The Toolbar Guide: Using AdSense Referrals

I haven't talked much about the AdSense referral program. I can't even display referral buttons on this site (MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com) because AdSense ads aren't allowed on it anymore. (See my previous entries for why this is so.) It's hard to talk about a referral program that you can't even use!

Well, that's not quite right. I can use the referrals, just not on this site. A few weeks ago I started building, on and off, a site about toolbars called (wait for it!) The Toolbar Guide. Regular readers will note similarities between this site and my case study site, The Invisible Fence Guide. This is no accident, of course, since I used the same basic layout and approach of the latter in building the former. Warts and all, in fact — when I finish fixing up the current AdSense case study I'll have to go back and fix the Toolbar Guide, too.

You'll note that I'm not quite done with the site. I'm announcing it here, though, so that it gets quickly crawled by the search engines. As I've said before, one of the best ways to get a site indexed is to link to it from one or more blogs, because blogs are continually being crawled by various search engines for new content. It's a great way to announce a new site. Hopefully I've done a good enough job with my search engine optimization that the pages will rank highly for toolbar-related searches — we'll see where things are at in a few weeks.

Note that you can have more than one AdSense referral unit on a page, but the units must be referring different things. It's OK, therefore, to have a referral unit for AdSense and one for Firefox on the same page. But you can't put two or more Firefox buttons on the same page, for example.

Don't count on referrals bringing in a lot of money. I haven't gone whole-hog and placed them on all my sites for that reason. They work well in the context of something like a toolbar guide, but they're not appropriate for every site. What's especially missing right now are text-only referral links — the image-only nature of the referral units definitely makes them harder to fit into some page layouts.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.

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