OPAD Winner: Gary Hendrickson
Time to announce another One Page A Day winner! Today’s winner is Gary Hendrickson, The Auction Rebel. Gary makes a full-time living selling on eBay and his blog is full of advice at how to be successful as an eBay seller, with great tips like 6 Tips For Part-Time eBay Sellers or Where Do I Put This Book?. Check out his great site!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?
As a university lecturer, my wife occasionally gets a glimpse of what today’s young adults are excited about, no matter how perplexing that excitement might be, and sometimes she passes those tidbits on to me. Something one of her students told her this week has left me wondering if Facebook has jumped the shark and is about to die a slow, lingering death.
The Facebook Phenomenon
By all accounts, Facebook is an Internet phenomenon. What started out as an exclusive site for university and college students (you needed a college email address to sign up) has grown into a global social networking site on the same scale as MySpace. According to Alexa, and I know Alexa’s numbers aren’t perfect, Facebook ranks #6 globally. (The top 5 as of today are: Yahoo!, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace. One could argue, though, that the Google and YouTube numbers should be combined, since they’re both owned by Google, which would make Google either #1 or #2. But I digress.) Here’s the latest traffic snapshot:
Looks great, doesn’t it? A steady upward growth that any site would be thrilled to have. Facebook’s even been in the news lately for nabbing two high-profile Google executives. So what makes me think that Facebook may have jumped the shark?
Facebook “isn’t interesting”
Back to my wife’s student. According to her, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Facebook isn’t interesting anymore to me and my friends.”
OK, that’s a sample size of 1. Or maybe more than one, since she implied it wasn’t just her. Do a bit of digging, though, and you find others expressing similar views:
- Quitting Facebook
- Are the cool kids leaving Facebook?
- Who will give students their Facebook back?
- Why I quit Facebook
If Facebook’s core constituency is slowly leaving, where does that leave Facebook?
More Numbers
Back to the Alexa numbers. Traffic is up, but it looks like the average page views per visitor are going down:
In fact, the average number of pages viewed per unique visitor this week was 23, down from 26 page views a few months ago. Looking at the graph, there was a definite dip at the beginning of February, although I’m not sure what caused that. I do know my wife’s students are concerned with the privacy issues around personalized advertising that Facebook introduced last fall to a lot of flack.
SocialAds: The Facebook Shark
Ten years from now, historians will try to define exactly when Facebook jumped the shark. There are two strong possibilities: when Facebook opened itself to everyone, or when it introduced the SocialAds advertising system.
My bet is on the latter, because of the negative publicity and privacy concerns it engendered. The aforementioned student referred to it, as have others in the commentaries I’ve followed online. While people rarely object to a shopping site making recommendations based on past purchases, having a social networking site passing along information about your preferences and purchases seems to cross an unwritten line in the sand. Too much like Big Brother, it would seem.
Of course, I have no idea if Facebook is in decline or not. This is all speculation on my part. Only the Facebook execs know for sure, and maybe that’s why they went out looking for talented individuals to help them beat back the shark and still make decent money (a problem for many social networking sites).
If I were them, though, I’d be worried.
P.S.: Eric Giguere on Facebook
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Google Bans Deceptive AdSense Ad Placements
It took them long enough, but Google has finally put the kabosh on deceptive ad placements. Specifically:
- You can’t place ads under misleading titles or headings; and
- You can’t blend the ads such that they’re indistinguishable from other content.
This is not a ban against ad blending in general — choosing ad colors to match the color scheme of the rest of the page — but a ban against ad placements that are specifically designed to fool the user into thinking the ads are not ads, but content.
I’ve seen some egregious placements over the years. I remember once reading an ebook that specifically recommended you use a heading like “Top 10 Methods To Stop Smoking” followed by a large rectangle ad unit and then a list of 6 stop-smoking tips. This made it seem like the ads (which would normally — but not always! — show 4 ads) were part of the list. That kind of reader duping is now specifically forbidden.
Google Improving the Content Network
These measures are part of Google’s overall strategy of improving the quality of the sites in the Google Content Network, which includes us AdSense publishers. AdWords advertisers can now use demographics to target the content network . Many of the recent messages from Google to its AdWords customers have been trying to encourage advertisers to try the Content Network.
It may be that Google is seeing slower growth in its core search advertising business and has therefore renewed focus on the contextual advertising business. It’s too bad it’s taken so long for these things to happen, though.
See also Search Engine Roundtable.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Review: iContentRobot
Today I took iContentRobot for a spin. This monthly membership was hyped a lot late today and given my interest in traffic and content I thought it was worth looking at. So let’s see what’s inside this “robot”. Unlike Web Traffic Machines, this system actually works. You just have to understand its limitations and decide if the price is worth it.
iContentRobot
iContentRobot bills itself as a content generation system that will generate unique content for each and every member that uses it. (Like many IM products sold recently, it’s a membership-based service with a monthly or annual charge. When ClickBank made recurring payments an option for publishers, it sure turned on the floodgates for this kind of service… though I should point out this product’s not sold through ClickBank.)
Unique content sure sounds good, but how is it done? They assure us it’s not done by combining snippets of text pulled from other sources. Nor is it rehashing existing articles or PLR.
Here’s the trick: iContentRobot is not a general-purppose content generator. It only works with a limited set of topics at any given time. This month there are 50 or so topics to choose from: credit card debt, wedding favors, easy weight loss, etc. Basically you log into the service, choose your topic, and it generates a unique article for you about that topic. Press a button and it will regenerate another article on the same topic.
So how does the content get created? My guess is that’s it’s actually a very simple system at its core. For any given topic they write one article. Then they write multiple variants of each sentence or phrase, probably a large number of variants. The variants are all written so that any version can be combined with any other version and be perfectly readable and understandable by a human. “Generating” an article is then done by randomly selecting variants. if the pool of variants is large enough, this should yield a “unique” article. This is all speculation on my part, but I’m pretty sure I’m write.
Let’s take a look at a couple of samples. Here’s one on credit card debt:
It was only a matter of time before the number of people experiencing credit card debt would increase; many families are now experiencing severe financial problems. With the debts rising, it is not surprising that individuals have started to realize the financial problem they have created by the constant and indiscriminate spending they have carried out. Before the situation goes too far, seek a credit card debt relief solution to the problem.
The first step is to stop using the cards altogether as continued use will just compound the problem and make it harder to resolve. The reluctance to make a decision can create further delays to obtaining credit card debt relief. There are various debt consolidation alternatives available but the three most common options are detailed below.
Obviously, the easiest way to proceed is to apply for a credit card with a low interest rate on balance transfers where the debt can be consolidated where repayments can be made regularly within a specified budget. Another method is to arrange a consolidation loan to relieve the debt, then paying just one amount which is easier and within a budget.
The only problem here is that the debtor must be determined enough to stick to the plan they have made until the end. Whilst arranging a new low interest rate card or loan to consolidate debts is the easiest option to take, it is also only available if the person’s credit rating is in tact.
Where credit card debt relief as an option fails, do not give up hope as the next step is a debt negotiation company. Debt relief companies usually have a good track record at this type of negotiation with the usual arrangement of around half the outstanding debt will have to be paid and any balance can be dropped.
The final option is bankruptcy which should not be taken lightly but if the debt is totally out of control and there is no way to escape from the debt trap then filing for bankruptcy may be the only way out. This is the last resort for a debtor because once they declare bankruptcy, their credit standing fails and it will be difficult to get further loans; however, the positive aspect of filing for bankruptcy is it enables a fresh start. Once your debts have been cleared, hopefully you will learn to be more responsible and not require debt relief from your credit cards ever again.
Now here’s the same topic again:
Credit card debt is beginning to cripple many people who are finding themselves with huge debts; the industry may be flourishing but the ease with which credit is given is causing financial distress to many. With the debts rising, it is not surprising that individuals have started to realize the financial problem they have created by the constant and indiscriminate spending they have carried out. It now remains for each individual to realize what a position they are in and find some way to obtain credit card debt relief.
The first thing to do before opting for financial help is to stop using the card all together because if this doesn’t happen it will be almost impossible to devise a debt relief plan. The reluctance to make a decision can create further delays to obtaining credit card debt relief. Of the options available, three in particular come to mind as the best ways to approach the debt consolidation problem.
Obviously, the easiest way to proceed is to apply for a credit card with a low interest rate on balance transfers where the debt can be consolidated where repayments can be made regularly within a specified budget. If this method is not available then a consolidation loan may be a debt relief answer where a number of debts can be replaced with just one at a lower monthly installment.
This option does require a certain level of commitment on the debtor’s part as once the debts are clear there must be no temptation to use them again. Debt consolidation does require that the debtor is still able to access credit and that they will have sufficient funds to repay the loan.
At this point, debt negotiation is one option available, provided you decide to make a lump sum payment and if the debtor lets a credit card debt relief company negotiate with the creditors on their behalf. The company can negotiate with the creditors to accept some money, generally about 50 percent of the outstanding balance and then write off the rest.
Bankruptcy should always be viewed as a last resort when all other options have been tried as there are serious consequences to this course of action. This is the last resort for a debtor because once they declare bankruptcy, their credit standing fails and it will be difficult to get further loans; however, the positive aspect of filing for bankruptcy is it enables a fresh start. However, the debtor must remember that opting for debt relief from their credit cards cannot become a regular feature and must be careful not to get into such a situation again.
Look closely and you’ll see what I mean.
So while this system produces “unique” articles, they’re still articles on the same topic. Useful if you want to submit articles to different article directories, not so useful if you’re trying to build a niche content site — it’d be silly to publish what is essentially the same article over and over again on the same site.
Note that you can’t resell the content in any way, so you can’t go and build PLR bundles or anything like that. You can use them on blogs, websites and article directories. It’ll be interesting to see how many of these articles show up on EzineArticles and other IM hotspots over the next month.
If you’re looking for unique content over a fixed set of niches, iContentRobot may be for you. Introductory pricing is $67/month.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Serge Giguere: Winner of Governor General’s Award
Once in a while I make a post that has absolutely nothing to do with AdSense or Internet marketing. Today I’m happy to announce that one of my (many) uncles, Serge Giguere, is a recipient of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts for 2008. This is a big deal — in Canada, the Governor General’s Awards are akin to the Pulitzer Prizes in the United States. Serge is a documentarist and cinematographer and he does all his work in French, of course, so it’s unlikely anyone here would have seen or heard of any of his films, but I thought it deserved a mention. The nomination for the award by a film critic is particularly interesting reading if you’re not familiar with Serge’s work. Congratulations to Serge!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.<
The Wrong Kind of Traffic
Yesterday I mentioned that my fence had been hit, again. Here are some pictures to show you what I mean. The picture on the left was taken in December, 2004, and is featured on my Electronic Pet Fence Guide on the page describing what I had to do to repair our Invisible Fence system. The picture on the right is the latest crash. Both pictures feature my daughter making faces in the foreground, just to add the human touch…
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Anyhow, on to the topic at hand…
Bad Traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. No traffic, no visitors.... No visitors, no clicks... No clicks, no AdSense earnings! I was reminded of this recently when my AdSense earnings dropped because I lost a lot of traffic.
The quest for traffic sometimes leads people to sign up for "traffic exchange" programs. AdSense publishers should be careful, however, when doing so. The AdSense program policies state:
These prohibited methods include but are not limited to repeated manual clicks or impressions, using robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. (emphasis added)
As you can see, Google doesn’t like “autosurf” type programs. And in general they don’t like low-quality, non-converting traffic sources, which is what these traffic exchanges end up being. If you use such programs, you stand a good chance of either getting smart priced (very likely) or else getting kicked out of AdSense altogether.
In other words, stick to the usual means of traffic generation:
- Search engine optimization
- Submitting to article directories
- Web 2.0 techniques including videos
- Blogging and RSS feeds
- Signatures in forums posts, comments, and similar user-generated content sources
You can also use legitimate paid sources of traffic like AdWords. Just stay away from the programs that “guarantee traffic” or compensate you for visiting other sites. It’s just not worth the risk.
PLRSiteBuilder Customers: If for some reason you’re not on my customer mailing list, you’re missing out on updates and such. I’ve started a blog for the product, but you also need to be on my list. Contact me for details.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.<
Keyword of the Day: forex, short for “foreign exchange currency trading”. Approximately 1700 searches per day.
OPAD Winner: Manuel Viloria
It’s hard to believe it’s Easter! It’s so early this year, apparently it won’t come this early again for another 200 years or so…. and someone just hit our wooden fence again with their truck, although this time they took out part of our neighbour’s fence, too. At least our Invisible Fence system wasn’t affected this time. And, thankfully, no pedestrian was hit on the sidewalk.
Today I want to feature another One Page A Day challenge winner, Manuel Viloria. Manuel runs a site providing tips on Internet marketing. He generated a bit of controversy during the whole AdSense Resurrected debacle by offering free AdSense coaching to purchasers of said book.
Anyhow, Manuel provides some great tips on SEO, AdSense, affiliate marketing and related topics in his blog, and he seemed quite happy to take part in the challenge. Be sure to check out his site.
More winners are coming!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Review: Web Traffic Machines
Before I jump into the review, I just want to let everyone know that I’ve decided give everyone who finished the One Page A Day challenge a free copy of PLRSiteBuilder in addition to the AdSense book. So you’re all winners! Watch this blog…
Today, though, I want to focus on Web Traffic Machines, which has the dubious distinction of being the first ClickBank product I’ve disliked enough to ask for a refund.
Web Traffic Machines
A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of hoopla about Web Traffic Machines, or WTM for short. I lost track of how many Internet marketing gurus were promoting this sucker. I didn’t feel like coughing up a $97/month membership, so I took the $37 10-day trial instead, figuring it would give me enough time to take the software for a spin. I was pretty busy with other things, but I found some time to test things out. (If you don’t use these tools carefully, don’t be surprised if the search engine cops pull you over and tell you to get a DUI attorney for driving traffic to your sites via questionable methods.)
WTM is actually a set of software tools. Like most such tools, they only work on Windows — sorry, Mac and Linux users! (They may work on a PC emulator of some kind.) There’s a “meta-tool” for starting the individual tools, but it never worked on my Vista machine. After contacting support about this (the clock was ticking, after all) they told me to download the individual tools one-by-one. First, though, I had to wait for the tools to be activated — you can download the software right away but it took a few hours for activation to occur, which was a surprise. (Seems to me they should learn a thing or two about customer relationship management — when you lay out real money you want to use the stuff right away.)
As it turns out, all the software included in WTM is downloadable for free anyhow. So you can try each software tool once with no restrictions and decide if you like them or not. If you purchase WTM you get an activation code for all the tools that are part of the WTM package. I’m not sure how many of these tools are actually new, certainly the packaging of them into a monthly membership is new.
I noticed all the gurus was saying the tools could be used for nefarious purposes in the hands of the wrong people and that it was up to you to use them responsibly. I see what they mean. With these tools you can create “unlimited” accounts on GMail, Yahoo, various forums, AOL, create Google pages, create WordPress blogs, create Blogger blogs, etc. A splogger’s wet dream, in other words. (Of course, some people dream of washers and dryers. To each his/her own…)
Putting aside the fact that the tools aren’t that obvious to use (I was scratching my head a lot on a few of them), I can’t honestly condone the techniques being used. There’s a fine line between using tools to help you do your Internet marketing and using tools to spam as part of your Internet marketing, and I think WTM crosses that line.
Anyhow, I don’t have much juegos online gratis pokerjuegos de cartas pokerpoker internet gratisreglas poker cartascomo jugar a pokerjuego de cartas pokerpai gow poker portal internetpoker por internet gratis,poker internet,jugar poker en internetpai gow poker portaljuegos de poli pokercartas lineapoker brokerjuegos de polly pokercaribbean poker paginas internettexas holdem rulespoker de dadosjuego poker online gratistop poker en lineajugar omaha pokersexy poker onlineworld series of pokerbwin pokerjuego al instante onlinecuartos del pokerdescargar juego de pokertorneo poker gratisjugar poker en lineapai gow,pai gow poker,pai gow poker portales internetreglas texas holdeminformatica pokerpoker del juego librepoquer de dadosapuesta pagina webtrucos ruleta americanawww casino netjuego gratis ruleta downloadganar premio portal internetonline kenojuegos flash casinopremio dinero portales webcasino tropezcasino pagina webapuesta dinero portales internetapuesta dinero onlinejuegos interactivos lineacasinos internacionales portal internetjugar tragamonedas,jugar tragamonedas linea,jugar tragamonedas webplay baccara onlinejuego casino paginas internetjuego gratis pagina internet else to say about this. Visit the download page above and take a good look at the tools and you’ll see what I mean. Maybe you’ll find them useful, and certainly the WTM membership is a cheaper way to get access to them in the short term. I suspect most of my readers, though, will be better off pursuing more traditional traffic generation methods.
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
OPAD Winner: Lane of Vegan Bits
I’ve been wondering how to announce the winners of the One Page A Day Challenge and rather than just present a list that no one will read, I thought I’d do individual posts featuring all of the winners. Today’s winner is Lane of Vegan Bits, a blog about the vegan lifestyle.
My parents went vegan not too long ago, so Vegan Bits’ content isn’t unfamiliar to me. Like Lane, they became vegans for the health benefits. I think the first few months were challenging, but they seem to thriving on their new diet, just like Lane and his wife. (See A Choice To Eat Vegan.) Lane did a number of reviews of vegan restaurants and various vegan products to fulfill his OPAD requirements, and I think he did a great job. Please visit his vegan blog and let him know what you think!
Winners: when you see the post referring to you, please contact me so we can arrange your prize. Thanks!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
The AdWords Death Dance
As you know, I’ve been experimenting lately with sending traffic to sites via AdWords. If you’ve tried this before, you know it’s tricky to do, because it’s easy to fall into the “AdWords Death Dance”.
The AdWords Death Dance is an upwards spiral in ad costs that is triggered primarily by ads with low clickthrough ratios (CTRs). The CTR of an ad is perhaps the most important thing about it, because Google rewards high CTR ads with higher ad positions and lower ad costs. Even if you have a great, relevant landing page, a poor CTR will push you into the death dance and turn your AdWords campaign into a money-sucking black hole.
Most AdWords advertisers spend a lot of time choosing the keywords they’ll target. But that’s a mistake. Spend most of your time on the ad text. If you can’t make an ad that people will click, you’ll find that after about 100 ad impressions your minimum bid prices will start to increase — even though you’ve done nothing to change the situation. I haven’t quite figured out what the CTR threshold is, but certainly anything below a 1% CTR is a fast push into the death dance.
After you’ve got the perfect ad text, deliberately overbid when you first activate your campaign. Compelling ad text is absolutely necessary, but you also need to get the ad up where people will see it. You have to bite the bullet and overpay in order to get high initial ad positions. Then when the ads are clicked and you have a reasonable CTR you can start ratcheting the price down to something more reasonable. Your ad should stay in relatively the same position if you do it slowly and the ad maintains a high CTR.
All of this takes time and (perhaps most importantly) money. You’ve got to approach it seriously. Don’t do the AdWords death dance!
[Note that everything I just said applies to ads on the search network. Ads on the content network aren't treated in the same way because of the sheer number of content sites out there. Which is good, because you can get cheaper traffic that way. But it doesn't seem to convert as well, either, so you need more traffic. A high CTR is still important here.]
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
OPAD Challenge Now Closed
Yesterday was the last day for our One Page A Day challengers to get their last entries in for the contest. Overall, I think it was a great success for the participants, although it was a washout for me. But anyhow, I’ll be tallying the entries and announcing the winners in a few days, as soon as I find an hour to go through everything. Thanks for participating everyone! All the challengers who succeeded will get a free copy of Uncommon AdSense and a nice summary post (with some good backlinks) describing what they did.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
New AdSense-Friendly Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress
Yesterday I wrote about how Google is requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on their sites. If you’re a WordPress user, I’ve made the job a bit easier for you with my new Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress, which you can install for free on any or all of your WordPress blogs. It generates AdSense-compliant privacy policies like this one, even creating the page for you if that’s what you want. You can also use it with non-AdSense blogs, as the privacy policy is fairly generic.
If there’s interest, I’ll add more options to this plugin to make it more flexible. Please leave a comment on the plugin download page with your requests and I’ll be happy to oblige.
Spread the Word!
If you think this plugin is useful, I’d love to see you help me spread the word about it. Feel free to vote for it:
- Digg: AdSense-compliant Privacy Policy Generator for WordPress
- Propeller: New privacy policy generator plugin for WordPress
And, of course, be sure to bookmark it with del.icio.us and your other favorite bookmarking services.
P.S.: Don’t forget to check out my SEO Siloing plugin as well.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
The New AdSense Privacy Policy
A few days ago, all AdSense publishers were presented with a new set of terms and conditions. If you don’t agree with the new terms, you’ll be booted out of the AdSense program at the end of May.
One of the changes to the terms and conditions that will affect all AdSense publishers is the new privacy policy requirement. Here’s what Google wants:
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws and that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
Most AdSense publishers are familiar with cookies, but the term web beacon may be new to you. A web beacon is also known as a “tracking pixel” — a small (usually 1 pixel high by 1 pixel wide) image that is inserted into the background of a web page. The beacon is the same color as the background (or is transparent) and hence invisible to the user. When the browser fetches the image, however, a web server can track some basic information about the user (IP address, any cookies, browser used, etc.). Beacons are generally used in HTML emails to track when and how many emails are read as part of an email broadcast.
To abide by the new rules, you are going to have to retrofit all your AdSense sites to include an appropriate privacy policy. It’s not hard to add a privacy policy, but if you have a lot of sites it will take some work to update them all. If you’ve built sites recently, chances are you already have a privacy policy in place, but it’s probably not comprehensive enough.
So what should your privacy policy look like? I’m going to help you do it quickly and easily — watch this space!
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
European Vacation at End of August - Ideas?
Excuse me for this digression, but we’re trying to plan our summer vacation. Due to my wife’s teaching schedule we’re limited to the last two weeks in August. We’ve been to Paris and London already, any ideas for a good one-or-two week European trip at that time of the year? We’ve been told to stay away from Rome and Greece because of the temperatures…. so we’re looking for alternatives. Post away! And thanks in advance…. (We could do Paris again, but it would be nice to have another spot to visit as well.)
It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!
Time for me to fess up. Midway through February, I did something really stupid. Without going into the details, most of the pages from my best-performing site were summarily dropped from the Google index. Oops. My attempts at fixing the situation got two other sites banned completely. Triple oops! So much for quickly paying off the new car! As the traffic’s dried up, so have the AdSense earnings. At this point I’ve resigned myself to the situation and I’ll just have to build some new sites to take their place… it’ll be a long process, of course, because traffic doesn’t happen overnight.
Losing organic traffic is a common complaint among webmasters, and it’s not always their own fault. It’s something to consider, however, when your earnings make it past a certain level. Which is why in some sense it’s better to follow the create-many-sites-with-small-traffic model than the one-big-site-with-all-the-traffic model (see the AdSense Crapshoot for what I mean).
I’ve been experimenting with using the AdSense Resurrected model (we probably need to come up with a better name for it given the negative association with the ebook) on a single small site in a non-IM niche. To recap, the model involves sending low-cost PPC traffic to a squeeze page. Subscribers are then sent a new message every 2 or 3 days asking them to read one or more articles on the site. Some percentage of those visits will result in ad clicks, making you money, and possibly even affiliate sales, making you even more money.
So far, the clickthrough rates on the site are quite high. The average for the month just past is about 32%, with average per-day earnings around 60 cents. That doesn’t sound like much, but there are only 40 or so subscribers so far.
There are two major gotchas with this method, however:
- You need a good squeeze page. You’ll definitely get traffic to the site (but see the second point), but a lot of that traffic won’t sign up for your list. This is a perennial problem with list-building, of course. You need to come up with an excellent reason for people to join your list (a great freebie) and ad text that makes it clear a signup is required. These are non-trivial things to do.
- Don’t pay too much for subscribers. Currently, I’m in a loss situation with respect to my ad spend vs. my AdSense revenues because I didn’t pay too much attention to my spending in the first few days as I was trying to deal with my traffic situation (see above). My per-subscriber cost is therefore $1.40, which is way too high given my squeeze page conversion rate.
None of the subscribers have made it through the complete set of emails yet, however, so it’s still too early to tell what the ultimate result of this experiment will be. The niche I chose was perhaps not the best niche, too. So many variables to test…
I’d love to hear others’ experiences with that model, since I know some of you were planning on implementing it. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on getting free traffic to my sites. It takes time, but the price can’t be beat! 
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
OPAD Day 29
The last day of the One Page A Day challenge! Wow! Sorry for being so late in posting this… Please leave your final entries here.
Remember, you have until March 10th to submit all your content, after which I’ll compile a list of “winners”.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
OPAD Day 28
Wow, hard to believe that the One Page A Day challenge is over now.
Please add your links for Day 28 here…
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.