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…

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.

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