SenseGuard: Protect yourself from accidental AdSense clicks

Reader Kory Becker of ksoft has released a Windows application called SenseGuard that protects AdSense publishers from accidentally clicking their ads by entirely removing AdSense ads from all pages. It works by noodling with a configuration file on your PC to block the ad serving and as such will work with any browser. (If you have Firefox, though, I must point out that there are free extensions available to block ads as well.) Inexpensive and may be useful to some of you here, so check it out.

And, to continue briefly the discussion about Google Custom Search Engines we've been having, a reader announced the new CSE Links directory for finding CSEs by topic. But you'll have to give them a reciprocal link in exchange…

And yes, I will actually start the new AdSense case study soon. I'm pretty busy right now with the AvantGo for BlackBerry beta (my day job) and various writing projects.

Sponsored Link: I know that a new ClickBank video tutorial is being heavily promoted today, but if you're serious about ClickBank you'll definitely want to check out the e-book Affiliate “Project X”. One of my readers, Jeremy Curtis, had this to say about it: Have read the ebook once, it is good in that it is not fluff and as you say clearly involves some hard work (not so good!). Another reader, who hasn't (yet) given me permission to identify him/her, said:
After spending a few hours with the affiliatex pdf last night I will agree it was worth the money.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not ask Technorati to fix their broken tracking system!

October 31, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

More on Google Custom Search Engines and Non-profits/Charities

Last week I gave an example of how charities and non-profits can use Google Custom Search Engines as fundraising tools. I had one small concern with what I wrote, though, and that was whether or not it was OK for employees of the organization to click the ads on a CSE (custom search engine). As you know, AdSense publishers may not click ads on their own sites, and a strong interpretation of this rule would put an organization's AdSense account at risk if its own employees were clicking ads. Although I had a solution in mind for this scenario — just create two identical CSEs, one with ads and one without, and make sure the internal folks use the latter — I thought it best to get the scoop right from the horse's mouth. This is what I asked the AdSense team:

Say the American Cancer Society creates a CSE that emphasizes results
from authoritative cancer sites and maybe even excludes some
objectionable sites. It then monetizes the CSE with AdSense.

Say further that the society encourages its employees and its supporters
to use the CSE for their day-to-day searching.

In this scenario, is it OK for society employees to click ads as part of
their normal searching, just as they would on the main Google result
pages?

The answer I got back from Google was:

Yes, in your
example it is fine for the society employees to click the ads as part of
their normal searching as long as they don't have the intention to click
only to monetize the society's AdSense account.

Straight from the horse's mouth. Of course, you can't go around telling people to click the ads. In fact, you probably don't want to mention the ads at all — just publicize the CSE and explain why how the CSE benefits the organization's supporters. You might even want to make the CSE available without ads at first (only non-profits and charities can get away with this, actually) and then introduce the ads once the CSE has established itself.

Again, if anyone tries this out, I'd love to hear how it works out for your group. Or if you need some help getting it set up, just drop me a note.

Sponsored Links: Want eBay listings on your site? Try Build A Niche Store. Want to make serious cash with affiliate marketing? Try Affiliate “Project X”. You get bonuses if you buy either through my links.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Do all Internet marketers write their sales pages with Microsoft Word?

A bit of an off-topic rant here. I like Affiliate “Project X” so much (hey, it has real content, so unusual for an e-book) that I signed up for the author's limited promotional offer where he gives affiliates a complete website to promote APX, including a new video with advanced tips not found in the e-book. The result is my Affiliate “Project X” site, which is what led to this rant, because I wanted to customize that page. This is not a rant about Project X, but a rant about sales pages in general. Why does every sales page looks as if it's been written with Microsoft Word and then converted to HTML?

Look at my APX sales page, the main APX page, or pretty much any sales page you see. View the source for the page. 9 out of 10 times you'll see this kind of HTML:

<p align="center"><font face="Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif"><strong>
<font color="#ff0000" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="4">
"On October 3rd, 2006, the affiliate marketing community went <u>bezerko</u>
over a product called Affiliate Project X. But was this all a smoke
screen. And did the product really follow-through? Since launch, the
results are in..." </font></strong></font></p>

Ugh, a <font> tag for each paragraph? Even better, two tags! It's so 1990's. But this is the kind of crappy HTML you get from tools like Microsoft Word and the many build-your-own-sales-page-automatically applications and scripts out there today.

People, don't you know that cascading style sheets (CSS) make this crud entirely unnecessary? I can live with using tables to guarantee positioning and such relatively painlessly across multiple browsers, but there's no excuse anymore to not use CSS to define things like font and color settings.

Do your affiliates a favor, please, and write a clean sales page that is easy to edit with an HTML editor or even a simple text editor.

P.S.: While you're at it, stop misspelling “AdWords” and “AdSense”. Capitalize the 3rd letter of each. Are you really that lazy? Thank you.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 30, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How Non-Profits and Charities Can Raise More Money Using Google Custom Search Engines

I'm going to interrupt my new AdSense case study to talk about a way that charities and non-profit organizations can make some extra money providing useful services for their members by combining Google Custom Search Engines with AdSense.

What's a Custom Search Engine?

A Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a new feature of Google Co-op, Google's project to allow for collaborative customization of Google search results. CSE lets you create your own versions of the Google search engine that emphasize, include or exclude results from specific sites. Multiple people/groups can collaborate to build CSEs that meet their specific needs while still taking advantage of the breadth and depth of Google's search engine.

Like AdSense, a CSE is provided to you as a snippet of JavaScript that you place on a page. You can customize the look and feel of the CSE (logo and colors) and let Google host it or else host it on your own site.

Monetizing Custom Search Engines

Google displays ads on CSE result pages, just as it would on its own search result pages. But here's where it gets interesting: if you're an AdSense publisher you can associate your AdSense publisher ID with the ads in any CSE you create. This means you'll get a share of the revenue Google makes when those ads are clicked, just as with AdSense for search. If your CSE is popular enough you could make some serious money.

How Charities and Non-Profits Benefit

So here's an idea you can pass onto your favorite charity or non-profit. If they don't already have an AdSense account (and I suspect most wouldn't), get them to apply for AdSense. Once they're approved, they can then create a CSE tuned to their specific needs. Usually this would mean emphasizing results from their own sites and the sites of related organizations. Or excluding sites that don't fit with organization's goals.

Once the CSE is running, place is on the organization's main site somewhere and encourage members to use it as their main search engine, possibly even making it their default startup page. (It would be neat, too, if Google extended its toolbar to direct queries to a user-specified CSE.) The organization would then enjoy additional revenue from its membership while providing them with a useful service.

There are some caveats with this, of course. For one thing, advertising in general may not be compatible with the organization's goals — note that Google allows non-profits and charities to remove the ads entirely. For another, the organization would have to be careful not to encourage or otherwise entice its membership to click on ads for no reason — the AdSense terms and conditions still apply.

Something to think about, in any case. If anyone tries to use CSE as a fundraiser, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Sponsored Link: Easily add an eBay mini-store and further monetize your site with Build A Niche Store.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 26, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

New AdSense Case Study: Building A Travel Site

It's been a while since I've done an AdSense case study like the one I did before for the electronic pet fence guide (which, BTW, I'm happy to note ranks 4th on Google for “adsense case study” — the first three are Google's own case studies). My (much needed) vacation last week in San Diego gave me the idea for a new AdSense case study focusing on travel. Let's build a travel site!

Travel is for Everyone

So why choose travel as a general topic? Because traveling is something that almost everyone does at some point in their lives. Some people travel to exotic locations far away. Some don't stray too far from their hometown. It doesn't really matter — if you've gone somewhere, you can write about it. And that means you can monetize it with AdSense. If you do it right!

The problem with travel is that it's an ultra-competitive topic. You don't have to use any fancy keyword tools to know this, just type travel into Google and you'll see that there are about 1,790,000,000 pages in Google's index containing the word “travel”. Forget about getting a good ranking. And getting your AdWords ad in the #1 spot for “travel” will set you back a few dollars per click.

But competition is good, because it means there's broad interest in the topic. It also means that there's a chance to make good money with AdSense.

The key to success, of course, is to go small. When real people think about traveling, they usually have a specific place in mind. They don't type “travel” into Google, they actually type things like “travel san diego” or “travel disney”. They want to see pages relevant to the journey they wish to undertake. They're looking for travel deals or travel information. And that's where you can jump in.

Documenting Your Travels

What we're talking about here is essentially documenting your travels. It's not hard to do. When you start planning a trip, keep all your reference materials handy. Take along a digital camera and take some pictures. Collect maps, brochures, pamphlets and other useful informational or promotional materials. If the trip is complicated, you can even write some notes during your travels about what you've seen, where you stayed, etc.

When you return from your travels, sit down and organize all the materials you've gathered and build a site or blog around them. Keep it focused, don't make the mistake of trying to expand your visit into a general guide to whatever area you were visiting. There are plenty of professional sites out there that create those kinds of sites. Your site needs to be more personal and more specific.

I'll be using my trip to San Diego as an example. I don't want to write a generic site about San Diego because I didn't see all of San Diego. But I did learn some interesting things about visiting San Diego:

These things could all be incorporated into a site/blog about San Diego. If they're interesting to me, they'll be interesting to others traveling to San Diego as well.

There are some crucial decisions you need to make at the start of the project, however. What do you name your site? Should it be a blog or a standalone website? Should you document one trip or multiple trips? We'll tackle these next time.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 25, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Free Keyword Analysis

It's not often that I plug a product on this blog — usually I'm telling you what to avoid buying — but once in a while I come across a product that is valuable enough to recommend to my readers. Here are four products I'd like you to consider:

And here's a deal for you: if you buy one or more of these products through my affiliate links above, I'll throw in some free keyword analysis for you: send in two keywords you'd like to know more about and I'll send you pricing and competition information about those keywords. Or if that doesn't turn your crank, I'll do a quick analysis-by-email of a site or blog you own and give you my recommendations for improving your AdSense earnings. (Please note that I'll do these things as my schedule allows and that the length and scope of the analysis will be at my discretion. I also reserve the right to refuse any request.)

Be sure to clear out your ClickBank cookies (the ones for clickbank.net) before you buy :-)

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 24, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

A "Build A Niche Store" Example

Kelvin Firminger of Build A Niche Store decided, quite unprompted, to build me a niche store to show off how easy it is to use his software. He built a niche store around my pet fence guide. It only took a few steps. I'm posting the email he sent me below along with my comments — the sections in italics are Kevin's words.

I’ll walk you through the process that I took to get a targeted affiliate store for that niche.

1. I Went To eBay. There I did a search for “pet fence” so that I could find which category had the most related products in. It was this category (it has 552 products inside it): eBay pet fence products.

I now knew where this category was located: “Home & Garden > Pet Supplies > Dogs > Electric, Invisible Fences”. Therefore it was easy to find the category number from the eBay sitemaps which the Build A Niche Store demo links to: eBay sitemap.

The category number was: 116388.

I noticed that this was an “End Category” meaning that were no more eBay categories inside it. What this means is that if I enter that category number into Build A Niche Store I would get a searchable store that could access the 552 products inside that category but no way of navigating them. I would therefore need to create a custom navigation.

Kelvin then continues with his description of custom navigation. You don't have to do this if your category has sub-categories in it.

2. I Worked Out A Custom Navigation. Using Overture's Keyword Tool I entered “Pet Fence” to get a list of keyword searches that contained that keyword phrase: Get list of pet fence keywords

My navigation would consist of two lists. One is “Types of Fences”, which includes these options: Electric Fence, Wireless Fence, Invisible Fence, Underground Fence, Radio Fence, Indoor Fence. The second list is “The Best Brands” and includes PetSafe and Innotek.

Here I have to make a correction to his lists. “Invisible Fence” is in fact a brand name and should be moved from the first list to the second list. I don't need any more trouble from their lawyers!

3. I Built My Store. I then installed Build A Niche Store, ran the setup.php file, built the store, placed the 6 tags inside the template, added my custom navigation and modified the CSS style sheet. (End of letter)

What Kelvin's referring to here is Build A Niche Store's templating system, which lets you modify the look and feel of the store fairly easily.

What he's done is take an eBay category listing:

eBay — Electronic Dog Fences

And transformed it into a page that blends right into my site:

Mockup of Eric's new eBay store

Notice how the AdSense ads still there. He basically took the main page of the site and threw in the special tags at the appropriate spots, leaving the rest of the page (including my AdSense code) unchanged.

Very cool little demo showing how easy it is to add an eBay store to an existing site. And you could embed stores like this into each of your sites and make them look like part of the site with only a bit of adaptation.

Thanks for the demo, Kelvin, I'm sure my readers found it useful. Build A Niche Store sells for $97. To buy it, visit the official site.

Sponsored Link: If you're apprehensive about writing content, I highly recommend you read Turn Words Into Traffic to break the writing process into a set of manageable and not-so-scary steps.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Should you buy "The Adsense Formula"?

Some Internet marketers are pushing an e-book called The Adsense Formula. It's really cheap, less than $8 as I write this right now. Should you buy it?

First of all, I have an immediate distrust for any e-book that misspells “AdSense” in its title and throughout its text. It's “AdSense”, not “Adsense”. Same for “AdWords” — it's not “Adwords”. This may seem picky, but small things like this are indicators of quality to me.

Putting the spelling aside, let's look at the e-book itself. It's 97 pages, yes, but with a large font, huge margins and lots and lots of (generally useless) screenshots. So really there's not much text. This is nothing like the pages packed full of information that Affiliate Project X or even my book offer.

At the bottom of each page there's a footer: The Google Adsense Empire Handbook. So this is just a re-titled version of an e-book I've seen before called “AdSense Empire”.

The book makes some dubious recommendations, telling you to look at Traffic Equalizer, for example. It's not recent — no mention of link units or anything.

Take a pass on this one. Read my (free) article The AdSense Formula instead.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 19, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Build A Niche Store: eBay and AdSense integration

This is related to my recent experiments with integrating AdSense and Amazon data. A reader of mine has just released a product called Build A Niche Store that does something similar for eBay data. The product is a PHP script that you install on your server (you can install it on unlimited servers) and an accompanying manual. After installation, you run the script and it asks your for some details about what kind of eBay store you want to run, including which eBay category you want to pull data from. It then builds a store for you using eBay's RSS feeds. The store updates itself automatically as data changes on eBay.

The nice thing about this product is that you can also add AdSense ads to the store and make two streams of revenue. And yes, the pages are actually all generated on the server, not the within the browser, so there's lots of actual content on the pages for the AdSense crawler to examine. I'm going to do a detailed review of this product at some point on my GeekAffiliate blog, but for now you can just read the details they have posted on their site, which includes some demo stores. Looks very cool. If you've worked with any of these data feeds you know how painful it can be to build scripts and applications that process the data.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 18, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

TechDailey.com: New reader-built site

Reader Jon has just premiered his blog, TechDailey.com. He says: “i bought your book from barnes and noble, and i am subscribed to your newsletter, your book was a great help in the sense that it is plain down to earth practical information, that gets right to the point, and because of it, i was inspired to write my first post titled keep technology simple, and thats why my blog follows that same theme”. Good luck, Jon!

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 17, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Too Much Content for AdSense?

I've had a few clients with high-volume sites who couldn't properly monetize the sites with AdSense. The problem, oddly enough, is that they have too much content on their sites.

What's wrong with having lots of content, you say? Nothing, especially if that content is unique and is properly indexed in the search engines. These sites fit the bill perfectly. But they also had problems getting targeted ads with AdSense.

A common problem with larger sites is that either there's no single theme that spans the entire site or the site-wide theme isn't the topic you want to base the ads on.

Remember, AdSense doesn't just look at the content of a page to determine which ads to show. It also looks at the content of the other pages on the site as well as the pages that are linked to and linked from the pages in question. (Small plug here: I have an inexpensive special report about Google's AdSense patent that explains many of these things.) On larger sites sometimes the site-wide characteristics override the page-specific characteristics, leading to seemingly untargeted ads.

How do you fix this? By working at improving the on-page elements that AdSense uses to deliver targeted ads. Things like the name of the page, its title, the headings, the body content. And, just as important, using section targeting to exclude site-wide elements that are messing up the targeting. It takes work and experimentation to adapt the pages this way, but I can almost guarantee it'll work and you'll see your clickthrough rate rise accordingly, especially if your site benefits from natural search traffic.

Not to mention that these changes will also lead to better
page indexing in most cases, as many of the techniques you use
to improve ad targeting are also search engine optimization (SEO)
techniques.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 16, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

PHP Guide for AdSense Publishers

Yesterday I went public with The HDTV Shoppe as an example of how to integrate AdSense with embedded content that is normally unavailable to the AdSense crawler. Today I'd like to talk about a related topic, how AdSense publishers can use PHP to their advantage to simplify website creation.

PHP is a programming language, but don't let that scare you if you're not technically inclined. The truth is, you don't have to know much to take advantage of some basic PHP features, features that can be extremely useful in your website development. We're limiting ourselves to “plain” websites here, but if you develop a familiarity with PHP you'll find that it becomes a lot easier to customize WordPress blog themes and similar things.

How PHP Works

PHP is what's known as “server-side scripting”. In other words, you mix PHP commands with the HTML tags of a page and when the web server is asked for the web page it first runs the PHP commands and then returns the processed page — not the actual page that's sitting up on the web server. In other words, if you had this page sitting on your web server:

<html>
<body>
<b><?php echo "Hello, world."; ?></b>
</body>
</html>

then a request for the page would return:

Hello, world.

PHP commands start with “<?php” and end with “?>”.

Remember, the PHP commands gets processed on the server, not in the browser. This is different from JavaScript code, which runs in the browser. This is why PHP processing is referred to as “server-side”.

Enabling PHP Support

Almost every hosting service these days supports PHP. If you're not sure, contact your service. Normally, PHP commands are only executed for pages that end in “.php”, while pages that end in “.html” or “.htm” are sent down to the browser without any processing. But that's just the default setup. Personally, I prefer to use a “.html” extension with all my files. It looks better and, frankly, it shouldn't matter to the visitor what technology I'm using to process my web pages.

To enable PHP processing for .html files, all you do is add two lines to the .htaccess file for your site:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm

This obscure syntax says: “forget about the normal processing for .html and .htm files; whenever you see a .php, .html, or .htm file run it through the PHP processor”. Now you're ready to have some fun.

Using PHP for Common Page Elements

PHP makes sharing common page elements among different pages quite simple. A “common page element” is something like a header, a footer, or a navigational menu that is shared between two or more pages on the site.

Let's take a footer as an example, because it's so simple. To create a footer, use a text editor to create a file called “footer.php” — use the .php extension for the command page elements and reserve the .html extension for the actual pages. It would look like this:

<div id="footer">
Copyright © Eric Giguere
</div>

You may notice that there are no PHP commands in this file. That's because the file is pretty simple. But you could put PHP commands in the file if you wanted.

Now in your page instead of pasting in the code above you just “include” the footer.php file:

<html>
<head>
<title>A Simple Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php include 'header.php'; ?>
<p>This is where my content would go.</p>
<?php include 'footer.php'; ?>
</body>
</html>

Actually, the code above also includes a header.php file. So now you can change the footer on every page just by changing the footer.php file, and similarly for the header.

Including AdSense Code

You can probably see where I'm going with this. You don't have to limit yourself to headers and footers. Any block of code that you find yourself repeating over and over throughout your pages can be included via PHP in a similar manner. Such as your AdSense code!

What I do is create a file for each type of ad or link unit I'm using on a site. For example, I might create a largerect.php file with the AdSense code for a large rectangle format ad unit:

<div class="largerect">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-5964030199537728";
google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel ="0373974695";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "206ba2";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "000000";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
  </script>
</div>

Then whenever I want to include a large rectangle in the content I just reference the file:

<p>This is some text. I want to place a large rectangle ad unit immediately after it.&lt/p>
<?php include 'largerect.php'; ?>
<p>There we go.</p>

Now that's pretty easy, isn't it? And if you know what you're doing, you can even fiddle with the AdSense code itself with PHP commands — as long as the end result (what the browser sees) is something that would be generated from the AdSense console. For example, a website owned by two people could use PHP to display one person's publisher ID half of the time and the other person's ID the other half of the time.

What I've shown you above is just the very tip of the iceberg. There are many books and online resources available for budding PHP users. A good place to start is with the official PHP Manual, but I hope this mini-tutorial has helped you.

P.S.: I see today that this blog has finally recovered from the domain renaming I had to do a while back and is showing a PageRank of 6 in most Google datacenters now. (See here to check it yourself.) That's great, but now I need your help getting my pages out of Google's supplemental results and into the main index — a link from you directly to one of the permalink pages in this blog would be much appreciated. I can't do too much about the quality of the spammy links from the MFA blogs that just copy my postings wholesale, unfortunately, except by combating them with quality links from my readers!

Sponsored Link: If you're apprehensive about writing content, I highly recommend you read Turn Words Into Traffic to break the writing process into a set of manageable and not-so-scary steps.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 12, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Integrating Google AdSense with Amazon aStore and other embedded content

I've long been a member of Amazon's affiliate program, ever since I published my first book. One of the new features available via the Amazon Associates program is the Amazon aStore, which Darren Rowse already reviewed, but here's the quick summary: an aStore is an Amazon-hosted website that displays Amazon products chosen by the associate. It can be customized to a certain degree to let the visitor also see categories of products, but it really needs more customization capabilities. All product information comes from Amazon's databases, of course, and any purchases made through an aStore earn the affiliate a commission. The idea is to make it easy to build a featured set of products and include it on an associate's website with no programming required. (If you're willing to invest some time and do some programming, however, you're better off looking at Amazon Web Services, you'll get much more control that way. You may be interested in the series of articles I wrote for IBM on using AWS as a starting point.)

Anyhow, I was wondering if it was possible to integrate AdSense into an Amazon aStore, so I did some experimentation and came up with The HDTV Shoppe (opens a new window).

There's actually very little direct integration you can do with an aStore. The store itself is hosted by Amazon. In fact, this link shows you my aStore without all the frills of The HDTV Shoppe. You either open your aStore in a new window, just like I just showed you, or else embed it in a site using conventional or inline frames. The aStore is effectively a “black box” that you place on a page of your website. Which means that the content of the aStore is really not part of your site. Which means that the AdSense crawler will only see it indirectly. And, more importantly, which means you can't place AdSense ads in the aStore content.

So what you have to do is place your ads around the aStore. Look back at The HDTV Shoppe. The main part of the screen, the one labelled “Hot HDTV Sets” and “Search”, is my aStore, embedded into the home page using an iframe. So where is my AdSense?

Take a look at the left side of the window, at the navigation menu. Do you see it? Yes, I've used a vertical link unit, something I rarely ever use, but in this case it seemed appropriate. What I've done is styled my navigation menu so that the link unit blends right into it. I then made sure to add lots of topical, keyword-laden links to the menu, to have a proper page title, and to make sure “HDTV” was in the headings and in the domain name as well. Although you should do these things anyhow, they take on even more importance when there's very little content on the page itself — remember, most of the content on the home page is actually nested inside an <iframe< and is not considered to be part of the page by AdSense.

The other pages on the site, the ones that don't involve the aStore, are conventional pages, of course, so I was able to add a normal ad unit to them along with a bit of content. I should probably thrown an AdSense search box on those pages as well.

I wouldn't say this site's my best work, but mostly I just wanted to show you one way of integrating AdSense with embedded content. You could use similar tricks with Flash-based content, for example, or with embedded videos. Without resorting to keyword-stuffing or dubious blackhat techniques to get the right ads to show.

Sponsored Link: If you're apprehensive about writing content, I highly recommend you read Turn Words Into Traffic to break the writing process into a set of manageable and not-so-scary steps.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 11, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Taffy (November 18, 1998 - October 9, 2006)

Yesterday we had to put down one of our dogs, Taffy. You may remember Taffy as one of the stars (under a pseudonym) of the Pet Fence Guide, which I used as an AdSense case study. Taffy had cancer, and it was starting to compromise her breathing, so we had to make the difficult decision. She was only 7 years old, it was too early for her to go, we were assuming that Dino, our other dog, would be going first because he's 15 years old. It's been a tough couple of weeks, let me tell you, especially for my wife, who lost her father and now her favorite dog…



I think I'll take the day off, so no Amazon discussion until tomorrow…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 10, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Instant AdSense Templates 2

Get ready, tomorrow Joel Comm releases his Instant AdSense Templates 2 product. Apparently there's something really big in store with this set, though I haven't been invited to preview them this time so I can't tell you what's different about this set of templates versus the last set. Presumably he'll be including more PLR content. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

By the way, today is Thanksgiving in Canada (we do it early), so Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! Watch for the next post, I've been playing around with a cool Amazon feature and integrating some AdSense with it…

Sponsored Link: Here's my affiliate link for Instant AdSense Templates :-)

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 9, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Affiliate "Project X"

Yesterday evening I actually parted with some money and bought an e-book called Affiliate “Project X”. Anyone who knows me (and who reads this blog) knows that I'm pretty skeptical about many of the products that get promoted, especially when I see a whole bunch of Internet marketers (I'm subscribed to so many lists now I've lost track…) flogging them. Still, this one piqued my interest and since it was sold through ClickBank and was less than $100 (it was $77 when I bought it) I figured it was worth a try. (In case you don't know, any product bought through ClickBank can be returned within 8 weeks for a full refund. See the ClickBank refund policy for the details.) The only other e-book I remember purchasing lately was Jim and Dallas Edwards' Turn Words Into Traffic, which is an excellent introduction (and fairly cheap at $39) on how to generate traffic via article writing.

Anyhow, it will be a few days before I can do a formal review of it on GeekAffiliate, but here are my initial thoughts on this book.

Affiliate “Project X” describes a set of systems for making money as a ClickBank affiliate. The book itself is sold through ClickBank, which is good, otherwise I wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole. It's 50 pages long. Unlike many e-books I've seen, this book uses a normal font with a normal amount of whitespace on each page, so those 50 pages are actually fairly dense with information.

The bulk of the book describes 6 systems (the author calls them “methods”) for making money via ClickBank:

  1. The “Leech”: The Art of the Pre-Sell
  2. The Affiliate Diary
  3. The “Workhorse” Method
  4. Thief In The Night
  5. Copy the Best Part 2
  6. The “Opportunist” Method

It wouldn't be fair for me to describe more about each method, but the instructions the author provides are very detailed. He provides tips on choosing the right ClickBank products (successful affiliates continuously promote many products), what traps to avoid, and breaks each method down into concrete steps. Only one of the methods requires the use of another product (Brad Callen's Keyword Elite), but you'll need to spend some money on AdWords (to get targeted traffic) if you want to make money quickly with most of these methods. (But some of them can be done completely for free, with only time and effort on your part required.)

Note that this e-book does assume you know something about Internet marketing. It talks about using autoresponders for follow-ups, for example, but doesn't tell you how to actually set up the autoresponder. Nor does it walk you through the mechanics of setting up a “squeeze” page. It does provide some tips on cloaking affiliate links (primarily to make it easier to sell a product) and how to track which methods are generating which sales.

The author claims to have tested each method with a dozen “newbies” over a three-week period:

By the last week of September, the results were starting. Of the 12, fully half were making $100 or more per day in net profit using the Project X strategies. Four of the remaining six were making $50 per day, and the final two did not invest the time required to make it work (although they both still earned over $200 in less than two weeks).

— excerpt from Affiliate “Project X”

Note that the author never claims that this kind of income will happen without any work, just as I never claim you can make AdSense money without work. I like that — no matter what you do, your potential earnings are directly related to how much time and effort you're willing to commit to your project. Everyone should brand that on their forehead (in reverse) so that they see it whenever they look at themselves in a mirror.

Although I do make a bit of money via affiliate selling, the bulk of my attention has been focused on AdSense. This book may just be the kick in the behind I need to ramp up the affiliate side of things. Diversity of income is good, after all. This is one of the few e-books about Internet marketing that I can heartily recommend. I know not everyone reading this is interested in affiliate marketing, but it's worth a look if you are.

Sponsored Link: Well, go get your copy of Affiliate “Project X” now!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 5, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

AdSense on 404 (Page Not Found) Error Pages

Yesterday in 172 AdSense sites? Eric, are you crazy? I listed a number of things you could do to build AdSense sites using whitehat techniques. One of them was:

I subsequently removed it in response to some comments. Not because I was wrong to say it, but because I didn't say it well enough.

(A “404 page”, by the way, is the “page not found” page that gets displayed when you try to access a page that doesn't exist or no longer exists on a site. The “404″ refers to the HTTP return code that the web server sends to the browser.)

Alright, let's go back to the AdSense terms and conditions and quote the relevant section:

5. Prohibited Uses. You shall not … (v) display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page ….

It seems fairly cut-and-dry, doesn't it? Well, it's not. For one thing, notice the omission of “Search Box” from that list. It's OK to use AdSense for search on an error page. That only makes sense. After all, if a page is missing then it's helpful to the user to provide them with a way to quickly search the site for relevant pages. (You cannot, though, pre-fill the search box — users have to type in the search terms themselves.)

But even ad and link units are fair game on these kinds of pages if they have relevant content. See message #60 on this Digital Point forum thread for Google's OK on this. Let me quote the important bit of the clarification an AdSense publisher received from Google:

After looking up ticket #70447117, I noticed that your questions were
about placing Google ads on customized error pages that contain sufficient
text-based content. For this type of pages, you're welcome to place Google
ads on them, as our crawlers will be able to serve relevant ads.

However, regarding your question in ticket #70532660, it sounded like
the 404 error pages you've mentioned were the default error pages with no
content. According to our program policies
(https://www.google.com/adsense/policies), no Google ad may be placed on
any non-content-based pages.

So you can't just plaster your 404 pages with ads if all they do is say “Page not found”. You have to put some useful content on them. What's useful and relevant depends on your site and what you think the user was looking for.

Please note that I try hard not to give incorrect or bad advice about AdSense, which is why I'm posting this long clarification of what I meant. If you have any concerns about what you can or can't do with 404 pages, your best bet is to create a mockup page showing what you want to do and sending the URL to the AdSense team. They can then look at it and give you the yea/nay. Even if they say “no”, they might give you suggestions as to what you could do that falls within the rules. It never hurts to ask!

Sponsored Link: Try SEO Elite for help with search engine optimization.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 4, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

172 AdSense sites? Eric, are you crazy?

My previous post 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month has elicited a few comments from readers telling me that 172 sites is simply too many sites to manage. The cynics probably think that I'm preparing to sell a system that helps you create and manage dozens or hundreds of sites — well, I don't have such a product. Nor can I recommend one. Most such tools (Traffic Equalizer being the prime example — I actually get the occasional affiliate payout from people buying it through links like that, though interestingly enough most of them end up returning the product shortly thereafter, reducing my affiliate earnings for that product to almost nothing!) fall into the greyhat/blackhat arena. I do have my own homegrown system for managing static sites using the open source FMPP templating system, but I can't see myself developing the nice GUI frontend a commercial product would require, as it's all command-line based right now.

[Aside] Speaking of open source, recently someone's begun selling a modified version of the Camtasia product, which was originally released using an open source license. That version is called CamStudio. The license used, interestingly enough, was the Gnu Public License, or GPL. I say “interestingly enough” because the GPL is one of those “sticky” open source licenses that says that the software is free, that any modifications made to the application are themselves subject to the GPL, and that the source code to those modifications must be made available. If you've bought the modified version of CamStudio (not the commercial product available from TechSmith) then do me a favor and see if the seller will actually give you the source code to the modified version. (I should note that any videos and documentation included with the product would themselves not be subject to the GPL… but the software should be yours for the asking.) [End Aside]

I do not expect people to go out and create 100 or more sites. It's not that it's impossible to do. I think a determined person could build a large set of mini-sites (ideally using the principles I described in Six Degrees of Web Separation), but it would take a number of months to do so if they're built using whitehat techniques — some kind of system would definitely be needed in order to not go insane building them and tracking what you're doing.

But I do think building a smaller set of topically-related mini-sites and then working to get each of those sites up to a certain earnings level is worth the effort. Again, you have to think long-term. AdSense is not going away, Google makes too much money from it. But Google is trying to kill the scraper/non-useful sites, which means the schemes people used before to deploy large numbers of such sites just won't cut it anymore. Develop your sites using whitehat techniques such as:

Again, the hard part is writing the content and promoting the sites. You can develop systems for handling the mechanics of creating and deploying a website. And if you DO want to build a 100 or more sites, you'd be better off to write unique content that requires little or no updating, otherwise you'll go crazy trying to keep track of things. This means that you'll want to develop static sites, not blogs, though you could use one blog (call it your “update blog”) that lists changes/additions to your site network.

If you decide to do this, drop me a line once you've started, I'll be curious to hear how it goes for you.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

October 3, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off