New blogs by readers of Make Easy Money with Google
Dr. Rodolfo Rafael and his wife Dr. Amelyn Rafael — physicians based in the Philippines — wrote me recently to tell me about their two blogs, Clinica Cayanga and Health for Life. The former is for medical practicioners, the latter offers health tips and disease prevention information for the general public. The doctors have taken advantage of the free listing offer that I've made to my readers and their blogs are now listed on the Make Easy Money with Google reader resources page.
Rodolfo had this to say about Make Easy Money with Google: I'm quite impressed how you convinced me and my wife to do something beyond clinical practice for additional INCOME and of course for fun. He goes on to say: You see we are living and practicing in a Third World Country we earn money here always on a hard way 16 hours a day. Your book makes us also discover that there is another lane to earn money while sitting down in our clinic waiting for our patient.
Visit their blogs and feel free to ask them some questions, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear from you. Here are the links again:
As always, I enjoy hearing from my readers. Please don't hesitate to send me mail at eric@MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com to tell me what my book's inspired you to do.
The second easiest way to make money with Google
When people ask me what's the easiest way to make money with Google, I point them to this graph of the Google stock price (Nasdaq: GOOG). If you were lucky or astute enough to buy the stock at its IPO price, you'd have almost tripled your investment. And just imagine the gains you would have seen if you were an insider or an early investor!
Google stock ownership aside — and the stratospheric growth in the stock price seems to have stalled recently — the second easiest way to make money with Google is with the AdSense program. Putting up a website or a blog and devoting some of its prime real estate to displaying contextually-targeted advertisements (chosen automatically for you by Google) is an easy way to make some extra money. That's why my book is called Make Easy Money with Google, because it really is easy once you understand how AdSense works — it takes more time than anything. And yes, if you work harder, you can even make a lot of money doing it — there are people making thousands of dollars per month from AdSense (though I think most sites and blogs average between $50 and $250 a month, so don't do this expecting to get rich overnight).
But you have to be willing to give up something to get that money. A recent posting by the Graywolf called AdSense: Why Bloggers Don't Get It points out that many bloggers (and this also applies to website owners) don't treat their blogs as advertising vehicles. If you don't optimize your content and your layout for advertisement, you shouldn't complain about not making enough money from AdSense.
And you know what, AdSense isn't right for every situation either — see my recent article When AdSense Makes No Sense. No one's obligating you to make advertising a prominent feature of your site or blog, but don't complain about your AdSense earnings if you're not putting some effort into the process.
There's a reason why I didn't title my book Make Money with Google with No Effort — it may be easy, but it's not effortless, and you have to be willing to play the game.
Click fraud etymology
I've started a click fraud etymology thread up on threadwatch.org, a great site for Internet marketers to exchange ideas. The terms I've defined originally come from my click fraud page, but I was curious to see what other terms people were using.
Graywolf reviews Make Easy Money with Google
Michael Gray, aka Graywolf, just posted a review of Make Easy Money with Google on his site. The review is very fair, describing Make Easy Money with Google as a “good book” for “people with little or no experience with contextual advertising programs”, which is exactly the audience I was aiming for when I wrote the book. Check out the review, and then browse through Michael's site — it has some great summaries of AdSense information based on Michael's own experiences with AdSense.
Answers to a visitor's questions
Elliot Lee left a comment on my last posting asking a few simple questions, and here are my answers.
- What do you do for a living? My full-time job is a software developer at iAnywhere Solutions, where I've worked for about 12 years now. (Yes, that's long in this industry!) However, I also write about computing topics, though up until now it's mostly been technical books and articles.
- What is actually in the book? Make Easy Money with Google teaches you how to build money-making web sites and blogs with no programming required. It shows you how to start with a few ideas, choose among them, prepare the material you need, get yourself a domain name, find a hosting service, build your web pages, join the AdSense program, place ads on your site, and finally get some visitors to your site. Everything you need to know to get started with a web site or blog.
- Would my mother find it useful? Yes. I wrote the book for my father, a computer user, not a techie. I walk the reader through the basics, like why web-based advertising is important and how it works, how to choose the right kind of content, how to build simple web pages using HTML and CSS (using the Nvu web authoring tool), and so on. And of course I walk the reader through the AdSense system. For non-techies, it's a great book. If you already have a web site up and running, this book's not really for you. Check the reviews on Amazon to see what I mean: the non-techies love it, the techies think it's too basic. I've never claimed this was a book for techies, and from the mail I've been getting it's clear to me that my intended audience — the non-techies — think it's right on the mark.
You can find out more about the book by reading the detailed description and viewing the table of contents. Or send me mail using the link at the bottom of each page on the MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com site.
MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com is on the Google hit list
As I recommend in my book, I regularly check my web server's referral logs to see who's visiting MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. It's a great way to find other sites linking to mine, including blog entries of course. Anyhow, imagine my surprise in finding this entry in yesterday's logs:
gweb.corp.google.com/adwords-ext/html/policy/resources/Google_Trademark/Escalated_Domains.htm
Oh-oh, it looks like MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com is on Google's list of “escalated domains”, probably because the domain includes the word “Google” in it. Google is protective of its trademarks. I wasn't able to place any AdWords ads that directly referred to my book's title (Make Easy Money with Google) or to the companion website because of those policies. I'm expecting the Google hit squad to knock on my back door at anytime now:
Knock, knock.
Me: “Yes?”
Large guy of Italian descent: “Youse Eric Gooriay?”
Me: “It's actually pronounced jeeg-air. It's French.”
Guy: “Yeah, whatever. The only French things I like are fries. Look, my bosses have sent me out to let you know they're not happy with ya.”
Me: “They didn't like the book?”
Guy: “It's the way the book uses their name. It's a sacred name, ya know, and you can't just use it like you've done.”
Me: “Actually, I didn't choose the name, the book publisher did. My working title was very lame.”
Guy: “Doesn't matter. I mean, we'll go speak to them, too, I'm sure. But youse got the G word in your domain name, too.”
Me: “Well, sure. The book's called Make Easy Money with Google, so naturally the domain is MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com.”
Guy: “Look, I can't tell you what's natural and what's not these days, but I will tell you this: the Two Big Guys ain't too happy about this. We just might have to break some legs, you know what I mean?”
Me: “That would be good publicity for the book, actually. So it wouldn't be that bad in the long run. But don't you have better things to do? Like track down click fraudsters who give you a bad rap?”
Guy: “I'm not here to bust any legs yet, just to give ya a warning. We'll be in touch later, I can guarantee it.”
Stay tuned for more!
The challenge of getting people to buy your book!
Make Easy Money with Google has been out for a bit more than a month now, but I think it's still trying to find its way to its audience. Let me tell you, the hard part about writing a book isn't writing it, it's getting people to buy it! Seth Godin, author of various business bestsellers like Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable talks about this in his recent Advice for authors blog entry. There's a lot of truth in what he says. I especially like his third point, there is no such thing as an effective book promotion by a book publisher, because it's true: most publishers simply have too many books in print to devote more than a small micropercentage of their time and effort to promoting all but the “blockbuster” hits (think Harry Potter and various other books by big-name authors). For a book to sell, the author has to actively promote it.
This, of course, is where many authors fall flat on their face. Selling is an art, and few people are truly good at it. Those who are can make a phenomenal living selling just about anything, it seems. If you know me, you know that selling is not my strong point. And, according to Seth, I shouldn't even have bothered to write the book because I don't have a “permission base” of thousands of people hanging onto my every word. How depressing!
Well, not every book is going to sell millions of copies. I've been lucky to have written a book that has obviously helped others already, and that makes me very happy. If you've bought the book, I thank you, and I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. There's a good selection of (mostly positive!) reviews up on Amazon now, but feel free to add your own observations and comments there as well.
Of course, I wouldn't mind it if you told your friends about the book, too. Positive word-of-mouth is always the best publicity. Despite what you might think, this is a book for a non-technical crowd. Retirees, stay-at-home parents, students — anyone looking to do something on the Web and maybe making a bit of money at it will find it useful.
And if you're walking by a bookstore… Every time I visit a Chapters or Indigo store (I live in Canada — think Borders or Barnes & Noble if you're in the United States) I make sure to find the copies they have of my book (it's unfortunately on the E-Commerce shelf of the Business section, not the best placement) and make sure they face out so that the catchy cover gets seen. I even try to get the store to put the book out on one of the tables, though in reality most of those spots (you probably didn't realize this) are actually paid for by publishers in order to promote specific books, so that's not always possible. But I can't possibly visit every bookstore, so feel free to do the same at your favorite bookstore!
Alright, enough selling. I'd love to get the book featured on Oprah, but there's no angst in it, so I doubt that will happen. The book will have to succeed on its own merits. Just like most things.
Using other people's content
Last week I participated in a Slashdot discussion on copyrights. The discussion was specifically about the Creative Commons initiative. For those who don't know, Creative Commons (CC) provides free license texts that you can attach to copyrighted content that license the content for use by others in specific situations and with specific conditions. A typical CC license would allow people to use content for non-commercial purposes, for example. People confuse CC with copyrights, but CC is about licensing copyrighted material, which may not be as simple as you might think and is why CC was developed. Many blogs (but not this one) are licensed under a CC license.
The reason I bring this up is to point out that there are obstacles to using other people's content. In almost every country in the world today, including the United States, content is granted copyright protection automatically, as soon as it's created. That protection exists whether or not there's a copyright notice. In other words, a lack of notice is not an invitation to copy.
If you want to use someone else's content, you must get permission from them. This is where licenses like those from Creative Commons come into play. Many times, the copyright owner (note that this may not be the actual person who created the work, depending on different factors) gives explicit permission to use the content in certain ways. For example, I've licensed my recent articles The AdSense Formula and When AdSense Makes No Sense to any site or newsletter that wants to reproduce them, providing that they are reproduced in full with no changes and that the copyright message and the biographical information that accompany them are also left untouched. The result is that you can now find those articles on many different sites like SelfSEO or EZineArticles. This provides me with a bit of extra publicity for my AdSense book for non-techies Make Easy Money with Google.
Remember, though, that once your content is on the Web it's easy for others to copy it. For example, my original Google AdSense Tips keep finding their way on other people's sites even though I haven't given them permission to do so. Someone had even copied them to a site and placed a Creative Commons-type license on them, which meant that other sites picked them up and republished them, thinking they were free. If it's not yours, be wary of using it, and check out its pedigree as much as you can. (I discuss this all in Chapter 3 of the book, by the way.)
Google is an advertising company
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google is really an advertising company, not a search engine company. Like I said in my AdSense book, “Google is one of the major players in online advertising”. For proof of this, just take a look at Google's second quarter earnings release (PDF). In particular:
- 46% of Google's revenues ($630 million) came from partner sites, which includes sites displaying AdSense ads. Presumably the majority of those revenues came from the AdSense Premium sites, but I'm sure the “regular” AdSense revenues are nothing to sneeze at.
- Google paid $494 million to partners in revenue-sharing.
Now, 494/630 gives you 78%, so it looks like Google is only keeping 22% of the revenue it makes from advertising, but I'm not sure that the traffic acquisition costs can actually be allocated that way. Still, it looks like the majority of the ad revenue gets shared with its partners. Again, the Premium partners would get better payouts than the regular guys.
Any way you slice it, though, $630 million is a lot of advertising revenue! It's going to be hard for them to keep up the kind of growth they've seen, no doubt — at some point the ad revenues will flatten out.
Google filters out the fraudsters (I hope!)
Those of you who've followed my recent complaints about the click fraud that someone's been doing via my sites (see Get mad at click fraud) will be happy to know that Google has resolved the issue for me, at least for now. Here's part of the letter they sent me:
We have made modifications to our filtering system and you should soon see
a change in the activity on your account. Please be assured that we are
monitoring your account and are working to keep the invalid activity from
continuing on your site.
This is good news for me — as an AdSense promoter, I was very annoyed by the click fraud. Now my earnings should go back to normal. As you can see, it pays to be diligent and to report any suspected fraud you see. Google wants to stop click fraud, after all — it's a threat to their business model (their CFO even said this a while back).
I'll be responding to a reader's comment on what I think about pay-per-action from a technical standpoint shortly. This click fraud's certainly given me lots to think about. I'm not the only one: another reader sent me a link to a recent article in The Patriot Ledger about a click fraud startup (well, technically, an anti-click fraud startup).
AlaskaCruisingReport.com: A Make Easy Money with Google reader-built site
I'm pleased to announce the listing of AlaskaCruisingReport.com, which provides the comprehensive lineup of Alaska cruiseships, cruiselines and ferries as well as other Alaska cruise information, as the first site in the Make Easy Money with Google reader-built site list. Site owner Mike Miller, an Alaska resident and well-known travel writer, has built this site to provide the “single most complete, most informative, most up-to-date, most all-in-one-place source of Alaska cruising information on the web”. The site's not perfect yet — Mike hasn't applied all the book's recommendations yet — but it's well on its way to being a profitable site for Mike.
The best thing about this site has to be Mike's letter to me announcing his site. I won't bore you with the whole letter, but this line sums it up best: “I was going nowhere fast until I read your book and learned what I was doing wrong.” This is exactly why I wrote Make Easy Money with Google!
Now, I know not everyone who's reviewed the book up on Amazon's been thrilled with my approach, but Mike certainly appreciated it: “P.S. Best to Claude, Stef, and Anita. I know they're fictional, but I feel like I know them. Great technique for humanizing the subject.”
Thank you, Mike, for the kind words, and I wish you all the best with your exciting new site. The scenery looks absolutely fantastic and the information you're providing is great. And for those reading this blog entry: again, quality of content is what's most important. You don't need a fancy site, just a useful one. Write about what you know, what you love, and keep the site simple.
Please visit AlaskaCruisingReport.com and tell Mike where you heard about it. And think about cruising Alaska!
Get mad at click fraud
Readers of this blog (and Make Easy Money with Google) will remember that I've talked several times about the problems of click fraud that have been occurring via my site. Actually, it's sites now, because the attacker has also hit my personal site. At first I was wondering if someone was just targeting specific ads that happened to appear on my site, but now I'm just wondering if they're trying to get my booted out of the AdSense program entirely. That's unlikely to happen, I've been in touch with Google throughout this and they're quite interested in tracking this down as well. However, if you see AdSense ads disappear temporarily for some pages, you'll know why…
PageRanks have been updated
MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com is now out of its sandbox — Google has just updated its PageRank (PR) values. This blog now has a PR of 5, on a scale of 0 to 10. This is probably because the PR of the EricGiguere.com home page has PR 6 and most of the other pages on that site (which currently all link back to this one) have PR 5 or 4.
Higher PageRank values are good, because they help you rank higher in Google keyword searches. They're not the only factor that Google considers, of course, but other things being equal a page with a higher PR value will rank ahead of those with lower values. Things are rarely equal, though, so don't put too much faith in PR — it's just one ranking measurement.
AdSense management console has a new look
The AdSense management console has a new look to it today, offering a cleaner look and more interactivity. Unfortunately, this also breaks (temporarily, I'm sure) the AdSense Notifier for Firefox, so you have to log in to see your earnings. The AdSense Terms and Conditions have also changed, see this WebmasterWorld forum entry for all the details.
The screenshots from Make Easy Money with Google will need to be updated. The only thing constant about AdSense is that it constantly changes!
Don't write about AdSense if you want to be rich
Over at feedbuzzard, Rick talks about how his blog discussing AdSense doesn't make him any money and so he's removed the ads from them. He was commenting on the ProBlogger entry Should Bloggers Forget AdSense? that deals more extensively with the topic.
The truth is, you won't get rich talking about AdSense. The payouts are too small. Use the Overture view bids tool (I still find it easier to refer to it as “Overture” instead of “Yahoo! Search Marketing”) to see what people are paying for the “adsense” keyword and you'll see that it currently maxes about at less than $0.40 per click, which means the average pay-per-click value on an AdSense will be the $0.03 to $0.10 range. (Remember, advertisers generally pay less to display ads in the Google content network as opposed to only on Google's result pages, and then you only get a percentage of that.) Based on what I'm seeing on MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com, I'd say the payouts tend to the lower end of that range, too.
Now, I can't promise that anyone will get rich from AdSense (and I make this very clear in my book, which I did not title Make Oodles and Oodles of Money with Google even though that would have been a catchy title), but it seems to me that the obvious strategy is to apply AdSense and not just talk about it:
- Read The AdSense Formula to refresh yourself on the basics
- Read When AdSense Makes No Sense for reasons not to use AdSense on certain pages
- Write good content about a topic with higher-paying keywords (but avoid the really high-paying ones, they have too much competition)
- Keep a wary eye out for click fraud
- Above all, be patient!
As a topic, I'd say that AdSense fails the high-paying keyword test. In fact, it's probably even worse than that because the people looking for information about AdSense are less likely to click on ads themselves due to banner blindness.
But am I being a hypocrite for having AdSense ads in a blog about AdSense? Not really, because the blog (and the site that hosts it) are really meant to promote Make Easy Money with Google. In my mind, it would be hypocritical and a disservice to my readers not to have ads on the book's companion site. You gotta practice what you preach!
When I have some free time, though, I think I'll setup some kind of debt consolidation site and really rake in the bucks. Or better yet, move to the United States. After all, I'm already approved for multiple loans and mortgages which I can then legally abandon with no repercussions. I get all kinds of mail on this subject every day, so it must be true!
AdSense Tip #8: Access your console from alternate domains
It's rare, but on occasion access to the AdSense management console is unavailable from the usual www.google.com/adsense address. If it's not working and you really need to check your earnings, try logging in through one of the alternate domains like www.google.ca/adsense or www.google.fr/adsense, since these entry points may be up even if the main “google.com” site is down or inaccessible. You'll get a “Domain name mismatch” error from your browser because the security certificate is for “google.com” and not “google.ca” or “google.fr”, but if you just ignore that you can still access the management console. You may have to select a different language using the language selection box at the top of the login page — for example, “google.fr” defaults to (big surprise) French text.
This tip brought to you courtesy of Eric Giguere, author of Make Easy Money with Google, an AdSense book for the non-technical.
Keyword news: Vioxx return recommended
Reader Bill Warhol passed this article on to me: according to The Globe and Mail, an independent panel is recommending the return of Vioxx to the market. As readers of this blog (or my book) know, Vioxx is a high-paying keyword that appeared almost out of nowhere when its manufacturer announced a voluntary recall of the drug due to serious long-time side effects. All of a sudden, a new breed of Vioxx attorney appeared paying high prices to display advertisements looking for people willing to sue the manufacturer, Merck, for damages.
The first lawsuit against Merck starts this month in Texas, and Merck is expected to vigorously defend itself against all claims of injury or death due to Vioxx. Having this panel recommend the return of Vioxx because it has “risks similar to dangers posed by other anti-inflammatory agents, such as ibuprofen” will strengthen their case. (The same panel also recommended the continued sale of Celebrex, by the way, a COX-2 inhibitor similar to Vioxx.)
If Merck can successfully battle the first few lawsuits and if more studies and panels suggest that Vioxx should be returned to the market, you can expect the pay-per-click value of the Vioxx keyword to drop. It's already dropped since its peak immediately after the Vioxx recall was announced, of course, but it's held a certain value as lawyers searched for potential victims and health companies sought to promote Vioxx alternatives. I'll continue to track this one, it's an interesting case study.
Make Easy Money with Google featured on Flickr
One of my readers put up a picture of Make Easy Money with Google on Flickr. Thanks for the plug, Billy! Maybe I should run a contest to see who can take the best picture of someone reading the book.
P.S.: The link I posted yesterday for the article The AdSense Formula is fixed now, have fun reading it.
The AdSense Formula: New article
My new article The AdSense Formula is now available for reading and for distribution in e-zines and on websites. The article expands on material in my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google and is for anyone interested in Google's AdSense program.
What is "Make Easy Money with Google" about anyhow?
With a title like “Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program“, you might be forgiven if you think one of two things about this book:
- It's yet another “get-rich-quick” book
- It's a book about “AdSense secrets”
Actually, it's neither! You can get a better feel for what the book's about by reading the full description on the companion site. Yes, it's definitely an AdSense book. Yes, it describes how to make money with AdSense. But it's also a book that describes how the Web works, how to create Web pages, how to register a domain name, how to build a Web site or blog. How to do all of that when you're not a technical person. Check out the reviews on Amazon.com to see what I mean. Yes, there are a couple of negative reviews there, but obviously that's because they bought a book that they were expecting to be full of little-known AdSense “secrets”. Well, let me tell you a secret: I don't think there are any real AdSense “secrets”. Google provides extensive documentation on their program, and many people out there have explored the ins and outs of the system and laid it all bare for others to see.
What's been missing, though, and this is why I wrote the book, is a way for average non-technical computer users — in other words, non-geeks — to get in on the action, so to speak. The underlying concepts of the World Wide Web are not complicated. You can easily create Web pages with tools that are just as simple as word processors. Having a blog simplifies the whole process even more. But many people think it's complicated. They're the ones that need to read my book!
So, whether you're a retiree, a homemaker, a student, or just someone with some spare time (because that's really the biggest “secret”: it takes time, not money, to build a money-making blog or Web site), Make Easy Money with Google is a great book for learning about how the Web works, how advertising drives much of its growth, and how you can participate in that growth and make yourself a bit (or maybe a lot — hey, think big!) of money doing it. And with a list price of only $24.99, it certainly doesn't require a huge investment on your part. And it's a fun read!
If you have any questions about the book, please don't hesitate to contact me at eric@makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com and I'll be able to help you out. And for those of you who've already purchased the book, don't forget to keep coming back and checking the Make Easy Money with Google blog on the companion site for updates and additions to the content of the book.