well those ads perform but I suspect they’d do better with a white background); and horizontal link unit at the top of the page. That link unit just does an outstanding job. The unit displays four links right beneath the navigation bar. Each one of those links contains either the word “offshore” or the word “banking.” Even though “Ads by Google” is still there right next to those links, they still look like another line of navigation links leading to relevant parts of the site. I think there’s a very valuable lesson there about the value of link units.While it’s true that link units contain very little information, used correctly that can be an asset. Had there been another line or two describing the site those links lead to, it would have been clear that those links are ads. As it is, they’re perfectly blended. How can you copy what Offshore Banking Central did? Easy. Create a very simple navigation bar made up of links rather than tabs and place your horizontal link unit directly beneath it. You’ll need to make sure that you’re hitting the keywords in just the way you want but if you pull it off, you should see some fantastic results.You have to look hard to spot the ads at SudokuLinks.com. The entire site consists of a series of vertical columns, filled with links. One of those columns is a vertical AdSense column which is placed in the middle of the page, not at the side where it would be ignored.This is certainly a striking example of one way to blend an ad unit into a Web page but I doubt it’s going to work for everyone. You might be able to follow this strategy on a Resources or Links page on your website but clearly the biggest problem is the lack of content. The only content on the page consists of a small column right beneath the ad unit explaining how to play Sudoku. That could be the sort of thing that drives down click value; Google prefers sites with lots of content rather than pages that contain nothing but links. But you could still use this strategy on a site with dynamic content by, for example, placing teasers to articles in vertical or horizontal columns, that match the AdSense unit. And you could make those content columns more obvious than pushing them to the bottom of the page. In general though, this looks like an extremely effective strategy. If you can make it work for you, you should see some great results.
Go4th.org Takes AdSense Forward
Go4th.org also uses vertical columns, but this site has a much heavier focus on content and still manages to blend the ads in well. In fact, placing a vertical ad unit on the side of a blog has become pretty much a standard layout for many online publishers. You have a sidebar full of links, a link unit under the blog entry headline and a skyscraper on either the left or the right. It’s the obvious way to lay out a blog page, and it works. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t be creative and come up with new ways to blend those ads into the page and make them more attractive to users. Go4th.org does this in a really interesting way. The blog entry — or rather, the articles that the site posts — are positioned in a wide space in the middle of the page sandwiched between two sidebars. The sidebar on the left is where the ads go. The sidebar on the right contain a bunch of links to external sites. And this is where things get clever... The design of each of those areas is exactly the same. Even the “Ads by Goooogle” line has been copied and turned into “May lead to external sites.” That helps to draw the two parts together, an idea which is polished off by putting the word “More” above the ads and “Links” above the external links. Those ads just don’t look like ads any more; they look like the same sort of recommended links that are on the right hand side.This isn’t the only place that the site blends ads well into the page. There’s a second set of ads at the bottom of each article entry. What’s nice about these ads is that they follow a little author bio that includes links itself. That helps users get used to reading content that contains links and might be ads. Could the site get more clicks by replacing that banner ad unit with a square unit at the beginning of the article? Maybe. But that’s exactly the sort of thing that can easily be tested.If you wanted to use a similar strategy on your site though, all you would need to do is put two sidebars on your site, make sure that they both look exactly the same but put ads in one and links in the other. Easy!The challenge for AdSense publishers is to persuade people to look at your ads without letting them realize that what they’re looking at is an ad. One general strategy to do that is to camouflage them on the page. DogToysMart.com does this in a truly fantastic manner. It’s got the usual vertical ad unit in a sidebar and a link unit at the bottom of a list of other links. But above each section, the site also has a very neat header which it carries into the ad sections. So the left-hand side bar contains sections called “Information”, “Resources” and “Sponsored Links.” “Sponsored Links”? You got it. That’s where the link units are. The right-hand sidebar does the same thing, calling the links in its ads “Featured Sites.”But it’s in the middle of the page that this technique works the best. There’s an introduction, a section marked “New Products”, a section marked “Featured Sites” and a section marked “Recommended Reading.” By sandwiching the ads between two sections offering valuable products, the site makes the ad section looks like it contains something valuable too. It looks like it’s been put there by the site itself and not by a third party and I’m sure it’s going to deliver great results. The moral of this story is that one method of promoting your ads is to put them between two other valuable areas instead of at the bottom of the article or whatever it may be. That might require that you create those sections specially for the purpose... but it could well be worth the effort.Matching Articles To Ads... And Cell Phones
The usual way to blend ads into the site is to do 3-Way Matching: to make the ads match the rest of the site in terms of background color, font color and font size. It is possible to take a different approach though: you can make the site match the ads — or at least elements of it. Chris at GetACellPhone.com provides a fantastic example of this. He’s put one ad unit in the left-hand column but right above it and right below it, he’s also put introductions to two articles. The headline of each article is a link to the rest of the piece further in the site and matches the headline of the ad. That makes the ads look like links to articles, and it’s a great idea. What I really like about this set-up though is that there’s no space between the two introductions and the “Ads by Google” line. It makes the articles look like the ads, leaving the ads free and clear. As a strategy, it’s very easy to copy, but I’d take it further. You can match the color of the URL under the ad to the color of the links on the rest of the page and restrict the size of the introduction to just two line — just like the ads. Make the rest of the page look like the ads and you’ll do some great matching.Brewing Up Profits With Herbal Tea
Some of the most effective optimization strategies are very simple. Some are very creative. At TeaHerbalTea.com, we get both types. The site has three ad units above the fold: a banner ad immediately beneath the header; a horizontal text link above the content; and a large rectangle embedded in the content. But look at how each of those units is blended into the site. The banner’s background is lime-green, the same color as the site’s background, the titles match the color of the site’s header and the URL is kept just a tone or two above the background to make it almost invisible. The unit embedded into the article follows a similar strategy. The title of the links match the title of the article, the description is kept black and the URL is a light color so that it almost disappears into the background.It’s in the text links though that things get really interesting. The site has been designed so that it looks like there are little tabs above each of the links. That’s great idea. Would Google like it? It’s hard to say. So far, it’s not doing this site any harm, and it’s not an image, but you might want to clear it with your friendly AdSense rep before you put in your site.It’s worth asking about. The site’s ads don’t end there though. There’s another ad unit below the fold in the middle of the page, a Google search box at the bottom of the page and even a couple of referral buttons and an Amazon ad on the left. And with that second square ad unit turning up such well-targeted ads, there’s a great chance that they’ll get clicked. If you’re wondering about that “Ads by Google” logo in the first embedded ad unit, Google does have a habit of testing different approaches on its ad units. It looks like they were doing a little experiment here. Let’s hope they keep it; it looks a lot better than the long “Ads by Gooooooogle”.Whispy Makes Ad Units Disappear!
Sometimes, you really don’t have to do too much to get the sort of optimized ads that bring fantastic results. Whispy.com has done a great job of blending its ad links into its site. First, it’s used links in different colors. In general, that’s not a good idea; your users expect to links to be blue so that’s the color you should make them — and the color you should make your ad links too. But Whispy is only using two different kinds of blue: a bold blue which functions as the title for the profiles, which link to the content; and a lighter blue for the links in the sidebars. When the user sees ad links in exactly the same color, he’ll just assume he’s looking at more content links. This is a very simple strategy that anyone can copy: just make sure that your ad links are the same color as the rest of your other links... and hide those ad links in a list of content links. Very simple. Very, very effective.
Mixing AdSense With Kontera On DealOfDay.com
Ever since Google changed its policy to allow publishers to combine different ad programs on the same page, finding ways to make the most out of multiple ad units has proved an exciting challenge. I talked about how I blend horizontal ad units into my forum on DealOfDay.com but recently, I’ve also been playing around with adding Kontera’s ads on those pages too. Earning revenue from forums isn’t easy. I’m more likely to plan a forum as a way of supplying a service to my readers and building a community than as a way of earning income. People are just too focused on looking for answer to their questions to spend their time clicking ads. CPM ads often do better here. But blending AdSense into the forum can work very well. And now I’ve found that adding link ads helps even more. Notice how the two sets of ads look different and offer different things too. The AdSense ads look like category headings. In fact, this thread category was specifically about bargains on baby products, so I couldn’t have asked for a better keyword there.
The Kontera ads though focus on specific products. That’s their strength, and that’s why it pays to use highly targeted terms when you’re using Kontera (so “Tylenol” not “painkiller,” “Playstation” not “video game system”). The result on this forum was that I got to offer my readers a range of different types of ads... and picked up two different kinds of income.
Google Ads And eMiniMalls At GPSReview.net
Of course, Kontera isn’t the only extra revenue source that you can use with AdSense units. For many sites, Chitika’s eMiniMalls can make a very profitable addition. GPSReview.net is a great example of the sort of site that can benefit the most from Chitika’s services — as well as a great example of the right way to do it. And again, it’s a very simple optimization. The first thing to note about the site though is that it’s product-related. Sites that focus on products are always going to be the best option for eMiniMalls. Chitika produces very specific ads that will appeal most for people looking for products rather than simply further information. That’s what AdSense does, and like Kontera, it’s why Chitika’s ads work so well with Google’s.
That doesn’t mean though that you can only put eMiniMalls on product-related sites. You can put them on any site. But publishers with pages that talk about products are likely to see the best results with them. There’s no reason, in fact, that you couldn’t add a sub-directory to your website that offers reviews of the products related to your topic. So if you blog about television shows, you could offer DVD reviews. If you write about mortgages, you could offer reviews of home furnishings. If you write about coffee, you could offer information about coffee machines... and provide ads that let people buy them. Once you’ve done that, you’d be able to copy what Tim Flight of GPSReview.net has done on his site. Tim has put a big leaderboard right across the top of the page. By giving it a frame that matches the rest of the site, he’s done a great job of blending it in and it’s in a very prominent position. And do you see how it’s only showing one ad? That’s probably because he’s been site-targeted by an advertiser who’s prepared to pay a premium to be sure of appearing on Tim’s site.Tim has then placed a small eMiniMall between the title and each content article so that it looks like part of the post. It’s totally unmissable — and raised his income by 200 percent! Personally, I’d have gone a little further and experimented with a well-blended AdSense half-banner at the bottom of each post to give readers a place to go if they don’t want to go to the article. (On the article itself, Tim prefers to use another eMiniMall, followed by a Recommended Product Unit, an exclusive link unit supplied by Chitika to select publishers). I’d also want to put a small link unit in the sidebar... but that’s just me. Even keeping it simple though, Tim’s GPS site is earning him great revenues. With AdSense though, you should always be looking for ways to earn even more.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
google marketing
Staying Up To Date And Learning The Latest AdSense Tips
AdSense changes all the time and lots of people are following those changes. They’re talking about what those changes mean for publishers and how you can take advantage of them. They’re also discussing the new contextualized advertising systems that appear from time to time and commenting on how well they work. Most serious publishers pay close attention to these blogs and other sites. They’re an invaluable source of first-hand information from people who have been there and done that. They’ll save you a huge amount of time — and money. I’ve put a short list of some of the most important sites to look at below. This isn’t meant to be a complete list — that would be way too long — but these are a good place to start. They’ll keep you in the loop and make sure your questions get answered.
• www.JenSense.com
Jen’s contextual advertising blog is a great read. She’s always coming up with useful information and sometimes manages to dig up a real scoop (like what lies behind Smart Pricing). This should definitely be in your favorites.
• www.ProBlogger.net
Darren is a blogger making a healthy six-figure income with his online thoughts and his advice about how to do the same thing. If you’re running a blog, you really need to be reading it... and if you’re not running a blog, you’ll still find enough great advice to keep you busy too.
• www.AssociatePrograms.com/discus/index.php
Forums are a really great place to swap ideas and most importantly, ask questions. Publishers who are old hands at making serious money with AdSense are usually more than happy to share their knowledge. The forum at Associate Programs is a great place to pick up tips about everything from links to marketing.
• http://Forums.DigitalPoint.com
And the forums at Digital Point are at least as good, if not better, with plenty of information on AdSense.
Talking AdSense at AdSenseChat
Finally, there’s my own forum at www.adsensechat.com. You’ll find plenty of people here swapping advice and sharing news about AdSense and other contextualized advertising systems... including me.
I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too much here, but if you’re finding this book useful you’ll certainly find AdSense Chat useful. It’s like having your book updated constantly with several thousand smart, experienced AdSense users in addition to my own contributions. Discussion threads range from how to make use of the latest releases from Google’s stable (you can be sure that in the time it takes you to read this book, Google will have brought out something new that I’ll need to discuss in the next edition) to what’s happening with Chitika and all the other contextualized programs.I can’t stress enough how important forums like AdSense Chat are to publishers. I can only update this book once every six months or once a year. It’s just too much work to do more often than that. But the forums let publishers talk AdSense all the time. It gives me new ideas, lets me see what problems other publishers have encountered and — more important — lets everyone weigh in with answers.Part of being a successful AdSense publisher means visiting forums, posing questions, reading responses and adding your own experience. We want to know what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been doing it.
Staying Up To Date And Learning The Latest AdSense Tips
AdSense changes all the time and lots of people are following those changes. They’re talking about what those changes mean for publishers and how you can take advantage of them. They’re also discussing the new contextualized advertising systems that appear from time to time and commenting on how well they work. Most serious publishers pay close attention to these blogs and other sites. They’re an invaluable source of first-hand information from people who have been there and done that. They’ll save you a huge amount of time — and money. I’ve put a short list of some of the most important sites to look at below. This isn’t meant to be a complete list — that would be way too long — but these are a good place to start. They’ll keep you in the loop and make sure your questions get answered.
• www.JenSense.com
Jen’s contextual advertising blog is a great read. She’s always coming up with useful information and sometimes manages to dig up a real scoop (like what lies behind Smart Pricing). This should definitely be in your favorites.
• www.ProBlogger.net
Darren is a blogger making a healthy six-figure income with his online thoughts and his advice about how to do the same thing. If you’re running a blog, you really need to be reading it... and if you’re not running a blog, you’ll still find enough great advice to keep you busy too.
• www.AssociatePrograms.com/discus/index.php
Forums are a really great place to swap ideas and most importantly, ask questions. Publishers who are old hands at making serious money with AdSense are usually more than happy to share their knowledge. The forum at Associate Programs is a great place to pick up tips about everything from links to marketing.
• http://Forums.DigitalPoint.com
And the forums at Digital Point are at least as good, if not better, with plenty of information on AdSense.
Talking AdSense at AdSenseChat
Finally, there’s my own forum at www.adsensechat.com. You’ll find plenty of people here swapping advice and sharing news about AdSense and other contextualized advertising systems... including me.
I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too much here, but if you’re finding this book useful you’ll certainly find AdSense Chat useful. It’s like having your book updated constantly with several thousand smart, experienced AdSense users in addition to my own contributions. Discussion threads range from how to make use of the latest releases from Google’s stable (you can be sure that in the time it takes you to read this book, Google will have brought out something new that I’ll need to discuss in the next edition) to what’s happening with Chitika and all the other contextualized programs.I can’t stress enough how important forums like AdSense Chat are to publishers. I can only update this book once every six months or once a year. It’s just too much work to do more often than that. But the forums let publishers talk AdSense all the time. It gives me new ideas, lets me see what problems other publishers have encountered and — more important — lets everyone weigh in with answers.Part of being a successful AdSense publisher means visiting forums, posing questions, reading responses and adding your own experience. We want to know what you’ve been doing and how you’ve been doing it.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Low Ad Relevance
Low Ad Relevance
If your ads aren’t relevant, people won’t want to click them. Try Section Targeting to focus Google on the ideas you want to emphasize. (If that works you might want to take things a little further by turning each section into a different page. That will give even more ads and more opportunities to earn). Alternatively, you can play with the keywords on your page, change the title of each page so that they include a keyword you’re trying to target or include more section titles. All of these options should help to keep your ads on track. It’s also possible that at least part of your site requires users to log in. Google’s AdSense Crawler can’t do that so it can’t tell Google which ads to serve on those membership pages. So you get irrelevant ads. The solution is to use the Site Authentication link under your AdSense Setup tab. You’ll have to confirm that the site is yours but once you’ve done that, it’s just a question of providing the crawler with a username and password.
Too Many Public Service Ads
Public service ads are another sign of a keyword problem. You might not be hitting the keywords you want, or it could be that there simply aren’t any ads for the keywords you’re aiming for.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you’ve got something to show instead of public service ads, nice though they are. You can specify an alternate URL to show, use GoogleAdSensePlus or try Google Backfill to make sure that you’re still earning even when the keywords aren’t working. Your next step though, is going to be to fix the problem. Make sure that Google does have ads for the keyword you’re targeting (you can use one of the preview tools such as googleadspreview.blogspot.com to do this). If nothing comes up, you’ll need to throw different keywords onto your page. If something does come up — and it’s not what you’re getting — you can just use all of the keyword strategies I mentioned earlier to dump those PSAs.My Ads Have Disappeared!
When Google made it possible for publishers to name their ad units and change them all automatically without repasting the code, it wanted to make sure that publishers didn’t accidentally delete them. So Google didn’t create a delete feature. Instead ads that aren’t shown for seven days are automatically made inactive. If your ads are on a page that gets no traffic at all — perhaps because it’s a test page or because it’s just been built — those ads might disappear. You’ll need to make the ads active again... and look at them at least once a week until you show the page to users.
Too Few Ads In A Unit
Sometimes a four-ad ad unit will only show one or two ads. There’s nothing you can do about this and it’s not really a problem. If you’re getting just one ad, you could be earning by CPM instead of cost-per-click. If you’re getting two ads — as Google likes to serve them sometimes — you just have to hope that they’re doing it because it pays better. With AdSense, you don’t get to control everything!
If your ads aren’t relevant, people won’t want to click them. Try Section Targeting to focus Google on the ideas you want to emphasize. (If that works you might want to take things a little further by turning each section into a different page. That will give even more ads and more opportunities to earn). Alternatively, you can play with the keywords on your page, change the title of each page so that they include a keyword you’re trying to target or include more section titles. All of these options should help to keep your ads on track. It’s also possible that at least part of your site requires users to log in. Google’s AdSense Crawler can’t do that so it can’t tell Google which ads to serve on those membership pages. So you get irrelevant ads. The solution is to use the Site Authentication link under your AdSense Setup tab. You’ll have to confirm that the site is yours but once you’ve done that, it’s just a question of providing the crawler with a username and password.
Too Many Public Service Ads
Public service ads are another sign of a keyword problem. You might not be hitting the keywords you want, or it could be that there simply aren’t any ads for the keywords you’re aiming for.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you’ve got something to show instead of public service ads, nice though they are. You can specify an alternate URL to show, use GoogleAdSensePlus or try Google Backfill to make sure that you’re still earning even when the keywords aren’t working. Your next step though, is going to be to fix the problem. Make sure that Google does have ads for the keyword you’re targeting (you can use one of the preview tools such as googleadspreview.blogspot.com to do this). If nothing comes up, you’ll need to throw different keywords onto your page. If something does come up — and it’s not what you’re getting — you can just use all of the keyword strategies I mentioned earlier to dump those PSAs.My Ads Have Disappeared!
When Google made it possible for publishers to name their ad units and change them all automatically without repasting the code, it wanted to make sure that publishers didn’t accidentally delete them. So Google didn’t create a delete feature. Instead ads that aren’t shown for seven days are automatically made inactive. If your ads are on a page that gets no traffic at all — perhaps because it’s a test page or because it’s just been built — those ads might disappear. You’ll need to make the ads active again... and look at them at least once a week until you show the page to users.
Too Few Ads In A Unit
Sometimes a four-ad ad unit will only show one or two ads. There’s nothing you can do about this and it’s not really a problem. If you’re getting just one ad, you could be earning by CPM instead of cost-per-click. If you’re getting two ads — as Google likes to serve them sometimes — you just have to hope that they’re doing it because it pays better. With AdSense, you don’t get to control everything!
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Troubleshooting — What To Do If You’re Not Getting The Results You Want
Troubleshooting — What To Do If You’re Not Getting The Results You Want
Troubleshooting — What To Do If You’re Not Getting The Results You Want
Follow the advice and strategies I lay out in this book and you should find that you get the results you want: a big fat check every month from the nice people at Google. But it doesn’t always work out that way. There will be times when you’ll be scratching your head and wondering why things just aren’t going the way you’d like them to. When that happens, check out the list of problems here and see if you can find a solution. And if you can’t find a solution here, check out AdSenseChat.com. Whatever I’ve missed here, you should be able to find there.
23.1 Low Revenues
This is the bottom of line of AdSense advertising and if your revenues are low then it couldn’t be clearer that you’re doing something wrong. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a bit of work to make clear what exactly it is that you’re doing wrong. If your revenues are much lower than you’d like then there are a number of different possible reasons and you need to check each of the following in turn:
Your traffic levels. If you don’t have the traffic, you won’t get the revenues. A low level of traffic could be one reason why you’re only making a low level of income.
Your CTR. Increasing your traffic might not raise your income as much as you want if your clickthrough rate isn’t all it should be. Once you’ve checked your traffic levels, take a look at how much of that traffic you’re converting into clicks.
Your click price. When the ads change all the time it’s not always easy to figure out how much each click is worth but if you divide your daily income by your daily clicks you can get an idea of how much you’re earning per click. If that figure is hovering around five cents, you’re not making much — and you need to be making more.
You won’t be able to make a move until you’ve figured out which of these potential problems is yours, and it’s likely that your problem will be a mixture of more than one of them. Your first move then, when you’re not making the money you’d like, is to check each of these possibilities. Your next move is to solve the problem you’ve found.
Low Traffic Levels
If your problem is that your site isn’t getting the traffic it needs, there are a whole range of different options you can take. I’ve covered the basic ideas in Chapter 20 — and you can take another look to see if there’s anything you’ve missed — but you also might want to try one of the courses or books that specialize in generating traffic. It might cost you a few bucks but when it comes to making money with AdSense just about any investment is worth the effort. You should be able to make it back in no time.
Low Clickthrough Rates
When your clickthrough rates are very low, you’re really in AdSense territory. This is all about getting the right ads in the right places. There all sorts of possible strategies that you can do and again, you’re going to have to check each one in turn.
Are you using the right ad units?
Compare your site to the case studies in this book, to other sites on the Web and to the recommendations I make about where to put each of the different kinds of ad units. Those examples and recommendations should be your starting point. If they don’t work for you though, you’re going to need to do some experimenting. This can take a bit of time, but it’s well worth the effort. Try replacing an ad unit with one of a different
Are you using the right colors and font size?
This is a very easy one to fix. If the colors of your ads don’t match the colors on your site, change them.
Are there better places on the page to put your ads?
Even if you’re getting the right ads and they’re well-blended, if no one sees them, no one will click them. Check to make sure your ads are in the most prominent positions. If you think you might do better if they were in different spots, move them and follow the results.
Low Click Price
Raising your click price is one of the trickiest challenges in AdSense. Because Google decides how much to charge advertisers for a click on your site, you can only affect their decision indirectly. Again there are a few things that you can do:
1. Target different keywords
Different keywords pay different amounts. It’s possible that your site is bringing up the lowest paying terms in your subject. Browse keyword sites such as Overture.com to see what people are paying for words in your field and try creating a page that focuses on the highest paying term. If that page brings in good revenues, you’ve got a keyword problem — and that’s easy to fix. If you’re still getting a low click price, you’ve got a low Smart Price rating, and that’s going to take a bit more work to fix.
2. Buy better traffic
Your Smart Price suffers when your users click but don’t buy. One solution is to buy better targeted traffic that’s more likely to be interested in what your ads are offering. For example, you could try working backwards and target your traffic to the ads you’re currently showing.
3. Build better content
Or it could be that people are clicking your ads not because they’re interested in them but because they’re not interested in what’s on the page. Good quality content will deliver high quality clicks from people who are motivated to buy from your advertisers.
There are no shortcuts to building great content. You can try to focus on a topic that genuinely excites rather than building a site just for the money. You could try buying in some professionally
written articles by taking a freelancer from eLance, and seeing if that raises your click price. Or you could just take another look at what your best competitors are doing — and do the same.
4. Remove poor-performing ads
Your Smart Price is affected by all the sites in your account. One poor-performing site then can bring down your prices across all your sites. If you own lots of different sites and your ads aren’t getting the price you think they deserve, one strategy could be to remove the ads from the sites that you think aren’t doing so well. Whichever strategy you choose, the goal will be to get more of the users to click on the ads to buy from your advertisers. You should start to see a change in your price within a couple of weeks.
Troubleshooting — What To Do If You’re Not Getting The Results You Want
Follow the advice and strategies I lay out in this book and you should find that you get the results you want: a big fat check every month from the nice people at Google. But it doesn’t always work out that way. There will be times when you’ll be scratching your head and wondering why things just aren’t going the way you’d like them to. When that happens, check out the list of problems here and see if you can find a solution. And if you can’t find a solution here, check out AdSenseChat.com. Whatever I’ve missed here, you should be able to find there.
23.1 Low Revenues
This is the bottom of line of AdSense advertising and if your revenues are low then it couldn’t be clearer that you’re doing something wrong. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a bit of work to make clear what exactly it is that you’re doing wrong. If your revenues are much lower than you’d like then there are a number of different possible reasons and you need to check each of the following in turn:
Your traffic levels. If you don’t have the traffic, you won’t get the revenues. A low level of traffic could be one reason why you’re only making a low level of income.
Your CTR. Increasing your traffic might not raise your income as much as you want if your clickthrough rate isn’t all it should be. Once you’ve checked your traffic levels, take a look at how much of that traffic you’re converting into clicks.
Your click price. When the ads change all the time it’s not always easy to figure out how much each click is worth but if you divide your daily income by your daily clicks you can get an idea of how much you’re earning per click. If that figure is hovering around five cents, you’re not making much — and you need to be making more.
You won’t be able to make a move until you’ve figured out which of these potential problems is yours, and it’s likely that your problem will be a mixture of more than one of them. Your first move then, when you’re not making the money you’d like, is to check each of these possibilities. Your next move is to solve the problem you’ve found.
Low Traffic Levels
If your problem is that your site isn’t getting the traffic it needs, there are a whole range of different options you can take. I’ve covered the basic ideas in Chapter 20 — and you can take another look to see if there’s anything you’ve missed — but you also might want to try one of the courses or books that specialize in generating traffic. It might cost you a few bucks but when it comes to making money with AdSense just about any investment is worth the effort. You should be able to make it back in no time.
Low Clickthrough Rates
When your clickthrough rates are very low, you’re really in AdSense territory. This is all about getting the right ads in the right places. There all sorts of possible strategies that you can do and again, you’re going to have to check each one in turn.
Are you using the right ad units?
Compare your site to the case studies in this book, to other sites on the Web and to the recommendations I make about where to put each of the different kinds of ad units. Those examples and recommendations should be your starting point. If they don’t work for you though, you’re going to need to do some experimenting. This can take a bit of time, but it’s well worth the effort. Try replacing an ad unit with one of a different
Are you using the right colors and font size?
This is a very easy one to fix. If the colors of your ads don’t match the colors on your site, change them.
Are there better places on the page to put your ads?
Even if you’re getting the right ads and they’re well-blended, if no one sees them, no one will click them. Check to make sure your ads are in the most prominent positions. If you think you might do better if they were in different spots, move them and follow the results.
Low Click Price
Raising your click price is one of the trickiest challenges in AdSense. Because Google decides how much to charge advertisers for a click on your site, you can only affect their decision indirectly. Again there are a few things that you can do:
1. Target different keywords
Different keywords pay different amounts. It’s possible that your site is bringing up the lowest paying terms in your subject. Browse keyword sites such as Overture.com to see what people are paying for words in your field and try creating a page that focuses on the highest paying term. If that page brings in good revenues, you’ve got a keyword problem — and that’s easy to fix. If you’re still getting a low click price, you’ve got a low Smart Price rating, and that’s going to take a bit more work to fix.
2. Buy better traffic
Your Smart Price suffers when your users click but don’t buy. One solution is to buy better targeted traffic that’s more likely to be interested in what your ads are offering. For example, you could try working backwards and target your traffic to the ads you’re currently showing.
3. Build better content
Or it could be that people are clicking your ads not because they’re interested in them but because they’re not interested in what’s on the page. Good quality content will deliver high quality clicks from people who are motivated to buy from your advertisers.
There are no shortcuts to building great content. You can try to focus on a topic that genuinely excites rather than building a site just for the money. You could try buying in some professionally
written articles by taking a freelancer from eLance, and seeing if that raises your click price. Or you could just take another look at what your best competitors are doing — and do the same.
4. Remove poor-performing ads
Your Smart Price is affected by all the sites in your account. One poor-performing site then can bring down your prices across all your sites. If you own lots of different sites and your ads aren’t getting the price you think they deserve, one strategy could be to remove the ads from the sites that you think aren’t doing so well. Whichever strategy you choose, the goal will be to get more of the users to click on the ads to buy from your advertisers. You should start to see a change in your price within a couple of weeks.
Monday, October 18, 2010
What To Do If Your AdSense Account Gets Closed
Most of the mistake people make at AdSense hit them in the wallet. Some mistakes though can hit where it really hurts and get your account closed. So what should you do if you get that dreaded email from AdSense informing you that your account has been shut down? Well, the first thing to remember is that you’ve pretty much got no power at all. Google’s Terms make it very clear that they have the right to kick someone out of their program whenever they feel like it and you have to prove your innocence. But the people at Google aren’t a nasty bunch and they will listen to you if you feel you’ve been hard done by. Your first step then should be to send them an email asking why you’ve been banned. The most likely reason will be invalid clicks. That might not mean that you’ve accidentally clicked your own ads. Google accepts that accidents do happen and takes occasional clicks like these into account. They’ll show up as clicks in your stats but you won’t earn revenue from them. Nor do you need to inform them every time your cursor accidentally lands on one of your ads.
But if it’s more than occasional, you could be in trouble. It’s possible that someone else might have been clicking ads on your site repeatedly —
perhaps a competitor hoping to hit your earnings or a family member who didn’t know it was forbidden. It’s also possible that someone has stolen your AdSense code and placed it on their own site. It sounds strange, but publishers have been concerned about this so Google now lets you create a list of Allowed Sites. Only those click on those sites will count towards your income. And at least one publisher has been banned because the previous owner of the domain had clicked his own ads before the domain was sold.
Whatever the reason, the next step is to appeal. Google has an official appeal form. It’s available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_appeal Be sure to fill in all the fields in the form and provide as much information as possible. Be polite. Remember, Google’s system has detected a strange pattern in your click rate and is acting to protect its advertisers from paying for nothing. When advertisers start to feel that Google isn’t looking after their budget, none of us will make money. If Google has made a mistake, you want to help the company correct it, not annoy it so much it won’t want you back. Someone will read your form, and you want to stay on that person’s good side. Provide proof of your innocence if you can and show that you’re genuinely trying to help them get to the bottom of the problem. If you spotted a click spike in your stats, tell them when you saw it and what you think might have caused it — if you have any suspicions. If you happen to know the IP address of the source of the multiple clicks, block it, supply it to Google and tell them you’ve blocked it. And remind Google that you think its service is great and that you’d like to keep using it. There are plenty of stories around about publishers who got banned but were reinstated after appeal. If you can produce a good explanation of the events that led to your site being banned, there’s a good chance that you’ll be allowed back in. And if all else fails and you find yourself cut off, there’s always Yahoo! Publisher Network combined with Chitika and Kontera ads.
It’s unlikely you’ll make as much as you did with AdSense, but you will still make something.
Most of the mistake people make at AdSense hit them in the wallet. Some mistakes though can hit where it really hurts and get your account closed. So what should you do if you get that dreaded email from AdSense informing you that your account has been shut down? Well, the first thing to remember is that you’ve pretty much got no power at all. Google’s Terms make it very clear that they have the right to kick someone out of their program whenever they feel like it and you have to prove your innocence. But the people at Google aren’t a nasty bunch and they will listen to you if you feel you’ve been hard done by. Your first step then should be to send them an email asking why you’ve been banned. The most likely reason will be invalid clicks. That might not mean that you’ve accidentally clicked your own ads. Google accepts that accidents do happen and takes occasional clicks like these into account. They’ll show up as clicks in your stats but you won’t earn revenue from them. Nor do you need to inform them every time your cursor accidentally lands on one of your ads.
But if it’s more than occasional, you could be in trouble. It’s possible that someone else might have been clicking ads on your site repeatedly —
perhaps a competitor hoping to hit your earnings or a family member who didn’t know it was forbidden. It’s also possible that someone has stolen your AdSense code and placed it on their own site. It sounds strange, but publishers have been concerned about this so Google now lets you create a list of Allowed Sites. Only those click on those sites will count towards your income. And at least one publisher has been banned because the previous owner of the domain had clicked his own ads before the domain was sold.
Whatever the reason, the next step is to appeal. Google has an official appeal form. It’s available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_appeal Be sure to fill in all the fields in the form and provide as much information as possible. Be polite. Remember, Google’s system has detected a strange pattern in your click rate and is acting to protect its advertisers from paying for nothing. When advertisers start to feel that Google isn’t looking after their budget, none of us will make money. If Google has made a mistake, you want to help the company correct it, not annoy it so much it won’t want you back. Someone will read your form, and you want to stay on that person’s good side. Provide proof of your innocence if you can and show that you’re genuinely trying to help them get to the bottom of the problem. If you spotted a click spike in your stats, tell them when you saw it and what you think might have caused it — if you have any suspicions. If you happen to know the IP address of the source of the multiple clicks, block it, supply it to Google and tell them you’ve blocked it. And remind Google that you think its service is great and that you’d like to keep using it. There are plenty of stories around about publishers who got banned but were reinstated after appeal. If you can produce a good explanation of the events that led to your site being banned, there’s a good chance that you’ll be allowed back in. And if all else fails and you find yourself cut off, there’s always Yahoo! Publisher Network combined with Chitika and Kontera ads.
It’s unlikely you’ll make as much as you did with AdSense, but you will still make something.
The Biggest Mistakes That AdSense Publishers Make
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The Biggest Mistakes That AdSense Publishers Make... And How To Avoid Them
Clicking on your own ads isn’t the only bad luck AdSense publishers have run into. There are lots of different ways that you can make a mistake when using AdSense and while some of them Google will be pretty quick to tell you about, others you’ll only feel in your pocket. Here are some of the biggest mistakes you can make when using AdSense. Be aware of them...and beware of them! Big Mistake #1: Not Being Familiar With Google's TOS On the one hand, this is an easy mistake to make. The terms of service change all the time and what’s legal one day could be illegal the next — and you could know nothing about the change. On the other hand though, if something you’ve been doing is suddenly made illegal you probably shouldn’t be doing it anyway. The bottom line is to check the TOS regularly and to make a habit of browsing the AdSense forums. Even if you miss a change, it’s unlikely that other people will. It’s a mistake not to stay informed. Big Mistake #2: Inviting Others To Click Ads That clicking your own ads is a mistake is pretty clear. There’s no reason to do it and no excuse for doing it.
That also includes asking other people to click on the ads for you. For site owners used to asking their users to support their sponsors, this can take some getting used to. Once the ads are up and optimized, there’s nothing more that you can do to persuade people to click. If you’ve got a line on your website that asks people to support your sponsors or if you’ve been asking people to click on your ads in any sort of way, you’re making a giant mistake. That’s the sort of mistake that can get you banned. Big Mistake #3: Using The Wrong Ad Blocks Those first two mistakes will get you banned. The remaining mistakes will “only” cost you money. Choosing the wrong ad blocks is one of the easiest mistakes to make. Almost any block can fit in almost any space but only one block will give you the highest revenues possible. Use this book as a guide to which blocks suit which locations best and check out the case studies to see how other people are using a similar spot. Even if you’re happy with your results so far, it’s always possible that you could do even better. Sitting on your laurels with the wrong ad block is certainly a mistake. Big Mistake #4: Using The Wrong Colors Exactly the same is true of your choice of colors. Forget about looking for some nice contrast or coming up with some snazzy design, you want the colors in your ads to match the colors on your site. The background color should be the same as the background of your site and the font colors should match too. Any other color is usually a mistake. Big Mistake #5: Poor Page Placement Some places on your page are much more powerful than others. You want to put your ads where your users are going to be looking, not where they’ll make the page look good. That might be at the beginning of an article, in the sidebar, at the top of the page, next to an image or any one of several dozen other spots.
Don’t be shy about putting your ads front and forward. As long as they’re blended into the site, they won’t be anything like as obtrusive as you think. They’ll be right in front of your users and attractive enough to click. Big Mistake #6: Not Using AdLink Units A common mistake that people make when they first start using AdSense is to assume that only the ad units are worth taking. That’s a big mistake. Clicks on AdLink units make up a serious part of my AdSense earnings. When used properly, they should be a serious part of your AdSense earnings too. Don’t overlook AdLink units just because they’re small. Put them in the right place and you’ll find that they can be very, very powerful Big Mistake #7: Not Checking And Analyzing Stats One of the biggest differences between AdSense publishers who get the big checks and AdSense publishers who earn pennies is that the big earners are addicted to reading their stats — and they understand what they’re reading. It’s very tempting once you’ve set up your site and put on your ads to just kick back and look at the bottom line. But the other lines tell you what’s working and what you should be doing. Read your stats carefully and regularly. Big Mistake #8: Ignoring Channels If you’re not sure how to use channels, don’t let it ride. Read the chapter on channels again, build some and play with them. For some people channels can look a little scary. You have to build them from scratch, you might not be too sure which channels you should create or what you should do with the data the channels should give you. None of those is a good excuse. Channels are easy to build and they give you heaps of information about the way each of your Web pages is operating that you just couldn’t get anywhere else. If you’re not using channels, you need to start. Big Mistake #9: Not Keeping An AdSense Journal When you were at school and your English teacher told you to keep a journal, you probably groaned, ignored her... and made up a month’s worth of entries the day before you were supposed to bring it in to class.When you’re trying to make a lot of money with AdSense, keeping a journal is vital. It’s the only way to keep track of your changes and what happened when you implemented those changes. Every time you use a different ad block, push a different keyword or try a new location on the page, write it down, wait a week and write down the effect. If you’re doing the same thing time and time again because you forgot what happened when you did it last time, you’re wasting your time and your money. Big Mistake #10: Building Huge Sites Overnight It’s possible to go from no site to AdSense site in just a few minutes (plus the time it takes to get the confirmation letter). But it will take a little while longer to build the sort of massive site that keeps users coming back and builds a loyal base. Sure, you can use free books to fill dozens of pages and you can use already prepared content, but neither of these methods are as good as creating a huge site filled with original material. That takes time. Rush it and it’s more likely you’ll end up with a lot of trash that kills your clicks and ruins your Smart Pricing than a quality site that makes you money. It’s better to be small and good than big and bad. Big Mistake #11: Building Throwaway Sites And if it’s a bad idea to build large trashy sites, it’s a terrible idea to build small, trashy sites. Check out the AdSense forums long enough and there’s a good chance that you’ll come across plenty of publishers who believe not in creating good quality sites but in building small garbage-y ones and trying to squeeze as much revenue out of them as possible. The advantage is that you can throw up a lot of them in a small amount of time and for little cost. The disadvantage is that the returns are small too — and most important, they’re just no fun to do. I thoroughly enjoy managing every one of the sites I’ve created. It’s because I enjoy them that my users enjoy them. That keeps them coming back and it keeps them clicking. And it keeps me coming back too.
If you’re building throwaway sites just to make a quick buck, you’re working too hard... and that’s a giant mistake. Big Mistake #12: Doing AdSense Halfway This was the big mistake that I made for a long time. It’s also the big mistake that about 95 percent of AdSense publishers are making. They create their site, put up an AdSense, maybe they’ll optimize it a little (and maybe not), and then they’ll wait for the checks to come in. Making a lot of money with AdSense will take a lot of work. It can make you more money than most people will make in most full-time jobs but it’s not the sort of thing you can throw up in a morning and then spend the afternoon shopping for your beach house in Cancun. You can start earning in the morning. But if you want to make real money, you’re going to have to go all the way. Anything less is a big mistake.
Big Mistake #13: Only Using AdSense Don’t get me wrong, I still think that AdSense is the greatest way to earn money from a website short of buying Google.com. But ever since Google changed it TOS to allow other kinds of advertising systems on AdSense pages — even other kinds of contextualized advertising systems — I’ve been happily mixing, matching and earning even more. You should certainly use one of the text link services like Kontera. You can use Chitika’s eMiniMalls if you have a good product-related site. You can recommend affiliate products. You can mix different payment systems so that your pages are earning by impression, by click and by sale. You should have every base covered and every income stream up and running.
The Biggest Mistakes That AdSense Publishers Make... And How To Avoid Them
Clicking on your own ads isn’t the only bad luck AdSense publishers have run into. There are lots of different ways that you can make a mistake when using AdSense and while some of them Google will be pretty quick to tell you about, others you’ll only feel in your pocket. Here are some of the biggest mistakes you can make when using AdSense. Be aware of them...and beware of them! Big Mistake #1: Not Being Familiar With Google's TOS On the one hand, this is an easy mistake to make. The terms of service change all the time and what’s legal one day could be illegal the next — and you could know nothing about the change. On the other hand though, if something you’ve been doing is suddenly made illegal you probably shouldn’t be doing it anyway. The bottom line is to check the TOS regularly and to make a habit of browsing the AdSense forums. Even if you miss a change, it’s unlikely that other people will. It’s a mistake not to stay informed. Big Mistake #2: Inviting Others To Click Ads That clicking your own ads is a mistake is pretty clear. There’s no reason to do it and no excuse for doing it.
That also includes asking other people to click on the ads for you. For site owners used to asking their users to support their sponsors, this can take some getting used to. Once the ads are up and optimized, there’s nothing more that you can do to persuade people to click. If you’ve got a line on your website that asks people to support your sponsors or if you’ve been asking people to click on your ads in any sort of way, you’re making a giant mistake. That’s the sort of mistake that can get you banned. Big Mistake #3: Using The Wrong Ad Blocks Those first two mistakes will get you banned. The remaining mistakes will “only” cost you money. Choosing the wrong ad blocks is one of the easiest mistakes to make. Almost any block can fit in almost any space but only one block will give you the highest revenues possible. Use this book as a guide to which blocks suit which locations best and check out the case studies to see how other people are using a similar spot. Even if you’re happy with your results so far, it’s always possible that you could do even better. Sitting on your laurels with the wrong ad block is certainly a mistake. Big Mistake #4: Using The Wrong Colors Exactly the same is true of your choice of colors. Forget about looking for some nice contrast or coming up with some snazzy design, you want the colors in your ads to match the colors on your site. The background color should be the same as the background of your site and the font colors should match too. Any other color is usually a mistake. Big Mistake #5: Poor Page Placement Some places on your page are much more powerful than others. You want to put your ads where your users are going to be looking, not where they’ll make the page look good. That might be at the beginning of an article, in the sidebar, at the top of the page, next to an image or any one of several dozen other spots.
Don’t be shy about putting your ads front and forward. As long as they’re blended into the site, they won’t be anything like as obtrusive as you think. They’ll be right in front of your users and attractive enough to click. Big Mistake #6: Not Using AdLink Units A common mistake that people make when they first start using AdSense is to assume that only the ad units are worth taking. That’s a big mistake. Clicks on AdLink units make up a serious part of my AdSense earnings. When used properly, they should be a serious part of your AdSense earnings too. Don’t overlook AdLink units just because they’re small. Put them in the right place and you’ll find that they can be very, very powerful Big Mistake #7: Not Checking And Analyzing Stats One of the biggest differences between AdSense publishers who get the big checks and AdSense publishers who earn pennies is that the big earners are addicted to reading their stats — and they understand what they’re reading. It’s very tempting once you’ve set up your site and put on your ads to just kick back and look at the bottom line. But the other lines tell you what’s working and what you should be doing. Read your stats carefully and regularly. Big Mistake #8: Ignoring Channels If you’re not sure how to use channels, don’t let it ride. Read the chapter on channels again, build some and play with them. For some people channels can look a little scary. You have to build them from scratch, you might not be too sure which channels you should create or what you should do with the data the channels should give you. None of those is a good excuse. Channels are easy to build and they give you heaps of information about the way each of your Web pages is operating that you just couldn’t get anywhere else. If you’re not using channels, you need to start. Big Mistake #9: Not Keeping An AdSense Journal When you were at school and your English teacher told you to keep a journal, you probably groaned, ignored her... and made up a month’s worth of entries the day before you were supposed to bring it in to class.When you’re trying to make a lot of money with AdSense, keeping a journal is vital. It’s the only way to keep track of your changes and what happened when you implemented those changes. Every time you use a different ad block, push a different keyword or try a new location on the page, write it down, wait a week and write down the effect. If you’re doing the same thing time and time again because you forgot what happened when you did it last time, you’re wasting your time and your money. Big Mistake #10: Building Huge Sites Overnight It’s possible to go from no site to AdSense site in just a few minutes (plus the time it takes to get the confirmation letter). But it will take a little while longer to build the sort of massive site that keeps users coming back and builds a loyal base. Sure, you can use free books to fill dozens of pages and you can use already prepared content, but neither of these methods are as good as creating a huge site filled with original material. That takes time. Rush it and it’s more likely you’ll end up with a lot of trash that kills your clicks and ruins your Smart Pricing than a quality site that makes you money. It’s better to be small and good than big and bad. Big Mistake #11: Building Throwaway Sites And if it’s a bad idea to build large trashy sites, it’s a terrible idea to build small, trashy sites. Check out the AdSense forums long enough and there’s a good chance that you’ll come across plenty of publishers who believe not in creating good quality sites but in building small garbage-y ones and trying to squeeze as much revenue out of them as possible. The advantage is that you can throw up a lot of them in a small amount of time and for little cost. The disadvantage is that the returns are small too — and most important, they’re just no fun to do. I thoroughly enjoy managing every one of the sites I’ve created. It’s because I enjoy them that my users enjoy them. That keeps them coming back and it keeps them clicking. And it keeps me coming back too.
If you’re building throwaway sites just to make a quick buck, you’re working too hard... and that’s a giant mistake. Big Mistake #12: Doing AdSense Halfway This was the big mistake that I made for a long time. It’s also the big mistake that about 95 percent of AdSense publishers are making. They create their site, put up an AdSense, maybe they’ll optimize it a little (and maybe not), and then they’ll wait for the checks to come in. Making a lot of money with AdSense will take a lot of work. It can make you more money than most people will make in most full-time jobs but it’s not the sort of thing you can throw up in a morning and then spend the afternoon shopping for your beach house in Cancun. You can start earning in the morning. But if you want to make real money, you’re going to have to go all the way. Anything less is a big mistake.
Big Mistake #13: Only Using AdSense Don’t get me wrong, I still think that AdSense is the greatest way to earn money from a website short of buying Google.com. But ever since Google changed it TOS to allow other kinds of advertising systems on AdSense pages — even other kinds of contextualized advertising systems — I’ve been happily mixing, matching and earning even more. You should certainly use one of the text link services like Kontera. You can use Chitika’s eMiniMalls if you have a good product-related site. You can recommend affiliate products. You can mix different payment systems so that your pages are earning by impression, by click and by sale. You should have every base covered and every income stream up and running.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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AdSense Prohibitions, Mistakes And Problems
Google is very protective of its AdSense program and is a pretty strict ad provider. It has a relatively long page of Terms and Conditions (www.google.com/adsense/terms) and monitors sites pretty closely. While YPN usually sends a warning to sites that it believes have broken its terms and conditions, Google has been known to cut people off right away. And that can be pretty painful.
I do recommend that you read the AdSense Terms and Conditions. I realize that they’re not much fun and they’re hardly a gripping read, but they are important, especially when you start really pushing your ads to their limits. To make it easier for you though, I’ve gone through those terms and pulled out the most important restrictions contained in them. This list is not a replacement for reading the Terms page — you’re still going to have to do that. They just might make it clearer so that you’re less likely to make a very costly mistake.
• One individual or entity cannot hold more than one AdSense account; all accounts will be closed.
This is important if you have many sites covering different topics and are worried about the effects of Smart Pricing. You might want to open a separate account in a spouse’s name or open more than one business.
• You cannot modify the JavaScript or other code provided in any way.
Google is pretty strict about this. Cut into the code and you risk the axe.
• Web pages cannot contain solely ads, a Search Box or a referral button.
Blank pages with nothing more than AdSense ads are pretty rare; pages which contain only ads of different types are much more common. Google is working against these sorts of things and you’ll probably find yourself if not banned, then almost certainly Smart Priced out.
• Ads cannot appear on pages that are “under construction,” used for registration, chat, contain adult, objectionable or illegal content. And they can’t be used in emails either.
If you have a site that’s in any way morally objectionable, then AdSense isn’t for you. That’s the bottom line. More relevant for most people though is the idea that you can’t put AdSense on every page of a website. There are all sorts of pages on many people’s sites that really don’t contain any content, like password pages or error messages. You can’t use them as places to put ads.
• You cannot generate searches, clicks or impressions by any method other than genuine user interest.
So no automatic bots or clicking your own ads or any of that nonsense. That’s just fraud and Google will spot it in a second.
• You cannot display anything on your Web page that could be confused as an AdSense ad.
That’s an interesting rule that prevents people from putting up affiliate links that look like ad units to try to cash in on Google’s brand. In theory, this rule could cause a problem for someone who blended the ads into the page by making link lists that looked similar to ad units. As long as those links aren’t ads though, and as long as you don’t write “Ads by Goooogle” on them, I doubt if Google would have a problem with them.
• You cannot put related images right next to an AdSense unit.
The old strategy of using images related to the ads to draws to ad units has gone. Google doesn’t want any picture next to an ad unit that looks like it’s part of the ad. There’s no clear definition of how far the images should be or how it defines ‘confusing’. The best bet is to use common sense, and if you’re going to put an image near ad unit, make it a logo, unrelated to the content of the ad unit or some part of the site.
• If you’re using a Google Search box, you cannot use any other search service on the page.
Again, Google wants a monopoly of services on your site. You can’t offer your users the option of searching through Google or Yahoo; it’s either-or, not both-and.
• You cannot put anything between the ad link and the ad site.
So if you were thinking of trying to capture your lost traffic by redirecting ad clicks to another of your sites, think again. But who thinks of that?
• You cannot communicate to advertisers directly concerning the ads on your site.
That would have been quite useful. You could have written to an advertiser and suggested ways in which they could make their copy more effective for your users. Of course, you could also suggest they advertise directly on your site and cut out the Google middleman... Interestingly though, you can do all of this on your “Advertise on this site” landing page.
• You cannot change the order of the information in an ad unit.
This is pretty well covered by the ban on changing the code. But again, it might have been nice to put the ads that are most likely to get the most clicks at the top of the list, even if they pay less. But putting the ones with the highest bid price there though isn’t a bad idea either.
• You cannot reveal your click-through rates or any other information about your site performance.
Which is why I haven’t quoted my own CTR figures in this book. But you can reveal the amount of Google’s gross payments to you, which I have done. These rules are all pretty straightforward and for the most part, easy to follow. Usually, if someone has been banned from AdSense it’s because they’ve clicked on their own ads and Google didn’t believe that it was an accident. That’s just rotten luck.
AdSense Prohibitions, Mistakes And Problems
Google is very protective of its AdSense program and is a pretty strict ad provider. It has a relatively long page of Terms and Conditions (www.google.com/adsense/terms) and monitors sites pretty closely. While YPN usually sends a warning to sites that it believes have broken its terms and conditions, Google has been known to cut people off right away. And that can be pretty painful.
I do recommend that you read the AdSense Terms and Conditions. I realize that they’re not much fun and they’re hardly a gripping read, but they are important, especially when you start really pushing your ads to their limits. To make it easier for you though, I’ve gone through those terms and pulled out the most important restrictions contained in them. This list is not a replacement for reading the Terms page — you’re still going to have to do that. They just might make it clearer so that you’re less likely to make a very costly mistake.
• One individual or entity cannot hold more than one AdSense account; all accounts will be closed.
This is important if you have many sites covering different topics and are worried about the effects of Smart Pricing. You might want to open a separate account in a spouse’s name or open more than one business.
• You cannot modify the JavaScript or other code provided in any way.
Google is pretty strict about this. Cut into the code and you risk the axe.
• Web pages cannot contain solely ads, a Search Box or a referral button.
Blank pages with nothing more than AdSense ads are pretty rare; pages which contain only ads of different types are much more common. Google is working against these sorts of things and you’ll probably find yourself if not banned, then almost certainly Smart Priced out.
• Ads cannot appear on pages that are “under construction,” used for registration, chat, contain adult, objectionable or illegal content. And they can’t be used in emails either.
If you have a site that’s in any way morally objectionable, then AdSense isn’t for you. That’s the bottom line. More relevant for most people though is the idea that you can’t put AdSense on every page of a website. There are all sorts of pages on many people’s sites that really don’t contain any content, like password pages or error messages. You can’t use them as places to put ads.
• You cannot generate searches, clicks or impressions by any method other than genuine user interest.
So no automatic bots or clicking your own ads or any of that nonsense. That’s just fraud and Google will spot it in a second.
• You cannot display anything on your Web page that could be confused as an AdSense ad.
That’s an interesting rule that prevents people from putting up affiliate links that look like ad units to try to cash in on Google’s brand. In theory, this rule could cause a problem for someone who blended the ads into the page by making link lists that looked similar to ad units. As long as those links aren’t ads though, and as long as you don’t write “Ads by Goooogle” on them, I doubt if Google would have a problem with them.
• You cannot put related images right next to an AdSense unit.
The old strategy of using images related to the ads to draws to ad units has gone. Google doesn’t want any picture next to an ad unit that looks like it’s part of the ad. There’s no clear definition of how far the images should be or how it defines ‘confusing’. The best bet is to use common sense, and if you’re going to put an image near ad unit, make it a logo, unrelated to the content of the ad unit or some part of the site.
• If you’re using a Google Search box, you cannot use any other search service on the page.
Again, Google wants a monopoly of services on your site. You can’t offer your users the option of searching through Google or Yahoo; it’s either-or, not both-and.
• You cannot put anything between the ad link and the ad site.
So if you were thinking of trying to capture your lost traffic by redirecting ad clicks to another of your sites, think again. But who thinks of that?
• You cannot communicate to advertisers directly concerning the ads on your site.
That would have been quite useful. You could have written to an advertiser and suggested ways in which they could make their copy more effective for your users. Of course, you could also suggest they advertise directly on your site and cut out the Google middleman... Interestingly though, you can do all of this on your “Advertise on this site” landing page.
• You cannot change the order of the information in an ad unit.
This is pretty well covered by the ban on changing the code. But again, it might have been nice to put the ads that are most likely to get the most clicks at the top of the list, even if they pay less. But putting the ones with the highest bid price there though isn’t a bad idea either.
• You cannot reveal your click-through rates or any other information about your site performance.
Which is why I haven’t quoted my own CTR figures in this book. But you can reveal the amount of Google’s gross payments to you, which I have done. These rules are all pretty straightforward and for the most part, easy to follow. Usually, if someone has been banned from AdSense it’s because they’ve clicked on their own ads and Google didn’t believe that it was an accident. That’s just rotten luck.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
make money internet
Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic. Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt. Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages. Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a robots.txt file: User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.] Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to exclude.] In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”). Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings. Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings. A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of number which confuse the robots. One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.
Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down. One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their site, they don’t post their links on yours. Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related to your topic but don’t be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve your search engine ranking. Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and http://forums.seochat.com is another. You should also check out my own forum www.AdSenseChat.com. Although this is mostly about AdSense optimization, not surprisingly, SEO issues are discussed often, especially as they relate to AdSense. It’s a great source to dig up new ideas. And if you’re going to putting your links all over the forums, why not do the same thing for blogs? You can think of blogs as places to read someone’s writings if you like, but don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. www.seobook.com is a good one, www.bradfallon.com is another and of course there’s my own blog at www.joelcomm.com. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
It’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though. There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be happy to display your link if it means that they get an article in return. Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try www.ezinearticles.com. You don’t even need to write anything original when you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links will end up? The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free, www.linkmetro.com makes the whole link exchange process very formal. There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with so you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like www.Adzaar.com, www.AdBrite.com, and www.LinkAdage.com. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
On my own site www.buyjoeldessert.com, for example, I give page links to people who satisfy my sweet tooth with a donation to my cause. (I’m still hungry by the way, so feel free to sign up, improve your rankings and make my dentist happy!)
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their visitors a tangible way to say “thank you” for their online efforts. Smart site owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
www.buyleoalatte.com
www.buybarbaracoffee.com
You can actually acquire the “Buy Me A Drink” script that all these sites run on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing (www.webring.com). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant sites that I can’t believe it’s not the talk of the net. The idea is to link together sites on similar topics so that users can quickly find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But it’s nicer for you when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank sites.
Create Gateways
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter. But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages, there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads. So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to know about “cats.”
Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo! right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it. The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later. (Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to climb the rankings.) That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can concentrate on content. There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example, lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.
SEO Tools
There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of your page ranking. You can download it for free at http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html
SEO Elite
SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful competitors. You can discover the optimum number of times to repeat keywords, where you should put them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount more.
In short, you can find out exactly how your competitors have got to the top of the search engines, learn what they did — and do the exact same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of managing your links. As you continue to optimize your site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links on other sites and being asked to host links from other site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-looking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for both your link partners and your visitors. The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime placement in Google and the other search engines.
I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series, Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how to duplicate his success for your web site(s). I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
A Word About Cloaking
One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you present to users. There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular. You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you much traffic. One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the content. Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether. Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s TOS and could get you banned. So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your content. Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try). And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
21.8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optimization. We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at www.trafficandconversion.com. Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say. You won’t regret it.
Search Engine Optimization
In the previous chapter, I talked about a number of different ways that you can increase your traffic. Probably the most important method though is to get a high ranking on search engines. That’s free traffic. Again, there are all sorts of books and experts who can help you improve your SEO and win a top spot for a site. I have had experience with a number of strategies that could help you improve your ranking. I’d like to share them with you now.
Robot.txt
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do that with a file called robots.txt. Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index which pages. Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a robots.txt file: User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.] Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to exclude.] In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”). Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search engine rankings. Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
Titles And URLs
I mentioned earlier that Metatags just aren’t what they used to be. I also said that it’s important that your titles and URLs contain the most important keywords for each of your pages in order to keep the ads relevant. But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your search engine rankings. A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better. www.domain.com/page is always an improvement than http://domain.com/page.php?newsid=1234583373. That’s why on my website www.familyfirst.com, I use URL’s like www.familyfirst.com/miss_abigails_time_warp.html rather than strings of number which confuse the robots. One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your rankings then is your titles and URLs.
Links
The more links you have, the better. And the better the sites that list those links the more they’ll be worth. It is always worth aiming to put your links on sites that look good and have high rankings. In fact, being listed on a poor site can bring your ranking down. One of the best places to place links to improve your search engine rankings is on forums. This isn’t an exchange; you post your links on their site, they don’t post their links on yours. Make sure you browse forums regularly, add comments and include your URL in your signature. You’re likely to get the best results on good forums related to your topic but don’t be fussy. Even unrelated forums can help to improve your search engine ranking. Google’s spiders love forums and review them every week. And because these sites tend have quite high ranking, those posts will do wonders for your listings.
Of course, you shouldn’t ignore the SEO forums themselves for some good tips. www.searchengineforums.com is one good place to browse and http://forums.seochat.com is another. You should also check out my own forum www.AdSenseChat.com. Although this is mostly about AdSense optimization, not surprisingly, SEO issues are discussed often, especially as they relate to AdSense. It’s a great source to dig up new ideas. And if you’re going to putting your links all over the forums, why not do the same thing for blogs? You can think of blogs as places to read someone’s writings if you like, but don’t forget they also let you add your own feedback. That means that as an AdSense publisher, you should also be thinking of them as free places to post your links. Again, any blog is good but top blogs on your topic are probably the best.
Don’t forget to check out the SEO blogs too. www.seobook.com is a good one, www.bradfallon.com is another and of course there’s my own blog at www.joelcomm.com. You’re welcome to leave your links there!
It’s not just blogs and forum that that let you leave your details though. There are plenty of sites that welcome free content and would be happy to display your link if it means that they get an article in return. Start by looking at other sites on your topic and then try www.ezinearticles.com. You don’t even need to write anything original when you do this. If you write a new entry to your blog, submit it to an article site at the same time as you upload it to your blog. Who knows where your links will end up? The easiest way to put your links across the Web though is to do a link exchange. If you’ve got friends who have websites, start there. That’s very easy.
While linking from friends’ sites is straightforward and cost-free, www.linkmetro.com makes the whole link exchange process very formal. There’s a giant range of different sites that you can exchange links with so you can keep your links relevant and your ranking good and high.
You can also buy links on sites like www.Adzaar.com, www.AdBrite.com, and www.LinkAdage.com. Again, these allow you to choose sites on which you can place your own links but charge a fee for the process.
On my own site www.buyjoeldessert.com, for example, I give page links to people who satisfy my sweet tooth with a donation to my cause. (I’m still hungry by the way, so feel free to sign up, improve your rankings and make my dentist happy!)
I know of several associates who have done something similar, allowing their visitors a tangible way to say “thank you” for their online efforts. Smart site owners see opportunity in this strategy as you can acquire quality links rather inexpensively. Here are some additional examples:
www.buyleoalatte.com
www.buybarbaracoffee.com
You can actually acquire the “Buy Me A Drink” script that all these sites run on. Click here!
And finally, one resource that I highly recommend is WebRing (www.webring.com). This is such an easy way to gather links on relevant sites that I can’t believe it’s not the talk of the net. The idea is to link together sites on similar topics so that users can quickly find topics that they’re interested in. Nice for them. But it’s nicer for you when a bunch of links from similar sites rocket your SEO ranking. That’s exactly what Google and other search engines are looking for when they rank sites.
Create Gateways
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter. But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages, there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads. So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to know about “cats.”
Automatic Submissions
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo! right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it. The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later. (Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing your pages to climb the rankings.) That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can concentrate on content. There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example, lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and MSN are important, in that order.
SEO Tools
There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of your page ranking. You can download it for free at http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.
The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html
SEO Elite
SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful competitors. You can discover the optimum number of times to repeat keywords, where you should put them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount more.
In short, you can find out exactly how your competitors have got to the top of the search engines, learn what they did — and do the exact same thing to swipe their spot.
You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html Reciprocal Manager
Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of managing your links. As you continue to optimize your site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links on other sites and being asked to host links from other site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professional-looking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for both your link partners and your visitors. The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other sites to link to based on search word or phrase.
Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com.
Stomping The Search Engines
Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime placement in Google and the other search engines.
I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.
You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series, Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how to duplicate his success for your web site(s). I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.
To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.
A Word About Cloaking
One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you present to users. There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular. You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you much traffic. One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the content. Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for anything.
And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether. Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s TOS and could get you banned. So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your content. Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try). And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
21.8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optimization. We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at www.trafficandconversion.com. Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say. You won’t regret it.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Getting Traffic To Your Web Site
Getting Traffic To Your Web Site
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’ll give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the information you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.
Advertising
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too. For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit. Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign. One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising. It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic! Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement. The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link. If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use. The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask. Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users. If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?
Send A Friend
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google
allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.
RSS Feeds
One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help your feeds to stand out. It’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts. One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level. The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off giving them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.
Offline Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that traffic online. You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.
Promoting Your Blog
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have. If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash. The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic.com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option. You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts). Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings. You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
Public Relations And Publicity
Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture. Publicity can be free.
It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning. Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call. Sound difficult? It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write. There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run. Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might. Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story. And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers. And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!” Sound good? The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”. He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com.
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is “Will your ebook teach me how to get more traffic to my web site?” Lots of people have written books — and series of books — on generating traffic. The focus of this ebook is to show you how to maximize the traffic that you already have. And while tips for building pages through forums and free content are excellent ideas, they are no replacement for a solid course on how to get more people to visit your site. Because this question is so common though, I will address it briefly in this chapter. I’ll give you the basics, describe some unusual ideas that some people are using and tell you where you can get all the information you need. In the next chapter, you’ll also find a quick run-through of search engine optimization.
Advertising
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying your traffic from other sources too. For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click then you’re never going to make a profit. Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign. One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy advertising. It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
Reciprocal Linking
Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic! Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement. The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link. If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use. The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask. Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users. If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?
Send A Friend
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google
allows ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.
RSS Feeds
One of the challenges of keeping your user base is that readers can be pretty forgetful. Adding an RSS feed to your site is a great way to let people know that a new post has gone up and that they should stop by and take a look You’ll want to make sure that your headlines are attractive and inviting. Many users don’t look past them, so if they don’t do the job, the post won’t be opened or read, and the user won’t click to your site. Images can also help your feeds to stand out. It’s rarely a good idea to send more than RSS post to a subscriber each day. The most common reason that users unsubscribe isn’t poor content or too much advertising, but too many posts. One good strategy then is to divide your RSS feeds by theme and let subscribers only receive posts on the topics that interest them most. If you’re writing about a range of different themes, that should already help to keep the deliveries down to a manageable level. The only other choice you’ll have to make is whether to include the whole post in your feed or just a teaser to bring people to your site. When the goal of the feed is to get people back to your site to click the ads, you might think that there’s little point in giving them the whole article in their feed reader. But readers will often unsubscribe if they can’t see the whole article. That would reduce your subscriber base. You might be better off giving them the whole article and inviting them back to your site to add and see comments. Test both options and see which works best for you.
Offline Marketing
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that traffic online. You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies and just about anything else you can think of.You should certainly have your site address in your email signatures.
Promoting Your Blog
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good blog but also because a lot of people aren’t making the most of the blogs they have. If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash. The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping rpc.pingomatic.com as soon as you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools, such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option. You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update. Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest posts). Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries? One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites and higher search engine rankings. You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it — and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
Public Relations And Publicity
Just about all of the methods that you use to bring people to your site will cost you money. You’ll have to pay for ads on other sites, you’ll have to give up valuable real estate on your site to lists of links and you’ll have to decide how much you want to pay for an AdWords campaign or to get yourself promoted through Overture. Publicity can be free.
It doesn’t have to be of course. You can pay a PR expert to publicize your site for you and place articles in the press on your behalf... but it’s not necessary and they can be too expensive for most sites, especially at the beginning. Or you can simply create a good quality press release yourself, fax it out to the media and wait for reporters to call. Sound difficult? It really isn’t. A press release is just one page and will take between twenty and forty minutes to write. There are a number of rules you have to follow: you need a gripping headline; you have to include a quote; and you have to be available for the interview to name just three. Most importantly though you have to have a story the press wants to run. Telling them that you’ve just launched a new site isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that your new site is going to set a new trend or change some people‘s lives just might. Think about the effect that your piece of “news” will have on the public and you’ve got the beginnings of a great story. And what do you get in return for doing that? Well, not only do you get the name of your business in the press, you also get the halo that comes with it. When you’re in the media, people assume that you’re an expert. You become the number one source for whatever your website offers. And to underline that fact, you can even put a button on your home page that says something like: “As Seen On CNN!” Sound good? The real expert on marketing through free publicity is Paul Hartunian. This is the guy who bought a hunk of wood that had been cut from the Brooklyn Bridge during renovations, cut it into one-inch cubes and wrote a press release with the headline “New Jersey Man Sells Brooklyn Bridge For $19.95”. He was on CNN for two days and the story was run as far away as Peru.
He now lives on a 30-acre estate and teaches people how to use publicity for their businesses. You can order his publicity kit at www.hartunian.com.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
how to make money internet
Searchfeed
Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States.
You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time.
Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google — or can’t use Google — and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative.
You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft
One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all start-ups. Or should that be up-starts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.Copyright © 2008 Joel Comm and InfoMedia, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 176
Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.
They’re still far behind.
There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.
Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.
What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.
Searchfeed
Searchfeed is slightly better, especially for international publishers. It also supplies contextualized ads to advertisers but offers geotargeting services which gives them a wide global reach, useful if you’re based outside the United States.
You can integrate the ads smoothly into your site, either by cutting and pasting the HTML from their site or even by asking their own specialists to help you increase your CTR. And they have a good reputation for paying on time.
Whether they’ll give you more money than Google is a different question though. The only way to find that out is to try it but if you find that you’re doing well with Google, then why would you bother? If, for some reason, you don’t want to use Google — or can’t use Google — and YPN isn’t your cup of tea either, then you might find Searchfeed a good alternative.
You can learn more about Searchfeed at www.searchfeed.com
The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft
One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all start-ups. Or should that be up-starts? A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.
eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.Copyright © 2008 Joel Comm and InfoMedia, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 176
Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want. But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information. And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.
That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html. The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.
They’re still far behind.
There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.
Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.
What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
AdBrite
AdBrite
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads. For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.
You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
Kanoodle – Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer — or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries.
Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool
Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like. AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads. For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site. That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.
You can learn more about AdBrite at www.adbrite.com.
Kanoodle – Bright Ads
The same criticism can be made of Kanoodle’s BrightAds service, which is similar to Google’s. It’s a search engine that delivers contextual ads to publishers’ websites. The contextualizing isn’t quite as accurate as Google’s but BrightAds does offer a number of options that Google doesn’t offer — or at least not yet. Its RSS advertising program has been around for a while, it has a focus on local sites which might be attractive to businesses with local markets (or sites with content of local interest) and it also serves ads related to previous user behavior. If a user visits a lot of real estate sites, for example he could continue to receive ads about real estate even if he’s on a site about sport. That means your site could be displaying ads that have nothing to do with your content. That’s all creative stuff and it’s nice to see new ideas. It would be nicer though to see revenues that compete with Google’s and I haven’t heard of anyone earning more with BrightAds than they can earn with Google. BrightAds might be worth looking at if you want to make money with your RSS feed but I’m not convinced they’re going to give Google or Yahoo! any worries.
Learn more about Kanoodle’s BrightAds at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Yahoo! Publisher Network
how to make quick money
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)
They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re
using that on your site.
As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One
of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often
Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads.
These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal
with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not
contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more
frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of.
And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad
thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.
Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do
with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve
enough to attract us.
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)
They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re
using that on your site.
As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One
of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often
Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads.
These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal
with YPN.
They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not
contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more
frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of.
And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad
thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.
Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do
with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve
enough to attract us.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
how to make money on the internet
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page. You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eye-catching and attractive.
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image. Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.
Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too.
You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.
If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase. If you don’t qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.
I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.Want to get signed with Chitika? Easy! http://www.adsense-secrets.com/chitika.html All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
Chitika — All Malls, More Money
Kontera, Intellitxt and ContextCash all fit so neatly into your site, you’ll hardly notice the difference to your page. You will notice the difference in your revenues though. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are more intrusive than text links but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of their greatest advantages is that they are just so eye-catching and attractive.
The eMiniMalls are product ads that come with a number of different tabs. Those tabs include a list of Best Deals (with paid links to advertisers), a description of the product, reviews and a search box that draws on Chitika’s catalog. The tabs bring up different content when they’re moused over and each ad also comes with a picture of the image. Although you can let Chitika serve you contextualized ads, you can also turn off the contextualization engine and choose the ads you serve yourself. That’s a huge benefit: no more messing around with keywords or playing with text. You can just do a search, find an ad you like and start presenting it to your users.
Again, there are all sorts of factors involved in making eMiniMalls work at their best, from deciding which tabs to display (you can choose those too!) to choosing the right ad format for your page to figuring out how to use the ads together with AdSense ad units. There are some great ways to make them work together. One of the biggest issues though is where on the page to place your eMiniMalls units. For the most part, what’s true for AdSense is true for Chitika too. Ads above the fold get more clicks. Ads embedded into articles do well too.
You could, for example, create an eMiniMalls shopping zone at the top of your page or slip a horizontal unit at the bottom of each article. But that might mean that your ads are going to be competing against each other for the same spots. Although you can test each type of ad to see which earns you more, you can often combine the two and increase your earnings. Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog for example, is the perfect model to follow.In general, you can expect to find that eMiniMalls do particularly well on sites that focus on products. But Darren has put the picture of the product in the center of the page, blended an AdSense unit next to it and complemented the review with eMiniMalls ad. Chitika’s eMiniMalls are an excellent product. I’ve used them at my site DealofDay.com and been very pleased with the result. But Chitika has some other products that are very attractive too.
If you have a blog that focuses on products and has a lot of traffic, you should certainly take a look at their ShopLincs program. This lets you create an online store stuffed with products for users of your blog to purchase. If you don’t qualify though—and Chitika’s restrictions are tight enough to make sure that few people will—you can still put their ShopCloud$ units on your pages. These let users search for products, see results on your page... and earn you a commission when they click.
I’ve spent a lot of time playing around with Chitikas ads as well, come up with some very effective strategies and written them up as another book. You can find that book at www.chitikasecrets.com.Want to get signed with Chitika? Easy! http://www.adsense-secrets.com/chitika.html All of these programs work with AdSense. I think it’s pretty unlikely that they’ll give you more money than AdSense but they can be very useful ways to bring in a little extra income. Let’s talk now about programs that aren’t compatible with AdSense...
Sunday, October 10, 2010
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
how to get money fast
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH (www.contextcash.com). This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales. The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and — like any affiliate system — whether or not you’ve recommended the products.And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
ContextCASH — Affiliate Revenue The Easy Way
If you don’t like either of those though, you could also look at ContextCASH (www.contextcash.com). This system looks pretty similar to Kontera and Intellitxt but it works in a very different way. You still get the highlighted words that appear in your text but instead of bringing up an ad when you mouse over, these links lead directly to affiliate sites. Again, the links are unobtrusive, they don’t clash with your ad units and they’re compatible with AdSense. And they can also bring in good money too... provided you get the sales that win the commissions. Remember, with ContextCash, you get nothing if users click out of curiosity. You only get paid if they buy. While that will give you more money than the small amounts you’d get on a CPC basis, you have to make the sales. The factor that is likely to have the greatest influence over whether or not you get sales is the context of the page and — like any affiliate system — whether or not you’ve recommended the products.And with ContextCash can be a problem. Usually, the best way to generate income with affiliate products is to choose them carefully and talk them up in your content. ContextCash’s affiliate ads though could change constantly so it will be difficult to recommend them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good though. Far from it. If the ads are contextual enough, the sites reputable enough and your content geared towards buyers you could see some great rewards. And you do have some control over all these elements. Not only can you optimize your links in all sorts of ways making them easy to blend in, you can also pick the keywords yourself, filter the source of your ads (most come from Amazon or Clickbank), view the list of ads that would fit your site and choose which ones to place on your page. In short, if you’re thinking of using affiliate ads on your site, this is a pretty unique way to do it. I think it’s worth testing them on one site and seeing how you get on.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
how to make money fast
Provide Targeted Content That Will Help Google Advertisers To Capitalize Your Traffic
But writing about what you enjoy rather than what can help you earn doesn’t mean you should forget about using your content to bring you targeted ads. If you know that there are certain keywords in your topic that are worth more, then you can certainly write about those. You can also make sure that you toss in plenty of keywords and headings to keep those ads targeted.
DON'T Build A Website Specifically To Target High-Value Keywords Unless You Plan On Developing Quality Content!
Not all advertisers bid high on the same keywords. Just as it’s a bad idea to create more content simply to create more money, so it’s a mistake to focus on particular keywords to create lots of money!
If you are prepared to produce good content and want that content to include high value keywords, one VERY useful report reveals those high-value keywords. You can find it at http://www.adsense-secrets.com/cashkeywords.html
But writing about what you enjoy rather than what can help you earn doesn’t mean you should forget about using your content to bring you targeted ads. If you know that there are certain keywords in your topic that are worth more, then you can certainly write about those. You can also make sure that you toss in plenty of keywords and headings to keep those ads targeted.
DON'T Build A Website Specifically To Target High-Value Keywords Unless You Plan On Developing Quality Content!
Not all advertisers bid high on the same keywords. Just as it’s a bad idea to create more content simply to create more money, so it’s a mistake to focus on particular keywords to create lots of money!
If you are prepared to produce good content and want that content to include high value keywords, one VERY useful report reveals those high-value keywords. You can find it at http://www.adsense-secrets.com/cashkeywords.html
Friday, October 8, 2010
Keeping Track Of What Works — And What Doesn't Work — For You!
make money with google
Keeping Track Of What Works — And What Doesn't Work — For You!
Start An AdSense Journal People who want to lose weight often keep a "food diary". Without a food diary, it's easy to forget that late-night snack or the extra sugar in your fourth cup of coffee. A food diary keeps you honest. It helps you figure out the real reasons behind those little ups and downs in your weight. I'm sure that after reading this book, you would be eager to try out many of the tweaks discussed in here — including some of your own. Without an AdSense journal, it would be easy to undo your successes, or to repeat your failures. Remember the program that I mentioned earlier, AdSenseDesktop. This tool provides everything you need to keep an ongoing journal of your AdSense activity! Every little tweak counts, but don't try to do everything at once. Take the step-by-step approach. Write your own AdSense plan for the first week. Log into your AdSense account once a day, to track your click-throughs and earnings.
Don't be rigid about your plan. Make room for inspiration. If you've got a great idea, write it down to implement it later. Don't implement your ideas all at once and DO give every idea some time to prove its mettle. You'll find out within a day if you have thousands of visitors hitting your web pages. If that is not the case, give it a few days. Preferably one week! Don't be discouraged by minor, day-to-day fluctuations in your click-throughs and earnings. It's normal and probably has nothing to do with your latest tweak.
Join an AdSense forum, several if possible. Share your tips with other members. Discuss what works and what doesn't work for you. Every once in a while, a forum member might alert you to a possible violation of the AdSense TOS. It could be just a false alarm, but I prefer to be safe than sorry! When in doubt, dash an email to AdSense support, at: adsense-support@Google.com Most emails are answered quickly by a real person. They won't suspend your account for asking them, but they might if you don't ask! Read all you can and jot down every good idea. It will keep your interest levels high and give you something new to work on all the time. Every new 'tweak' is your stepping stone to AdSense success. Once you've reached a certain level, it's easy to say 'Cool! I've figured it all out!' But take it from me — Internet Marketing keeps changing and the rules will change for you too. Don't be like the two lazy little-people in "Who moved my cheese?" Keep looking for new ways to make money with AdSense. Replace ideas that no longer seem to work with new ideas and inspiration. Some people I know are still rubbing their backsides after the dot-com bust. It's always easier when you see it coming, than when it takes you by surprise! Remember the story about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? There's a lesson in it for all of us Internet Marketers, and it's this: It doesn't matter how much money you've made with AdSense or what the IQ tests say about you: It ain't working till your stats say so!
A Sample AdSense Journal
For example, let’s say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this book and you decide to start implementing the strategies that I’ve been talking about. Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have all sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:
• 3-Way Matching — Text color, background and text size.
• Layout — Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent.
• Targeting ads — Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords.
You’re already using 336 x 280 ads so you decide to start with 3-Way Matching and change all your ads so that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text. A week later, your stats look like this:
Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go. You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3-Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3-Way Matching is worth to your incomes. Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:
Date
Page Impressions
Clicks
Page CTR
Page eCPM
Your earnings
5/15/07
8365
343
4.1%
5.93
49.65
5/16/07
8296
324
3.9%
6.04
50.09
5/17/07
8032
321
4.0%
6.42
51.59
5/18/07
7920
317
4.0%
6.30
49.93
5/19/07
7853
306
3.9%
6.20
48.67
5/20/07
6725
282
4.2%
6.68
44.92
5/21/07
7145
293
4.1%
6.51
46.55
Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set. Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at all. You create a channel for that page and follow your stats for a week. The original stats look like this:
Channel
Ad Unit Impressions
Clicks
Ad Unit CTR
Ad Unit eCPM
Your earnings
Cuttings page
829
8
1.0%
1.44
1.20
Cuttings page
764
9
1.2%
1.89
1.44
Cuttings page
801
7
0.9%
1.22
0.98
Cuttings page
712
7
1.0%
1.37
0.98
Cuttings page
758
10
1.3%
1.85
1.40
Cuttings page
652
5
0.8%
1.07
0.70
Cuttings page
704
6
0.9%
1.19
0.84
That’s pretty weak but as few of your users are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not too surprising. So you change the title of the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.html to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.html and turn the word “cuttings” into “tree-cuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box. You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites. After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:
Channel
Ad Unit Impressions
Clicks
Ad Unit CTR
Ad Unit eCPM
Your earnings
Cuttings page
1300
52
4.0%
6.40
8.32
Cuttings page
1423
58
4.1%
6.52
9.28
Cuttings page
1346
52
3.9%
6.18
8.32
Cuttings page
1256
50
3.9%
6.40
8.04
Cuttings page
1156
44
3.8%
6.09
7.04
Cuttings page
1098
45
4.0%
6.56
7.20
Cuttings page
1247
49
3.9%
6.29
7.84
Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal. So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104. And there’s still plenty more you can do! You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higher-paying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues. And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.
Note that only in the last example (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simply made the most of the traffic you already have! Of course, if you add more traffic, you’ll make more money. The important point to remember is that you should be recording everything you do and keeping a close eye on the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a complete record of all the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom line.
Keeping Track Of What Works — And What Doesn't Work — For You!
Start An AdSense Journal People who want to lose weight often keep a "food diary". Without a food diary, it's easy to forget that late-night snack or the extra sugar in your fourth cup of coffee. A food diary keeps you honest. It helps you figure out the real reasons behind those little ups and downs in your weight. I'm sure that after reading this book, you would be eager to try out many of the tweaks discussed in here — including some of your own. Without an AdSense journal, it would be easy to undo your successes, or to repeat your failures. Remember the program that I mentioned earlier, AdSenseDesktop. This tool provides everything you need to keep an ongoing journal of your AdSense activity! Every little tweak counts, but don't try to do everything at once. Take the step-by-step approach. Write your own AdSense plan for the first week. Log into your AdSense account once a day, to track your click-throughs and earnings.
Don't be rigid about your plan. Make room for inspiration. If you've got a great idea, write it down to implement it later. Don't implement your ideas all at once and DO give every idea some time to prove its mettle. You'll find out within a day if you have thousands of visitors hitting your web pages. If that is not the case, give it a few days. Preferably one week! Don't be discouraged by minor, day-to-day fluctuations in your click-throughs and earnings. It's normal and probably has nothing to do with your latest tweak.
Join an AdSense forum, several if possible. Share your tips with other members. Discuss what works and what doesn't work for you. Every once in a while, a forum member might alert you to a possible violation of the AdSense TOS. It could be just a false alarm, but I prefer to be safe than sorry! When in doubt, dash an email to AdSense support, at: adsense-support@Google.com Most emails are answered quickly by a real person. They won't suspend your account for asking them, but they might if you don't ask! Read all you can and jot down every good idea. It will keep your interest levels high and give you something new to work on all the time. Every new 'tweak' is your stepping stone to AdSense success. Once you've reached a certain level, it's easy to say 'Cool! I've figured it all out!' But take it from me — Internet Marketing keeps changing and the rules will change for you too. Don't be like the two lazy little-people in "Who moved my cheese?" Keep looking for new ways to make money with AdSense. Replace ideas that no longer seem to work with new ideas and inspiration. Some people I know are still rubbing their backsides after the dot-com bust. It's always easier when you see it coming, than when it takes you by surprise! Remember the story about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? There's a lesson in it for all of us Internet Marketers, and it's this: It doesn't matter how much money you've made with AdSense or what the IQ tests say about you: It ain't working till your stats say so!
A Sample AdSense Journal
For example, let’s say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this book and you decide to start implementing the strategies that I’ve been talking about. Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have all sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:
• 3-Way Matching — Text color, background and text size.
• Layout — Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent.
• Targeting ads — Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords.
You’re already using 336 x 280 ads so you decide to start with 3-Way Matching and change all your ads so that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text. A week later, your stats look like this:
Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go. You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3-Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3-Way Matching is worth to your incomes. Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:
Date
Page Impressions
Clicks
Page CTR
Page eCPM
Your earnings
5/15/07
8365
343
4.1%
5.93
49.65
5/16/07
8296
324
3.9%
6.04
50.09
5/17/07
8032
321
4.0%
6.42
51.59
5/18/07
7920
317
4.0%
6.30
49.93
5/19/07
7853
306
3.9%
6.20
48.67
5/20/07
6725
282
4.2%
6.68
44.92
5/21/07
7145
293
4.1%
6.51
46.55
Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set. Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at all. You create a channel for that page and follow your stats for a week. The original stats look like this:
Channel
Ad Unit Impressions
Clicks
Ad Unit CTR
Ad Unit eCPM
Your earnings
Cuttings page
829
8
1.0%
1.44
1.20
Cuttings page
764
9
1.2%
1.89
1.44
Cuttings page
801
7
0.9%
1.22
0.98
Cuttings page
712
7
1.0%
1.37
0.98
Cuttings page
758
10
1.3%
1.85
1.40
Cuttings page
652
5
0.8%
1.07
0.70
Cuttings page
704
6
0.9%
1.19
0.84
That’s pretty weak but as few of your users are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not too surprising. So you change the title of the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.html to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.html and turn the word “cuttings” into “tree-cuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box. You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites. After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:
Channel
Ad Unit Impressions
Clicks
Ad Unit CTR
Ad Unit eCPM
Your earnings
Cuttings page
1300
52
4.0%
6.40
8.32
Cuttings page
1423
58
4.1%
6.52
9.28
Cuttings page
1346
52
3.9%
6.18
8.32
Cuttings page
1256
50
3.9%
6.40
8.04
Cuttings page
1156
44
3.8%
6.09
7.04
Cuttings page
1098
45
4.0%
6.56
7.20
Cuttings page
1247
49
3.9%
6.29
7.84
Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal. So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104. And there’s still plenty more you can do! You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higher-paying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues. And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.
Note that only in the last example (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simply made the most of the traffic you already have! Of course, if you add more traffic, you’ll make more money. The important point to remember is that you should be recording everything you do and keeping a close eye on the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a complete record of all the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom line.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
get money fast
Other Contextual Advertising Programs And How To Use Them With AdSense
AdSense is probably the easiest way to generate revenue with your website — I know it’s making me a fantastic amount of money — but it’s certainly not the only way you can make money using contextualized advertising. At the beginning of 2007, Google changed its Terms of Service to allow publishers to place other contextualized ad systems on the same pages as AdSense units. There’s just one restriction: those other systems’ ads can’t look like AdSense units. That still leaves you a huge range of possibilities. In this chapter, I’m going to look at some of the other programs that you could use — either instead of AdSense or as well as AdSense. I’ll explain how they work and how you can make them work with AdSense.
Kontera — Making Your Words Pay
Kontera (www.kontera.com) is a great way to make extra revenue. Instead of putting ad units on your site, like AdSense does, Kontera highlights particular keywords in your text and brings up an ad when the user mouses over them.
The words are marked out from regular links by an underline and a second dotted line, and you can change the colors of the text and the links. For some of the biggest publishers, the ad inventory even includes some very high-earning video ads.
I use Kontera on my personal blog at JoelComm.com and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The ads are fun to bring up, they’re relevant and they’re totally unobtrusive. But like AdSense, you will need to play with them to maximize your revenues. There are so many different factors that affect your incomes with Kontera, such as which keywords you want highlighted, where you want those words to appear on the page and which colors to choose for the best results, that it took me some time to figure out all of the best combinations. It also took me a few phone calls directly to the people who’d created it to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes of the program so that I can maximize my income. The key issues are the number of links you should place on your Web pages, the color of the links and how those links are distributed. The first issue is pretty simple. Kontera lets you place up to six ad links on each page and recommends that you take all of them. I don’t see any reason to argue with that. In general, your best strategy when building a website that earns income through advertising is to keep the pages relatively short and focused on just one topic. That will keep your ads relevant. If you’re following that strategy, then it’s unlikely that your page is going to look overstuffed with Kontera’s ads. You’ll probably find no more than three or four on a page, and because they only appear as links they won’t distract the user.
The color of the links is a tougher question. Usually, it’s best to choose a different color to the one you’ve used for your AdSense units. That’s because Google and Kontera tend to pick up on different keywords. Offering different links in different colors helps to emphasize that variety and lets Kontera’s links stand out. If you’re thinking that the goal of optimization is to blend the ads into your site, you’re right. But these links are going to be embedded in your content. They’re also going to be double-underlined so that they’ll look different anyway. You want people to see them and to place their mouse over them. You could try using blue as your link color if you want. I use them sometimes on my blog. But I suspect that if you tested different colors, you might well find that a tone that matches your site’s design will give you better results. Testing is going to be key. Making sure that the ads appear in the best locations on the page is easy to do but might require a little work. For the most part, Kontera’s software should distribute the ads fairly evenly across the page. But if you want to make sure that you don’t get any ads in particular places on the page, you can use Zone Tags. These simply tell Kontera: “No ads here please.” To define certain text areas as off-limit simply add the line: before the text, and the tag: at the end. If that sounds to you like AdSense’s Section Targeting, you’re on the right track. But Kontera’s filters aren’t exactly the same as Section Targeting. Placing these filter tags won’t prevent Kontera’s contextualization engine from checking that section for keywords. The contents of that section will still be used to assess the meaning of the Web page. Kontera just won’t place ads on any keywords it finds there. While that’s useful for keeping ads away from the bottom of the page, the sidebars or spots right next to AdSense units, you can also use the tags to control which terms are highlighted.
Kontera doesn’t let you choose which terms and phrases you want turned into ads. But it does recommend that you make the phrases you use as specific as possible. Talking about the “Nokia 5300 XpressMusic myFaves Black Phone” from T-Mobile is likely to get you better ads and more clicks than talking about “mobile phones.”
There are a lot of different strategies that you can use with Kontera. Far too many for me to describe in detail here. That’s why I put them together in a short book that lets other publishers can shorten their learning curve. You can find that book at www.konterasecrets.com. If you’re going to put Kontera on your site in addition to AdSense — and I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t — you will need that book to shoot straight to the high revenues.Intellitxt is a direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over. When Kontera was first rolled it was probably fair to say that Intellitxt was at least as good, if not better. Their ads looked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads. These days I’m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that Intellitxt certainly doesn’t have an edge there. In fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page.Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green or be certain that an ad will contain an image, the most attractive part of these sorts of floating ads. What you might get though is a movie. And those movies are great. Unlike Google’s video ads, these start automatically and they’re impossible to miss. Unfortunately, they’re only for really big sites. If you have fewer than 500,000 page views a month, you don’t qualify. That’s a shame because some advertisers have reported CTRs two and three times higher for these ads than for AdSense ads. And you can be sure they’re paying a lot more too. If you do have lots of users though — or think you will soon — those video ads might have been a good reason to choose Intellitxt over Kontera, but Kontera has now produced its own line of rich media ads. (Although again you need to be big to benefit from them.)
The same placement and keyword strategies that work with Kontera should work with Intellitxt too but I’d always turn to Kontera first. It’s the system that I use on my blog. First thing you’ll want to do is get signed up at http://www.adsense-secrets.com/kontera.html
get money online
Other Contextual Advertising Programs And How To Use Them With AdSense
AdSense is probably the easiest way to generate revenue with your website — I know it’s making me a fantastic amount of money — but it’s certainly not the only way you can make money using contextualized advertising. At the beginning of 2007, Google changed its Terms of Service to allow publishers to place other contextualized ad systems on the same pages as AdSense units. There’s just one restriction: those other systems’ ads can’t look like AdSense units. That still leaves you a huge range of possibilities. In this chapter, I’m going to look at some of the other programs that you could use — either instead of AdSense or as well as AdSense. I’ll explain how they work and how you can make them work with AdSense.
Kontera — Making Your Words Pay
Kontera (www.kontera.com) is a great way to make extra revenue. Instead of putting ad units on your site, like AdSense does, Kontera highlights particular keywords in your text and brings up an ad when the user mouses over them.
The words are marked out from regular links by an underline and a second dotted line, and you can change the colors of the text and the links. For some of the biggest publishers, the ad inventory even includes some very high-earning video ads.
I use Kontera on my personal blog at JoelComm.com and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The ads are fun to bring up, they’re relevant and they’re totally unobtrusive. But like AdSense, you will need to play with them to maximize your revenues. There are so many different factors that affect your incomes with Kontera, such as which keywords you want highlighted, where you want those words to appear on the page and which colors to choose for the best results, that it took me some time to figure out all of the best combinations. It also took me a few phone calls directly to the people who’d created it to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes of the program so that I can maximize my income. The key issues are the number of links you should place on your Web pages, the color of the links and how those links are distributed. The first issue is pretty simple. Kontera lets you place up to six ad links on each page and recommends that you take all of them. I don’t see any reason to argue with that. In general, your best strategy when building a website that earns income through advertising is to keep the pages relatively short and focused on just one topic. That will keep your ads relevant. If you’re following that strategy, then it’s unlikely that your page is going to look overstuffed with Kontera’s ads. You’ll probably find no more than three or four on a page, and because they only appear as links they won’t distract the user.
The color of the links is a tougher question. Usually, it’s best to choose a different color to the one you’ve used for your AdSense units. That’s because Google and Kontera tend to pick up on different keywords. Offering different links in different colors helps to emphasize that variety and lets Kontera’s links stand out. If you’re thinking that the goal of optimization is to blend the ads into your site, you’re right. But these links are going to be embedded in your content. They’re also going to be double-underlined so that they’ll look different anyway. You want people to see them and to place their mouse over them. You could try using blue as your link color if you want. I use them sometimes on my blog. But I suspect that if you tested different colors, you might well find that a tone that matches your site’s design will give you better results. Testing is going to be key. Making sure that the ads appear in the best locations on the page is easy to do but might require a little work. For the most part, Kontera’s software should distribute the ads fairly evenly across the page. But if you want to make sure that you don’t get any ads in particular places on the page, you can use Zone Tags. These simply tell Kontera: “No ads here please.” To define certain text areas as off-limit simply add the line: before the text, and the tag: at the end. If that sounds to you like AdSense’s Section Targeting, you’re on the right track. But Kontera’s filters aren’t exactly the same as Section Targeting. Placing these filter tags won’t prevent Kontera’s contextualization engine from checking that section for keywords. The contents of that section will still be used to assess the meaning of the Web page. Kontera just won’t place ads on any keywords it finds there. While that’s useful for keeping ads away from the bottom of the page, the sidebars or spots right next to AdSense units, you can also use the tags to control which terms are highlighted.
Kontera doesn’t let you choose which terms and phrases you want turned into ads. But it does recommend that you make the phrases you use as specific as possible. Talking about the “Nokia 5300 XpressMusic myFaves Black Phone” from T-Mobile is likely to get you better ads and more clicks than talking about “mobile phones.”
There are a lot of different strategies that you can use with Kontera. Far too many for me to describe in detail here. That’s why I put them together in a short book that lets other publishers can shorten their learning curve. You can find that book at www.konterasecrets.com. If you’re going to put Kontera on your site in addition to AdSense — and I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t — you will need that book to shoot straight to the high revenues.Intellitxt is a direct rival to Kontera. The company’s system works in a similar way: by picking keywords, turning them into links and producing floating ads when users mouse over. When Kontera was first rolled it was probably fair to say that Intellitxt was at least as good, if not better. Their ads looked great (Kontera’s were a bit bland initially) and they turned up some very good ads. These days I’m not so sure. The people at Kontera have put so much work into improving their contextualization engine that Intellitxt certainly doesn’t have an edge there. In fact, you can often find that the ads will match the keyword but the keywords won’t be the most relevant terms on the page.Nor can you define the link color, which is stuck on green or be certain that an ad will contain an image, the most attractive part of these sorts of floating ads. What you might get though is a movie. And those movies are great. Unlike Google’s video ads, these start automatically and they’re impossible to miss. Unfortunately, they’re only for really big sites. If you have fewer than 500,000 page views a month, you don’t qualify. That’s a shame because some advertisers have reported CTRs two and three times higher for these ads than for AdSense ads. And you can be sure they’re paying a lot more too. If you do have lots of users though — or think you will soon — those video ads might have been a good reason to choose Intellitxt over Kontera, but Kontera has now produced its own line of rich media ads. (Although again you need to be big to benefit from them.)
The same placement and keyword strategies that work with Kontera should work with Intellitxt too but I’d always turn to Kontera first. It’s the system that I use on my blog. First thing you’ll want to do is get signed up at http://www.adsense-secrets.com/kontera.html
get money online
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