Chitika adds category hints to eMiniMalls

While I'm waiting for my first Chitika payment to arrive (and this is like their last chance to please their publishers who've had to endure reduced and delayed payments), I thought I'd mention a new feature they announced today called “category hints”.

One of the problems in using Chitika in non-contextual mode (which is what you want to do if you're displaying AdSense on the same page) is that you have to provide a fixed set of keywords for the eMiniMalls code to select an appropriate product. If you can't find the right keywords or there are no products that match those keywords in Chitika's database, you won't get a product showing in your eMiniMalls unit. A category hint is basically a fallback position for Chitika — if it can't find a product for the keywords you specify, it will then choose a product from the desired category instead.

While this is a good feature in and of itself, I find that the list of Chitika categories to be the more interesting piece of information. This list shows us exactly what kind of products Chitika is advertising. It's an easy way for potential Chitika publishers to see if the eMiniMalls concept will work on their site or not.

Full details about the category hints are found in Optimize your Chitika revenue using eMiniMalls Category Hints. Funny use of the word “optimize”…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The greatest effect on AdSense earnings for international publishers

Quick! If you had to identify the single biggest thing that, as an international publisher, affects your AdSense earnings over time, what would it be? Here are some possible choices to consider:

  1. the primary language of your site
  2. the number of advertisers geo-targeting your audience
  3. the stickiness of your site
  4. the domain of your site (see today's posting on country-code TLDs)

Or how about:

  1. none of the above

I chose “e”, because it looks like the single biggest thing that affects my earnings is the US dollar exchange rate! Today I got a measly 1.12CA = 1.00US rate at my bank when I deposited the Google cheque. This is much lower than when I started with AdSense almost three years ago, look at this graph charting the CA-US exchange rates over the last five years:

This is not news, of course, and anyone selling their products to the US knows what the exchange rate can do to their results. On the other hand, it would appear that European publishers are seeing increased earnings. Here's the same chart comparing euros to US dollars:

Well, as we francophones say, c'est la vie. It'll be interesting to see how much I get from Chitika this week, my audited earnings from their program finally broke through the minimum payment barrier. After PayPal takes its graftshare off the top, I'm sure the effective exchange rate will be even lower.

Since there's nothing you can do about exchange rates, this should give you added incentive to work harder at increasing your earnings!

Speaking of hype: (we were talking about Chitika, after all) if any of you fork out the $997 for that Butterfly Marketing course I'd be curious to know what it's really all about. My take is that's it's all about building a big email list with tens or hundreds of thousands of people on it, get them all excited, and then sell them a high-priced product… wait a minute…

January 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Are country-specific TLDs useful?

Last night, I sent an email to my newsletter subscribers about an offer that domain registrar EuroDNS was running: any US, Canadian or European resident could register up to 20 domains in the “.be” top-level domain (TLD) for free. (The offer's now over, so don't bother trying… You had to be quick on the draw, and I think they had a flood of last-minute registrations…) But this leads us directly to today's discussion about country-specific TLDs. Are these TLDs useful?

As anyone who's read my book knows, each geographic region in the world has been assigned a two-letter top-level domain, known simply as a “country-code TLD” or ccTLD. Thus Canada gets .ca, France gets .fr, Belgium .be, Germany .de, and so on. The administration of each ccTLD is left up to the government of the region. Many delegate it to third-party registrars in return for a share of the proceeds. Many have a residency requirement — you can't register a .ca domain unless you're a Canadian resident or company (see here for the full rules) for example.

There's no doubt that the “.com” domain is the most powerful domain today. It's where most people go to register their domains. You say “dot com” and people instantly know what you mean. So given the choice between registering “domain.com” and “domain.ca”, the “.com” variant almost always has the edge because:

Unfortunately, finding a good domain name in the .com registry is extremely hard these days. Especially if you're looking for a keyword-based domain name instead of building a brand. (There are two different approaches to choosing domain names: one is to go for generic terms, one is to build a brand. The former favors random search traffic, the latter favors standing out from the crowd.) So some registrants end up registering their domain in a ccTLD instead. But this can be problematic, because chances are that people looking for your site will end up finding the “.com” version instead. So think carefully about substituting a ccTLD when you really want a .com domain.

That said, ccTLDs are useful for many sites. A ccTLD implies a cultural, geographic or linguistic association that may be useful to you. If your site is in French, for example, anyone seeing a .fr, .be or .ca address will not be surprised to come across French content. In fact, for .fr they'll probably expect it. If you're targeting a specific locale (geek talk for a country/region/culture/language) then a ccTLD may make a lot more sense than the generic .com.

Of course, there's nothing to say that you can't use both types of domains. For example, you could register a ccTLD and place translated content on it while having your English content on a .com domain. If you're looking to monetize content via AdSense, this is a better approach than having your web server return different content for the same page based on what the user's browser says it prefers — because the ads aren't as well-targeted as they could be. Always put your translated content on different pages to ensure that the AdSense crawler sees it in all its translated glory.

I'd love to hear about any positive or negative experiences you've had with ccTLDs, so drop me a note…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Real-life applications for PageRank

Many website owners focus on getting good PageRank for their websites. PageRank, or PR for short, is Larry Page's famous algorithm for determining the relative importance of pages. Google's ranking algorithm uses PageRank as one of its inputs (but certainly not the only input — you can rank highly in Google even with a low or non-existent PR) and so it's the topic of much discussion and debate among webmasters interested in getting their pages to rank highly in Google's search results.

The other day, though, it occurred to me that there were other, real-life applications for PageRank. But first, let's briefly revisit what PR means.

In the Google world, each page is assigned a measure of its importance based on how many other pages link to it. In general, the more inbound links to your page, the higher your PR. The page then votes on the importance of still other pages through its own links — in effect sharing its PR value among all the pages by dividing that value equally among all the links. The fewer outbound links a page has, the more its “vote” is worth to each of those pages. There are some complex mathematics that keep track of everything.

As a general rule, then, what you want to do is get as many inbound links to your pages but to minimize the number of outbound links, preferably keeping them within the pages of your own site(s) so as to spread your PR “manure” amongst your own pages and not that of external sites. Of course, if you're too stingy then you'll have trouble getting anyone to link to you, so you can't avoid those external links completely if you want to be a good Web citizen. But if you have a high-PR page then links from that page are valuable, and you want to be picky about who you link to.

So how does this apply to the real world? Well, my daughter's just signed up for the Multiple Sclerosis Read-a-thon, which means we have to hit up our friends and family to sponsor her reading. Not our favorite task, really, but it's for a good cause and it encourages her to read, so we do it.

Here's where PageRank comes into play. Say the PR represents the willingness of a family or individual (which I'll just refer to as “family”) to donate to charitable causes. A “link” from A to B means that family A donates money to family B's cause. Ignore for a moment how wealthy (or not) a family is. The more times a family is “linked to” (asked to donate), the higher the family's PR. In other words, if you keep pestering your friends and family to donate money to your kid's cause, you'll be more susceptible to being asked for donations yourself from those same friends and family, because of course they contributed to you, so why wouldn't you contribute to them?

Just like with real PageRank, a family's PR gets shared out proportionately based on how many times it donates to other families' causes. As you can imagine, then, having a high PR makes you more valuable. The trick for donation-getting success, then, is to find those families with more incoming contributions than outgoing contributions. This gives them a high PR, which they can then share with you by donating to your cause. The fewer outgoing donations they have, the more money they'll be willing to contribute to your cause.

Who said PR only applied to Web pages?

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Advice for writing and selling e-books/infoproducts

Though this isn't really related to AdSense at all, anyone who's ever thought of writing and selling an e-book or infoproduct (”information product”) should check out Aaron Walls's great posting How to Create, Market and Sell an Information Product Online. Loads of great advice from someone who's been there. Let me add a few comments of my own.

I've talked before about how great articles are in getting traffic to your site. Well, as Aaron states, they're also great for generating publicity for your book. The two go hand-in-hand, of course, since you'll need to create a site to promote your e-book. Create the site first, though, and then make sure to place copies of the articles you write on the site itself. Ideally, make sure that copies of the articles you submit to other sites link back to those original articles on your site. You'll also want the bio box to promote the fact that you have an e-book, so be sure to mention that you're the “author of such-and-such, an e-book about blah-blah-blah”. Those two things will get more people visiting your book's site.

So here's a question for you: do you place AdSense ads on your book's site or not? My gut reaction is to say “not”, because the primary purpose of your site is to promote your book, to lead people to the order page. This is a constant struggle for many people who run e-commerce sites selling things. It's different when you're providing information for free — in that case the AdSense ads make perfect sense. When you're selling the information, though, it's usually better to just promote your own stuff, not someone else's.

That said, realize that when people republish your articles on their sites, they're going to take them and wrap them with ads. That's how they make money. So you could do the same with the “original” copies stored on your site. I just wouldn't put the ads elsewhere on the site. Again, your goal is to move people through the buying process, which consists of these steps:

  1. Need recognition
  2. Information search
  3. Evaluation of alternatives
  4. Purchase decision
  5. Postpurchase behavior

That list comes straight out of a marketing textbook, Principles of Marketing. The articles you write to promote your infoproduct address #2. But when they eventually get to your site, any ads they see may factor into #3 and cause them to look elsewhere — after all, the ads will normally be well-targeted and relevant to the consumer's current quest.

If you want to experiment with the ads, though, a better way to do it would be to setup a second site to promote the e-book. Fill it with the articles and whatever content seems relevant and put ads on those pages. Make it act as a funnel to your main sales site. See how well it makes money. Or not. Maybe repeat the process if it works well.

And, by the way, I second Aaron's recommendation of OpenOffice as a great way to build e-books. Within Writer (the word processor, it's equivalent of Microsoft Word) there's a menu item labelled “Export to PDF…” that does exactly that. It's what I used to create my little e-book the two words that can make you rich and what I'm using to write Uncommon AdSense. There is a bit of a transition in moving from Word to Writer — it's not exactly the same — but you can work though it and come up with a pretty decent looking product in the end.

One last thing: you might be thinking this e-book/infoproduct topic doesn't apply to you, but are you sure? If you've been blogging extensively for a year or two about a subject, for example, chances are you've got some great material with which you can write a book. Same with any of the articles you've written — more material for an infoproduct. Just because you've put the material out there for free doesn't mean you can't bring it all together and repackage it into a different format. You can even build audio versions of your stuff! If people are reading what you're writing, chances are a small subset of them will be willing to pay for the privilege of more/better/expanded information. Think about it…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 29, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

DoctorsAtWork.co.uk: New reader-built site

Reader Danny Lim in the UK is pleased to announce his new site reviewing UK junior doctor jobs. (In the UK a junior doctor is the term for a medical intern or resident.) Junior doctors look for 6-month to 2-year contracts to get trained, so DoctorsAtWork.co.uk provides them with reviews by other junior doctors about the working and learning conditions at various facilities throughout the UK.

There are no AdSense ads on the site as of yet, because as Dr. Lim puts it:

This is my very first website & very little IT background. So I have used your book & site to get an introduction & background on creating a website & getting google adsense. I have not yet involved AdSense as I want to build a few more quality pages as you said.

Danny is himself a junior doctor, so I applaud him for finding the time to create his site, which is gaining popularity among medical students in the UK.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 28, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How to prevent ads from printing

Right now I'm following my own advice and setting up yet another site, this time a questions and answers site. I've been spending some of my spare time playing around with the look and management of site, so there's no real content on it yet. But it's a good opener for discussing a topic that's sometimes neglected by website owners: printing.

When you're building a content site, you spend a lot of time worrying about the layout of the content. As an AdSense publisher, you try to find the right balance between placing ads so that they're noticed while not getting in the way of the visitor who is trying to read the content. So you spend a lot of time staring at the screen and trying to see how the pages will look in different browsers (I always try Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer) and at different screen resolutions. (See Graywolf's website design and layout series for more on this.)

But what about the people who like to print pages for later reading? Have you considered them? This is a constant problem I run into — I'll print a page I like only to discover that because they used wide, fixed-width tables to layout the content that the right side of the sentences are cropped off, making them very hard to read. Truly annoying.

AdSense sites have another problem, though, that can further hinder the printability of a page: the ads themselves! Let's face it, printing a page full of AdSense ads is pretty useless in most cases. You're not going to make any money from them when they're printed, so why even bother displaying them when the page is printed?

Luckily, it's almost trivial to hide ads when a page is being printed. All you need is a little CSS (cascading style sheet) magic. Let's look at how it's done on cluelessabout.com.

Most sites use external style sheets to control the look of their pages. So in the <head> part of the my pages you see this kind of statement:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="screen.css">

This tells the browser to use the stylesheet screen.css. By default, it gets loaded for all page loads. But there's a way to specify that styles should only be loaded for certain media types, or ways of viewing the page. A media type is just a name like “screen” or “print” that the software used to load a page identifies with. This means you can define CSS styles that are only used when printing, simply by adding a media property to the link tag:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="print.css">

Rather than create a whole new stylesheet, though, we're just going to define what's called an inline style:

<style type="text/css" media="print">
.noprint { display: none; }
</style>

What this does is define a CSS class (because it starts with a period) called “noprint” that does nothing except turn the CSS property called “display” off. A tag with its display property turned off is effectively invisible.

So here's how we use this. Take your AdSense code and wrap it with a <div> tag:

<div>
.... put your AdSense code here
</div>

Now set the class attribute of the tag to “noprint”:

<div class="noprint">
.... put your AdSense code here
</div>

If you already had a <div> wrapping the ad code and it already had a class defined, just add the “noprint” class:

<div class="myotherclass noprint">
.... put your AdSense code here
</div>

And that's it! When the AdSense code is displayed on a screen, nothing changes because the “noprint” class is only defined for the “print” media type. When printed, though, the “noprint” class does exist and it turns off the display of the <div> tag and everything it contains, which means that the ads are invisible… and if you design your pages properly the other content should fill in the space otherwise taken by the ads, which makes for a better printing experience.

Try it with the cluessabout.com about page: view it normally, then use your browser's “print preview” function. You should see the ads disappear and the text of the page move over to the left. Very easy to do, though not everyone (including me!) remembers to do it. But anyone who tried to print your pages will thank you for doing it…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense payments on their way and referral news

Yes, it's that happy time of the month when Google pays its AdSense publishers. Log into the management console and check the “Payment History” link under the “My Account” tab and you should see your earnings for December. It's like a delayed Christmas gift!

And over at JenSense.com you'll find news about the new time limit on AdSense referrals, which is generating some controversy among publishers. There's even less reason to promote AdSense via the referral program now, and the only reason I can see to use the AdSense referral buttons at all is…. described in issue #2 of my newsletter. In any case, I've always told AdSense publishers not to worry about the referrals and to concentrate on the meat and potatoes, which is making money via normal ad and link units through good content and good SEO techniques.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 26, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Organic link building works best

As you know, I often tell AdSense publishers that to increase traffic to their site they need to concentrate on basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques instead of dubious or hare-brained schemes. When it comes to SEO, of course, you should always listen to the acknowledged experts. One of those masters is Aaron Wall, and if you're not reading his SEO blog then you're missing out on a great resource.

Take this posting as an example: If you don't build links then you are not a real SEO. Although it's aimed specifically at SEO professionals, there's a lot of good information buried in there. I especially like his list of things to do to build links, some of which (articles and press releases) I've covered here quite extensively. Definitely worth a look, and definitely worth adding his blog to your blogroll.

Aaron sells a great e-book on SEO, by the way, called The SEO Book, which is the #1 book about SEO. So if you're looking for something to read while you're waiting for my book to be released, give it a try!

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 26, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Is using Traffic Equalizer ethical?

As I mentioned a couple of days ago in How does Traffic Equalizer work?, the latest issue of my newsletter includes a discussion of how programs like Traffic Equalizer (which is not cheap, by the way, the current version retails for $147!) work to generate traffic. One of my readers wrote to complain that I'd been too soft on Traffic Equalizer (TE). Let me quote the relevant part of the email:

I'm sorry to see you talking about programs such as Traffic Equalizer in such a positive light. These are nothing but webspam generators that pollute the internet and make it more difficult to find legitimate content. To me this is the equivalent of littering. I would assume you wouldn't talk about a litter generator so positively.

As readers of this blog and/or my book know, personally I think that the best long-term strategy is organic growth through good content. Look at a site like Ask Dave Taylor, for example, which is essentially a blog where fellow writer Dave Taylor answers random technical questions sent to him by his readers. There is a lot of content on that site, and Dave has carefully tweaked his pages to be search-engine friendly and able to make some good money via AdSense from it.

The problem with the organic content approach, of course, is that it takes time to bear fruit. Dave Taylor did not come up with all that content overnight. Not everyone wants to wait as long, or work as hard, to build that kind of a high-volume site. So if making money online is your primary goal, you end up looking at two basic strategies:

The guys who are really making a LOT of money end up combining the two strategies. It's a numbers game, of course, because you make money based on your conversion ratio (the percentage of people that click ads) and the easiest way to make more money is simply to get more traffic — as long as it's the right kind of traffic, of course. (See my free little e-book for more details on this topic.)

Truth be told, I'm not sure how many of the really big online money-makers use TE specifically, but in talking to a few of them I'd say that most of them have some way to generate content pages in one form or another. You almost have to do it if you're looking for traffic breadth, as opposed to traffic depth. The problem with that approach is that they generate pages that don't really have any content in them, and yes, that does “pollute the Internet” and causes the search engines to work hard at detecting and removing those kinds of pages from their indexes. The best money-makers realize this and use a semi-generated approach, mixing in new content with generated content to get the best of both worlds.

The true purists would argue that search engine optimization techniques — even a lot of the basic stuff covered here and in my book — are also unethical. But we, as AdSense publishers, spend a lot of time tweaking our content and our site/blog layouts to make sure that our pages end up ranking as highly as they can in search engine results.

In the end, you just have to draw a line in the sand and stick by it. There will always be programs like TE around and Google and the others will always be fighting them to some degree. It's entirely up to you to decide if you want to use those kinds of tools or not. People like to characterize SEO techniques as “whitehat” and “blackhat”, but the reality is that there's a “grayhat” spectrum between them that most of us use at one time or another. It's a bit of a slippery slope.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 25, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Invest-in-Serbia.com: New reader-built site

Reader Richard Forrester is taking advantage of my free listing offer to announce three related sites that his group has developed:

These sites present news of interest to businesses and investors interested in these regions.

Richard had this to say about the book: “My partner and I have just read your book. ummmm, well, to be honest, I really liked it, but when you see our sites, you'll see that we, as old programmers, knew instinctively how to do a lot of that stuff. They're not perfect, but given that it's all been done by our lonesomes, and that I've financed the great bulk of it out of my pocket, then you'll see . . .”

It's true, Make Easy Money with Google wasn't written with old programmers (or “new” ones) in mind, but I'm glad to see it was still of use to them, and I wish them continued luck with their venture in what is surely a challenging part of the world.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 24, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How does Traffic Equalizer work?

Wondering how traffic generation systems like Traffic Equalizer work? Can you do the same thing yourself? Find out in the latest issue of my newsletter, which current subscribers will be getting today. If you're not already a subscriber, you can still join, it'll just be a few days before you get the latest issue while you get the previous issues and the bonus tips first. (But you can ask me to advance you straight to the latest issue if that's what you want…)

Also in this issue:

I hope you'll subscribe!

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Have you found your weekend (or weekday) niche?

I have about three months of earnings data now on the Invisible Fence Guide, enough to make some conclusions about it. The most interesting thing about the earnings is that they tend to go up, sometimes significantly, on the weekend. Hence our topic today, the weekend niche.

People search for different things on the Internet at different times of the week. On the weekend, for example, people are more likely to spend time searching for leisure activities or for things to do with their house — hence the interest in the Invisible Fence site. On the weekday, in contrast, people are more likely to be searching for things related to work. These are grossly oversimplified and general statements, of course, but there's an element of truth to them.

So when you're looking to start your next site (because if you want to really increase your earnings, you need more than one site — see the two words that can make you rich for what I mean), why not consider building a site that targets the opposite part of the week that your current site targets. It's one way to get yourself a very different audience and to even out your earnings across the entire week.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 23, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Review of my book, Joel Comm's book and The Rich Jerk

Just came across this nice review by Chris Andrews titled Joel Comm Vs Eric Giguere Vs The Rich Jerk. The opening paragraph really caught my eye, of course:

Like three bandits in a Mexican stand off they just stand there, still as moonlight. Eric Giguere, Joel Comm and the Rich Jerk, all nervously eying each other amongst the ruins of many books, e-books and “special reports”. There’s gun smoke all around and the sound of broken glass as people scatter. How will people know which book to buy, if any?

At first I thought he was going to be pitting me directly against Joel Comm and The Rich Jerk and giving me a bad review as a result, but no, it's actually a nice review that fairly describes all three books and the different markets they target. While I haven't met The Rich Jerk, by the way, though he's started to haunt the Digital Point AdSense forum, I have talked to Joel Comm (we exchanged books, even) and can assure you that he's a nice guy. (The Jerk's probably a jerk, but that's what he wants, right?) We even know some people in common, it turns out, small world….

Anyhow, please read Chris' review for some more insight into what all these books are like. He doesn't have any affiliate links in his review.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 21, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense complements: Chitika, MotionMall, AffiliateSensor, Amazon, etc.

Rick over at feedbuzzard has a good little piece introducing us to MotionMall, a company that webmasters can use to serve Amazon-based product ads. See Rick's entry MotionMall | New Kid on the Block for more details. Let me move the discussion up a level, however, to talk about complementary services of interest to AdSense publishers. In some sense this is also a continuation of my posting How to make $4000 in 4 months with AdSense.

First of all, let's make one thing clear: it is not against the AdSense Terms and Conditions to show non-Google advertising on your pages provided one of two conditions are met:

  1. the advertising is non-contextual; or
  2. the advertising is contextual but there are no AdSense ads (this means ad and link units, but not referral units or search boxes) on the page.

The key, then, is whether the ads are contextual or non-contextual. A contextual ad is one that analyzes the content of the page (the context of the ad) to decide which ads to serve. If there's any kind of process that involves the crawling of the page to determine the page's keywords and topics, don't display those kinds of ads in conjunction with AdSense ads. (Watch out for programs like Chitika's eMiniMalls that have both contextual and non-contextual modes — be sure you're using the right mode.)

Here's a listing of some ad programs that are complementary to AdSense:

This is just a small sampling of programs that are available. Lots of these programs are popping up everywhere, especially those that involve sharing revenue by doing affiliate ID substitution. Then there are also services like AdBrite that you can use to sell ad space on your site (which is effectively what you're doing with Google's AdSense program anyhow, except with AdSense you're doing it on a contingent basis) directly to interested advertisers.

The point of investigating and possibly using these programs is to wean yourself away from total dependence on AdSense. Financial advisors worth their salt will tell you that you should always diversify your investments. If all you're doing is using AdSense, aren't you putting all your eggs in one basket? What if your AdSense account gets suspended? What if you start getting more PSA ads than before? What if smart pricing really throws off your earnings? Having other programs to fall back on makes a lot of sense. Finding the programs is easy; finding the right programs for your site is what's hard. But some time aside now to think about and implement some complementary ad services to protect your future earnings.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How to make $4,000 in 4 months with AdSense

Catchy title, eh? Our TV went kaput suddenly and so we've had to go shopping for a new one, an unexpected dent in the old budget. It got me thinking, though, about how quickly someone could make money online using AdSense and other content monetization schemes. You know, the stuff that programs like The Rich Jerk advertise anyone can do.

Mostly I'm thinking out loud here, because up to now I haven't really concentrated on anything other than slow, organic growth through good content and natural traffic. (Which is what I still recommend for long-term monetization.) But if you're willing to take some (*cough*) shortcuts then I think it's possible to quickly make a few thousand dollars online. I need to cover some of this for my own upcoming book, since I get asked about it often enough, so here's my untested recipe cobbled together from analyzing various schemes.

First, though, the prerequisites:

What makes this at all possible is that there are money-making programs out there that pay you on a fairly quick basis. Programs like AdSense and Chitika pay monthly. ClickBank pays out twice a month. Programs like Amazon Associates aren't as good because they only pay out quarterly, but they still might be OK for your target market.

Now to the details. As I explain in the two words that can make you rich, you need either a high-traffic site or a bunch of low-traffic sites. Since the former is hard to do in normal circumstances, it'd be almost impossible to do in a short period of time. So the latter is the basis of the strategy. You should also re-read The AdSense Formula to get in the right mindset.

The basic strategy:

  1. Choose a niche. But not just any old niche, a niche related to something that people pay money for. This is where a lot of people trying to make money online fall down — you have to follow the money. For example, don't try to sell something to webmasters, who are notoriously cheap.
  2. Build at least one site devoted to that niche, preferably more. Don't spend too much time making it fancy. You'll need to find content, of course, and here's the dicey part — if you want to do it quickly you probably can't do it all yourself, you have to get some semi-generated or auto-generated pages using “scraping” techniques:
    • The best solution is to write some code to generate the pages yourself. Then you get complete control over the content. This requires some programming skills, though. If you're uncomfortable with that, you can use programs like Traffic Equalizer, AdSense Empire and various others to generate the pages for you — but if you do, don't use the standard pages that they generate, make sure you modify the templates they use.
    • Content gets pulled in from various sources. RSS feeds and article directories are the most obvious sources. (RSS in particular is very easy to parse.)
    • You can also scrape search results from Google and the like to build pages like this that aren't actually content but serve strictly to attract random search engine traffic. (See here for more pages from that site — or check out their sitemap for the complete list.) Funneling search engine traffic is an important part of the strategy, because you can't compete against the big guys for the main money-making keywords… but you can easily get good rankings for less-popular-but-still-searched keyword combinations.
  3. Use good SEO techniques. Basic stuff, really: keywords in URL, title, h1, bold, italics, watch the keyword density. Submit the sites to the search engines for good measure, but don't spend much time on that. Basic SEO should get you ranking high enough on Yahoo!, MSN and (eventually) Google for at least some of your pages.
  4. Make sure the content pages are well-formatted to prominently display AdSense/YPN ads, Chitika eMiniMalls (if appropriate), and links to related products that are sold through ClickBank or other affiliate programs.
  5. Create a simple blog (be sure to use a different hosting service, you want the blog on a different IP address). Post content on the blog related to the niche site's topic and have the blog link back to the niche site. Use one-way links — don't have the site link back to the blog. You're trying to drive traffic to the content site.
  6. Register the blog with the various blog search engines. Claim it on Technorati. Subscribe to it on Bloglines. Submit it to Google's blog reader. Ping the various blogging services whenever you add content. Get the crawlers coming to the blog.
  7. Now go back to step 1 and repeat with another niche.

That's the money-making strategy in a nutshell. Be prepared to “lose” sites once in a while — getting banned by a search engine or losing rank is one of the costs of doing business. Hence the need to not link sites together except to funnel traffic.

For bonus points, do the same kind of thing with email:

  1. Choose a niche.
  2. Sign up with a mailing list provider like AWeber.
  3. Set up autoresponders for your sites and/or products you're promoting (affiliate-based products, i.e. most ClickBank products, are good things to promote this way).
  4. Get people to sign up for the autoresponders.
    • If you actually have a useful digital product (e-book, software) that you can give away, participate in promotions with outfits like ZeroCostPromotions.com to grow your mailing list.
    • Advertise your list with AdWords and other PPC programs. (But it's going to cost you.)
    • Place signups in various spots on your different sites.
  5. Have the autoresponders send them multiple mails about a topic. You don't have to be pushy, though, you can go for the soft sell.
  6. Now go back to step 1 and repeat with another niche.

Work hard at it and I'm sure you can make a ton of money. Will you like doing it? Do you have the time to do it? Can you afford to flub up a few times while you hone your technique? Do you feel comfortable with this kind of selling? These are all questions you'll have to answer for yourself.

Above all, remember that the steps I've described are all still work. There is no “flip a switch and make money automatically” program out there. I think you can hone your systems and get it down to an art, yes, and probably put out new sites/autoresponders with minimal effort, but it'll still take you a lot of effort to get to that stage. (At which point you can make even more money by telling people how you developed your money-making system.)

If any of you reading this decide to try this, please let me know, I'd love to hear about your experiences. I'm going to be writing more about this in my next (FREE! SUBSCRIBE TODAY! BONUSES!) newsletter.

In the meantime, back to my writing…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 19, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Spam fatigue

I've not been posting as much lately because I'm quite busy with various things, including my upcoming e-book Uncommon AdSense. And my day job! So today's topic is not really related to AdSense, but it's something that all bloggers have to think about: spam.

A few years ago, the floodgates on my main email address were opened and I was getting literally hundreds of mails a day. I was handling it all myself, manually, but eventually it got to be too much, so I bit the bullet and nstalled SpamAssassin to deal with most of the spam.

At first I was a bit concerned that I'd lose important mail to SpamAssassin. I always try to answer questions readers of my books might have, for example, and I didn't want any of them to think I was being unresponsive. But the sheer amount of spam meant I was probably missing some of those messages anyhow, so in the end the result is probably the same.

If you have a blog whose pages have decent PR, you're probably going to face the same kind of issues with comment spam. Someone's been hitting this site hard over the last few days trying to sneak in links to their spammy sites. It's so easy to spot these that I can just delete them as soon as I get the mail from the blogging software asking me to approve the new comment. But it's also annoying. I'm wondering if I could train SpamAssassin to recognize bogus comments via the approval message and have it automatically delete the comment. Sure, I'd miss some comments this way, just like I may be missing legitimate email, but it would certainly be an elegant way to handle comment spam.

Or I could just disable comments entirely…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 18, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

CaliforniaMan500.com: Another reader-built site

Reader David Shore wrote to me to announce his site, CaliforniaMan500.com, aka Dave's Travel Adventures. This site is full of pictures of David on his travels throughout southeast Asia. The soundtrack on each page is annoying, but thankfully he provides a mute button to turn it off!
David certainly leads an interesting life, as the pictures attest.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 17, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Keep link units away from other ads

Diggers Realm is complaining that horizontal link units are performing no better than vertical link units, which seems to go against what I said a couple of weeks ago in Yes, Virgina, AdSense link units do work. So, who's right?

Let me start with this admonition: everyone's site is different and therefore everyone's experiences with AdSense are different. What works for the majority of sites may not work for yours, and vice-versa.

I think, though, that in this case it comes down to one issue: placement. Where you place the ads on your page is extremely important for getting more clickthroughs. Look at this image from Diggers Realm showing where the horizontal link units were placed:

Placing your link units immediately underneath a normal ad unit is probably not a good idea. If your visitors are banner-blind, their eyes will slide right over the links — they're simply too close to the ads. Link units work because they look like a set of regular links and (this is my theory) get clicked on accidentally, causing visitors to discover a set of related ads which some percentage will then explore further. (Remember, you don't make any money on that first click, just the clicks on the actual ads.)

To make the best use of horizontal link units, then, you should move them away from the other ads. Keep them above the fold, but close to the navigational links on your site (such as the breadcrumb) if at all possible. You should see better results in a few days.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 16, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Updated (less cheezy) page for Uncommon AdSense

As promised, I've updated the sales page for Uncommon AdSense to be more low-key and more like the kind of content you expect to see from me. The original cheezy sales page is still available so you can laugh at me about it. Let me tell you, it's not easy being a blatant self-promoter when that's not your natural inclination, and I think I just went too far with that one.

I'm shooting to have Uncommon AdSense ready by the end of January, at least a pre-release version. I'll probably send a free copy out to selected people in order to get some feedback on the content and maybe even some testimonials (although it's unclear to me how many people believe the testimonials they see on the Web these days, especially on e-book sites). I'll probably choose a few people at random from the Uncommon AdSense subscription list, so sign up today.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

January 16, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

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