AdSense Tips: Use Link Unit as an ‘Additional Navigation Bar’
May 3, 2006 by Gaman · 10 Comments
Yea I know, yet another seemingly ‘simple’ Adsense tip that some of you may already know. But I’ve included a twist to this, so if you are interested, keep on reading 
Following the AdSense Strategy: No Borders, Mo’ Money post at V7N, Andreas Kraus decides to add a little follow up.
He recommends that after removing the borders from your Adsense Ads, you might want to try aligning them in a way to show up as additional Navigation Bar. You can click the link to view the screenshot.
My personal experience from this technique suggests that it can definitely increase your CTR and make you more money. But I’ve added a small twist to this.
In one of my blogs at OffbeatEnough.com, instead of making my ‘navigational’ Adsense links the same colour as my real navigation links; I use the colour that’s currently being used by the links in my content.
Ten Ways To Cheat Google Adsense
May 3, 2006 by Gaman · 17 Comments
At last someone creates a blog dedicated to cheating Adsense, or rather why you shouldn’t cheat.
Fernando over at Adsense Cheats writes how to go about cheating Adsense with the focus on Adsense click-frauds.
The cheat techniques range from the basic clicker cheat to software clicker cheat to the more advance click-through-rate cheat.
Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way suggesting that you go out there and start cheating Adsense, in fact I would highly recommend you to stay away from this activity unless you want to get banned from the program of course:)
Don’t fall into the making easy money trap by commiting click fraud like some AdSense newbies do…
Incidentally, you might want to read my other article: Making easy money from your blog
Aiming to become a six figure blogger? How about a four figure blogger first?
May 3, 2006 by Gaman · 7 Comments
People have been talking about earning a six figure income from blogging annually. One of the best inspirations for us, the ordinary bloggers is ProBlogger Darren Rowse who has been earning and writing about six figure income from blogging.
He jumped into the blogging bandwagon relatively earlier than most people when making money from blogging was still uncommon as it is today.
While earning a six figure income from blogging is not uncommon these days, it’s definitely not an easy target to achieve for many people. Setting a lower goal, say earning a four figure income is perhaps more attainable to many.
To this end, Ben at College Startup is writing a useful series of article describing how to become a 4-figure blogger. He explains why people would want to set a modest goal.
Monetize your blog feed with Feedburner Ad Network
April 27, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
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Feedburner has announced recently the opportunity for publishers to make money from their feeds by allowing them to place ads and get paid for it. Publishers participation in the FeedBurner Ad Network is currently by invitation only. Selection is based on how long FeedBurner has managed your feed, your subscriber base size and frequency of posting. This is done to ensure the balance between supply and demand is maintained. However if your feed is well-subscribed and updated regularly, you can email them at publishers@feedburner.com to let them know your interest. In a follow up announcement, Feedburner unveils the availability of a self-service interface to help advertisers purchase ads: |
On the heels of our first announcement on the topic, we follow up with the availability of a self-service interface designed to make the ad-buying process easier for advertisers. The new self-service tools provide a quick way to bypass human contact and purchase media directly via the FeedBurner Web site. If you are a media buyer, ad agency or marketer looking to participate in this new medium, this is the place.
Click Fraud is not bad as you might think?
April 26, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
ClickFraudIndex.com which is backed by click fraud auditing company Click Forensics has recently published a finding that says click fraud that inflates the cost of online advertising is actually lower than expected.
The average click fraud rate across the industries is 13.7 percent which is much lower than what the industry had expected which was 20 percent to 35 percent.
Click Forensics also reported that click fraud on tier one search providers such as Google and Yahoo was 12.1 percent, which was far less on tier two (21.2 percent) or tier three (29.8 percent) providers.
The problem with this data is that it comes from a limited pool of advertisers who are part of the Click Fraud Network. This figure alone is not enough to represent the entire state of the industry.
Danny Sullivan points out in his blog:
Can Bloggers Make Money?
April 20, 2006 by Gaman · 2 Comments
Instead of the usual discussion in an article format, the Wall Street Journal lets Alan Meckler chief executive of Jupitermedia Corp and Jason Calacanis CEO of Weblogs Inc debate the question ‘can bloggers make money?’
Of course the answer is yes, no doubt.
I agree that the majority will not make a living off blogging but many others will.
With the help of Adsense, AdBrite and the like, more bloggers big or small, will be able to monetize their content and grab their share of the advertising pie.
Making money is relatively easy but for many, bringing in the big bucks like USD100K isn’t. But it isn’t impossible either.
I guess Alan Meckler isn’t aware of the potential or tools that can be used to monetize a blog.
Reciprocal Link Requests: How to select ‘good’ sites
There’s an interesting post over at Search Engine Roundtable which talks about a thread started by a member of High Rankings Forum on how to go about identifying good sites to exchange links with.
From the post:
The subject of reciprocal linking comes up fairly regularly in discussion about search engine optimization. “Reciprocal linking” in its “pure” form means that you exchange a link with another website, by hosting a link to that site in return for a link to your site. Chances are that the more search engine rankings you have, the more requests for link exchanges you will receive. Reciprocal linking is mostly related to SEO and improving your visitor experience by linking to and from relevant sites, but the larger category of Internet Marketing also can gain some momentum in the form of increased traffic.
You might want to check this out if you are conducting link exchange campaign yourself.
Purchasing an ad spot at OneBillionViews.com
April 18, 2006 by Gaman · 2 Comments
I’ve been looking for ways to advertise my blogs. I’ve tried BlogAds, Adwords and now there’s OneMillionViews.com. It costs me US64 to advertise one of my blogs OffbeatEnough.com
OneBillionViews.com was created by an Aussie who try to make it the first page of its kind to reach 1,000,000,000 page views. Hence the name “One Billion Views”.
You might say this looks like just another spin off or copycat from the original Million Dollar Homepage idea created by Alex Tew.
Talking about the Million Dollar Homepage, if I got the chance I wouldn’t mind spending RM5000 which would’ve bought me a 36×36 pixels spot.
Trust me, that’s not much considering the last 1000 pixel that was auctioned off at Ebay had fetched a whooping USD38,100 for the winning bid!
Market research and keywords tool
April 18, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
If you are doing keywords research, you might be interested in this tool. Just type in your search phrase and see the following results:
- The search popularity in Yahoo Search (overture) for the previous month, with up 100 related terms
- The Google search engine page for that term where you can see the competition on Google, the number of adwords, Google max bid etc.
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The Overture View Bids screen. With this you need to type in a security code, and it will then display the Overture bids.
Check out Market research and keyword tool
Placing images next to your Adsense ads to improve your CTR
In one my Adsense optimization posts, one of my readers suggested using images next to an Adsense ad to improve click thru rates.
In a related issue, a user over at Digital Point forum started the following thread:
Seems like most arcade games use some variation of pictures next to google ads to improve CTR and reportedly, it works great. The question is, is this OK with Google? Would you recommend using this tactic?
I am aware of this trick and it may be able to improve your CTR. However, I wouldn’t recommend this as much as the standard optimization tips because you could end up breaking Adsense terms and get booted from the program.
Jensense has written about this issue some time ago in her blog. She went straight to Google and asked them about it. Google replied:
