1. They are genuinely interested in it
2. They see highly relevant ads to your content
3. They thought it’s part of your content
4. It’s an accidental click
5. Because they notice it
6. They want to support your site
7. They are tricked into clicking it
8. Because you opt for image ads which potentially have a higher value than the corresponding set of text ads.
9. They thought your link unit was part of your navigation menu
10. They thought the AdSense ads were part of the search result when you use AdSense For Search
11. You rotate colour palettes which add freshness to your ads
12. You use more wide ad formats than their taller counterparts
13. You use multiple ad units if you page contain lots of text
14. You have an optimised number of ad units occupied by top paying advertisers
15. You keep your filter list small. More filtering means fewer ads appear on you pages which decrease your potential earnings.
16. You don’t clutter your page with competing ads
17. They want to sabotage you
18. They are envious and like to see you banned
19. Because you moved you ad from the right side to the left, close to the body of your content
20. Because you have more visitors coming from the search engines than regular visitors
21. Because you have a great content

About a week ago I started an AdWords campaign targeted at John Chow Dot Com. I hope this article answers some of the questions people may have as to whether it’s worth spending money on AdWords to attract traffic to your blog.

The campaign centered around a review that I wrote about my experience having Sabahan.com reviewed at John Chow Dot Com.

Some Background of the Experiment

For those who are not familiar with AdWords site targeting feature, it lets AdWords advertisers choose individual sites in the Google content network where they’d like to show their ads.

It’s taking a while, about three weeks to be exact, to collect enough entries to start the draw for group 6. While I’ve noticed more bloggers writing a review for the contest, I can only consider those who have emailed me directly about their review.

So if you have written a review but haven’t been entered, please email me and tell me about it.

Without further ado, here are the 5 entries for group 6, sorted by time received.

1. Aczafra.com
2. Wayan Wandira
3. xBrain.biz
4. Jamez Z
5. SkorCareer.com.my

Over at the Inside AdSense blog, the team give out tips to help forum owners improve their AdSense performance. I quote the suggestions below.

In the past few days, I’ve posted the following articles about affiliate program targeted towards bloggers

• How to Make Money from Affiliate Programs With Your Blog
• How to Select Suitable Products to Sell On Your Blog

When I wrote those articles, I assumed the potential readers (or bloggers in particular) already have a pretty good understanding of what affiliate program is all about. Whether they realise it or not, those running AdSense to make money from their blogs are already involved in affiliate program.

After I’ve written the 8 unusual tricks to boost your AdSense CTR, an interesting discussion in the comments ensued where a reader suggested that as long as you have lots of traffic you’ll have clicks. In response, I wrote that CTR is more important than your traffic; higher CTR makes you more money with less traffic.

Another reader wrote, having a 5% CTR with 1000 visitors is better than 100% CTR from 10 visitors. When it comes to AdSense, common sense dictates that the more traffic you have the bigger your potential income would be. That I totally agree.

Some of you may have noticed that currently I have an AdWords campaign running over at JohnChow.com. I wanted to see whether AdWords could drive me more traffic at a lower in comparison to my previous ReviewMe order.

So far the result has been encouraging. I’ve also noticed an increase in my RSS subscription.

In addition to running my ads at JohnChow.com, I am also testing them over at several other blogs such as BloggingTips.com.

If you’d like to read the result of my experiment and get some insight as to the effectiveness of using AdWords to drive traffic to your own blog, please subscribe to my blog via RSS or email.

Some of you may recall that I wrote about re-running Kontera ads (those text links with double underline) at Sabahan.com.

I was testing to see how much money I could make from it, and whether it’ll affect my AdSense income, traffic and readers experience. I was also watching the relevancy of the ads.

I setup the Kontera ads to run from 22 Jun 2007 until 26 July 2007 today. Up until 24 July, I’ve made $30.42 from 320 clicks which translates to around $0.095 per click. My effective CPM stands at $1.29, the revenue generated for every 1000 net impressions.

This is a follow up to my post about making money from affiliate program via your blog.

Choosing the right products to sell is one of the most challenging steps you’ll take when you want make money from affiliate programs. You can select products from the best and biggest merchants such as Amazon, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make money if the product itself has a poor conversion rates.

Some people get lucky and hit the jackpot after only a few tries. For the rest, due diligence may help you filter out products with poor conversion rates. Once you’ve gathered enough experience you’ll be able to better decide which products to promote.

There are several ways bloggers can make money from their blogs. Text-Link-Ads, Sponsored Reviews and AdSense are some of the most widely used advertising programs by bloggers to monetize their blogs.

In contrast, making money by selling products or promoting affiliate programs is somewhat under- utilised probably because most bloggers find it’s harder to convince readers to part with their hard earned cash.

Hence, many chose the path of least resistance by plastering Amazon product banners for example and hope someone will notice and is tempted enough to purchase the product. Unfortunately that’s the worst way to make money from affiliate programs via your blog.