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.

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.

How do I read a Google AdSense report?

In general, AdSense reports show the following fields of information:

* Page Impression -- how many times the page or pages containing the AdSense advertisement was shown to visitors
* Clicks -- the number of times someone actually clicked on an advertisement
* Page CTR -- the resultant click-thru rate, as a percentage
* Page eCPM -- the effective cost per thousand (M = mil, it's Latin) for your ad space. This is a statistic that only a marketing person could love, so it's fine if you ignore it, but it can show you what ads / ad units are most valuable, particularly if you use channels
* Your earnings -- no explanation needed. Bigger is better. :-)


I hope that helps clarify how to read these Google AdSense reports!

How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR

Many people think that they just have to copy and paste Google Adsense code into their website and start earning a huge amount of money from it. What a huge mistake! I also thought the same way two years ago. Later I realized that without optimization, that's impossible. Here I will share all of the tricks to increase my Google Adsense CTR that I found within the last two years.

Here are some tips to increase your Google Adsense CTR:

1. Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. This is the first thing you have to do because if your ads are not relevant, there's small possibility that people will click on them. Then, what should you do to tackle this problem? Here are the tips:

   • Create a keyword rich content. I suggest you creating one topic a page.

   • Check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic. But don't do it too much, just do it 1 – 2 times per page. Otherwise, Google assumes you are doing spamming.

   • Use your keyword in your page title< title >How to bake delicious bread. For example:

   • Use HTML Tag

     as your content title, and put your keyword in it. Don't forget to place this tag at the beginning of your content.

   • If all those tips still do not work, there is just one possibility: there are no ads that matched with your keyword! You can check this out by using this marvelous tool from the Digital Point Website. It is called the Google Adsense Sandbox, and located in http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/Adsense-sandbox/
     You'll be asked to enter your selected keyword and it will display every Adsense ads that's connected with that keyword. What if your suspicion is correct? Change your keyword! Do not worry; sometimes you just have to change one or two words.

2. Use wide ads (336x280, 300x250 or 250x250). Because these are the best performing ads.

3. Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well. If your background color is dark (black), use bright color such as yellow as link color. This will decrease user ad-blindness.

4. Place your Google Adsense in these positions:

   • Above the fold
     Above the fold is the top position of your page that's visible without your visitor having to scroll down. This is the best location that works for me. I place 336x280 ad unit in this location and it works very well. Why? Okay, back to our example. Your article is about "how to bake delicious bread". Someone finds it from search engine; when he opens it, he first sees ads about "baking school", "baking book" or "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?

   • In the middle of an article.
     This works well if your article is long (more than 500 words). People tend to stop for a while and look for something different while they read. I suggest using rectangular ads (125x125, 180x150, 300x250, 336x280, 250x250 ad unit) for this purpose and make it left justified. I usually put my Google Adsense code inside this code:
     

     
     
     
     
     This code will nicely blend your Google Adsense ads with your content.

   • At the end of an article.
     Many people reported that placing Google Adsense ads at the end of their article tends to work very well. This is because when people finish reading an interesting article, they usually think "okay, what's next?" That's your chance! By placing Google Adsense ads at the end of this article, people will spend a minute to read it and then (maybe) click it. For example, you write an article about "how to bake delicious bread". And at the end of it, there are some ads about "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?

5. Regarding the fourth tip, I don't recommend you placing three ad units in a single page. From my experience, the number of ad unit you place in a single page doesn't affect your CTR. In fact, I even found that placing three text ads in a single page make my ads "unblended". For example, I put 160x600, 468x60 and 336x280 ads on a single page. You know what? My 468x60 ads only showed 3 ads in it, whereas my 336x280 ads only showed 2 ads in it! My suggestion is: use 1 – 2 ad unit and a single link unit on your page (Google allows 3 ad unit and 1 link unit to be placed on a single page).

6. Always use Link Unit! Many people never realize that Link Unit is the most profitable format if put in the right place. Try to place it near your navigation menu. People will misidentify it as a navigation menu and automatically read it. If your ads are closely relevant to your content, there's big possibility they will click it. I move the top navigation in one of my websites to the bottom section and replace it with 728x15 Link Unit Ads. You know what? My Google Adsense CTR increased by 200%!

7. Place an image near your ads because user tends to look at this section.

8. Use channels to track your ads performance.

9. Include Google Search Box in your website. Though it will not drastically increase your CTR, it's still worth to be used. Around 3% of my monthly income comes from Google Search Box. What I love about this facility is that it shortens my development process. I don't have to develop my own search facility and let Google handles it!

10. Do not click your own ads, or ask people to click it. Believe me, Google will be able to detect those illegal clicks and they will ban your Adsense account if you do it. In fact, I even suggest you emailing Google if you find that your CTR is "abnormal" (above 20%). Ask them to investigate it, in case one of your competitors tries to ruin your reputation.

11. Increase your traffic. There are many ways to increase your traffic; firstly you have to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), then submitting your website to several search engines, directories, free articles directories, doing link baiting, and many more. I will discuss all these techniques in another article.

12. Many people suggest targeting high paying keywords. But I won't recommend the same thing because I'm sure you will face bloody competition to reach the top position in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Believe me, there are thousands of people who also think like you do. I would prefer to use popular keywords that many people search in Google and there are not many competitors (let's say, 200 – 400 searches a day with total competitors below 500,000). These maybe are not high paying keywords (they usually only pay $0.1 - $1/click); but imagine if you can get 1000 page views/day with 3% CTR, you already get $3 - $30/day! (for a new publisher, this is a very good start).

13. Being specific. If you have many interests, do not put them into a single website. You better create several websites for each of them. For example, you like baking cake, cooking and gardening. Do not put them together into a single website because it will make it too general. You better create three different websites for each of them. This will make them more specific, has more targeted visitors and your keywords will not be diluted.

14. Learn what "masters" say. You will find many valuable tips by joining Google Adsense forum such as http://forums.digitalpoint.com.

15. Be patient. If you are a new Google Adsense publisher, please remember one thing: BE PATIENT. You won't become a millionaire within a night. Everything takes time (unless you already have huge amount of traffic).

Google Adwords

Tips and Tricks to getting better Adwords Results
Your success in Google Adwords rests very heavily on your ability to create ads that get good clickthrough rates. Here are the top 2 resources I recommend to help you develop an effective Google Adwords ad:

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2. FREE Google Adwords Course
   This is a FREE 5-day e-mail course by the leading Adwords consultant, Perry Marshall. The information provided by Perry Marshall has helped me immensely in improving the profitability of my Adword campaigns. I also recommend his $49 ebook packed with helpful information on how to raise your clickthrough rates.
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What is Google Adwords? A Quick Overview
Google Adwords is a pay-per-click program that lists ads on the right-hand side of Google search results. In just a few years, Google Adwords has become the largest and most popular pay-per click engine on the Internet.

Unlike Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adword bids start at just $0.05, providing a more attractive starting bid for small businesses. But more importantly, Google uses clickthrough rate (CTR) as a factor in determining how high your site ranks in the listings. So even if you bid $10 per keyword, if your site gets 0 clicks, you will be listed very low. On the other hand, a site that bids $0.10 and gets a 10% CTR will rate highly.

This method may seem strange to some people, but from Google's standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. You have to remember that Google's main goal is to provide listings that are useful to the web surfer. If a site gets very few clicks, then Google reasons that the site is not proving to be of use to the surfers (who are not clicking on it), and therefore the site gets listed lower.

Because Google Adwords has become so big, along with Yahoo Search Marketing, it has become a MUST for PPC advertisers. Although it takes more time to manage a Google Adwords campaign, you will see that the time spent is well worth it.

PROS

• The traffic is excellent both in terms of quality and quantity
• You can run multiple ads for the same keyword and constantly optimize your ads
• Your ads go up almost immediately. For most keywords, there is no waiting period
• Bids start at just $0.05

CONS:

• If your clickthrough rate is low, your ads will be disabled or slowed. This means you must have the ability to write effective ads if you want to succeed. You must also monitor your account closely, so managing Google Adwords can become time-consuming.

Google Adsense Tips

Here are some Google Adsense tips that I recommend based on my experiences:

1. Make your ads blend into your site
The more the ads blend in, the more likely a visitor will click on a link. Remove borders from your ads, and use similar colors to your website for the links. Try as much as possible to integrate links into your site and make them look like links within your site, not ads.

2. Check content and keyword density
Your content for each page must be focused, and the keywords you are targeting for your ad should have a density around 2 - 5%. This simply means you should repeat the keyword phrase at least twice for every 100 words on your page.

3. Position your ads prominently
Here is a Google Adsense tip that is obvious but not always implemented. Some site owners are bashful about where they place their ads. Don't be. Place them toward the top of the page, in a prominent place.

4. Don't cheat and follow the rules
Another obvious but sometimes overlooked Google adsense tip: don't cheat. Period. That means don't click on your own ads, don't hire others to click on your ads, don't put porn or gambling content on your site, and don't use scripts to generate phony clicks. Otherwise, you may be surprised at how quickly your site gets banned.

5. Use channels
You need to understand which of your ads on which sites are getting results, so remember to create channels in your Adsense interface. At a minimum, you should have a different channel for each site.

6. Try adding a Google search box
Adsense gives you the option to add a search box that delivers search results that are all sponsored links. This can be a huge moneymaker if used correctly, but be aware that it also takes people away from your site.

7. Test different formats and color combinations
My last Google Adsense tip is simply to test different ad formats and color combinations. Different size ads and colors get different results, and you can easily improve your revenue by trying different things out.

3 Make Money AdSense Tips

Think you can't make money with Google Make Money AdSense Campaigns? Then think again, as more and more people like you and me are doing it.

Google adsense adwords allows website owners to create additional steams of income by placing ad codes on their websites, and when site visitors click on the ads the website owners get paid a commission for the "clicks".

There is no set amount for the fees paid. Instead, it can range from a few cents per click to upwards of $5.00 or more. I've not experienced the "high end" yet, but I'm working on it. I'm getting better and better at identifying high paying Keywords. And the more the keywords pay the greater my commissions are.

What you'll find that is paramount to your success is your ability to generate lots of high traffic, low competition keywords. While you might think of it as something hard to do, there's a tool that makes the task elementary, but more about that in a few more seconds.

Here are 3 Make Money AdSense Tips

1. Get Started.
If you're at all interested in Make Money AdSense Campaigns you should go to Google and sign up for an account. It won't cost you a dime. Plus, there are lots of free tutorials to fully explain what Google adsense adwords are and how it works.

Additionally, you'll also learn how to optimize your website pages for greater adsense earnings and higher "click throug" rates. The site is full of useful information designed specifically to help you maximize your earnings. There's absolutely no reason to not take advantage of all the money making tools and resources the site makes available to you.

2. Niche Marketing
Perhaps the best way to increase earnings from Make Money AdSense Campaigns is through Niche Marketing, a form of marketing that identifies and targets smaller, specialized audiences.

Niche markets are exemplified by the fact that niche markets cater to smaller subsections of larger audiences.

For example, instead of marketing the term "flowers", you'd target "roses". While this will result in a keyword term that generates fewer searches, there is often times a lot less competition for it. Consequently, you could end up making a lot more money on a keyword that generates fewer searches.

In the past, uncovering niche markets was near impossible, and when the technology became available it was terribly expensive. However, now it is both affordable and very easy to do.

3. Keyword Selection.
So, how do you go about uncovering hidden, keyword rich niches. Well, its pretty easy to do these days with any one of several keyword research tools, some of which are free.

However, I've settled on a Micro Niche Finder that is absolutely out of this world. With it I have discovered keywords that are searched upwards of 60,000 times per month with hardly any competition whatsoever. Plus, I've been able to buy up the domain names of those related keywords.

This particular Niche Finder has a function that tells you the strength of competition for the keywords and when I find words that are attractive, but that I have little chance of cracking into the Top 3 with I avoid them and move onto something with easier pickings.

Summarily, if you're not hosting Google Ads on your websites you're missing out on a great opportunity to generate passive income. If you already have websites up and running it won't tale but a few minutes to Monetize it with another stream of income and you should go for it.

Google Make Money AdSense Campaigns are great ways to create Multiple Streams of Income.