Go 2 Adsense

by: Nintendo

Some times I get a message that says 'Page could not be found' with a 404 error, where the link units should be. What do I do?

Make sure you alternative ad URL is working, and from AdSenseAdvisor..... I recommend contacting http://www.webmaster-headquarters.com/faqs/adsense-support@google.com. They should be able to tell you what's happening.

Everyday, my 'aggregate' clicks are about 15% more than the sum of all my channel clicks. Why do I have missing clicks?

If you are using URL channels, some of these clicks could have been generated from cached versions of your page appearing in search engine results. Also, someone might be framing your content so the clicks are attributable to a different URL. Using 'www' in your URL channel can also have an effect on tracking.

If you are using custom channels, it is likely that one of your ad units might not be attributable to a channel.

Is it OK to create an Adsense Search Engine, ie direct users to a particular keyword?

I recommend reading the 'Implementation and Operation of Ads and Search Results' section of the AdSense ToS (http://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms).

We ask that you do not pre-populate search results. Search queries should be generated naturally by your users. In fact, a new AdSense for search feature allows you to see the top 25 queries generated by your AdSense for search box, which is a feature many publishers requested to help with site optimization.

Also, as per the AdSense program policies (http://www.google.com/adsense/policies).... We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services...

If you have elected to receive Google search services, this would include other search services on the same site and non-Google query-targeted ads. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

Can we have images above or next to our ads?

Yes, but include a border line between the ads and use generic ads.

From AdSenseAdvisor... Placing images above AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. However, depending on the method of implementation this could be considered `encouraging users to click on ads'.

Encouraging users to click on the Google ads appearing on your site is prohibited by AdSense program policies.

The reason for this is to prevent artificial inflation of advertiser costs. This benefits both advertisers and publishers by preserving the integrity of the network, and maintaining its long-term viability.

If you have concerns about whether you have implemented your ads in a way that complies with AdSense program policies, feel free to email us with your URL. A specialist will be happy to conduct a review, and you will not be penalized

My Adsense ads stopped showing up on some of his pages, and then stopped showing up altogether. Why?

This problem is isolated to your colleague's computer and you are able to see ads on your computer.

I have several suggestions which might clear up this problem. First, have clear your browser cache and delete the browser cookies on both IE and Firefox.

This sometimes solves the problem. Next, make sure that JavaScript is enabled on the browsers. If the problem persists, I suggest taking the following measures:

1. Scan your computer for viruses, making sure that any anti-virus programs on his computer contain the most recent updates.
2. Download and run an anti-spyware program to remove any adware and/or spyware from his computer.

What are CPC ads versus CPM ads?

Cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM). When AdWords advertisers bid on a CPM basis, their ads will compete against CPC ads to display on your pages.

Our technology automatically displays whichever ad will generate the maximum revenue for that page, so these ads should only improve your site's revenue potential. if a CPM ad appears on your site, you will be paid each time it appears on your page, not every 1000 times.

The term 'cost-per-thousand-impressions' refers to they way AdWords advertisers bid on these ads. For example, an AdWords advertiser might bid $X for 1000 ad impressions.

If this ad appears on your site through the AdSense program, you will receive 1/1000 of $X each time the ad appears. This type of ad will only show on your site if it represents more revenue potential than a CPC ad.

Can we view CPM ads on our own site?

You are permitted to view CPM ads appearing on your pages without the risk of creating invalid ad impressions.

Will AdSense effect my Google listings?

AdSense does not affect either positively or negatively your site traffic or its ranking in the Google search results.

Posted by somaya at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments

by : Nintendo

Are AdSense Trackers OK to use?

If you're not modifying the code, or trapping the clicks or changing the way ads are processed, it should be all right to implement a click-counter script like the ones suggested. Do be careful not to change the ad code without realizing it, though.

How can I view my ads with out clicking them?

If you are using Windows and the Internet Explorer browser, you can download the Google AdSense preview tool. More information is available at: http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=160 If you are not using Windows or do not have access to the Internet Explorer browser, you can view the destination URL of ads appearing on your site by following the instructions on: http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=9876 If you use these tips, you can set your mind at ease when you want to view the ads appearing on your site.

Should I be worried about all the accounts disabled for invalid clicks reports?

I've noticed there seems to be concern surrounding accounts disabled for invalid clicks. We have not made any significant changes to our monitoring system recently, and would like to reassure publishers that we value our relationships with you. However, sometimes it is necessary to disable some publisher accounts to maintain the quality of the network and ensure the long-term viability of the program. We have strict policies and guidelines for invalid clicks. However, each escalated case is re-reviewed by a team dedicated to detecting invalid activity using several specialized tools and a wide variety of techniques. Generally, this action is reserved for deliberate and egregious violations of the ToS and should not affect most of you. In most other cases, we try to work with publishers to comply with our guidelines and improve the results of their AdSense implementation. In all cases, if you notice something suspicious in your account statistics, or if you feel there has been a misunderstanding, please email us.

Will I get terminated for not generating enough clicks or impressions?

While this language is indeed included in the T&C, please note that we have never done this sort of termination

Can Adsense be in pop-ups?

According to AdSense program policies (http://www.google.com/adsense/policies): No Google ad or Google search box may be displayed on any domain parking websites, pop-ups, pop-unders, or in any email. From AdSenseAdvisor... The reason for this policy is that Google believes strongly in providing a positive experience for the user. We have found that pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. take away from the user experience.

Can I have AdSense placed in a newsletter (online) that is accessed by a link in an email to a sites newsletter subscribers?

As long as the newsletter is a live HTML page, you should be able to use AdSense. The ToS apply to newsletters sent out by email (i.e., when the text of the newsletter is pasted into an email). If the email you send out only contains a link to the newsletter page, you should be fine.

Posted by somaya at 6:59 AM | Permalink | Comments

by Nintendo

What is a channel?

It's an extra code you can have added in the ads that does some great stuff. To track each of your ad units, link units, and AdSense for search boxes. Then you can figure out on your own which color schemes, placements and ad formats are most effective for your particular site.

I clicked a bunch of ads on the first day, and I didn't know. What do I do?

If you accidentally click on your own ads, it's best to let the AdSense team know. Email http://www.webmaster-headquarters.com/faqs/adsense-support@google.com and explain the situation

Google Adsense ads (and AdLinks) are using italic text. How do I make them look normal?

Firefox Adblock extension can cause that, and AdSenseAdvisor said... Try clearing your browser cache and deleting your browser cookies. Sometimes strange things happen when cookies are corrupted.

I got some English text on my site, but it's mostly *Insert other language.* Why do I mostly get PSAs?

It looks like PSAs are appearing because *Insert other language* is currently not supported by the AdSense program. While I see that there is some English content, it is probably not enough for our crawlers to be able to determine the meaning of your page and serve relevant ads. If you are not satisfied with the ads that are appearing, I recommend removing the code until we are able to support *Insert other language*. I see you are already using AdSense for search, and recommend continuing to use this option in the meantime. AdSense serves ads that are relevant to the text-based content of a given site, which provides a positive experience for advertisers, users and publishers. If AdSense is placed on a site written in an unsupported language, the ads probably won't be relevant. Therefore, we kindly ask that you do not modify your code to try to alter the natural targeting.

Posted by somaya at 6:49 AM | Permalink | Comments

One of the difficulties I have found in writing a Tutorial Series is that there is such a range of readers, from the beginner right up to the expert.

I decided from the beginning to try to write chapters which would be helpful to both groups and everyone in between. Beginners might look at it as a start to finish guide while I hope that even experts can find a few gems hidden within them. That being said, now that you have actually set up your company, its time to build a site to accompany it.

So many people do this as the first step, which I believe is a mistake. You gain so much insight from the Business Plan stage that if you had built your site early, you would most likely want to change it drastically afterward. In order to instill some sort of organization, I will be dividing the process into steps.

How to Build ItThis seems like a very basic one but to a first time entrepreneur, it can actually be daunting. Where do I start? What software do I use? What are my Options?
If you ask at any SEO or Webmaster forum they are going to tell you to learn HTML and use notepad to write it. I wouldn’t disagree with this advice and in fact this truly is the best way.

Unfortunately, it can also be the slowest as there is a learning curve, especially if you don’t even know what HTML is. I will discuss alternatives but first, if you want to give this method a try, there are a lot of tutorials out there.

As long as you don’t go the eBook route (most are scams and filled with ads), you should be all right. I recommend resources like w3schools HTML Tutorial but it really comes down to your own comfort level. By using notepad and writing each bit of code from scratch, it will mean fixes in the future will be very easy.

As an alternative, there are many programs out there that allow you to design your site independent of coding and are often referred to as WYSIWYG programs (What You See Is What You Get). These programs are great but because you aren’t actually coding, they have their limitations. I recommend that if you go down this route, use a split screen and see the code it is generated.

You may find it easier to teach yourself HTML by going backwards in this fashion.. The two best programs are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage. The Microsoft program is cheaper but not as feature rich so if you have the money, definitely spring for Dreamweaver.
What I would not suggest under any circumstances is using online WYSIWIG programs combined with hosting such as Homestead.

Although when first starting out, it may look easy and inexpensive, it works out much more expensive and transferring your site is extremely difficult if not outright impossible. I will talk about free hosts later but they would also be something to avoid.

Site Design
When designing a site especially for E-Commerce it is important that everything you do or add is for a reason. The only acceptable reason is to improve customer experience and conversions. Now in achieving that goal it can be further divided into fast loading, clear intuitive navigation, simplicity, and general ease of use. Have friends or family test out the site and see if they can find what they are looking for. Many people doing their first site try to put as much info as possible in every page rather then smartly dividing it into several pages, being sure to keep intuitive navigation.

Also be weary of the “latest” tricks such as Flash unless they truly add something to the site and even then they should be an optional part. I can’t tell you how many sites I have bought, removed the flash, and relaunched which saw a huge increase in conversions. Unless you sell very technical stuff (and even then its questionable), don’t even use Flash.

Design Your Site for People, Not Bots
Many people when first starting out are under the allusion that getting their site ranking number 1 is the main goal and the key to success. It would surprise those people to know that my eCommerce site get 80-90% of their conversions from other places then the natural listings. Don’t let the fact that ranking in a Search Engine like Google is “free” cloud your judgement, because in business you always need to put a cost to your time.

This means for most people starting out, ranking number one in the natural listings is actually one of the most expensive options. So when designing your site, be sure to use natural language rather then keyword stuffing. Its OK to use your keywords wisely but once the sentence becomes difficult or impossible for your target market to read, they will associate you with the ton of spam sites out here and think twice before ordering.

For instance
“We sell widgets and widget accessories to meet all your needs” is good“We sell widgets, blue widgets, red widgets, green widgets and other widgets for cheap. Get your widgets and widget accessories or other widgets” is bad
Have people that know nothing about Search Engine Optimization read it and give their assesment. Even most webmaster forums will warn you that it sounds spammy. In the end keyword stuffing gains you very little as the major Search Engines rely a lot more on how sites link to you then they do on page content.

You may move up a position or two keyword stuffing your site but what good is that if you lose 10% of your customers because of it.
The most important thing is to think of your site as a first draft and a work in progress. The chapters in the weeks ahead should teach you a lot about marketing which is crucial to incorporate into a site design. Traffic is relatively easy to get but keeping it and getting the visitor to buy is the real challenge.

by jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments

According to today’s Guardian, Tesco is to take on Microsoft by producing its own brands of software.

Now obviously the same guys who roam the aisles and shrug when you ask them where something is, luckily won’t be programming the new software. They have partnered with a company called Formjet who will handle the software creation while Tesco will handle the branding and distribution. Formjet is known for making knockoffs of Microsoft products with varying levels of success.

This type of strategy by Tesco who already sells car insurance, offers financial services and petrol seems to really fly in the face of what most business advisers will tell you. The conventional way of thinking has always been to find your strengths and improve/innovate on them rather then spread yourself thin trying to be all things to all people.

Despite taking on some pretty ridiculous business ventures already (anyone have a Tesco computer?), it doesn’t seem to phase them. With the recent announcement of half year profits of £1b (they only crossed the £1b a year hurdle 3 years ago) it would seem to be oddly paying off.

I am probably one of the worst people to give business analysis on Tesco though as I stopped shopping there years ago. Compared to their competitors their stores are far dirtier, their produce bordering on the ridiculous at times in regard to freshness, and staff that are either non existent or incompetent. I suppose the staffing problem may just be indicative of full employment though as comprehension is the biggest issue.

Me: Can you tell me where the sprinkles are?Them: (Blank Stare)Me: Hundreds and Thousands - Ya know, the little candy pieces you put on Ice Cream?Them: ohhh (They walk me to another aisle and proceed to hand me some Bacon Bits)

It will be interesting to watch if these odd offerings pay off in the next few years. An Post, which is our Post Office, did a similar thing offering every service you could think of. In their case however it resulted in massive losses as they struggled with their identity. Their core service of mailing things suffered the most and instead of fixing their issues, they decided to offer extended financial services such as mortgages and advice. It has so far been a disaster.

I would still suggest for those with a small or online business, resist the temptation to try to add profit by taking on unrelated products and expanding your scope. There is way more profit to be had in better sourcing and streamlining. It is a more efficient profit which can be crucial to a business that may have few or no employees.

As far as Tesco is concerned, I look forward to Tesco Hospitals which I am sure aren’t far behind. Maybe they will put in an MRI scanner between aisle 6 and 7.

by jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments

There was a time a couple of short years ago that asking what the importance of your Alexa ranking in a forum would get a million responses that it was worthless and all of those people were right. I then ignored those discussions over the years because they were all exactly the same. That was until a recent thread on Digital Point Forums where another new webmaster posed the question and although it elicited many of the same “It is easily manipulated” responses, there were a few dissenting voices. Now being used to post count padding, I wouldn’t normally have paid attention but those denying the ability to manipulate it are people who I regard as pretty up to date and knowledgeable in these areas.
So being drawn into the thread I decided to post my same response from a few years ago outlining all the reasons it could bot be trusted for rankings under 100k. I figured maybe these usually informed posters just didn’t realize the wide range of tools out there for changing your ranking drastically. The response back was a simple and plain one: If those tools work so well even now, prove it and manipulate your own rank.
Now it is really common for discussions in forums to break down when people just keep saying prove it but in this case I felt it was a legitimate point. It was so easy when I previously changed it, it would only take a week or two to do the necessary tests with minimal effort and be crowned king of that particular thread. I love proving peoples wild accusations based on myth wrong so this was a perfect opportunity.
So the experiment begins. The first step to any manipulation is to just install the toolbar on a few computers, preferably with different IP address’s. I only have two that fall into that category so I put the bar on my home computer and my work computer. I don’t normally put what is basically “spyware” on my working computer but I thought it would be beneficial to the challenge and the small tweak of the firewall would be worth it. Normally doing this and setting the soon to be manipulated site as the home page causes enough refreshing to give you a huge boost. After all, each install in the old days represented thousands if not tens of thousands of computers.
Then I pulled out the big guns. I rooted around on my hard drive and found an old Alexa booster program and set the machine going. I’m worthless when it comes to programming but as far as I can tell, it uses a proxy system to access your site thousands of times through the Alexa toolbar, “spoofing” a unique visitor each time and racking up the brownie points. Just in case that particular program was blacklisted by Alexa, I also found a few more boosters via eBay and installed those. I couldn’t wait to manipulate the ranking down to like 35K and show how ridiculous Alexa is as a ranking system.
Now normally I would see results at the next update which used to happen every Sunday night/Monday morning. I’m not sure when it actually happened but before I knew it, this site which had a starting point of 402k rose to 403k at the next update. To be honest I was expecting for it to drop by about 250k in one go like the old days so I figured the update didn’t take my work into account YET. So I patiently waited for another update and it went up again to around 404k. Now this was getting ridiculous as it seemed all my efforts had absolutely no effect. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that it actually settled back down to around 350K. You would be tempted to say that a 50K+ drop was phenomenal but when you are in the 400k range it is pretty much meaningless. To this point I still haven’t seen a drop down past the 100k mark which would have normally happened within a single update.
The testing I did convinced me that Alexa is not as easily manipulated as it used to be. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be able to be manipulated at all. One area where there does seem to be inconsistencies still is the fact that webmasters tend to have the toolbar installed in way bigger numbers then the average Joe. This is turn means that webmaster resources like directories tend to have highly inflated Alexa values. In the above example, the 400K site is actually a very successful site of mine that pulls in huge visitors and 6 figures a year. In contrast, if you are going by Alexa numbers alone, you would think that this blog has significantly more traffic and potential for revenue. This blog, however, is nowhere near the numbers nor success of the other site. What this means is although Alexa can be off when it comes to the reach, it is still a good comparison tool for sites in the same industry.
So if the above is actually true and I am of course now one of the believers, is the previous myth that Google uses a bit of Alexa ranking in its algo still so dismissible? If it is no longer so easy to manipulate and the only existing problem is comparing sites in different industries, it’s not a stretch that Google would use it, even if as a very minor part of the algo.
If anyone has a manipulation tool they believe still works, please email or post a link in the comments and I will definitely give it a try. I will only accept the methods though as anyone just posting, “It is easy to manipulate” will be ignored since I truly believe Alexa has either achieved a critical point when it comes to number of installs or have limited the number of same range IPs it will accept as votes.

by jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

You may have read in the Building Your Website chapter that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a minor part of running a successful online business. There are many that may disagree with that sentiment but after years of experience (and many offline years before that) it is my personal opinion. I try to judge everything by using a time to benefit ratio, that is comparing the amount of time spent on a particular discipline versus the amount of benefit (profit) you receive from it. I don’t dispute the Search Engines bring in a lot of traffic but in the majority of industries where physical product is being sold, there are many more time efficient methods.
All of that being said, you should do at least the basic amount of SEO to get your site going, which is what this chapter covers. If you have the staff or the spare time and want to make SEO an integral part of your strategy, I will include some resources for getting the information and advice needed.
In order to apply the basics of SEO, you will need to understand how the Search Engines find you and how they rank your site against all the others. We will firstly talk about finding you (called Indexing) as this is the one thing I believe all businesses should actively seek. When you run offline campaigns, it is very common that you will have people that remember your name but not your url, especially if it is long or has dashes. It is for this reason that you want to rank first for your business name, which if unique, would happen merely by being indexed. Search Engines basically work by going to sites which it knows are there and following every internal and external link on those pages. When following internal links, it adds the pages it finds which is how your entire site can show up in the results. When it follows external links, it adds the new sites it finds to its results and so on. So it is possible to have a site for years and if there is not a single link from a recognized site to it, it would never be recognized by Google. Anyone doing the basics should be able to get their site to appear in approximately 7-10 days. I have gotten sites indexed within hours before while I have also had it take considerably longer. The speed at which it does get indexed depends on the number of links which point to it. The thinking there is that the more links point to a site, must correspond with how popular or important it is. How to get these links will be included further down the road in this chapter.
So once the Search Engines find you and add you, they need to decide where to place you in the rankings. There are a few things you can do to your site to improve your rank. The first is to be sure to utilize your title. With so many people using template systems, I see the title tag wasted by having every page just list a few keywords there. What you should be doing instead is give a descriptive and unique title to every page you have. Try to avoid unnatural language as most times, your title will appear the the Search Engine Results and when it comes to click through rate, a smart and interesting title will bring in a lot more people then one which makes no sense, even if it uses all the words you are targeting. When it comes to on page factors, you need to always remember that customer experience should figure in higher then SEO benefit at all times. Those that are most successful with SEO are able to balance the two perfectly. After your title, your attention should turn to the keywords you use throughout the copy on each page. Although on site text benefits you more in Yahoo and MSN, it can still affect your position in Google. Again, be sure to use natural language. To avoid an overcrowded or spammy feel, if you are targeting multiple keywords create unique pages for each. I never advise anyone to have all of their products on one page as it is very difficult to SEO. If having this setup is customer friendly, I suggest then adding a “More Info” link to each product. You can then use laser precision to SEO each page while keeping the page itself clean and crisp. Although the description and keyword meta tags have very little bearing on the major Search Engines, they should still be used and unique to each page. Avoid any other metas as they are not time efficient as the Search Engines do not even look at them. Most SEO’s will advise you to use H1 tags for your keywords but this should only be done if it does not take away from the design of the page. They are not given the recognition they used to get from the majors so its only a “If you can” situation. The last area of on site optimisation is to be sure to have clear and inclusive navigation (using text links where possible) and a comprehensive site map within one click of your index page. Your site map should not be a auto generated one but instead a hand coded page using descriptive keywords for every link. This is important for both customer retention and SEO.
Once you have your site in order, it is time to turn your attention to linking. This is the area you will most likely spend your time and is quite important. There are several ways to get others to link to you which I will outline below. They are in no specific order as the usefulness of each method and its effectiveness is a topic for debate. This tutorial is meant to give you the tools with the hope you will use them to form your own opinions.
Useful or Unique Tools and Games
This is probably my favourite although it can be the most difficult to use. I am sure most people have linked to something they thought was cool. It basically works on the principle that if you provide something people truly like, not only will they email the link to others, if they own a site they will probably link to it there. In the past it has been a great way to generate related links which although there is a debate on whether Search Engines give a bonus because they are related, there is no debate that they bring a higher quality (judged by conversion rate) of traffic. If your programming skills are lacking, you can go somewhere like Rent a Coder and as long as you know what kind of tool you want, they can create it for you for very little cost. Although they are now a dime a dozen, a good example would have been different mortgage calculators for a finance site. Almost every industry can work in some tools which will bring in traffic and create links. Last year one of my tools brought in 500,000 unique visitors and generated 1,000’s of links. The creation of the tool cost me around $20.
Reciprocal Linking
This is by far the most popular and used method. The basic principle is that, in exchange for a link to your site, you place a link to their site. There are many that would say a recip link is not counted or viewed upon as highly by Google, but I have seen sites of mine rank highly purely with reciprocals. The downside is that due to its popularity, there are a lot of hijinks associated with these trades. It is common for conmen to remove your link a few days after your trade and not telling you, adding a nofollow to your links (So SE’s don’t count them), or disallowing their linking page in their robots text file. All of these things mean that you either have to spend a lot of time tracking these things down or you lose a lot of the benefit of the links you worked so hard to achieve. It is for these reasons you should not rely on this method exclusively. There are some tools to increase your efficiency such as Link Market and Click Sentry amongst many others but just because you use these tools, it doesn’t mean you don’t have exposure to the issues outlined above.
Linking Networks
After people started seeing success with recip’s, it didn’t take long for them to start developing automated systems. These systems allowed you to put a piece of code on your site that would display a prespecified number of links and in exchange your links would be displayed on others sites. All of these links would be Search Engine friendly and because they are part of a system, you would never have to worry about being cheated. These systems are highly effective but in order to take advantage of them you need to have a site which has a lot of pages indexed and/or a high PR. My personal advice would be to be careful though as although they will help in your rankings, be sure that text link advertisements will not hurt your sales or conversions. You are able to specify footer links which seem to have minimum negative effect on customer conversions versus something like a flashing banner or pop ups. Probably the two biggest and most trusted are Link Vault and the Coop Network.
There are many more aspects to SEO but as this was a guide for the beginner, using the tips and suggestions outlined above should give you a good start at very little to no cost. I always suggest people start with the basics as there are many more important uses of your time for a new business. Once you find you have the time to commit to SEO after all your initial work, you can do more research at places like SEOmoz which is an excellent resource. My only warning would be to be careful to not get too bogged down. That site represents professional SEO’s who tend to be proactive in their approach. This is great for someone who does nothing but SEO but any business owner should practice reactive SEO where you use proven knowledge which you implement on your site. In most industries this will get you Top 10’s with very little expense or work and is much more resource efficient. Leave the experimentation to the big guys as your only focus should be converting sales.

by jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:43 AM | Permalink | Comments

I recently wrote a short “How To” Guide about getting your AdSense account reinstated. It proved to be so popular that I decided to do a follow up which contains my letters to Google. Keep in mind that these were written while I was learning the process myself. If I had been able to read my own “How To” guide, I may have done a few things slightly differently. That being said, there are some people that may find them helpful regardless. It is also worth noting that I did not receive a response until after my last letter.
Letter 1
Dear Sirs,
I believe our account was suspended due to a spike in activity. Please allow me to explain the reasons and have the account reactivated and our balance restored as soon as possible.
Our health tool located at (removed) was recently featured on the Nationally Syndicated Kim Komando show. If you are not familar, this is a radio show that goes out to over 10 million listeners. In addition to this feature, we were also featured on their site as “The Cool Site of the Day”. You can view this high profile listing here: http://www.komando.com/koolsites_cat.asp?catID=xxxxxx
Her cool sites also go out on her newsletter which has millions of subscribers. This went out on August the 18th and meant around xxx,xxx unique visitors. This number has decreased every day but would still be considered more than usual.
I imagine our account was suspended due to this spike and am hoping our account will be re-activated and the balance restored after human review so that we can continue to grow with the AdSense program.
I can also provide our raw logs to back up all of this and would be more than happy to do so.
I can assure you that we are a long established company that believes in doing things the right way. We would never click on our own ads as we are AdWords advertisers ourselves and have always supported the AdWords/AdSense
Furthermore, If you would like to talk to us over the phone, feel free to provide a number and we will be more than happy to discuss this issue further.
Looking forward to your response,Jason(removed)
Letter 2 (I also put the previous letters below the new one divided with a line for reference)
Hello,
I just wanted to check in and see if there is anything I could do to aid in your investigation of our AdSense account. As an Adwords Advertiser, I certainly appreciate the need for checks on accounts. It is those checks and balances that have kept me loyal to AdWords for the last couple of years.
I hope once this is concluded, I can continue to grow my site along with the AdSense program as it is truly the best advertising program we have been associated with.
Let us know if there is anything you need (including logs)
Thank You,Jason(removed)
Letter 3 (The subject line in each of these is “Re: Investigation”)
Dear Sirs,
In order to aid your investigation of (removed), I have include the email from the Kim Komando Show below. Hopefully this helps to explain the spike in traffic. If you need any additional information to aid in the reinstatement of our account, do not hesitate to ask. Our previous correspondence has also been included below their letter.Thank You,Jason(Removed)————————————————From the Kim Komando Show:————————————————Dear Webmaster,
Congratulations! Your Web site is being featured in The Kim Komando Show Cool Site of the Day on August 18, 2005.
In case you are unfamiliar with Kim Komando, she hosts the largest talk radio show about computers and the Internet. The program is heard on over 450 stations throughout the United States. You can learn more at our Web site:
http://www.komando.com/
We are alerting you because you are likely to receive a large spike in hits. Our newsletters have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Many of them will try your Web site, so you are likely to receive far more traffic than usual.
Let us know if this mention by Kim helps you out!
Thank you,–James (removed)Content DeveloperThe Kim Komando Show(contact details removed although it was a phone, fax and email)
Letter 4
Dear Sirs,
I trust your investigation is going well, may I again take this opportunity to say that I don’t feel I have done anything to break the rules of your TOS and would like to offer any help I can in terms of web logs or any other information. You can let me know what I can do through email or supply a phone number and I will be more than happy to speak to a representative.
Thank You,
Jason
(removed)
Letter 5
Hello,
As it has been nearly a week since the investigation of our AdSense account started, I just wanted to send a short email to see if there was anything else you needed me to provide to help you along. It has come to my attention by reviewing my logs that it may be the large percentage of “blocked refferers” that triggered the automated investigation. As you will see below, much of our traffic was due to an email newsletter sent out by the Kim Komando show. James Marshall has provided the details of that newsletter and is available for any questions you may have. He can be contacted at (removed)@kom ando.com or 602-(removed) ext. xx. It is my hope that the investigation concludes favourably as we have always supported AdSense and have just built our momentum through original content for our visitors. I look forward to the outcome of your investigation
Jason
(Removed)
It was at this point that my account was reinstated in full.

by Jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments

It is certainly no new phenomenom to see forum posters complaining about being banned. In fact, many forums members have grown tired of the repeated posting which typically look something like:
I wuz banned frum assent for no reason! How do I get my acct backPlzzzz Help!!!
There are so many posts like this that I thought I would address the issue from both an analytical and personal standpoint. To debunk some of the myths going around that people are banned for no reason and even more to the point that these bannings of accounts (more of a suspension really) are completely and easily reversible provided there has been no violation of the Google Terms of Service.
How can I give such advise? I am one of the muppets who has banned and posted in a forum. Now I can’t say my post was anything like the one sampled
above, and I actually chose the forum I was going to post my questions in as carefully as I chose my words. I decided against posting them at Digital Point basically because for once I wanted a highly moderated environment. I wanted to avoid the natural backlash and rubber necking associated with these threads. If its a brand new member there is a “here we go again” attitude (highly deserved unfortunately) and if its a long time member there is a “whats the site, thats a shame” attitude. Neither of which informs nor helps your case so in my instance I decided to go with WMW. I thought at the time, I might even get a look from AdSense Advisor who hadn’t started posting at Digital Point yet.
My account was banned August of 2005 and of course I found out by not being able to login. The dreaded letter did not arrive announcing the ban for around 2 days and I have to say it was a stomach turner. Before I get into my eventual reinstatement and my tips for others, I should first explain why I was banned. The official reason was invalid clicks but as we all know, that is a catchall phrase and does not neccesarily mean “clicking on your own ads” (Although thats most common). The actual reason was because I was featured on a Radio Show syndicated throughout the world. This show sends out a newsletter which goes out to a few million people so its routine that your site goes down as all that traffic hits you. I was prepared for that aspect but I never thought to notify Google about the feature.
Now I can’t discuss specific days and CTR’s as I do not want to violate the Google TOS. However, I will talk about monthly numbers which is allowed and will give you an idea on the numbers involved and why it was signifigant enough to get red flagged. In the month before that feature I had done $1,800 with the majority of that being the affected site. The month in which I received my ban I did $7,800 (I was down for around 7-8 days due to the ban otherwise I would have probably hit 5 figures) on what was around 500,000-600,000 impressions. This is quite a signifigant difference, made even more problematic by the fact that most of these carried blind refferers seeing as how they got to the site through their email client.
Now on to how I was actually able to get the account reinstated. I want to take this chance to reiterate that I never violated the TOS. That means I didn’t click on any of my ads ever (even by accident) nor where there any other violations. This is important because your strategy may differ slightly if you made a “mistake” and clicked one of your ads or something similar.
Step 1:Email Google - You can do this either by replying to the notification mail or using their online form.
As far as the contents of your emails:
Remain Nice. Rather then going into a rant on how they can’t do this or they are being unfair, remember that they are the ones that will reinstate you so kiss a bit of butt. Use phrases like “I realize that click fraud is a real issue facing AdWords Advertisers” and “I have full respect for your program and would never violate the TOS”
Don’t Threaten Legal Action. This is a biggie because as soon as you say “I am going to sue you”, they pass your account off to the legal department who file it away awaiting your lawsuit. So unless you have already sent the paperwork, don’t even mention the word lawsuit
Offer Anything You Can. This is most commonly logs but it can also include emails, letters or screenshots. Basically make the offers and be sure to let them know “If you need anything, Please let me know”
Check the Grammar and Spelling. So many people put 10 seconds into their letters and not only are they difficult to understand, they severely hurt your credibility. Right or wrong, Google may think “If this guy/girl can’t take the time to properly write an email that decides the fate of their account, are they really the type of Publisher we want?”.
Step 2:Prepare Documentation - If you think your ban was due to a jump in traffic, put together your logs and burn them on to CD as a backup to your server. If there is a reason for the traffic, try to get a letter from the refferer. In my case I wrote to the Radio Show and they provided a letter explaining the whole situation and gave their contact information.
Step 3:Don’t Give Up - Develop a regular schedule of emailing Google. Try to always save a few pieces of information so that you are able to send an email each day. It can take anywhere between 5-30 days for a human review which is what your goal is here. If you give up after 2 days, don’t expect a response.
Step 4:Don’t Post About Your Experiences Publicly - A human review takes time so posting to a forum with all your details can only hurt your case for reinstatement.
In my case, I received a lot of this advise from others who I respected and had been in the same situation. For my account it actually worked and not only did I get the account back but all back monies were reinstated.
So if your account has been banned and you firmly believe you did not violate the TOS, there is hope. I have spoken to probably around 20 people who were banned in similar circumstances and every single one got their accounts back with full reinstatement of funds.
Best of Luck on Your Crusade!

by Jason :- the source is here

Posted by somaya at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments

Posted by somaya at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something - relax).

It was 10.30am and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on at the time. I shifted the ad to a new position and then got distracted with something else and forgot about it.

A few hours later (I got very distracted) I again was thinking of bed but decided to check my Adsense stats for one last time before shutting down my powerbook - imagine my surprise when I found that my click through rate was 40% higher than normal (and so was the earnings for that time of night)!? At first I thought I was dreaming, then I considered that maybe Google had made a mistake, then I panicked that someone had been randomly clicking all my ads - and then I remembered the repositioning of ads that I’d done a few hours before.


Needless to say I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake excited by the potential that I’d just unlocked in my blogs, inspired by the fact that I could make the same changes to all my other blogs tomorrow, kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier (what a missed opportunity) and wondering if there might be an even better spot to try putting my ads.

The following morning I lept out of bed and checked my Adsense stats again to find that my click through rate was even higher than the night before and that I’d stumbled upon a way of doubling my income - literally over night.

Posted by somaya at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments

Bloggers often complain about irrelevant AdSense ads on their blogs, but you hear fewer relevancy complaints from non-blog site owners. Why is this? You have look at how AdSense works to see what might be causing those problems.

If you analyze the AdSense patent you'll see that a number of factors come into play when AdSense tries to determine what the page is about:

The URL of the page
The page title
The anchor text of links on the page to other pages
The anchor text of links to the page from other pages
The content of the other pages the page links to or that link to the page
The keywords that appear most frequently within the page
The keywords on the page that appear less frequently across the entire site
Search engine queries that lead to the page or to another page that links to the page
Sometimes all it takes is one word or phrase to trigger different ads. Look at these two examples I've concocted (the links open new windows): here and here. The pages differ in only two ways: the URLs are slightly different (abcde-1.html vs. abcde-2.html) and one phrase has been changed. Otherwise, they're identical. But you see different ads on them, don't you?

This is why section targeting is useful. Here are the same two pages with section targeting used to exclude the bolded phrase: here and here. The pages now show the same ads or none at all — use the AdSense preview tool to test different geographies. We've taken out some trigger words and there's not much else left in the content that corresponds to keywords that advertisers are bidding on. We could fix this by changing the URLs to include some descriptive keywords. Here are the same pages with meaningful URLs: here and here. See how important the URL is if there's no biddable content?

So if you're having trouble with ad relevancy, look objectively at your page and see what's on it that might be throwing AdSense off track. Do you have lots of links to feeds and other blog-specific stuff? Try excluding them with section targeting. Are your titles up to snuff? Make sure to include a keyword or two whenever possible. Do you have proper headings instead of plain text made to look like a heading via CSS? If not, fix it. Does the URL structure lend itself to giving AdSense good clues about your content? Fix it if it doesn't.

Remember that to do your testing you'll need to cause the AdSense crawler to visit a page so you can see what it thinks of the content by the ads it displays. The only way to guarantee that a crawl will occur when you want it is to use a new URL for the content. But you don't have to create new pages, you can just use the change the query parameter trick to quickly test changes to pages.

Hopefully this helps!

Posted by somaya at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments

For a long time now, I've recommended that AdSense publishers join Google's AdWords program. (If you don't know what AdWords is, see my AdWords summary.) There were two good reasons for joining:

To access good keyword estimates
To drive traffic to your own sites by buying ads
Now there's a third, even more compelling reason: AdWords customers get access to the Google Analytics service for free! (Actually, the program is free to all comers, but AdWords customers aren't limited to the number of page views they can track.) Google Analytics tracks how visitors use your sites by gathering all kinds of statistics. All you do is register your sites and embed some simple JavaScript code onto your pages. Google takes care of the rest.

Google Analytics is something that Google acquired during one of its (few) recent acquisitions. (Google doesn't buy many companies, and the ones it does tend to be small, Google seems just as interested in getting good people as well as intellectual property. I doubt you'll see them ever buying a big company because of that -- too much chaff. But I digress.) As a company, Google loves to collect and analyze statistics, so it's no wonder that they're interested in collecting statistics about how people visit websites in their quest to provide better searching and advertising services.

Google Analytics is already causing a lot of buzz, so spend the money to join AdWords (it only requires a credit card and a small initial payment of $10 or less -- it depends on where you are in the world) and reap the benefits of seeing what's happening. The great thing about this is that even bloggers whose blogs are hosted on sites they don't control -- like the blogspot.com domain -- can use this service. This is a great way to get some good data on what people are doing on your site.

Note: expect delays when trying to access the Google Analytics site for a while, at least until the dust settles due to the excitement this is causing in the webmaster community.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

Posted by somaya at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments

It's rare, but on occasion access to the AdSense management console is unavailable from the usual www.google.com/adsense address. If it's not working and you really need to check your earnings, try logging in through one of the alternate domains like www.google.ca/adsense or www.google.fr/adsense, since these entry points may be up even if the main "google.com" site is down or inaccessible. You'll get a "Domain name mismatch" error from your browser because the security certificate is for "google.com" and not "google.ca" or "google.fr", but if you just ignore that you can still access the management console. You may have to select a different language using the language selection box at the top of the login page -- for example, "google.fr" defaults to (big surprise) French text.

This tip brought to you courtesy of Eric Giguere, author of Make Easy Money with Google, an AdSense book for the non-technical.

Posted by somaya at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are a great way to control how Web pages look. They make it easy to separate the presentation from the structure of the content. However, some people go overboard and use CSS in ways it shouldn't. When this happens, AdSense publishers often find that the ads being displayed on their sites are mistargeted. What's happening?

As I explain in Make Easy Money with Google, HTML is a markup language. Its primary purpose is to describe the structure of a Web page. Tags let you specify which parts are headings, which are paragraphs, what the title is, and so on. HTML tags also let you format text using tags like (i) and (b) to indicate italic and bold text, for example. However, much of the formatting was done poorly and it polluted the content -- there were (font) tags all over the place and all kinds of tricks were done with (table) tags to get things to position where the Web page designers wanted them.

The emergence of CSS removed the need for many HTML formatting tricks, which is great. HTML returned to describing the structure of a document. However, there are a few tags that you should not remove. For example, don't remove the header tags [(h1) and so on] . Don't remove (b) or (i) tags. The tags are used by AdSense and search engines to figure out which keywords are prominent and important in your content. If you take them out, you're making it harder for them to figure out what your content is all about. Leave them in, but take out the other formatting tricks.

Posted by somaya at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments

The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something - relax).

It was 10.30am and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on at the time. I shifted the ad to a new position and then got distracted with something else and forgot about it.

A few hours later (I got very distracted) I again was thinking of bed but decided to check my Adsense stats for one last time before shutting down my powerbook - imagine my surprise when I found that my click through rate was 40% higher than normal (and so was the earnings for that time of night)!? At first I thought I was dreaming, then I considered that maybe Google had made a mistake, then I panicked that someone had been randomly clicking all my ads - and then I remembered the repositioning of ads that I’d done a few hours before.


Needless to say I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake excited by the potential that I’d just unlocked in my blogs, inspired by the fact that I could make the same changes to all my other blogs tomorrow, kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier (what a missed opportunity) and wondering if there might be an even better spot to try putting my ads.

The following morning I lept out of bed and checked my Adsense stats again to find that my click through rate was even higher than the night before and that I’d stumbled upon a way of doubling my income - literally over night.

Posted by somaya at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments

For some sites, an AdSense account is like a license to print money. Now, most sites aren't making thousands of dollars a month from AdSense, but it's very feasible for niche sites to make a hundred or more dollars a month -- see Rick's recent entry on Feedbuzzard, for example. Whether you're making a lot or not so much, it's still extra income that should be coming your way.

I say should because the reality is that many people outsource the management of their sites third parties. Not everyone has the time or the expertise to develop their own Web pages (though it's not that's difficult to learn the basics, as I show in Make Easy Money with Google), so outsourcing the development and maintenance of a site may make sense in many cases. But don't outsource the management of your AdSense account or, worse yet, let someone else use their own account to display ads on your site. The AdSense account should be registered in your name (or the name of your business), not in anyone else's name. The money should be sent to you directly, as should the tax information. If you want to give the guys maintaining your site a cut of the revenue, fine, but do it yourself from the money that Google sends you, don't have the money sent to Google.

For similar reasons, make sure that the ownership and control of your domain name rests with you and not a third party. Your domain name (or domain names, it's common to have more than one, even if they just point to the same site) is a valuable resource, it's part of your brand. Take the time to learn how to use a domain name registrar (it's easy) and manage the names yourself. If you ever have problems with your hosting service, for example, you won't be held hostage by them (you do have local backup copies of your website, don't you?) if you control the domain name -- there are plenty of web hosting companies out there eager for your business.

Posted by somaya at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments

author : eric
http://www.ericgiguere.com

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:


Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.

Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.

We appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler

Posted by somaya at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: George Slater
This was the question my copywriter asked me at one of our meetings about joint ventures on the web. What follows is the question and answers as best as I can remember them. Just to let you know he was making money 24 hours later…

Question: How do you make money out of your site with no product, no affiliate program, no services and no idea of how to sell…

Answer: Easy use Adsense.

Question: But what is Adsense.

Answer: Adsense is the other side of Google's Adwords. These are little three line text adverts that companies use to get targeted traffic to their websites.

Question: But how does it work.

Answer: Simple. Your Website is Internet real estate. The more your website is vested the more valuable the real estate. Just like a piece of real estate you can sell bits off. In this case it is the same as you putting up an advertising billboard on your property. You rent this to a company; in this case Google and they put their ads on it.

Question. OK But how do I get paid

Answer: You get paid every time somebody goes to your site and clicks on one of the ads. Simple enough. (In fact very sophisticated from a technical and marketing point of view but that is getting off the subject.)

Question. How much do I get paid?

Answer. Well here is a thing; you will probably not be able to work out exactly how much you get paid for any one ad that changes ad to ad. But after a few days of running this system you can probably work out how much you are getting per page per day.

Question. How much are you getting?

Answer. I am not allowed to tell you because I have signed a contract with Google that tells me that I am not allowed to say. However, I can tell you that to get to a stage where you get up to $1 per page per page is not impossible, but if you work on $0.30 per page per day, for a well-visited site you could be very happy.

Question. OK but $0.30 per page per day is not a lot.

Answer. No not if you only have 5 pages. But even that would cover the cost of a web site. Have a look below at the figures.

5 page web site at $0.30 per page per day

5 x 0.30 x 365 days = $547.50 per Year

10 page web site at $0.30 per page per day

10 x 0.30 x 365 = $1095.00 per Year

25 page site at $0.30 per page per day

25 x 0.30 x 365 = $2,737.50 per Year

50 page site at $0.30 per page per day

50 x 0.30 x 365 = $5,475.00 per Year

OK We are not talking retiring owning your own island and helicopter. But if you said well I think I could put up one page a day for every day of the year. Have 50 pages per web site. That’s means 7 web sites with 50 pages each and 15 day off.

365 divided by 50 = 7 and 15 over.

That would give you 7 sites at $5,475.00 per year or $38,325.00 in annual income after all the pages were finished. Now does that sound interesting. And all you have had to do is write 200 words per day. Just to let you know this article is so far 543 words.

Even if it is only half that is $19,162.50 per year. That is the repayments on an interest only loan at 5% of just under $400,000.

Question. Why not just have one big website?

Answer. It is better to build a number of columns to hold up a building. Better to diversify and survive.

Question. OK if this is so good why isn’t everybody doing it?

Answer. Many reasons, some people make more out of selling their own products, some do not know about it, some are just too purest. In the end who cares; if you quest is to make some money. There is nothing bad here. In fact there is only good.

Question. What do you mean there is only good.

Answer. Well let’s think. Somebody has got to your site because they have either searched for you on a search engine or somebody has referred them. They will only visit your site if they are interested in what you have. The ads that google put up on their billboard on your site are targeted to what your site is about. Therefore your visitors not only get to see your info but they get to see other offerings. If they are interested they click on the ad. Now look what has happened here. You have made money because somebody has paid to put an ad on your site. The user has clicked on the ad because they are interested in the subject and ad. The advertiser gets a warm lead. Google make a slice as the middleman and can continue to run their excellent service. So everybody wins. And it only costs people pennies.

Question. OK I’m sold what do I do now.

Answer. Simple go to www.google.com/adsense download all the info on setting up and account, the details what specifications your site must meet. Basically, no competitive ads, not profanity, must be a reasonable site with good navigation and no to many spelling mistakes.

The just get going.

Question. Are there ways that I can maximize the adverts and make more money?

Answer. Yes there are. But that is not for this article.

For further information come back to this web site for the next article – Now to maximize your adsense review stream.

Bye for now.

About the author:
George Slater
www.the-web-master.com
www.1st-retirement.com

George Slater is an SBI Webmaster and can help you generate massive amounts of traffic to your site that can then be turned into paying clients.

Tel +61 8 9291 7343
©George Slater

Posted by somaya at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: Phil Wiley
This is only my second letter in seven or eight weeks. Sorry about that, but at first I had no Internet connection when things went wrong with my satellite service (I'm now on wireless broadband)
and then I developed a quite serious illness which I'm slowly getting over.

If you want to, you can read more on my forum I reckon you should go there anyway, it's a great community.

Incidentally the forum posts are being indexed by Google, which makes it a good place to get links to your websites - as long as you've got something useful/interesting to say that is :)

Ok, I'll keep this relatively short because I'm still not feeling too good. But I hope that normal "service" has now resumed.





1. Concentrate on what's important...

First of all, it looks like I'm missed seeing a lot of new products since I've been offline.

When I visited my forum I saw a number of programs/software being talked about that I'd never even heard of.

And, do you know what? I didn't really care that I'd missed the products being announced.

There's probably nothing wrong with them. They're most likely useful. They're probably worth investigating.

But... remember this.

It's IMPORTANT to not get distracted with new things all the time. You could spend all your limited web time learning how to use
new tools, when really you should be focusing on improving your sites and your skills and your own business.

I remember David Garfinkel and Mark Joyner saying to me in Vegas that I should focus on what I'm good at (in my case writing).

And that's what you should be doing too.

Play to your strengths.

Work out what you're good at/what your main interests are and give them most of your attention and time.

Don't get sidetracked by everything new that comes along.

Write down your "online business" plan, even if it's only on one piece of paper. And work out the steps you need to take to achieve success with it. Doing this will help you focus on what matters, and it will clear your head so that you know where you should be spending your time.

Once you've mapped out your action steps you need to follow them. Don't make a plan and then not stick to it. Don't let anyone or
anything put you off. Go for it.

Don't sign up for every crappy new scheme that comes along. Don't buy every new piece of software or every ebook.

Do what works for YOU and use the tools that works for YOU.

And just go for it.






2. One of the smartest brains around...

I'm not sure if you've heard of him, but James Maduk is one of the smartest business brains around. He's been working online since 1995, writes monthly articles for Entrepreneur Magazine, and he's an expert at online selling.

Plus he's got more products on the market than anyone I know, even beating the prolific Marlon Sanders.

So why he's not amazingly well known in this field I'll never know.

I'm a big fan, especially of his member only site

If you'd like an introduction to his style and knowledge have a look at one of his free weekly webcasts, where he uses "internet whiteboard" technology to get his messages across.

And when you've finished watching and listening you might fancy signing up for his affiliate program which is looks like turning into one of the best around.






3. Free Amazon Tools...

If you're promoting Amazon's affiliate program here are a couple of useful sites which help you automate the process.

http://www.associatesshop.com/

and

http://www.addassociate.com/add_register.php

Associatesshop lets you add an Amazon store to your site and sell products of your choice, while Addassociates provides you with code which works much the same way as Google Adsense -
meaning it "reads" the content of your webpage and displays context related products.

Of the two I prefer Addassociate, but you can't use it on pages where you're running Google Adsense ads.

Anyway, they're both free and could be a useful addition to your sites.






4. Beginners Bit...

I get heaps of letters about how difficult it is to build a good looking website. But I get even more letters about the complexities of getting a webhost and uploading pages to it.

One simple way around this is to use Site Build It! (SBI) because it offers an all-in-one solution.

The mastermind behind SBI, Ken Evoy, has been really busy with SBI over the past few months, constantly adding new features and making it easier to use. I've owned SBI for a few years now and it's now a far, far better site building tool than when I started using it. And it was good then.

One thing SBI is ideal for is displaying Google Adsense ads.

To really make big profits from Adsense you need a lot of content pages. Using SBI for these sites makes sense because once you've got over the learning curve it leaves you totally free to
concentrate on providing that content. So you can quickly put out a lot more pages.

Plus the in-built tools help you keep that content on topic, which means that Adsense can read that your pages correctly and display relevant ads.

In fact Ken has put together a very good info site about using SBI with Adsense. You should spend a bit of time reading through it.

http://salesnow.sitesell.com/adsense/





5. Stuck for ideas what to build a site about?

Try reading Michael Holland's Strike it Niche.
It's a great place to begin.

Michael's done a great research job, giving you ideas for 70 different sites, and explaining just what you need to do to profit from each
of them. Reading this ebook should leave you dancing with enthusiasm.





6. As a follow on to the stuff higher up...


Do you ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of data?
Well you're not the only one.

I just checked out the online edition of The Guardian, one of the best UK daily papers, and found this report:

"There's a lot of data on our hard disks, and there's more accumulating by the day. The University of Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems has just updated its "How Much Information?" study. In 2002 we created over five exabytes of data, in the form of video, print, magnetic and optical media — an increase of over 30% a year since 1999. That's equivalent to half a million new collections the size of the US Library of Congress — 92% of which was on magnetic media, and most of that was on hard disk."



About the author:
Phil Wiley is the author of the best selling book Mini Site Profits www.minisiteprofits.comand writes the free weekly Letter from Phil at www.ozemedia.com

Posted by somaya at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: Dustin Hemmerling
Gaga over Google

Google Adsense has taken the world by storm. Now the small guy can get a slice of big profits. But exactly how should one go about generating revenue from it? This article is designed to help you to decide what sort of web-page to make – one that will realize the largest profits.

First you should pick a theme where there is at least some competition. That is to say, if you choose a family history web page, you may only get genealogy ads in your Adsense boxes. These may be very low paying ads and hardly worth your while. Before building a web page you should check and see how much people are paying for a certain type of ad. To that end – PC Bidbrowser will give you an idea how much advertisers are paying at Overture, and you can extrapolate or take an educated guess at Adsense.

But is finding the highest paying keyword the best way to build a page around? Consider the point that there may be so much competition that your web-page may never see the light of day. If no-one ever reads your site, you have no clicks, hence no revenue. No, the money-making truth lies somewhere in the middle. You need a topic that has low enough competition that people will actually find it on search engines, but also high enough competition that you will receive some cash from advertisers.

A neat program called ‘keyword sleuth’ allows you to find alternate keywords that are still highly searched yet low in competition. Other programs do similar functions.

Find 6 or so topics that you find a nice balance between competition and reward. Now how do you build a web-page that will give some new slant on the topic?

Does your web-page really need to be unique? Perhaps you could write an interesting page or two about the subject along with some links. For instance, perhaps you want to write a site on stock market trading. If you’ve ever been in the stock market you could write a real life trading experience. Make it exciting, while keeping it truthful. What led you to invest? What stocks did you trade and why? Did you make money or lose some? Do you have any advice to give to new investors? Could you find a couple of links for free screeners or some other tool that would be useful? Did you employ any special techniques – humorous or not?

You see, it doesn’t have to be about making millions with your trading system, it can be a funny life experience which we all can learn from.

Thanks for reading and I hope you start your profitable business soon.



About the author:
Resource Box
The author - Dustin Hemmerling - enjoys music, computers, and family.
He also provides free information for building a profitable website at:
http://www.freehomebusiness.d2hosting.com
E-mail:turkey303030@yahoo.com

Posted by somaya at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: Darren Power
Copyright 2004 Darren Power

If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any money.

This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google Adsense.

There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader.

Let's get started with our 6 steps.

1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately.

There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog.

Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get spidered & found.

Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create your blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger provide.

Some key settings you will want to get right are:

I) 'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes
II) 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes
III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes
IV) 'Publish Site Feed' = Yes

2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries. You can write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google Toolbar.

You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link back to the site.

3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or 2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an account.

You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but basically you get Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them.

Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content it finds within.

You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this.

Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger.

Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs across the top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You will need to know a little bit of HTML to help find the right location to paste your Google code. But with a little experimentation you will find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help.

I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site.

4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after you first submit to them. Which is what we will do next.

5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically notified) You will need to manually submit to the various other directories some of which will require a link on your site to theirs.

You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of directories to get you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss

6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that they can't help but tell all their friends about it also.

As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if you can build a following you will make money.


About the author:
Darren Power is the author of The Money Seed, your step by step guide to making money online. For supplimentary information & free resources related to this article visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss

Posted by somaya at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: James Jackson
In this article we will review how you can put together a powerful three
step an action plan to attack a niche market.



Step I. - You Must Research A Niche Market.

First and most importantly you will have to research a market. I have
already done this and below the keyword example is -

Storage Sheds

Here are the top four keyword phrases on this list for this niche topic. The
full keyword list for this example was provided from this website -
http://www.findhotniches.com

NOTE: The full keyword list for contains over 250 phrases.


KEYWORD PHRASE 24 Hr Count 24 Hr Prediction

------------- ------------ ---------------

storage sheds 1345 1151

storage shed 631 540

outdoor storage sheds 445 381

storage shed plans 409 350


Now that we know that there is an actual demand for storage sheds we
can move on to step two.



Step II. - You Must Determine What The Surfer Really Wants.

This one is glaringly obvious that the surfer is looking for storage sheds
which is a physical product. They obviously need or want to have extra
storage space on their property or nearby.

More than likely the surfer wants to find the cheapest and easiest way to
get the best and most suitable storage shed for their needs.

So we need to move to step three.



Step III. - Put Together Your Profit Strategy.

You have several options to profits from niche this niche market but here
are just a few:

1. Create A Review Website.

You could create a website reviewing different types of storage sheds that
includes information such as:

- What sizes and models do different storage sheds come in?
- What type of material different storage sheds are made of?
- How long will your storage shed last before you have to buy a new one?
- What kind of storage shed you should buy based on your areas climate?
- What is required to put together a storage shed and how long does it take?
- Which brand of storage sheds are easiest to construct?

Do you get the picture that I am trying to paint here?

This will give your surfer a real reason to stay on your site and come back
often.

You could easily get this information by interviewing different storage
shed manufacturers or suppliers by giving them a call or emailing them.

Many times product manufacturers already have this type of information
already created to better sell their product. If they do ask them if you can
you use the information to add content to your website.

Also, you can ask them if they have an affiliate program for their storage
sheds. If not ask them if you could set up one for them and negotiate a
percentage of the sales for your self.


2. You Could Create An E-book or Physical Product.

How To Easily Build A Rock-Solid Long Lasting Storage Shed
Perfect For Your Specific Needs With Just $50 Worth Of Materials.

If you cannot write e-book yourself you can outsource this writing
project to a professional writer at the following sites:

http://www.elance.com
http://www.freelance.com
http://www.guru.com


3. Generate Extra Revenue By Joining the Google Adsense program.

This is pretty simple. Jus sign up for the Adsense revenue sharing program
at http://www.google.com/adsense. Each time someone clicks on one of
the ads on you website you will get paid a percentage of what the
advertiser pays to Google.

It is really easy to get set up with Adsense and the ads are automatically
targeted to be relevant your visitors interest. All you have to do is log
into your Adsense account and copy/paste a special code into your
web pages.

Always remember, marketing your website is a game of numbers and it
is not wise to build a business around any niche topic without doing the
proper keyword research before hand.

If there are not enough people interested in what you have to offer you
will not be able to bring enough traffic to your website to turn a decent
profit.



About the author:
James Jackson is the creator of the website, Find Hot Niches, where
starting at just one dollar you can get 75-100 topic specific niche
keyword lists with daily search counts.

To learn more please visit.... http://www.findhotniches.com

Posted by somaya at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: John Gergye
Copyright 2004 John Gergye

Don’t know about you but I really look forward to watching The Apprentice on TV each week. Because it almost always offers a lesson in online marketing.

Take the recent episode where the two teams were charged by The Donald with making money any way they could selling services to dog owners.

Drama aside, the team that lost was a so called "one trick pony". They pinned their success on one thing - dog washing. A good idea but not quite good enough. Because the winning team not only offered dog washing but dog massage plus nail clipping too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that by offering a variety of services they earned three times as much.

Income diversification is also a winning strategy online. One I mention to all who will listen. That’s because it’s dangerous to depend on one product’s cash flow for your site’s survival.

So here are three ways to avoiding the fate of most one trick ponies.

===== > Promote Your Own Product

I strongly believe you should have your own product to promote.

Ideally something digitally delivered like an eBook or software? This way your "bread and butter" can’t suddenly be taken away from you should the product owner decide to no longer use affiliates. Which happens you know?

Even better it’s smart to develop a higher priced back end product that offers even more help. Doing so knowing that if you offer a high quality product a certain percentage will want even more ideas and solutions from you. And these back end sales are the easiest kind.

Oh and don’t think I didn’t hear that groan two paragraphs ago. But anyone can develop a starter info product in 24 hours.

• Develop a list of 25 pressing questions those in your niche want answered.
• Have a friend interview you for an hour over the phone asking you those questions.
• You provide insightful answers while taping the call.
• Transcribe the audio tape and convert the text into a PDF file.

There you go - nearly instant product. If it sells flesh it out further and raise the price to reflect the added value. If not try again with another topic.


===== > Promote Related Affiliate Products

But what if your visitors don’t want YOUR product? Well, don’t let them slip through your fingers without a fight. In this case affiliate products ARE the perfect solution.

Because a site focusing on weddings can not only sell a wedding planning book it can also offer one on how to throw a bridal shower. Or another how to get the best deal on your honeymoon.

Now to find such related eBooks available at Clickbank I use Affiliates Alert. It’s time saving software that runs from your desktop. With it you can find top selling products by keyword or commission payout by searching the entire Clickbank Marketplace or just a selected category. Best of all you can download it for free from www.AffiliatesAlert.com.


===== > Cash in on Waste Traffic

Still not every visitor is going to buy from you no matter how many tempting solutions you dangle in front of them. In fact the vast majority won’t. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t make money off them.

The most common way to cash in on waste traffic is to use Google’s Adsense. That’s where you display Google Adwords ads on your site for some unspecified cut of the action.

The nice thing about Adsense is you can be up and running in no time. All I do is incorporate the Adsense code in my page templates using SSI or server side includes. That way every new page added gives me more opportunities to make money.

Now if the mystical and magical nature of Adsense is a turnoff, there are other services that offer similar revenue sharing programs. Even better some, unlike Adsense, let you specify the keywords you wish to target. Here's a short list of them.

Searchfeed www.searchfeed.com
RevenuePilot www.revenuepilot.com
AllPPC www.allppc.com
BidClix www.bidclix.com
Azoogle Ads www.azoogleads.com

Of course maybe you don’t want to settle for pennies and would rather shoot for dollars? Okay so what if the ads served up were for ClickBank products? Here are several ways to do that.

CBAdwords http://cbadwords.com
CB Clicks www.cbclicks.com
ClickAdWords www.clickadwords.com
CB Ad Generator www.procoversdeluxe.com/cbgenerator

The thing to remember about Adsense, or any of the alternatives, is visitors can’t click on the listings if they can’t see ‘em. So make sure you display the listings front and center. In the visitor’s face. If at all possible within the actual page content. For sure not at the bottom or below the fold somewhere lost in the recesses of the web page.

So there you have it. Three ways to diversify your online marketing efforts. Play your cards right and you won’t end up washing dogs for a living.


About the author:
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook "Traffic From Google in 35 Days". Find out more
here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtmlOr test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz
http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtmland get the free special report "Coming Out On Top".

Posted by somaya at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

by: Nicholas Dixon
Here are five “hook em in the jaw” affiliate tips that really
work. Implement them and see how well they work for you.

(1) Develop a positive and realistic mindset. Do you believe that
you can get rich quick or that your business will take time to
grow? Those who believe in the online hype are the ones who
normally lose. Think positive and know in your heart you can earn
an income from your efforts.

(2) Too much information or the lack of it can be dangerous. Not
using the knowledge that you have gain can stop your business
from getting off the ground and not having the right information
can have the same effect.

(3) Market your programs with Google Adwords. This is a powerful
strategy you can use and as long as you earn more in commissions
than your PPC costs, then you are getting something for nothing.

(4) Write your own ads, articles and reviews instead of the
pre-formatted ones offered by affiliate programs. This will set
you apart from all the other affiliates in the same program.

(5) Make sure your affiliate program matches the content of your
website or newsletter. If you have marketing content then you
should promote marketing products on that page. Think of it like
matching ads to the page content like the way Adsense does. There
may a few exceptions to the rule though, even Adsense does it
some time.

There you go. A few tips to help you with your affiliate programs
whether you are looking for your first check or to boost your
current earnings. Try them all or even a couple and test and
track your results. I am sure Lennox Lewis would be proud of your
hooks and jabs

© Oceanroc Web Publishing




About the author:
Nicholas Dixon is the CEO of Oceanroc Web Publishing. You are
invited to sign up for a free five day mini course on search
engines available at http://WWW.Oceanroc.com/Searchcourse.html

Posted by somaya at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments