Resale Rights Now Have Teeth Thanks To US Supreme Court

OK, this isn’t directly related to AdSense but it’s of interest to Internet marketers in general. I should really be posting this on GeekAffiliate, but I may change my mind about consolidating my blogs. Today’s topic is resale rights and how a ruling this week by the US Supreme Court may give the creators of resale rights products more teeth to control the prices at which resellers can sell those products.

What Are Resale Rights?

If you’re not familiar with resale rights, this is how I defined them in Resale
rights are the curries of Internet marketing:

Broadly defined, “resale rights” are the rights to sell a product that someone else created. Resale selling is different from affiliate selling because resellers interact directly with the customers — in other words, the reseller is the vendor. In affiliate selling, the affiliate is not the vendor and is merely acting as a sales agent for the vendor.

The term “resale rights” refers to a whole slew of rights, though:

There are different kinds of resale rights. Private label rights, for example, allow a reseller to pass a product off as their own creation. PLR articles, for example, can be used to create content-based sites that make money via AdSense and other advertising programs. Master resale rights let you sell not only the product, but also the rights to resell the product. And there are umpteen variations that we can all lump under the general category of “resale rights”.

If the concept is new to you, please take the time to read the entire article, the point of which is how product creators can use resale rights to generate further (”back-end”) sales and to change the meta-market they’re targeting.

Pricing Restrictions

I’ve purchased several products with resale rights, How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks being the most recent example. That report is an exception for me: mostly I just use the products myself and don’t try to resell them — the resale rights typically just get thrown in and weren’t the primary reason I bought the product in the first place.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how quickly the average selling price of a resale rights product plummets. I discuss this in some detail in The Fundamental Flaw in Selling Resale Rights:

Products sold in this manner suffer from a fundamental flaw that eventually works to the detriment of the purchasers and sometimes (but not always) the original seller: the inability to legally set a minimum price for the resold products.

In other words, once you bought the resale rights to a product you were able to sell it for whatever price you wanted. Yes, most products come with a set of restrictions on what you can and can’t do with the product, but most of those restrictions have no legal teeth to back them up. The vendor of the product could stop selling new products to you, of course, in retaliation, but if they were selling master resale rights (MRR) you could get around that by finding someone else who was selling the products and buying it (with resale rights conveyed) from them.

But all of a sudden things are different, at least in the United States.

Supreme Court Removes Antitrust Rule

On June 28, the US Supreme Court struck down a long-standing rule preventing manufacturers and distributors from setting minimum retail prices:

The court struck down the 96-year-old ruling that resale price maintenance agreements were an automatic, or per se, violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. In its place, the court instructed judges considering such agreements for possible antitrust violations to apply a case-by-case approach, known as a “rule of reason,” to assess their impact on competition. The new rule is considerably more favorable to defendants.

I’m not a lawyer, but it sounds like this ruling affects the sale of infoproducts with resale rights. It’s plausible to argue now that someone who creates a product and conveys resale rights to the product to purchasers can now insist upon minimum retail pricing of that product and not worry about antitrust regulations. (Note that this only applies in the US; antitrust regulations vary greatly from country to country.)

Will this have a measurable effect on product prices? I don’t know. I guess vendors who discover that their distributors are selling an infoproduct at very low prices can perhaps threaten legal action with more ferocity now. Then again, I can’t see many such actions landing in court in general, even with this newly added ammunition.

Still, it’s something to think about if you’re thinking about selling a resale rights product you’ve acquired at a significantly lower price than what the vendor recommends.

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 30, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

I Only Earn $5/Day From AdSense

There, I’ve said it! It’s true, on average I only make about $5/day in AdSense earnings… from this blog.

Oops, you thought I was talking about my overall AdSense earnings? Forget it! The only person I (begrudgingly) discuss that with is the taxman.

Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. Sit down with a bunch of bankers and you’ll discover that they don’t like to spend money, even though they’re flush with it. Sit down with a group of AdSense publishers and you’ll quickly learn that they never click AdSense ads themselves. I get a fair bit of traffic to this site, but it’s the wrong type of traffic to monetize via AdSense. Which is kind of ironic, but not unexpected…

If I pushed things a little, I’m sure I could improve this blog’s earnings. But I’d lose in other ways.

It’s Not Just About The Money…

Just because Make Easy Money With Google And AdSense doesn’t make me much from AdSense doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile endeavor:

I’m not sure I can put a price on the value of this blog! (But feel free to offer me big wads of cash…)

So What If Most AdSense Publishers Don’t Earn A Lot?

According to an unscientific AdSense earnings poll being run on the Digital Point AdSense forum, 75% of the poll’s participating AdSense publishers make $25 or less per day, with the majority (almost half) making less than $5/day. Critics say this is proof that webmasters should look elsewhere for monetization options.

My question to you is: how many of those sites would make any money without AdSense?

That’s what the pundits forget. AdSense is the program that monetized the World Wide Web. By automating things to the hilt, Google was able to provide itsy-bitsy webmasters (well, their sites, not the webmasters themselves) with a way to make some money from the dribs and drabs of traffic they got. It’s the long tail of advertising, as I’ve argued before. And it doesn’t require a lot of work to get going.

Something to think about over the long weekend. (Here in Canada.)

Sponsored Link: Learn more about the ins and outs of
AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 29, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 5 Comments 

More Flexible (And Better Paying?) Cost Per Action Google Referrals

So it’s official, Google is finally launching its new referral system. It will be rolled out gradually to all AdSense publishers in the next few days. I can’t see the new referrals yet, I still have the old ones. So what I’m writing here is based on what Google is saying in the announcement and what’s in the AdSense help center.

Unlike ad units and link units, referrals are paid on a cost per action (CPA) basis instead of on a cost per click (CPC) basis. This is not new: you only got paid if someone actually signed up for AdSense, AdWords, or whatever other Google service/product was being referred. Now, however, Google has expanded the referrals to include third-party products and services from AdWords advertisers.

You can select advertisers based on categories and keywords. Each referral unit can rotate multiple offers and will show the best performing offers more frequently — it sounds like Google is applying the same algorithms it uses for deciding which ads to display on its search pages to referral units.

More on this once I’ve played with them a bit.

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 28, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

From Website to Blog (Part 4)

Let’s continue with the series I started on how to transform a website into a blog, the idea being that blog will attract more traffic because of its more interactive nature and because search engines really like them. If this is your first encounter with the series, you’ll find the previous posts here:

As well, there’s a little aside to the series on what to do to configure WordPress immediately after you install it that is also of interest.

Choosing a Blog Theme

When we left off last time, I promised we’d discuss blog setup in some more detail. I’ve mostly done that in the aside mentioned above, but I wanted to go over some of the more concrete steps with an actual blog used as an example.

The site we’re transforming is a silly little site I create over a year ago called “No Debt Is Good”. It started out as a single-page site about debt-free living and ended up with a few pages on it. Nothing fantastic, I was using it mostly to demonstrate the concept of a single-page AdSense site and now I’m “sacrificing” it for the greater good. Actually, my mortgage is up for renewal in October and so I’ve suddenly developed a real interest in getting rid of debt, so this topic is very much a propos.

One of the most difficult things for me when I’m creating a new blog is deciding what the blog will look like. If I were a spammer, I wouldn’t care one bit, but as a general rule I like to use blog designs that look good and still manage to blend in the AdSense ad and link units quite nicely. There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there to choose from, so this is not an easy task. Lately, however, I’ve been finding myself using Brian Gardner’s free WordPress themes as a starting point. This blog uses a variation of his Silhouette theme, for example. After much deliberation, I chose to go with a variation of his Vertigo Blue theme for No Debt Is Good.

A Fine Balance

Brian’s themes are nice for several reasons. One is that he uses proper semantic markup throughout the themes. Unlike most themes, the blog name is not wrapped in an <h1> tag at the top of the page. The <h1> tags are in fact reserved for the titles of the blog posts and the individual pages. Another reason I like them is that they’re ready for monetization: adding AdSense to his themes is pretty easy.

Now, where you place your AdSense ads and how many you place on the page is one of those things that AdSense publishers debate quite heatedly. On this blog, for example, I try to make the AdSense unobtrusive: there’s a link unit at the top and the individual post pages have a half-banner ad as well. That’s pretty much it. This works well for me because I know that my regular readership isn’t likely to click ads anyhow, so there’s no point in obscuring the content just to get a few more clicks in. For some topics the minimalist approach makes the most sense, especially when the ad inventory is relatively small and/or the bid prices for ads falls quickly after the first two or three ads. (See Uncommon AdSense for a detailed explanation of why.)

But when you’re in a competitive topic space and/or you’re not so much interested in a regular readership, try a more aggressive approach to AdSense ad layout. This is what I’m doing with the modified Vertigo theme on No Debt Is Good. I’ve taken the big “V” graphic out and replaced it with an ad unit. I’ve also embedded an ad unit right at the start of the content and inserted one immediately after the content. The theme isn’t done yet, as I still need to create a for the header and tweak a few other things, but it’s mostly there at this point.

Static Home Page or Not?

As you transform your site into a blog, one of the decisions you’ll have to make early on is whether the new blog should look like a website or look like a blog. If the former, you’ll want to use a “static page” (a WordPress page, as opposed to a post) as the home page. If you want it to look like a blog, you’ll want a conventional blog home page with blog postings on it.

I’m going for the static page, but I haven’t enabled it just yet. I plan on using the SEO siloing technique to finely target the ads on the various pages, so I need to create a few categories first and create some landing pages for those categories. Using static pages fits very well with the siloing technique.

There’s another reason to stick with a website feel as opposed to a blog feel, and that’s when you don’t plan on updating the site very much. Users expect blogs to be updated on a regular basis. If the site doesn’t look like a blog (even though it is) they won’t necessarily be looking for regular updates. Be sure to drop all the date references (as in “posted on …”) from your theme in order to reinforce the website feel and to not make the content appear to be outdated.

Stay tuned for more…

Sponsored Link: Want an interesting and mostly unobtrusive ad effect? Try Peel Away Ads. You can see one in the top right corner of the page. Easy installation on any site.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 28, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

How Does Google Do Rounded Corners On Its Ads?

Now that rounded corners for AdSense ad units have arrived, I was curious to see how the corners were being done. There are three general ways to do rounded corners, and each have their drawbacks. The simplest way is to use images for the corners, but then you have to create new images for each color combo you’re using. The more sophisticated approaches use JavaScript and/or CSS, but then you run into problems with inconsistent browser support and/or longer execution times. See the CSS Rounded Corners Roundup for a good listing of the various techniques.

As it turns out, Google is using JavaScript and CSS to create the rounded corners. I pared everything down to the basics and came up with this “simple” example:

You can view the source code here — use the “view source” option on your browser to see it, of course. Most of the magic is in a JavaScript graphics library that Google has created, which is not included in the test file.

The technique they’re using works well for AdSense ad units because the ads are embedded on pages using <iframe> tags (that’s what the JavaScript that Google generates for you eventually does) and are of fixed width and height. This lets them use CSS’ absolute positioning feature to precisely place the borders and everything else. As a general technique it’s probably not something you’d use on your own site, especially for the more fluid (non-fixed) elements of your page layout.

Still, interesting stuff!

Sponsored Link: Want an interesting and mostly unobtrusive ad effect? Try Peel Away Ads. You can see one in the top right corner of the page. Easy installation on any site.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 27, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

New AdSense Feature: Rounded Corners

So rounded corners are now available to AdSense publishers as a new format option. Rounded corners are the quintessential “Web 2.0″ feature, of course, so this is mostly of interest to publishers who build sites that use lots of rounded corners. For most of us I don’t think it will make a big difference because we turn the borders off — making the roundness or squareness of the borders irrelevant.

What I find most interesting is how the AdSense code has changed to reflect this new feature. A new property is set, as in this example:

google_ui_features = "rc:6";

If you don’t choose any corner style, that line gets left out. Values so far are “rc:0″ for square corners, “rc:6″ for slightly rounded corners, and “rc:10″ for very rounded corners. Out of curiosity (don’t try this at home, folks — remember that you’re not supposed to modify the generated code), I tried different “rc” values and they all resulted in square corners.

It’s interesting that Google chose to implement a “google_ui_features” variable instead of something like “google_rounded_corners”. It looks like they’re going to stuff more user interface (”ui”) features into that one parameter. Wonder what’s next?

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 27, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

Peel Away Ads

I’ve been having some fun with a new software product called Peel Away Ads, whose launch has been in all the Project Black Mask excitement. You can see an example of a peel away ad right here on this site — look in the top right corner of the page and you’ll see a little “page curl” that says “CLICK HERE”. Move your mouse over it and the page curl “expands” out to a little ad for Uncommon AdSense, my AdSense ebook that I’ve fashioned.

Anyhow, the software works well but they could have designed it a bit better so that you don’t have to edit the JavaScript file to change the peel settings. And they could have included better instructions in the package.

So what I’ve done is grabbed resale rights to the package and am selling it directly via PayPal for only $25, which is less than the retail price of $37 on the main Peel Away Ads website. As a bonus, I’m including a slightly modified script that is easier to use (in my opinion) plus a PDF with some more detailed instructions on how to use the ads so that you can do the same thing I’m doing on this site.

You get the full package when you buy this: the main script, a rotating ad script, and an affiliate script. You also get access to some videos that show you how to install and modify the scripts, though these aren’t as important with my instructions.

To grab your copy, just press the PayPal order button below. I think you’ll be happy with the software, it works quite well. If you have any questions, just let me know and I’ll be happy to answer them. You can get more details about Peel Away Ads on the main Peel Away Ads site, but buy it here.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 26, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 13 Comments 

MEMWGA Back On Technorati

Some minor housekeeping: I finally updated the Technorati claim for MEMWGA (this blog) to refer to the new URL. If you’ve had it marked as a favorite, please remark it so at the new address. I’ve asked Technorati to remove the old address (http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense) from its database. The good news is that my Technorati ranking has actually improved, which is great… I thought I’d have to start over from scratch with the blog address change, but not so.

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 24, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Project Black Mask Review, Part 1: How to Build Hundreds of Made for AdSense Sites

As promised, I’m starting my review of Project Black Mask. I’m going to do it in parts so that I can properly cover everything that’s included in the package, including the upsell. There are actually two main parts to Project Black Mask: one is focused on AdSense, the other focuses on affiliate marketing. Today we’re looking at the AdSense side of things.

What’s Included in Project Black Mask

So the launch price for Project Black Mask was $77, although the price is going up sometime today apparently. This gives you a 99-page ebook and two videos. For a further $67 (I assume that’s going up as well) you get access to a set of “advanced videos”.

Because Project Black Mask was being promoted by Chris McNeeney of Affiliate “Project X” fame, I assumed the material was written by him. But it’s not. It’s actually written by Alex Goad, which I must admit was a disappointment to me. Part of what I like about Chris’ books is that they’re very entertaining. Anyhow, that’s just me. On with the review.

Copy Those Videos!

This is a bit of aside, but whenever I purchase an infoproduct that includes videos, I always download the videos to my local computer instead of watching them directly from the product site. That way if the site goes down or gets too slow I can still watch the videos. The problem is that most of these sites don’t make it easy for you to download the videos. Here’s what you do.

Most videos are provided in Flash format embedded right into a web page. The video itself is actually stored as a “.swf” file on the web server and the web page has instructions telling the browser to load and display the video. So the trick is to find and download the actual “.swf” file to your hard drive.

Click the link that brings up the video. If it starts running right away, pause it. Use the “Page Source” or “View Source” menu item on your browser to look at the HTML for the page. Look for a line similar to this one:

fo.addVariable( "csConfigFile", "IntroVid2_config.xml"  );

This line tells the Flash player to load its configuration from “IntroVid2_config.xml”, which is an XML file (looks a lot like HTML) sitting on the server in the same directory as the HTML file you’re looking at. Go to your browser’s address bar and change the URL to load the XML file. For example, if this was your URL:

http://www.somesillysite.com/videos/2/IntroVid2.html

Then you’d change it to:

http://www.somesillysite.com/videos/2/IntroVid2_config.xml

The XML file may or may not display nicely. It doesn’t matter, just use the “Page Source”/”View Source” menu item to see the raw XML file. Look for a filename ending in “.swf”, something like this:

<uri>IntroVid2.swf</uri>

That’s the file the player’s going to load. Change your browser’s URL to refer to it. You should see the video load and run in your browser window, minus the player controls. Now you just do a “Save Page As…” (or “Save As…”) to store the .swf file to your local drive.

Repeat this process for all the videos.

It’s About Traffic

The introductory videos make it explicitly clear that Project Black Hat is really all about traffic generation, not AdSense or affiliate marketing per se. The idea is that you use the techniques described by the project to send traffic to your sites, which you then monetize any way you want. But AdSense is so easy to use that it’s the place he recommends you start.

The traffic generation methods all revolve around getting pages you control to rank in the top ten results for relevant keywords. There is no pay-per-click involved here — no AdWords, in other words. This is strictly organic traffic generation.

There’s no denying that getting one of the top ten spots on Google is a great way to get traffic. I have direct experience with this phenomemon. My site promoting Invisible Fence gets a lot of traffic because it ranks consistently at #3 or #4 for the term “invisible fence”. There’s nothing wrong with working to getting your pages to rank highly in the search engines — that’s what “search engine optimization” is all about. What I don’t like is how Project Black Mask tells you to do it (and, yes, it’s step-by-step).

The “AdSense is King” Technique

Here’s the basic outline of the technique:

That’s pretty much it. If you follow these steps, the author claims many of your pages will rank well in Google. The cumulative effect of all those pages on all those sites will generate a lot of AdSense income, even if it’s only for a month or two. Create networks like these on a regular basis to ensure that your income stream stays steady even as the older networks get dropped by the search engines.

The Dangers of “AdSense is King”

There’s no discussion in the book about the downsides of the “AdSense is King” technique, the most obvious being the loss of your AdSense account because of violations of the AdSense program policies. Remember that the program policies forbid you from placing ads on “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. Now what exactly constitutes an MFA site is debatable, but the page generation software used in the book generates nonsense content that clearly violates that policy.

If that wasn’t bad enough, though, remember that Google recently started requiring AdSense publishers to follow its landing page quality guidelines. Again, the sites generated using this technique clearly fall short here.

It’s surprising, then, that there was no discussion on creating secondary AdSense accounts by setting up shell corporations or LLCs. It seems like a bit of an oversight to me, because surely if you’re doing all this black hat stuff you want to take every step possible to protect your income stream by splitting it across multiple accounts.

Does It Work?

Yes, I’m sure it does. Over the years I’ve seen posts on various forums describing techniques almost identical to the one presented here for getting lots of natural traffic — the concept of a blog farm is nothing new. You can’t just sit back and watch the money roll in, however, you have to keep working to stay a step ahead of the search engines, who really don’t want their result pages polluted with the crappy sites you build.

I don’t really see legitimate content producers using these techniques, however, and it’s not something I recommend you do. But I’ll save further commentary for the end of the review, once we’ve gone over everything.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 22, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 8 Comments 

The Post-Installation WordPress Routine

One of my readers asked me if I was planning on continuing my “From Website to Blog” series. Yes I am, and you can read the first three parts here:

This post isn’t strictly speaking a continuation of the series, it’s more of an aside. It’s about those boring and yet very necessary steps you need to take immediately after you install a new WordPress blog.

Installing WordPress

There are detailed instructions in the WordPress Codex on how to install WordPress. Most of us, though, don’t have to follow these instructions, since pretty much every web hosting service these days comes with a script to install new WordPress blogs. If your hosting service uses cPanel, for example, look for the Fantastico icon: you’ll find WordPress as one of the options. See Part 2 of my AdSense-Ready WordPress Blog series for detailed instructions on installing WordPress via Fantastico and cPanel. (For the record, of the two hosting services I use for blog hosting, ResellerZoom and Servage, only the former uses cPanel and Fantastico. Servage has its own script for installing WordPress that works just as well and is as easy to configure. The point is that the installation should be nearly trivial, no matter what hosting service you’re using. If not, it may be time to move to a different service…)

What we’re concerned about, however, is what happens immediately after the new installation is complete.

Step 1: Leave the Default Content Alone

A fresh WordPress install includes a default post (with a comment) and a default “about” page. I know it’s tempting to delete them right away, but don’t, for two reasons:

  1. You don’t want any crawlers coming to your site until you’re good and ready for them. By not modifying the content you ensure that no pings get sent to Ping-O-Matic prematurely.
  2. Having some content is the only way to make sure that your chosen theme (which you’ll probably be noodling with) looks right.

So just leave the content alone until you’re done with the other things.

Step 2: General Site Options

Immediately after installation, go to the Options and select the General tab. You’ll want to set some important things here as soon as possible: the blog title and description (if the installation script didn’t ask you for these), the blog address, the contact email, and the default timezone. For the blog address, you’ll want to decide now between the “www” and the “non-www” form of the domain name (if you’re not creating the blog as a subdomain): make your decision and stick to it. You’ll also need to modify the .htaccess to automatically redirect the “other” domain.

You should then go to Users and make sure that the administrative user (you) has the right options set. For example, I always go and turn off the visual editor.

Next, adjust the permalink structure to include the post name in the URLs. Very important for SEO purposes. (For general SEO advice, see AdSense and SEO For WordPress.)

Step 3: Plugin Installation

Now you’re ready to install some plugins. I have a folder on my local hard drive which stores the plugins I use. What I do is create a new folder for the blog I’m creating and then a “plugins” subfolder there. I copy all the plugins I want for that blog into that folder. I then use FileZilla (a free FTP program that I highly recommend) to copy the files over into the wp-content/plugins folder on the server hosting the blog. I then go and activate and configure the plugins. Here are my recommended plugins:

I also like the DoFollow plugin to remove nofollow attributes from links in comments, but I wouldn’t do that without a way to control comment spam…

Step 4: Theme Installation

This is both the easiest and the hardest step. Easy because all you do is copy the theme you want into the wp-content/themes folder and activate it. Hard because there are so many good themes out there to choose from!

However, no theme is perfect in my experience. You’ll always want to noodle with things. As with the plugins, I create a “themes” subfolder on my local hard drive and copy the theme there before uploading it to the site. I usually change its name slightly — both by changing the name of the folder and by modifying the name stored in the style.css file. I then make whatever initial changes I want and upload the modified theme to the server. What then follows is an iterative process of making small changes until I’m happy with the theme’s behavior.

Step 5: AdSense

If my blog has AdSense (or some other monetization scheme) on it, I’ll modify the theme appropriately. You can also use plugins like AdSense-Deluxe, but I prefer to modify the various theme files. You can use my free AdSensePHP script to make the code generation easier.

You probably don’t want to place live ads on your blog just yet, however. If you’re using AdSensePHP then the test mode is enabled by default, so that won’t be a problem. Otherwise you may just want to use <div> tags of the appropriate size to leave space for the ads while you play with things. You don’t want the ads showing up until you have some real content available — see How To Test Your AdSense Layouts for reasons why.

Step 6: Blogroll and Categories

Next I go and remove links I don’t want from the blogroll. I also rename the “Uncategorized” category to something more generic like “General”. Do whatever’s right for your blog here.

Step 7: Feeds

We’re almost ready. Now go to Options and select Reading. You need to select how many posts you want showing up in the feeds (and also on the home page) and whether your want complete or partial content in the feeds. Note that if you want full content in your feeds you need to follow my instructions on how to enable full feeds with WordPress.

Step 8: Create Your Static Pages

Now we can play with the precanned content. Go to the predefined “About” page and change the content to match what you’re site’s about. You can place a contact form here or else create a new page for it. You may also want to create privacy policy and disclaimer pages, depending on what you’re doing with the site. (The latter pages are important if you plan on sending AdWords traffic to the site.)

Step 9: Make Your First Post!

Finally, you’re ready to make the first post. Delete the old one and write the first post. Make it a good one!

Step 10: Back Everything Up

Now that your site is up and running, back everything up. The simple backup solution is to use your FTP application to copy the entire site down to your local hard disk and then use WordPress’ export facility to backup all the content into an XML file that you store locally as well. Unfortunately, this won’t get all your plugin settings — you need to backup the database that WordPress uses for this. Follow the WordPress backup instructions to grab everything. You may also want to look at the WordPress Database Backup plugin for an automatic backup solution.

That’s pretty much all I do. It’s a lot, and there’s always tweaking to do afterwards, I find, but the steps above get your blog started on the right footing and you generally go through it just once. If you’re a normal publisher you’re not creating many blogs at once, so there’s no need to automate things, just give yourself an hour or two to finish the install.

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 20, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 9 Comments 

Black Mask AdSense: Initial Thoughts

Project Black Mask AdSense launched today to much hoopla, though my prediction about an early launch was wrong — in fact it launched 20 minutes late. I was able to purchase it but had to immediately run out the door to pick up my daughter and bring her to an after-school pool party, so I’ve only just now started to look at it. I will do a full review tomorrow, I think, as I’ll need to look through the advanced videos (it’s an upsell on the ebook purchase) as well.

Let’s get one thing straight: this is a book about building farms of “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. The fundamental premise is the one that I explained in 172 AdSense Sites = $5000 per month: that if you build enough sites that make (on average) even $1/day in AdSense earnings then you’ll make a decently monthly income. Note that they can be legitimate sites — it’ll just take you a while to build that many sites.

But Black Mask AdSense is about building lots of crappy sites quickly that target long-tail search engine results. You get those sites indexed (the recommended approach is through a blog farm) and if you do it properly enough of your pages rank in the top 10 search engine results for very refined keyword searches, giving you lots of organic (natural) traffic. Put your AdSense ads strategically on the sites and you’ll have a 10% to 20% clickthrough rate and make money.

Anyhow, that’s the gist of it from what I can tell. Definitely not an approach I’d advocate most people take. There is certainly some risk involved, especially now that Google has changed its program policies to require AdSense publishers to follow Google’s landing page guidelines.

More on this later. As one of my readers told me:

Even though I’m hardly a young guy anymore…I feel like life and work is supposed to be about something a lot more substantial than such a short-sighted view. Once you start down a path like these guys have…you are forced to play this game every few weeks or months for as long as you need to make money…then you can go retire to a villa somewhere and drink pina coladas.

Something to think about!

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 19, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 19 Comments 

Project Black Mask AdSense

Interesting weekend…. had a mail meltdown Friday evening which meant I didn’t get any mail for over a day. Which is very weird when you’re used to getting several hundred messages per day. Anyhow, things are back to normal but I haven’t made it through my backlog yet, so if you’re waiting for a reply then please bear with me.

Black Mask AdSense

Tomorrow marks the release of Project Black Mask, another ebook by the author of Day Job Killer, Affiliate Project X and AdWords Miracle. The formal name of the project seems to be Black Mask AdSense, actually, but the emails I’ve gotten are a bit hazy on this.

In any case, this latest ebook has an AdSense twist to it, according to all I’ve read about it so far. As ad AdSense specialist, this aspect interests me very much, of course. As it would most of my readers, I’d imagine. But I’ve not seen the ebook yet, nor do I expect to before its launch. I will post an update here and on my Black Mask AdSense lens at the first opportunity.

I must admit that I enjoy reading Chris’ ebooks. I’m sure he’s going to sell a lot of copies of this one. Although I’m not a betting man, I can almost guarantee that:

Because they sell in so much volume, the techniques in Chris’ books rapidly lose exclusivity. So if you really want to take advantage of what he has to say (part of me is worried, though, that he’s going to recommend things that skirt or even violate the AdSense program policies — be careful!) then you’ll need to block off several hours of time tomorrow to read the book and (maybe) implement his techniques.

Should be an interesting day, at the very least.

Will You Offer Bonuses?

Someone asked me if I’m going to offer a bonus for those who buy Black Mask AdSense through my affiliate link. (Note that the link won’t work until tomorrow.) I honestly don’t know. I haven’t read the book and I don’t even know what it’s going to be selling at. I’m in the dark as much as you are about this one! Stay tuned is all I can say…

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 18, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

Articles 101: Writing Articles For Traffic and Profit

Not too long ago, I did a review of Brad Callen’s free directory submitter software — great software you should download now. Brad’s now come out with a free article submitter, which I’m going to review in the next posting. But first I thought it would be good to recap some article writing basics. What follows is an introduction to article writing: why it’s useful and how you get started. It’s based on a series I wrote in October, 2005, which were originally published as separate posts on why article writing can drive traffic to your sites, how to get started with article writing and how to submit your articles to article directories. Here, I’ve combined the series into a single post and make some minor updates to the content. Please note that if you’re looking for more information about article writing (including bum marketing) then the ebook I currently recommend is Secret Article Profits, which despite a hyped-up name and a focus on affiliate marketing has good step-by-step directions on what to do.

Compelling Content

One of the best ways to attract traffic to your site is to write compelling content that makes them want to visit your site once they’ve seen what your writing is like. But how do they discover you in the first place? Search engines are the obvious traffic generator, but they’re not the only way.

What many people don’t realize is that you sometimes have to write compelling content for other sites in order to get traffic back to yours. The idea is simple: you write an article and allow it to be distributed for free by anyone, provided they keep your copyright notice and provide a link back to your site. Other people then post the article on their sites/blogs or send it to their newsletters (or “ezines”).

Pros and Cons of Article Publishing

There are three major benefits to publishing articles for free in this manner. While you don’t get paid directly, you do get:

The main disadvantages to article writing are that you lose out on exclusivity (your content is now available in multiple places, not just your own site/blog) and that it takes time away from other possibly important things. So you have to balance the article writing with updating your own site. Note, however, that the articles you write also make good content for your own site — nothing prevents you from placing them on your own site in addition to distributing them far and wide for others to use.

Also, not everyone writes well. A poorly-written article can be a turn off, even if you have some great ideas in the article. So it may make sense for you to hire someone to either write the article (based on your ideas) or to proofread it for you. You should have a good idea of your own skills in this area and adjust your expectations accordingly. Then again, if you’re writing compelling content for your site you should be trying to write well anyhow, so this shouldn’t be any different.

Article Writing Guidelines

Here are some general guidelines to follow:

You end the article with a biography or resource box, which contains the following information:

Article Formatting

Many people find it easier to write the article with a standard word processor like Microsoft Word, because then you can use built-in features like spellchecking and word counting. But you won’t distribute the word processing file as the final form of the article. (Note, however, that one of the main article directories — EzineArticles — actually lets you create drafts articles and includes basic spellchecking abilities with its online article editor.)

In fact, you need to create two versions of the article: one in plain text, one in HTML. Many article submission places accept only articles in plain text format, so you absolutely need a plain text version, which is basically a version that consists of nothing but alphanumeric characters and punctuation: no HTML tags, no special codes, nothing. You can normally save these quite easily from within a word processor, look for a “text” format and make sure that the file you save ends in a “.txt” extension. (Alternatively, you can just write your article using a simple text editor — on Windows I recommend you download the free NoteTab Light editor and use it instead of Notepad, it’s full of useful features.)

To put links in a text file you have to write out the link explicitly using the “http://” prefix, as in “http://www.EricGiguere.com/”. These are normally automatically converted to links when you submit the text version of the article. Even if they’re not, the reader of the article can just copy and paste the link into their browser — not as easy as clicking the link, but still doable.

Now, some sites do accept HTML, so it’s good to have an HTML version of the article available as well. For these, you can create normal links in your text and use additional formatting tags for paragraphs, bold text, and the like. (Most article sites, however, limit how many links you can include in the body of an article, and may have other restrictions. EzineArticles doesn’t allow affiliate links, for example.)

Article Distribution

Now you’re ready to start submitting the article to the various article submission sites. There are two approaches you can take:

Which approach you take depends on your goals for the article. Are you looking to dominate search engine rankings for a given keyword term? Then because of duplicate content issues you’ll want to minimize the number of submissions. Are you just looking for a large number of links back to your site? Then you’ll want to maximize submissions.

If you don’t care about duplicate content, put a copy of the article on your own site. If you can, put both the HTML and the plain text versions on your site. You can then have the articles provide links back to the “original” and “alternate” versions on your site.

Article Submission

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

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

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

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

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

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

You do need to submit it to some repositories, though. The best thing to do is set aside 15 minutes a day and submit an article to one or two repositories. Do this regularly over the course of a few weeks and you’ll be surprised at how many places your article shows up. You can use Brad Callen’s free article submitter to help with the process.

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

Conclusion

That’s pretty much all I have to say about article writing. It’s not hard, it just takes time and effort. Just like anything!

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 14, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

Series Recap: High-Paying Keyword Lists

Since my move to WordPress, I’m hoping more people will find this blog and the over two years of AdSense-related content I’ve created. To this end I will on occasion to a recap of some of my better articles from yesteryears gone by. This first recap is all about high-paying keywords and those keyword lists you see people flogging all the time.

The High-Paying Keywords Series

If you haven’t read this before, I’m sure you’ll find it useful now. Here are the five parts of the series:

  1. The kinds of high-paying keyword lists
  2. How high-paying keyword lists are created
  3. The problems with high-paying keyword lists
  4. Understanding keyword popularity
  5. Why keyword lists are useful

Note that there currently aren’t any forward references in these articles, I haven’t had time to fix them up. (There are only backwards references to the previous parts.) You’ll want to go back to this page after reading one part to get to the next one.

Has Anything Changed?

Now you might be wondering if anything’s changed since I first wrote those articles. Not substantially, no. Keyword lists of both kinds abound, as do various keyword tools. (If you’re in the market for one, the two I recommend are Keyword Elite and AdSenseAccelerator — I use both.) Google still doesn’t release the same kind of data that Yahoo does via its Overture tools, although there’s some worry that the latter will eventually disappear. The bum marketing trend has shifted some of the focus to low-competition, moderately popular long-tail keywords, but people still want to know which keywords are being searched for the most and which ones pay big bucks. I don’t expect this to change much ever…

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 13, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 4 Comments 

Are AdSense Earnings Dropping Due To Recent Policy Changes?

I’ve noticed a small decline in earnings over the past few weeks, and some discussions I’ve had with other AdSense publishers seems to indicate that I’m not the only one. Based on what I’ve seen, it seems clear that the drop is due to two things:

These policy changes are likely causing bid prices on the Google content network (AdSense sites) to drop as both MFA (made for AdSense) and arbitrage-driven sites are being shut down or forced to find alternate traffic and/or monetization methods.

Question for my readers: Have you seen a drop in your earnings? Leave a comment below and let’s take an unofficial poll…

In the short term this is bad for us publishers, of course, as it reduces the pool of advertisers who are willing to show ads on our sites. (Don’t forget that it’s the AdWords advertisers who ultimately pay us!) Of course, that pool was being kept artificially smaller than it should have been because many advertisers opted out entirely of content network advertising due to concerns about click fraud and the general quality of typical AdSense sites.

It seems, however, that Google is showing a renewed focus on the content network and wants to make it more appealing to potential advertisers. It could be that they’re finding that advertising growth on the search network is slowing down and that content network growth is one way to keep growing overall advertising revenues. I don’t know, that’s pure speculation, but for whatever reason they have decided to improve the quality of AdSense sites in order to grow the content network.

Today, for example, many PPC news outlets are reporting that Google is making detailed content network information available to its advertisers. This is great news. Up until now the content network has been a bit of a “black box” for advertisers, with no real way to track how ads were performing on the content network. The new reporting features will vastly improve this situation. (Warning to advertisers, though: you can ultimately expect the content network to start affecting your CTR rates and your quality scores, which they don’t do today.) More data about clickthrough and conversion rates will attract more advertisers to the content network. (Plug: if you want to advertise on the content network today for cheap, try the technique described in the AdWords180 ebook, it works very well. Actually, those costs are surely decreasing as well for the same reasons — fewer advertisers to compete against.)

So ultimately AdSense earnings will probably start climbing again, once advertisers start to realize that the content network is again a viable option for their advertising dollars. Until then, though, some publishers may be in for a rough patch.

Sponsored Link: For only $7.50 learn How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks to your sites. No fluff, no special software required.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 12, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 24 Comments 

Cheap Domains With Privacy

One of the things AdSense publishers tend to do over time is accumulate domain names. That’s certainly true for me, although I must admit I’m not doing everything I should with all the domains I own. (See 10 Ways to Benefit From Your Surplus Domains for ideas.) Although for historical reasons I have several domains registered with GoDaddy, for a couple of years now I’ve been using 1&1 for most of my domain purchasing. Why? Because it’s cheap — $5.99 for a .com domain, which is often cheaper than what you can get with GoDaddy even after you apply a coupon — and privacy is included in the price. In other words, I can register a domain and not have all my private information show up in the public records relating to that domain. With GoDaddy there’s an extra cost for privacy. If you just have one or two domains then it probably doesn’t matter, but when you’re dealing with dozens of domains then these costs do add up and it’s a good idea to minimize them whenever possible. 1&1 now has PayPal integration, just like GoDaddy, which makes domain purchasing even simpler.

While I heartily recommend 1&1 to anyone, note that the domain registration process isn’t nearly as quick as GoDaddy’s. With GoDaddy it’s possible to register a domain AND set the name server settings for the domain in one go, and the domain is ready within a few minutes. With 1&1 there’s a delay of several hours before the domain is available and you can’t set the name servers until the domain is ready in your account. For the most part this doesn’t bother me as I’m thinking long term with my domains and a few hours doesn’t make any difference, but if you need to do something quickly (as in you’re trying to quickly capitalize on a hot affiliate product) then use GoDaddy or another registrar.

Note that 1&1 also offers web hosting and related services, but I can’t comment on any of those. Just as I believe in separation of church and state, I also firmly believe in separation of hosting service and domain registrar. Keeping the two separate ensures that any problems you might have with one — particularly the hosting service — won’t affect the other. Take my advice on this one.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 12, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 6 Comments 

How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks

If you have AdSense sites, you need to concentrate on getting traffic to those sites. One of the best ways to get traffic is to get good search engine rankings for search terms related to your site’s topic. This is a non-trivial task, especially in competitive areas. It’s why so many “search engine optimization” and “search marketing” companies have sprung up in recent years.

Links to your sites — especially to individual pages on those sites — are important measures to the search engines of how important your site is. But not all links are equal. Google, for example, tends to give links from certain sites more weight than others. For example, any Joe, Dick or Harry can come along and register a “.com” domain — that top-level domain is open to everyone. But not all top-level domains are like that. The “.edu” domain has a very restricted membership: it’s limited to bona fide institutions of higher education and related organizations. And those institutions tend to be very trustworthy as a general rule. Those two facts combined mean that, everything else being equal, a link from a site in the “.edu” domain is worth more than a link from site in the “.com” domain.

There’s a simple way to get links from “.edu” sites back to your own sites and it’s described in detail in an inexpensive report called How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks Now! by John and Matthew Rhodes. I’ve obtained resale rights to the report and am offering it to you for only $7.50. Plus I’ve thrown in my own bonus report on how to use the method they describe to obtain the best possible links to your site. The technique can also be used to get backlinks from any site, not just “.edu” sites, and doesn’t require any special software — just a bit of time on your part. It’s possible to create 10 or 12 links an hour using this technique. Even getting one link a day back to your site will make a big difference over the long term.

Order your copy of How to Quickly and Easily Get “.edu” Backlinks Now! today for only $7.50, with instant delivery via PayPal. Just click the button below to purchase the report.

I’m sure you’ll find the report useful.

Sponsored Link: Speaking of money, if you’re every looking for ideas on how to quickly generate cash to your PayPal account, consider the Emergency Cash Plans report by Ben Shaffer.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 11, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 8 Comments 

GaMerZ WordPress Plugins

If you click through to the permalink page for any of my posts, you’ll see now that there’s a new “Print this page” link at the top and a post rating at the bottom. These facilities are provided courtesy of the WP-Print and WP-PostRatings plugins by Lester Chan. See his complete set of WordPress plugins for some other great plugins, all free. Be sure to send him a donation if you use any of them, he obviously spends a lot of time developing these.

On a related note, I’m debating whether or not to show only excerpts on the home page. I’ve always shown the full post text on the home page, but maybe it’s time to shake things up. The WordPress Excerpt Editor plugin would make it a lot simpler. I’d like to hear your views on this before I do it, though, so drop me a note or leave a comment indicating your preference.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 8, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

AdSenseAccelerator vs. Keyword Elite

One of my readers sent me mail asking me for a review of AdSenseAccelerator and how it compares to Keyword Elite. As it happens, I’ve already done several looks at AdSenseAccelerator. See these posts in particular:

Then there’s my original three-part review of AdSenseAccelerator:

You should read all of these postings if you’re considering signing up for the service.

And here’s the big difference for most people between AdSenseAccelerator and Keyword Elite: AdSenseAccelerator is a monthly service, Keyword Elite is a one-time purchase. AdSenseAccelerator is definitely for pro/serious AdSense publishers, because it costs $47/month. If you’re building lots of content and you want to find higher-paying keyphrases for that content, AdSenseAccelerator is a great tool. If you’re more of an occasional keyword researcher, Keyword Elite is probably a better choice. But read my comments and see.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 7, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

How To Test Your AdSense Layouts

As anyone who’s tried designing their own website or blog layout, it takes a lot of fiddling with things to get the pages on a new site/blog looking “right”. Adding AdSense to those layouts complicates things even further.

Crawled By AdSense At The Wrong Time

Although I devote a couple of chapters to this topic in Uncommon AdSense, here’s the basic idea when designing new AdSense layouts: you need to keep the AdSense crawler away from your layouts until you’re ready to see some live ads.

The first time an AdSense ad or link unit is displayed on a page that Google’s never seen before — by this I mean that the URL of the page is new, not the content — then the AdSense system displays ads based on what it thinks the page is about based solely on the URL of the page and the content of the other pages on the site. Meanwhile, it dispatches the AdSense crawler (the “Mediabot”) to fetch the contents of the page for analysis. This typically happens within a few seconds of the “first view” of the page.

Here’s the problem, though: you probably don’t want the crawler to analyze the page. Not yet, anyhow — it’s probably full of nonsense or irrelevant content. If it has any content at all! Which means the ads you’ll end up seeing will either be non-existent or poorly-targeted. Not at all what you want. Because once the page has been crawled it will be a while (typically hours, if not days) before the crawler comes back to revisit the page. Oops.

There are two general solutions to avoid this problem.

Solution 1: Use Test Pages

This solution is extremely simple. Put the AdSense code in your layout as usual, but don’t actually display any “real” pages. Only use test pages that won’t be made public. You can do this quite easily by creating a “test” folder on your site and putting your test pages in that folder. Tweak away at your layout until you’re satisfied with the way those pages look, then switch the “real” pages on your site over to that layout.

Solution 2: Don’t Use The AdSense Code

The problem with the first solution is that it isn’t always possible. Or not easy, at any rate. Especially with blogs, where there are fixed URLs that you’ll need to interact with as you tweak things. The solution in this case is to not insert the AdSense code into the layout. Instead, replace them with an equivalently-sized block of HTML.

For example, say you wanted to display a half banner, which is an ad unit that is 234 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. This half-banner has a grey background. An easy way to do this is to use a <div> tag with appropriate style settings:

<div style="width: 234px; height: 60px; background-color: #AAAAAA;">
</div>

This is what you’d see with the code above:

That’s it. You can do this for all your ad and link units. By explicitly specifying width and height you ensure that the other elements in your layout reflect their true positions. When you’re ready to go “live” you just replace the “fake” ads with real AdSense code.

The AdSensePHP Test Mode

To help you deal with this issue, I’ve just updated the AdSensePHP Lite script to include support for “test mode” code generation. It’s on by default, which makes testing simple. The code that gets generated in test mode is similar to what I described above in Solution #2, except that it displays a more AdSense-like “ad” that respects your color scheme choices. See AdSensePHP Test Mode for more details.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

June 7, 2007 | Filed Under AdSense | 3 Comments 

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