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!
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?
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?