More AdSense Overviews on InformIt.com: Keyword Optimization, AdSense for feeds, and Click Fraud

The final articles in the AdSense series I wrote for InformIT.com has been published. The last two articles are about keyword optimization and AdSense for feeds. Here is the complete list of articles:

1. Using AdSense for Content to Rent Ad Space to Google explains briefly what the three AdSense programs are about and then goes into specific detail about the main program, AdSense for content, which lets you make money by displaying Google-supplied advertisements on your sites.
2. Find Money with Google's AdSense for Search Program describes how the AdSense for search content lets you make money by providing search facilities on your sites.
3. Web Ad Layout and Placement Strategies for Maximum Clickthroughs discusses the layout and placement options for AdSense ads on your web pages.
4. Keyword Optimization for Google AdSense describes the basic search engine optimization techniques that can be used to fine-tune content for AdSense.
5. Monetizing Syndicated Content with AdSense for feeds explains what AdSense for feeds is, how it works, and how it allows blog and website owners to profit from syndicating their content via RSS and similar technologies.

Although not strictly part of the AdSense overview series, InformIt.com has also published my article Protect Yourself from Click Fraud, which distills the advice I've given here before about the steps AdSense publishers can use to protect themselves from click fraud.

I hope you find these articles useful and enjoyable, please don't hesitate to send me your questions.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

The flaw in Technorati's popularity calculations

This is slightly off-topic, but if you look right now at Technorati's list of popular books you'll see that Make Easy Money with Google is first on the list, even beating John Battelle's The Search, an excellent book about the origins of Google and the way search engines have redefined the Internet.

Normally you'd think I'd be thrilled with this, but all it's done is proved to me that Technorati's way of calculating a book's popularity is all wrong. I mean, look at the Amazon rankings for those two books: Battelle's consistently stays below the 500 mark (meaning it's one of the top 500 sellers on Amazon) and mine hovers anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000. (For the curious, see this discussion about what Amazon rankings mean.) Battelle's book is a much broader topic than mine that will interest all kinds of people. Mine's about how to build websites and blogs and make money from them using AdSense. (And, apparently, the title turns some people off because they think it sounds like a scam… but if you read this blog you know it's not…) His book should always be above mine except perhaps in narrowly-focused lists.

The problem is that Technorati is counting the actual links to books on Amazon.com within blog entries as indications of that book's popularity. But the problem is that they count each entry in a blog, not whether a blog mentions the book. So if you have 20 blog entries in a blog that reference the book, that counts as 20 links in Technorati's popularity measurement scale.

The reason my book ranks so highly right now is that last night I was playing around with my blog software (blojsom), doing a little programming to automatically build archives of all my blog postings, which as of today will number 152 since the start of this site back in May. The first archive, sorted by date in reverse chronological order, is now up. To do this I briefly had to turn off the limiting feature of the blog software that limits the number of postings shown on the main blog page to 20 entries. So all 151 entries (this was last night, remember) were showing up. Unfortunately, Technorati's crawler showed up at that time and found all those entries and thought they were all new. And many of them, especially the most recent ones, have a link to the book.

So, thanks to this unfortunate bit of timing, Technorati now thinks that there are over 50 new links to my book within the last 48 hours. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the free publicity, but it's convinced me that it's not a representative list at all if it can be so easily manipulated.

What Technorati should be doing is counting the number of blogs that mention a book, not the number of blog entries that mention it. This would be a more accurate measure. They already do this to some degree. If you look at the Technorati rankings for individual blogs, you'll see that they list both the number of blog entries linking to a particular blog as well as the number of sites linking to that blog, and the rankings are apparently based on some combination of both numbers. They could do something similar when counting the links to Amazon.

OK, tomorrow we get back on topic and continue with the AdSense case study I'm doing. Also, tomorrow's the last day to subscribe to my announcement list to get your chance at winning a free signed copy of my book when I draw a name from the subscriber list on November 1. If you join after tomorrow, you'll have to wait another month for you next chance.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Tip #9: Use section targeting to exclude stop/poison keywords from your content

This is the next article in my occasional Google AdSense Tips series.

The introduction of section targeting lets AdSense publishers fine-tune the content that the AdSense crawler sees in order to better determine the topic of the content and to choose the ads to display accordingly. However, AdSense was already doing a good job in content determination before section targeting came along. No, the real benefit of section targeting is the ability to exclude content, particularly to exclude specific “stop” or “poison” words and phrases that affect which ads are shown on a specific page.

Excluding content with section targeting is simple. At the beginning of the part you want AdSense to ignore, place this comment in the HTML for the page:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

At the end, place this comment:

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

What you may not realize is that you can place these comments right in the middle of your text. Consider the following paragraph:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a multiple-personality disorder, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

As it turns out, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” triggers ads for treatment of narcissism and other psychological problems, which is not at all the topic of this particular content. (Don't believe me? Visit the
permalink page for this tip and see what kind of ads are being shown.) In this context, then, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” is a poison phrase (not generally, just for this particular topic) that needs to be excluded from AdSense's consideration. This is all you do:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>multiple-personality disorder<!– google_ad_section_end –>, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

The AdSense crawler will then skip over the phrase when determining what the main keywords of the page are and selecting the appropriate ads to display.

Note that you can achieve a similar effect two other ways, by using <span> tags to split problem words into multiple parts:

multiple-personality disorder

Or by inserting the offending words into the content via JavaScript:

<script>document.write(”multiple-personality disorders”)</script>

Neither solution is as good, however, as AdSense section targeting because they affect how search engines see the page in general. If all you want to do is avoid certain ads, section targeting's the way to go.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Forbes columnist Tom Taulli interviews AdSense book author Eric Giguere

Forbes.com columnist Tom Taulli interviewed me for for his blog. Check out my answers to his AdSense questions about whether AdSense can be a primary source of income and what kind of strategies you can use to maximize the impact of AdSense. Feel free to add your own comments.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Case Study: Stage 2 Description — It's all about Keyword Optimization

Right now we're in Stage 2 of my AdSense case study featuring my short Invisible Fence Guide. Stage 2 is all about optimizing the pages for AdSense, or AdSense optimization for short. Much of what I'm describing here is also discussed in an article I wrote for InformIT called Keyword Optimization for Google AdSense.

AdSense optimization is really just a special kind of search engine optimization (SEO). That means you start with the basic SEO techniques of placing keywords in the page title (aside: have you ever wondered how many people forgot to title their pages? try this Google search), in the headings, in bolded text, in italicized text, in lists, near the top of the content, etc. In general, what's good for the search engine is good for AdSense.

After you've made sure the keywords are mentioned in various spots, it's time to check your keyword density. If you page is public, you can easily do this using the free Keyword Density and Prominence tool on ranks.nl. Or you can buy software to do it for you. Before doing this, however, make sure to remove any AdSense code on these pages. You don't want the AdSense crawler to visit your page until you've finished optimizing it. (See the first of my Google AdSense tips for the reasons.)

Using a keyword density tool, rewrite the content of the page until the right keywords are more prominent. It's not just how many times they're used, it's also where they're used (title, headings, and so on) that determines their density. Don't go overboard, though — too much density and you'll trigger red flags and your page may be considered spam.

Pay particular attention to the density of the two-, three- and four-word phrases in your text. Remember, people often search with more than a single word, and advertisers can also tie their ads to keyphrases, not just keywords. You'll get more relevant ads and high search engine results if you can target the right keyphrases.

Though it seems simple enough, this step can actually take a lot of time. Why? Because you may have to rewrite the content to put the emphasis on different words. But you don't want the writing to sound awkward, and it still has to flow. If you wrote the initial text carefully, though, hopefully you won't have much tweaking to do.

Don't forget you can use the AdSense Preview Tool (for Internet Explorer only, unfortunately) to see what kind of ads a page might generate after you put it on your web server but before you enable ads.

Once you've adjusted the keyword density, there are a few other details to worry about:

• Have you missed any obvious subtopics? Are there are other pages you should be adding?
• Have you created descriptions and keyword lists for each page using the appropriate META tags?
• Does the site flow well? Are there any broken links?
• Is there an “about” page and a “sitemap” page?
• Do you have copyright messages on your pages? Although they're not technically needed — copyright is implicit — it doesn't hurt to remind visitors they can't just copy the text for their own sites.

Again, all these things take time. This is why I haven't revealed Stage 2 yet, I'm still working on the pages! But that will come shortly.

In the meantime, have fun with the keyword density tool. Look at the keyword density of some pages ranked first in Google and see if you can determine how important keyword density is to those rankings. It's not the only factor, but it's definitely not unimportant.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Speedy site indexing and PageRank

In response to my previous posting about my AdSense case study, reader Miha pointed out that my Invisible Fence Guide showed up quickly in the search engine indexes because it was a subdomain of a “well respected site” (referring to EricGiguere.com, my personal site) that ranks well in the search engines.

(Quick explanation of what a subdomain is: given a domain name like “a.b.c.d.com”, “a” is a subdomain of “b.c.d.com”, “b” is a subdomain of “c.d.com”, “c” is a subdomain of “d.com” and “d” is a subdomain of “com”. Get it? The subdomain is the part of the name immediately to the left of a period.)

While it's true that EricGiguere.com ranks well, I don't think the Invisible Fence Guide gets its good rankings from the subdomain itself. Yes, the EricGiguere.com home page has a PageRank of 6 out of 10, but there was no link from any page on EricGiguere.com to the Invisible Fence Guide until earlier this week.

What I had done, though, was link to it from this blog. And there's the key. A regularly-updated blog is the easiest way to get new material — including links — into the search engines. Once the search engines figure out that a blog exists — and here you need to spend a bit of time at the beginning registering your blog with as many blog searching and updating services as possible — then they send out their crawlers frequently in order to check for new content.

What about PageRank? Remember that PageRank is a page-specific measure, not a site-specific measure. The PR of pages on the same site are calculated independently. Normally, of course, the pages on the same site link to each other and share their PageRank that way. But you could do the same with pages on different sites. Or subdomains.

For example, compare the PageRank of my father's blog (no PR) versus that of one of my readers (PR 4). Both are hosted by Blogger on the blogspot.com domain. Surely blogspot.com as a whole would have a high PR if PR was calculated on a site basis. But it's not, it's on a page basis. My father's blog will gain PR over time, of course, but for now it doesn't have any.

But PageRank is just one factor in Google's ranking algorithm. You can get a page ranked #1 for a search term irrespective of its PR, as I've shown with the Invisible Fence Guide. What matters most initially is getting your new site indexed, and it seems that a blog is the easiest way to do it initially. (Of course, once you've established a site with good PR, you'd be wise to use it to boost the PR of your other sites, which is exactly what I did with MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com.)

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Free AdSense Book

It's almost the end of the month, which means it's almost time for me to give away a signed copy of my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google. All you need to do to get your chance at winning is to subscribe to my announcement list, a low-volume mailing list that I use to keep in touch with readers of my book and/or blog. At the end of each month I draw a name at random from the list of current subscribers and send that person a free signed copy of the book.

I also send out the occasional special offer or preview some new material I'm working on to members of the list. Yesterday, for example, I offered to feature subscriber's AdSense success stories in an upcoming magazine interview I'm doing.

Please note that if you subscribe to my list you should be prepared to receive emails from me. The winner of the first draw last month didn't answer repeated emails from me, hence that person lost their chance at the free book and the book has been returned to the book pool for a future drawing.

The AdSense case study will continue later today or tomorrow. We're at Stage 2, which is all about optimizing pages for AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Case Study: Stage 2 starts

Alright, I'm almost set to unveil Stage 2 of my AdSense case study featuring my Invisible Fence Guide. If you haven't been following along, please refer to my previous comments about Stage 1 of the case study.

But let's talk some more about the Guide as it exists today. It's been about two weeks since I put up the site, but a lot has happened in those two weeks, the most important thing being that the site has been indexed in Google.

Do a Google search on “invisible fence” (without the quotes) and you'll see that my Guide is at about position #77 in the search results. This is pretty much what I expected. The site holding the #1 position is the official Invisible Fence corporate site, which is no surprise.

But… search for “invisible fence guide” (again, without the quotes) and you'll see that my Guide holds the first position for that combination of keywords.

There are several things I'd like you to note here:

• You can get a good position for specific keywords with simple search engine optimization techniques.
• You don't need a fancy site.
• Search engines are the best way to get traffic, so get as high a listing as you can.
• Focus on lesser-used keywords.
• Use a blog to get quick indexing of a site.

Note that the pages in my Guide do not have any PageRank yet, but that doesn't prevent them from being indexed and from ranking highly. PageRank is just one factor. Yes, you want to get high PageRank, but a low PageRank doesn't stop people from finding you. And yes, I've gotten search engine traffic already for my site.

More to come…

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Don't remove pages, redirect them

Sigh, you'd think I'd know better. Shortly after making my Invisible Fence Guide public as an AdSense case study, I decided to move the files for the first stage of the case study into a new folder on the website. On most systems, this is trivial to do: log into your web host and rename the folder and voila, the content's in a new folder. Then all you do is fixup a few of the internal links in the content and you're back in business.

Of course, it's never that simple. Once you've made a page public, removing it is a big no-no. Why? Because other sites, including search engines, that link to that page will all of a sudden return a big “oh-oh, the page is missing” error when visitors try to follow the link. That's not good, not good at all. To paraphrase DeBeers, “a web page is forever”. Once a page is up, keep it there. You see, I had forgotten about the link from the actual case study page to the first stage's home page. So here I was sending people to the case study page and they'd click on the link and get a big error message. Good move, Eric!

The solution is to never remove a page but instead to redirect the visitor to the appropriate (new) page. A redirection is basically the web server telling the web browser: “Yo! The page you want isn't at that address anymore, go to this page instead.” Most of the time this happens so quickly that the user doesn't even realize it.

How you redirect the page depends on how much access you have to the web server hosting your site/blog. If you have access, you can actually get the web server to send a redirect code directly to the browser. If you don't, you have to resort to trimming the original page and using a META tag or even a bit of JavaScript in the now-much-shorter page to do the redirection. The first method (web server does the redirection) is much better, as search engines and so on will follow the redirection automatically. If you can't do it that way, then be sure to include a link to the new page from the newly-trimmed original page so that search engines can at least find the new page that way.

For more help on this topic, just do a Google search for “redirecting a web page” and you'll find lots of information.

The caveat in all of this is to test and retest the links on your own sites to make sure that you're getting the results you expected. Even seasoned pros can make mistakes, but it sure looks bad when they do!

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense vs. AdWords: What's the difference?

Most of the readers of this blog probably don't read a techie-oriented blog like Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software, but Joel's entry yesterday titled Something rotten in AdSense makes for some interesting reading. In particular, it shows three things:

• That click fraud still hurts advertisers.
• The growth of splogs.
• The confusion of AdWords and AdSense.

Let's focus on that third item today, because I've talked about click fraud and splogs before (and probably not for the last time, either). I was kind of suprised to see someone technical like Joel confuse the two, but maybe he relied on someone else's faulty explanation. Unfortunately, his confusion of the two programs distracts from the meat of his complaint.

So what is AdWords? AdWords is Google's primary money maker, the main reason it's a profitable company. It's the program that advertisers use to place ads on Google's “content network”. It started out as a simple, self-service program for placing small pay-per-click text ads, but it's since expanded to include image ads, site targeting (showing ads on specific sites) and more traditional pay-per-impression advertising. Anyone with a valid credit card can use the AdWords program to start placing keyword-targeted advertisements in a matter of minutes.

So what is AdSense? AdSense is sort of the flip side of AdWords. It's a program (a set of programs, actually, but let's leave that for another discussion) that lets third-party (non-Google) websites (and blogs) rent space on their web pages to Google. Google then displays ads in those spaces from the pool of available AdWords advertisements and gives the owner of the site a cut of the revenues it makes from those ads.

So what is the Google “content network”? When advertisers create advertising campaigns with AdWords, they can actually control where the ads are shown. They can specify, for example, that ads only be shown on Google's own search engine result pages. (In fact, advertisers usually pay a premium for ads shown on the result pages.) Or they can choose to have them shown all over the Google “content network”, which includes not only the result pages but also partner sites and AdSense sites.

Don't get me wrong, click fraud is a big problem. However, I don't see Google abandoning its content network, including the AdSense programs, because it makes too much money from it. Which means some advertisers much be finding it useful. I'm sure the programs would implode on themselves if the weren't useful. And of course, Yahoo! just launched a very similar, competitive program. So obviously others think it's a working, valid model.

OK, OK, I really need to get back to my AdSense case study. I promise to venture back to it tomorrow.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

High-paying keywords are not enough

This weekend we visited a member of my wife's immediate family who has just started treatment for lung cancer. As a result of this, I've

been learning a lot about lung cancer and cancer treatment in general. Let me say that it's not the kind of thing you wish on anyone.

Am I tempted to start a lung cancer information site? Not really. But aren't there high-paying keywords associated with that topic? Sure.

Use the Overture view bids tool to see for yourself. But high-paying

keywords aren't enough. This topic comes up all the time in various forums. Someone new asks “What are the best keywords for building a

money-making site?” Or even better, “I've got a site loaded with high-paying keywords, but I'm not making any money, why is that?”

You have to realize that high-paying keywords probably don't pay nearly as much as you think, for several reasons. First of all, remember

that advertisers can request that their ads only appear on Google's results pages. They'll pay significantly more for that privilege, because

someone searching for something on Google is more likely to be someone they're interested in reaching. Second, advertisers can actually target

specific sites on the Google content network (which includes AdSense publisher sites as well as bigger sites that use the AdSense Premium

program) and pay more for those. Third, Google's price adjustment algorithms can really reduce the amount that advertisers pay by tracking how

likely a click on your site is going to result in a sale/conversion/benefit to the advertiser.

So really, the likelihood that some random site I develop about lung cancer is going to pay well is pretty low. Choosing a topic solely by

how expensive the keywords are isn't the way to do it. Sure, you want to check to see what the topic pays and make sure it's reasonable for the

amount of effort you're going to expend, but don't base you topic decision solely on the price of the keywords. Write about something that

interests you, something you've experienced, something you'd like to learn more about, something that will benefit others. There are lots of

reasons to build a site, just make sure you have the right reason.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

China and India are fertile ground for AdSense and AdWords

I've had some interesting reaction to yesterday's posting about Are clicks from China and India automatically invalid? where I questioned Chitika's statement that they remove clicks from places like China and India. One of the readers of this blog left a comment about some email they received from Chitika about this, which includes this quote:

The problem is that, at this time, we dont have merchants who are willing to accept leads from India, China and Asia in general.

They then go on to indicate that they'd love to expand in Asia when they have the chance. And they should, but in the meantime they should really reword that question in their FAQ to remove the reference about invalid clicks from places such as China and India.

An interesting discussion was generated by this over in the Digital Point AdSense forum. The question posed was whether it would make sense to ban all AdSense publishers from Asia as one way to fix the click fraud problem. You can see my answer there, but let me expand on it here as well.

In short, banning Asians from AdSense would not solve the click fraud problem. Why? Because it's not the publishers who are the problem, it's the fraud artists. There are many legitimate publishers in Asia. Why should they suffer because many (but certainly not all) fraudsters live there? Not only would that be unfair, but it would also prevent Google from tapping into a growing market. In an article in today's Globe and Mail, columnist Geoffrey York mentions a study by Credit Suisse First Boston that 17% of Chinese households today have annual income over $5,000 but that number is expected to increase to 90% within the next decade. China and India are both ripe markets for advertisers, and Google would be foolish to avoid them (and they don't).

As I argued in the Digital Point forum posting, advertisers already have a tool at their disposal to help them combat click fraud. It's the geotargeting feature of AdWords, which lets advertisers choose the target countries and/or languages for displaying an ad campaign. If the advertisers have problems with click fraud from certain countries, they can always either avoid advertising in those countries or else run different (presumably cheaper) campaigns aimed specifically at those countries. A “click fraud discount” if you will. Over time, natural market forces will probably iron many of these issues out.

In any case, it would be wrong to assume that all click fraud occurs because of people outside of North America or Europe. Banning Asian AdSense publishers wouldn't fix the click fraud problem.

(For those who are wondering, I'll be continuing my AdSense case study next week.)

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Are clicks from China and India automatically invalid?

One of the things that surprised me about the Chitika advertising program was a statement in its list of frequently-asked questions. Specifically, the answer to question 10 about the difference between audited and unaudited revenue. The answer includes this phrase: “In the audit process we remove any invalid clicks such as … clicks from countries such as China and India”. That statement itself doesn't really surprise me, but the fact that they've stated it so boldly for everyone to see does.

The fact that certain countries like India and China are breeding grounds for click fraud has been well-documented before. AdWords advertisers can specifically exclude these and other countries from their advertising campaigns by using geo-targeting to specify which specific countries (and/or languages) they want their ads to target. But AdSense publishers have no such facility. They have to use server-side scripting to decide to display or not display advertisements based on the visitor's IP address.

Unlike what Chitika admits, we don't know what algorithms Google uses internally to detect invalid clicks. I've often wondered if Google has a “developing country discount” or some other flag that causes a click from such a country to be treated differently by the fraud detection algorithms. This is pure speculation on my part, of course, but I would imagine that the geographic location of the clicker's IP address (which can be determined from various geocoding databases, although if the clicker is using a proxy it only gives you the location of the proxy computer) plays some part.

There is a warning here for AdSense publishers. If you're developing a site that is aimed or popular with visitors from developing countries, you must be extra vigilant about click fraud. Please read my previous blog entry Proactively possible AdSense click fraud to avoid getting kicked out of AdSense.

That said, many people in the developing world who can build themselves quality blogs/sites have an interesting advantage over others in the sense that the payouts from AdSense make a much bigger difference to them in terms of overall income. Several of my readers are from that area and have built such sites, check out the reader-built sites section of my reader resources page.

uthor of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense traffic tip: Article writing, Part 3

Let's step back from the AdSense case study and our Chitika/eMiniMalls explorations and continue our discussion about article writing as a way to generate traffic for your site.

If you recall, Part 1 talked about why article writing can drive traffic to your site and Part 2 explored the mechanics of article writing. In this part, we talk about article submission.

After writing your article, you want to distribute it to as many places as possible. The idea is to have the article posted on other websites and in newsletters and “e-zines”. Remember, the article has at least one link back to your site/blog, so it benefits you in many ways to have the article in wide distribution.

If you already have a mailing list with a large number of subscribers, then obviously you can mail your article to them (if the topic suits the mailing list). But most people don't have such a mailing list. You can also post the article on your own site/blog (and you should) and hope that people find via standard searching techniques, but that's not the way to drive traffic.

What you want to do is submit your article to as many article repositories as possible. These are sites whose sole purpose is to warehouse free articles. Owners of websites and mailing lists comb these repositories for new articles that they can then repost on their own sites/lists. Well-written articles accepted by these repositories are almost always reposted elsewhere in a matter of days, plus they benefit just from being listed in the repository itself — the repositories are usually fertile ground for search engines to find new content.

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of article repositories out there. Sites like EzineArticles.com and SearchWarp.com are just two examples. Consult this list of article repositories for even more sites.

The biggest problem with submitting articles is that it can take a lot of time to submit your articles to all the different sites. Each site has slightly different requirements. Some accept HTML, some accept only plain text. (This is why I told you in Part 2 to write your article in both formats.) Some require you to separate the resource box (your bio and link) from the article text. Some require editorial approval of the article before they'll accept it, and may request changes. It's a lot of hassle. You may consider buying software to do it for you or even hiring a third party to submit them for you.

The good news is that it often only takes a few article submissions to get the ball rolling. Article repositories often scan other article repositories for new content, especially on hot or niche topics. Like a virus, your article may end up “reproducing” itself (quite literally, in this case!) without much intervention on your part.

You do need to submit it to some repositories, though. The best thing to do is set aside 15 minutes a day and submit an article to one or two repositories. Do this regularly over the course of a few weeks and you'll be surprised at how many places your article shows up.

Don't forget, however, to go looking for specific mailing lists and e-zines that are devoted to your topic and contacting them personally about reprinting your article. Often, it's the personal touch that gets your content distributed, especially when there are a lot of articles being written about a topic.

That pretty much ends this series on article writing. It's not hard, it just takes time and effort. Just like anything!

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

Chiquitita, er, Chitika for AdSense Publishers

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Overviews: Articles about AdSense on InformIT.com

The InformIT.com site is publishing a series of articles I've written providing an overview of the AdSense program. So far, three articles have been published:

• Using AdSense for Content to Rent Ad Space to Google explains briefly what the three AdSense programs are about and then goes into specific detail about the main program, AdSense for content, which lets you make money by displaying Google-supplied advertisements on your sites.
• Find Money with Google's AdSense for Search Program describes how the AdSense for search content lets you make money by providing search facilities on your sites.
• Web Ad Layout and Placement Strategies for Maximum Clickthroughs discusses the layout and placement options for AdSense ads on your web pages.

If you're looking for a simple explanation of how AdSense works, these are great places to start, after which be sure to download the sample chapter of my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program. (Sign up for my mailing list and get a chance to win a signed copy of the entire book!)

If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to check out my AdSense case study, which showcases how to build niche sites that make money using AdSense. Stage 2 will go live shortly, but feel free to check out Stage 1 of the Invisible Fence Guide.

The proximity effect

Seth Godin's latest blog entry, The Proximity Effect, talks about how competition can benefit sellers because competing wares are found in proximity to each other.

When you think about it, this is exactly what AdSense is all about: advertisements served in proximity to related content. Interesting parallel there, isn't it?

I can only hope that my proximity to Seth's blog (and his bestselling books) can lead to more sales of my own book

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

My father's blog

Readers of my book Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program know that it's dedicated to my father, Jean-Claude Giguere. I'm happy to announce that my father now has his own blog, Le Blog-Notes de Jean-Claude Giguère. No, there's no AdSense on it, and I doubt there will be any on this particular blog, but it's nice to see that he's finally found the time (being president of the Chorale St-Jean and helping various family members has kept him very busy for a “retired” guy) to start it. (My sister, however, does have an AdSense site you can visit.)

Note that the blog is entirely in French, so it probably won't mean much to most of the readers of this blog. However, it does highlight Blogger's support of other languages, in case you've not explored a non-English blog before. It should look very familiar, even if you can't understand the text. Those who do read French should read his interesting post about French blog terminology, which discusses the debate about how a made-up English term like “blog” gets translated into French (a common problem with computer terminology).

While I'm at it, French readers should check out mon-actu.com, an aggregator/search engine for French RSS feeds. (Thanks to Tara at the ResearchBuzz site for finding it.)

Alright, back to our regular programming…

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Case Study: Analysis of Stage 1

In my last posting I introduced Stage 1 of an AdSense case study, my Invisible Fence Guide (opens in a new window), without much fanfare. Here are some more details.

The whole idea behind this project is to build a real, money-making site in distinct, documented stages. My hope is that some of my readers will learn something from this project by watching what I do to the site over time. Unlike a conventional site, I'm actually keeping the stages separate and physically distinct. You'll see that Stage 1 is in a “stage1″ subfolder on the site. When I introduce Stage 2, it will be in its own subfolder. This will let you go back and forth between the stages to see what's really different. Normally, you wouldn't do this, of course, but it will be useful for educational purposes.

Stage 1 is all about content. If you've read my book, you'll know I spend a lot of time discussing content creation. I don't even talk about HTML or CSS until Chapter 6. For the average person, good content is the way to be successful with AdSense. Really, good content is the way to be successful with any website or blog, whether or not you're trying to make money from it.

Stage 1 showcases my initial content for the site. The site is about my experience with the Invisible Fence system, which is a “hidden fence” system used for pet containment. Even though we had a wooden fence on our property, one of our dogs managed to get out. So we installed an Invisible Fence system to keep the dogs in despite their best efforts to leave.

Why did I choose this topic? There are several reasons:

• It's something I know.
• I have interesting stories to go with it.
• It's about a product or service.
• There are advertisers for the product. (For a quick test, use the Overture view bids tool to see for yourself.)

Really what I'm building here is a niche site about pet containment systems. Searchers looking for information about Invisible Fence will hopefully find this site useful. If they visit, they're looking for information about hidden fence systems, so they'll be interested in advertisements for those kinds of systems. This is the beauty of AdSense's contextually-targeted advertising, of course. (If you haven't read my book, I encourage you to download the sample chapter called Finding Something to Say which is all about topic selection.)

Content creation can be hard, of course, and I've talked about this before in this blog. Sure, you may see a book at the bookstore and think “I could have written that!”, but if you actually sat down to write that book, you'd find it wasn't as easy as you thought. For Stage 1, I have less than a dozen pages, but it still took me two or three hours to write it all down.

But if you look at the pages in Stage 1, you'll see that they really are mostly about content. Use the “View source” option in your browser to look at the HTML for one of the pages. What you will see is mostly content and navigation. There are a few <div> tags to separate things, and of course there are headings and titles, but nothing else except the AdSense code to show some ads. The pages don't look very pretty, but they're quite readable. You can start at the first page and easily navigate all the way through to the last page of the site. That's the way Google's crawlers see your site, by the way.

Staying in a similar vein, Stage 2 will be about enhancing the content of Stage 1. We're not going to worry about making the site look good until later. Stay tuned.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

AdSense Case Study: Stage 1 — Building Content

As a further aid to my readers, I've started building a small niche site in stages. The first stage is up. The niche site is about the Invisible Fence system, something with which I've had lots of experience. I'll be posting on and off about this site for the next few weeks, discussing various things about it. For now, just take a quick look through it. You'll see that there's nothing there but simple text content. No layout yet, no pictures (I have lots of pictures to add), no keyword optimization. Just content. Because that's where you start, with content creation. It may not look fancy, but this is how you start: with an idea and some text.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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  For over two years, writer and software developer Eric Giguere has been discussing the ins and outs of Google AdSense, contextual advertising, and affiliate marketing.

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