Ah, where would I be without commenters to spur my grey matter into action? One of my readers left this question in response to my recent post on How Low-Paying Ads Can Dominate Higher-Paying Ads:

I don’t think it enhances the look of a page or the readers’ experience by having the max number of ads, but from my experience it has increased revenue. However, now with the very low earnings per click I’m getting, I’m wondering if it would be better to carry fewer ads.

Let’s stay away from the aesthetics and talk only about the earnings. So what’s the right strategy: more ads or fewer ads? As it happens, I deal with this topic in some detail in Chapter 14 of Uncommon AdSense. Here are some excerpts from that chapter.

Chapter 14: Display the Right Number of Ads

[The following is excerpted from Uncommon AdSense, Volume 1 and is copryight ©2007 by Eric Giguere. All rights reserved. Please do no republish this anywhere without my express written permission.]

When AdSense first appeared, publishers could only place a single ad unit on a page. (Yes, I’ve been using AdSense for that long!) That restriction was later relaxed to allow up to three ad units per page. (See Chapter 22: Know the Program Policies.) As you can imagine, many publishers immediately added two more ad units to their pages. Assuming each ad unit was showing four ads (the maximum allowed), that meant that up to 12 ads were being shown on a given page. But is that the right thing to do? Does each ad unit you add make you more money?

The Highest-Paying Ads Go First

AdSense displays the highest-paying ads first. Which is great for you, but what does “first” mean? There are two scenarios to consider:

• Within the ad unit. In horizontal ad units, the leftmost ad is the highest-paying ad – ads are ordered in decreasing value from left to right. In vertical ad units, it’s the topmost ad – the ordering is from top to bottom.
• Within the page. The highest-paying ads are displayed in the first ad unit seen by the browser. The ads shown in the second ad unit (as seen by the browser) pay less than the first unit’s ads, and similarly for the third ad unit (again, as seen by the browser) compared to the second ad unit.

Most publishers understand the ordering of ads within an ad unit, but you may not realize that the ordering of the individual ad units also influences your earnings. The ad unit the browser sees first is not necessarily the first ad unit visible on the page. It depends entirely on the HTML that defines the page. If the ad you think is first isn’t actually first from AdSense’s viewpoint then you may not be maximizing your earnings.

[An extensive discussion about page layout has been omitted.]

You may not care. If your pages are in a competitive topic area with plenty of ads to fill each ad unit (so you don’t have to worry about public service ads or alternate ads appearing in the prime clicking area) and if the bid gap (see Chapter 38: Mind the Bid Gap) is narrow then the ad unit order probably doesn’t matter. Of course, you’d be wise to test this assumption with the AdSense Preview Tool (see Chapter 17: Use the AdSense Preview Tool) to confirm that the ad inventory is as extensive as you think, especially when the page is viewed from other countries. See Chapter 18: Properly Handle Missing Ads for related information.

What Are The Alternatives?

But what if you do care? What are the alternatives?

1. The obvious solution is to change the physical order of the ad units so that the highest-performing unit (which may or may not be the one shown in the AdSense heat map – the heat map is a general guideline) appears first in the HTML.
2. If changing the physical ad unit order isn’t possible, another solution is to change the entire layout of the page in order to place the highest-performing ad unit in a position of prominence.
3. Instead of changing the page layout, consider moving the ads themselves to different parts of the layout.
4. Reducing the number of ads you show on the page is the simplest alternative. You can do this by removing ad units or by changing the ad formats you’re using.

[Note: The book describes each of the above in much greater detail.]

There’s no magic formula for determining which ads units to remove or reformat. Ideally, you’ll be guided by the tracking information you’ve collected for each ad unit (see Chapter 19: Track Ad Performance) and start by adjusting the least-performing ad units.

Test, Test, Test

There is no “one layout to rule them all” in the world of AdSense. What works on someone else’s site may not work on yours. What you have to do is test and make your changes in increments, seeing what happens.

[End of excerpt]

More Or Fewer Ads?

So the answer to my reader’s question is “maybe”, which I know sounds like a cop-out. But there are too many variables that influence what kind of earnings you get that it’s hard to come up with a blanket answer for everyone. Let’s say, for example, that in the particular layout you’re using it’s the second ad unit that’s getting most of the clicks. Then the right way to increase your earnings would be to drop the first ad unit entirely and leave the second (now first) ad unit where it is — this should increase your average per-click earnings. But that strategy wouldn’t work if the first ad unit was getting most of the clicks.

Now is a good time to re-read my post The One Answer To All Your AdSense Questions. You’ll have to look at your earnings, track where they’re coming from, and make decisions accordingly.

Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon 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.

This essay on why marketers sell resale rights first appeared on GeekAffiliate and is being reprinted here to give it a wider audience.

Any intro marketing textbook teaches the importance of defining and targeting specific market segments. Understanding your market is key to selling into that market. But do you understand your meta-market?

The meta-market

For online businesses there are two meta-markets: consumers and resellers.

Consumers are the traditional meta-market, the end, er, consumers of a product or service. To sell to them you must sell them on the features and benefits of the product. Show them how it fulfills a need or a want. All the usual marketing stuff.

Resellers are the other meta-market. Resellers take products and sell them to consumers. Or, more likely, other resellers.

So which meta-market appeals to you?

An example

Say you wrote an e-book on dog training. It’s a good book, and you’ve got some promotional material written. So which meta-market do you target?

The consumer meta-market is actually very hard to sell to. These are the same people that most marketers — online AND offline — are chasing. Lots of competition. Lots of money to reach them. Of course, if you have a high-traffic site about dog training or you’ve built a large mailing list of dog lovers, your job will be much simpler. This is why building a reputation and a following is important if you want to be successful at consumer selling.

Or you could go after the reseller meta-market.

Resellers are always on the lookout for products to sell, either to consumers or (more on this shortly) to other resellers. If there’s something unique and appealing about your product, if there’s a money-making angle you can exploit, the reseller meta-market can be extremely profitable.

Primed to spend, easy to reach

There are two problems with the consumer meta-market:

• Consumers are hard to reach; and
• Consumers are not easily convinced to spend their money online

The reseller meta-market, on the other hand, is almost the opposite:

• Resellers are actively searching for new products to promote; and
• Resellers are eager buyers of online products

Even though the reseller meta-market is much smaller than the consumer meta-market, it’s a much easier sell. I touched on this before when I talked about turnkey AdSense site economics, but it goes way beyond AdSense.

So what’s your meta-market?

Understanding which meta-market you’re actually targeting is one of the keys to succeeding as an online entrepreneur. The strategies you use to go after consumers are different than the strategies you use to go after resellers. There’s a lot of overlap, of course — you must convince resellers that what you’re offering is of interest to consumers, or at least other resellers — but you focus on different things.

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.

Time for a little break from AdSense to review another Internet marketing product. I’ve gotten some questions about the SiteStealer ebook that’s being promoted right now. At first I thought this was a book about how to frame product sites in order to get affiliate sales without using affiliate links (I show you how to do this in my report How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links, BTW), but that of course was just clever marketing by its creators. They’ve taken the “gangster” approach and have used a lot of innuendo to make it think that you’ll be doing something not-quite-kosher. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the “Rich Jerk” approach, although it’s nowhere near as insulting as the latter.

Banned From ClickBank?

If you believe what the other marketers are saying, this book’s been banned from being sold on ClickBank and on other places. That could well be true. Some of the order stuff I saw made reference to ClickBank, and they offer the same 8-week guarantee that all ClickBank products get, but when you order you actually pay through Paydotcom, which is the refuge of last resort for online marketers. (OK, that’s just my opinion.) If it was banned, though, it’s not because the content is controversial, it’s because ClickBank THINKS the content is controversial — they don’t actually read the ebooks that are sold there, they just look at the sales pages and whatever description the vendors provide. So they probably looked at the SiteStealer sales page (even the name by itself would give them problems) and decided to give it a pass. Maybe. Who knows?

What’s Included With SiteStealer

But who cares how it’s sold, it’s what’s in the package that’s important. SiteStealer is a 75-page ebook delivered in PDF format. (No popups in it, thankfully…) It comes with a number of bonuses (of course), including:

• A set of 229 headlines to use/adapt for your own sales pages.
• Headline Creator Pro, a Windows application that when run asks you four simple questions about the product you want to promote and then generates a whole pile of headlines based on your answers. (It’s kind of fun to use, actually, and you can build some really outrageous headlines with it!)
• The $7 Secrets report and the scripts that go along with it.
• Various on videos on creating your own resale rights product, how Peel Away Ads was promoted, etc.

Stealing Techniques From Others

By now you probably have a good idea about what SiteStealer‘s about: selling products online by “stealing” (legally) ideas and techniques from successful Internet marketers. There are 5 “levels” of “theft” that they describe:

1. Grabbing and rewriting winning headlines.
2. Swiping entire sales pages.
3. Swiping the entire business model.
4. Purchasing resale rights to a product.
5. Creating your own products to let others “steal” from you.

So really, SiteStealer compiles and explains various successful strategies used by online marketers, with an emphasis on the resale rights angle (remember GuruSlayer or Dominating ClickBank?).

Who Needs SiteStealer?

This product will appeal mostly to marketers who:

• don’t have a firm grasp of what resale rights are and how to use them effectively, or
• who want specific checklists and step-by-step breakdowns of how to create and market products, or
• who want “behind the scenes” looks at successful product launches.

I must admit that the latter part was what interested me the most, as of course I have my own products to promote and I’m the first to admit that I’ve done a terrible job promoting them. The “Peel Away Ads Deconstructed” video was particularly interesting, since I’m one of the people who actually bought resale rights to Peel Away Ads (PAA) and have been helping them build their empire! The deal with PAA is that although you purchase resale rights, you actually direct the buyers to the product site for order fulfillment after they’ve purchased the product from you. There they get exposed to an upsell and therefore you have an additional opportunity to make money from the customer. Meanwhile, the product creator builds his or her mailing list of customers and is able to keep those customers updated with the latest version of the product. So a win-win situation. (Note that the reseller can still build his or her own mailing list of customers as well.)

The video about building a resale rights product was also quite interesting: it’s still work, but it’s certainly a lot less work than creating your own product. (I know what that’s like!)

You also get a bunch of other bonuses, including process maps and checklists for various Internet marketing techniques and access to more case studies.

All in all, not a bad deal if you’re in the market for this kind of stuff. It’s not really anything new, but the real-world experiences described here and the processes used make it much more usable and worthwhile than things like Day Job Killer, at least in my mind.