Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Who
Wants to be a Millionaire?

Google's Adsense program allows webmasters of any level to earn revenue from their websites. This is done by placing a piece of javascript code (currently the only option) on your web page that will show advertisements of various editable sizes and should your users click on those adverts you will be paid a portion of the revenue. The ways to maximise site revenue seems to have given way to an "Adsense Fever" and general thinking has switched from "Build Site then Get Advertisers" to "Get Adsense Account then Build Site".

Firstly a quick preview on the ins and outs of a Google Adsense Account. What is Adsense? It is management centre for webmasters who want to display text and image adverts on their website that are automatically geared to showing advertisers relevant to the content of that site or individual page. Adsense advertising takes two forms: banners and search. Each banner comes in variousregular sizes that you would expect and can display either text adverts, images or videos and can be colour customised to better integrate into your own design, font choice is fixed though.
Adsense for search takes two variations in itself, you can place a search box on a page that either redirects to the Google country specific search engine of your choice or it can redirect to a bespoke results page on your own site showing Googles results. These results pages will have advertisers on them also. Each type of integration use a piece of script (currently javascript, no php yet) that you place in the location you want to show the ads/results. You make money
whenever a user clicks on one of these adverts. These earnings are dictated by how much the advertiser has paid to be listed in the banner or searches and by what percent of the revenue you are allocated (this percentage is not openly discussed by big G). Each click is monitored through tracking systems that attempt to eliminate fraudulent clicks and the results can be seen in the reports section of accounts. See the terms of service (TOS) for more details on fraud. This tracker will let you see your click through rates (CTR) which is the percentage of people who have viewed your ads and clicked on one of them.

You will also see how much you have earned per day and can create separate "channels" which allow you to track the performance of individual websites or even pages. But what is adsense to the website user?

Not exactly pretty are they ... but with hundreds of thousands of sites now using adsense for revenue people are getting used to seeing this form of advert. To find out if using Adsense makes sense for your website before opening an account there is a preview tool available.
This is a download that adds a feature to your right click functions whereby you can click on any page and get a preview of what types of ad would be shown.
It uses the words and other content available to determine what would be relevant and you can decide if such text would be something that your users would actually click on in the first place. Help is always available through their help database or through the contact forms available in the management centre. There is also adsense's blog that keeps people up to date with the current changes and new features. † Who wants to be a millionaire? Most people heading for the Adsense website these days have generally already had their head filled with promises of being a "millionaire overnight" or even just the phrase "steady income" will be enough to make some salivate at dreams of leaving their boring jobs to be self employed. Unfortunately many quit their jobs way too early and are sorely disappointed when "overnight" success turns into work 10x harder than their old desk job and the amazing "adsense income" doesn't even pay for the electricity your computer is using. It still amazes me that people believe there are secrets to be bought on the web. Any secret worth anything will always remain a secret ... eh, Nixon? Building an empire from a $9.99 ebook may sound possible when you read the gold whisperings of the salesmen but think about it just for a few seconds ... there we go, that clicking sound! Even Jade Goody's Autobiography retails at £16.95 (about $30) and it tells you nothing of any importance.After the tips and tutorials have let you feeling confused and alone, next we have the Adsense Ready web sites or the "business in a box" purporting themselves as the saviours of the newbie webmaster. These template driven software packages allow you to enter huge lists of keywords and at the click of a button a site of up to 1000 to 100,000 pages is instantly created and uploaded to the web.*

Again, let us take those few seconds to just think about that ... got it yet?
Let us take the small estimate of only 10 such software companies who sell only
one software package a day = after one year there will be 3,650,000 to 365,000,000 auto-generated pages vying for position in the search engine rankings. Of course, there are probably about 100+ such software companies out
there and they most likely sell more than one copy a day but my calculator doesn't go that high. Templates for disaster more than anything. Most of these auto generate business models will rely on adsense arbitrage which is the process of paying low amounts on Adwords (e.g. £0.05 per click) for keywords that land on pages where the adverts shown are worth £1.00+ per click. Sounds simple but again, take into account that you are jockeying for position against many other people attempting the same thing and you'll find yourself earning an average of 1p on turnaround. Take the high value keyword "mortgage" - currently there are 163 adwords advertisers bidding to show in the results. At 5p your ad will be shown on results page 14 and will never be shown on a content page.

There are easier ways. You have to remember that it's not just you vs. the search engine. It's you vs. a hundred thousand other webmasters. You think you're the only one to ever think of targeting misspellings? Here, try this: morgage, mortage, mortgae - search for those keywords and you'll see that there are already 100+ advertisers. Misspellings have been overrun and they are pretty low volume phrases. There are no back doors to making money with any program,(see our google adsense keyword research tips for more info). So how do you make money with Google Adsense? Well having spent a long time as an adsense publisher, the best trick I've learned is: there are no tricks and there are no secrets. What you have to do is keep adsense earnings as an afterthought. Put this in real world context (an art that is steadily becoming lost), if you were to focus on the sponsors of an event and build an event around them that's a pretty lousy event. However, if you put on a Monster Truck show Ford will pay you a fortune to advertise as they know loads of people will come. Traffic is the only way to a successful AND LONGTERM business model on the internet. Think of the major ad sense players right now - YouTube and Digg earn millions but they were not created for that purpose. These sites were created to develop traffic and then the income came later. You need to develop something that people want to come to (technical term is "sticky web pages") so that you do not rely solely on search engine traffic. You only have to spend a few hours trawling through the webmaster forums to read about the number of businesses that go under justbecause of a simple algorithm change. It doesn't even have to be an original thought, you can take a larger concept such as Digg and just make it local e.g. Scotland, Texas, Sydney etc.

Trust me, you are more likely to get a decent stream of revenue from being the top of a small niche than from throwing a billion pages at a huge industry. Also, with traffic and a niche comes prestige so that even if you do not rank for thebest keywords in your niche you will have a strong base of regular visitors that will keep coming back. Top paying Adsense Keywords are, in essence, a myth. But if you are determined that the only way forward is to work out the best words that make the most money and build a site around them then I do have some advice. The reason I say they are a myth is because although someone might pay out $50 a click for a keyphrase this is not always an indication of what will actually appear on your pages or of how much adsense will pay you. In most cases these "high paying" lists are created using the keyword addition tool from adwords, or one of the many API tools, where the person enters a word and sees what the bids are. But as part of the adwords model, merchants can place a completely different and much lower bid for banner adverts being shown on content pages through Google Ad sense. Then take into consideration the much secreted Smart Pricing feature where content pages that do not convert well are paid a much lower percentage that those that do. We ran a test on this for the word "mortgage" which the bid selection tells us has a high paying bid of £30 per clickthrough. We built a section totally devoted to this word and set it running. The adverts shown were spot on and the advertisers being shown were the same that were ranking top on the actual Goog site.

Average money made from adsenses ads for those pages was £0.57 per clickthrough. (Sidenote: we earned an average £1.23 per click with our regular banner advertisements selling mortgage products!) Now that would work out at as 1% of advertiser revenue being the money made with adsense but that is unlikely. What is more likely is that advertisers were paying much lower amounts for content clicks because of the high level of fraud as everyone and their dog was targeting their keywords. There are loads of "top paying adsense keyword" retailers out there:

With that in mind I'd like to bring up the less popular theory of building a decent site that gets lots of traffic and lots of clicking over a spam site that gets less traffic (because of a crowded market) with slightly higher paid clicking. Any successful affiliate, discussion forum and even the Google Adsense website will tell you this.
†† Any person looking to make a quick buck by selling you ebooks and out of date keyword lists will tell you differently. Do I add sense to the situation? (Oh come on, surely you've heard worse puns?) Adsense Alternatives? There are two main reasons that you will be looking for an alternative to Adsense.

Either you have been kicked off of the program, or all you get is public service ads and/or really low earnings from each clicker. Well, although popular, adsenses strength lies in it's relevance matching capabilities. If your site deals with several products or subject then chances are your ads will never really match the page's content and therefore hardly anyone will clickthrough and therefore you won't make money with any form of contextual advertising. This is particularly common with blogs and forums.
Sometimes having just 2-3 good image banner ads through affiliate networks such as Tradedoubler or AffiliateWindow can results in far higher earnings that you ever could get with the ad matching programming. Plus, good selection of advertisers can add visual value to your page, a cluster of text ads can generally detract from such. We have sites with just contextual ads, some with just affiliates banners and some with both. The tip is to change them each month and check the results until you find what works. What's popular isn't always what's best.

* Spam generation products are different to content management products such as Joomla or Wordpress that simply manage your own created content and use a Google Adsence plugin to manage the ads.
†

† at time of writing location is www.google.com/adsense. Common errors are adsense.google.com, www.adsense.com and www.adsense.co.uk but luckily they have thought of this and all redirect to the right site. Nice huh?

How do you make money from the Google AdSense Program?

How do you make
money from the Google Adsense Program?

How
do you make money from the Google Adsense Program?

What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then
some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a
decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable.
(Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am
now looking at
making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front
I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve earnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying oel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

Web Design and SEO: The Eternal Debate

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don't really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don't like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.
As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

Having a beautiful website no one can find is like having a store and keeping the doors locked. You know it is there, you've done a great job decorating it, the products are waiting for the customers, yet no one comes in.
When you pay for web design don't automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you'll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new "it." Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.
SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don't need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then choose the company that answers your questions in a timely manner, basically choose the company that proves a clear ability of designing with W3C standards and a clear understanding of the online trends and realities.
Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn't be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you'll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.
On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture: instead of debating what is better online entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.
Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they'll hear... nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.
As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy top understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.