terça-feira, 16 de outubro de 2007

The Pros and Cons Of AdSense

As the owner of a successful online website, you may be searching for a way to capitalize on the multitude of hits that your site receives. AdSense advertising is a way to easily generate income on your site. People everywhere are excited about the introduction of AdSense and what it could mean for garnering website revenue. The following will introduce you to the AdSense approach to Internet advertising. Both the positive and negative aspects of AdSense are going to be examined. This will allow you to make an informative decision regarding the use of AdSense on your website.

Webmasters constantly feel pressure to keep their sites online, which leads to anxiety about generating revenue to finance the site. AdSense is a great tool for webmasters because it allows these anxieties to be eased. AdSense generates the income, allowing webmasters the ability to devote more time and focus to the content of their site, ensuring its livelihood. In fact, when using AdSense, emphasis is placed on creating quality content that will steer numerous visitors to your site. AdSense also easily integrates with your website due to customizable preferences. Differing colors, size and position of the AdSense banner allows different styles to be tested so that they compliment your site and maximize its income.

When you employ AdSense, you are generating a constant flow of revenue. By creating quality content and updating it constantly, you are producing a means to financially live off your site’s earnings. Many users of AdSense have found in terms of income that it has evolved into a type of business in itself. AdSense also has the ability to allow webmasters to advertise the same account on all of the different pages of their site. This is an advantage because webmasters with a greater amount of content do not have to create and manage several separate accounts for each page of content.

The AdSense program can definitely be worthwhile. However, there are negative aspects to consider before choosing AdSense for your site. The most prominent negative aspect is the possibility of ‘click fraud’. ‘Click fraud’ is a term used when a revenue-generating program is used, and the site gets artificial clicks. It would seem obvious that ‘click fraud’ is the work of the webmaster, attempting to gain more revenue through artificial clicks. However, more often, ‘click fraud’ occurs when a competitor is making artificial clicks in an attempt to get your site shut down. Competitors of the company that is advertised on your page may also artificially click on your site in an attempt to drive marketing costs up. No matter what cause is behind ‘click fraud’, the impact on a webmaster is their site being shut down. Unfortunately, using a program like AdSense makes the possibility of ‘click fraud’ a potential risk of using AdSense.

AdSense has the possibility of earning profits for your site. However, this is not guaranteed and your earnings are often sporadic and unstable. Anything done differently on your site has the potential to be a mistake and could detract visitors. Updating your site cannot be avoided due to the nature of AdSense. You must constantly adjust your site to contend with others for optimal placement in search engine results. Mistakes made in an effort to continually evolve your site could cost you revenue, which again raises the stress and anxieties of webmasters. However, any form of generating revenue on the Internet carries the same negative impact, so it is not seen as especially significant. The final drawback to note is that all sites are not geared towards subjects that have the ability to constantly introduce better content. This can be amended with the assistance of a copywriter or by researching your topic thoroughly to offer new information and opinions.

When you consider utilizing AdSense, carefully consider both the positive and the negative impacts AdSense could have on your site. As a webmaster, the ultimate decision regarding the use of AdSense is yours and only you know if AdSense advertising is the right choice to generate revenue for your site.

domingo, 14 de outubro de 2007

Adsense Notifier

Adsense Notifier simply shows your adsense stats on the status bar and updates the stats automatically. This is wonderful for anyone with OCD ( or GAD as some have called it ) who needs to check their stats every three seconds to see if they have gotten any more clicks :-p

Version Notes:
- Google updated how money is displayed for Arabic, Finnish, French, and Russian causing stats to display incorrectly for those languages.
- Moved around the options to better fit on smaller screens

Install Adsense Notifier 0.9.4

How To Insert Your Adsense Pub-ID Into An Adsense Ready Wordpress Theme

It goes without saying, I hope so anyways, that you’ll need an Adsense account. If not, go get one first before trying this.

I’m going to try and explain it here, step by step. For this example, I’ll be using the Ads Minded Theme.

1. Choose an Adsense Ready Wordpress Theme. You can get one by cliking the link above.

2. Download the theme, choose it in your Wordpress control panel under “Presentations”.

3. Once you’ve selected the theme you want and it shows up on your site, go to “Theme Editor” under the “Presentations” button.

4. The Adsense Code can be in different files depending on which Theme you choose. The Theme developer will tell you which files contain the Adsense code. You normally find this either on their website or in the readme.txt file.

5. Once you find the Google Adsense code in the file, highlight the existing code and replace everything between the tags with your own code. Now save the file. That’s it. The code in the Wordpress Theme should be your own.

DO NOT CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS! It’s against Google Adsense TOS and can get you banned. I know it can happen sometimes when you’re working on a site and you do it without thinking. If that happens, you might want to contact Adsense and let them now what happened.

To make sure that the correct ads are showing, I monitor my Adsense ads in my control panel and make sure impressions and clicks are showing up.

Let’s say you have www.123abcdef.com with adsense on it. You’ve just used a new blog theme and inserted your adsense code into the theme. Let’s also assume that you’ve been receiving impressions and clicks so you know you have traffic. If you stop receiving impressions and clicks after inserting the code, you may want to redo it. Chances are it’s not counting.

Good luck and have fun with these Wordpress Themes and Google Adsense!

Adsense Alternatives To Help Boost Your Website or Blog Earnings

Here’s quick rundown of some alternatives for replacing Adsense on your site.

  • AdBrite - AdBrite advertises that it serves 727 million impressions to 33,534 sites. The income is a 75/25 split in the site owners favor.
  • Advertising.Com - They have a wide range of advertisers to choose from. They have CPA and CPC programs with a net 15 payout.
  • AzoogleAds- Azoogle has many companies to choose from with many different ways you can apply those ads. This is a popular Affiliate Network for credit card offers, debt relief, car loans and insurance offers.
  • BidClix- This is a model where advertisers bid for the highest placement. BidClix advertise that they serve over 30 million ads a day for their advertisers. They pay every 15 days.
  • Bidvertiser- Bidvertiser serves up ads that look like Adsense ads (as does many of these other companies). They also will pay your through PayPal, which I like!
  • Burst!- Burst has over 4200 specialty content websites currently on over 400 channels. Some of their recent advertisers include John Deere, Weight Watchers, Vonage and State Farm just to name a few.
  • Chitika - Let’s face it, they have the best looking contextual ads on the Web. But a wise publisher will do their research before joining up. Read the Internet Marketing forums and ask questions.
  • Claxon- Claxon pays on the 15th and the 30 or 31st of every month. At one time Claxon payed 85% of the gross. I’m not sure if that’s still the case since they were bought by Human Ingenuity International. You’ll have to contact them or join their program.
  • IntelliTxt- Another inline text contextual advertiser. They advertise that they serve over 250 million user-initiated video ads per month.
  • Kontera- Kontera offers inline text ads. Personally, I’d do more research on them before joining. They advertise that they’ll get back to you within 5 business days of submitting your application, but it took them over 2 weeks to get back to me the fist time and they denied 5 of my sites. Oh yeah, the denial email was a form letter that said they denied my claim because my “site” was offline (remember, I submitted 5, not 1). Ummm…yeah. So I recently submitted them under Joel Comm’s link and its been nearly 3 weeks and I haven’t heard a peep. They don’t seem to be real big on answering emails or applications!
  • Miva- They offer pay-per-click ads (resembles Adsense ads) along with inline-pay-per-click ads.
  • MSN Adcenter- Another Adsense type contextual program from the good people at MSN.
  • TribalFusion- TribalFusion says it serves up 19 Billion impression…yes, that’s Billions as in starts with a “B” plus some of the highest payouts on the Web. They pay 55% of ad revenue with a $50 minimum. You’ll have to wait 45 days for you money though.
  • ValueClick - They pay by the 25th of each month for the previous months clicks. They also pay by PayPal.
  • YPN- This is Yahoo’s version of Adsense. Trustworthy and their ad blocks resemble Adsense.

Okay, there you go. 15 alternatives to Adsense. Sure, there are other advertisers who you can sign up with, but these 15 seem to be the big players in the industry.