Make Money Blogging Online: 1/6/08

Sunday, January 6, 2008

this is another site iam using to create bux

shareapic ---------------- the pic sharing site that gives back ::

yes .iam using it and its cool !
how much earn depends upon the pics u upload .i mean if u upload the same pics which r already there in that site then there r minimal chances that u'd make money.

thus make sure that u upload unseen pictures [ those that r not already uploaded ] !

have a look at what they say ::

another site similar to adbux -------------- bux.to

bux.to ::

this is what u'd find in their home page ::

At Bux.to, you get paid to click on ads and visit websites. The process is easy! You simply click a link and view a website for 30 seconds to earn money. You can earn even more by referring friends. You'll get paid $0.01 for each website you personally view and $0.01 for each website your referrals view. Payment requests can be made every day and are processed through PayPal. The minimum payout is $10.00.

Earnings Example
� You click 10 ads per day = $0.10
� 20 referrals click 10 ads per day = $2.00
� Your daily earnings = $2.10
� Your weekly earnings = $14.70
� Your monthly earnings = $63.00

The above example is based only on 20 referrals and 10 daily clicks. Some days you will have more clicks available, some days you will have less. What if you had more referrals? What if there were more ads available?

Join now and receive a $0.05 Sign-up Bonus

Thousands of satisfied members that have received their payment. Proof of Payments.

Availability Limited!
Hard to find active members? Why not let us do the referring for you? We have a limited amount of un-referred members left for sale. Packages with 15, 35, 100 and 500 referrals are available now.

url -------------- http://www.bux.to/

what is ppc [ pay per click ] ?

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. Advertisers bid on keywords they predict their target market will use as search terms when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser's keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser's ad may be shown. These ads are called a "Sponsored link" or "sponsored ads" and appear next to or above the "natural" or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses on a content page.

Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

Categories

PPC engines can be categorized into two major categories "Keyword" or sponsored match and "Content Match". Sponsored match displays your listing on the search engine itself whereas content match features ads on publisher sites and in newsletters and emails. ^[1]

There are other types of PPC engines that deal with Products and/or services. Search engine companies may fall into more than one category. More models are continually evolving. Pay per click programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for sites that display the ads. Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the ad itself.

ADBUX

WELL , HERE IS ANOTHER WEBSITE WHICH CLAIMS IT'D PAY FOR EVERY AD U CLICK .
I HAD PERSONALLY USED THIS FOR A WHILE . I HAD MADE SOME 3$ ,BUT GOT BORED AND IAM NOT USING IT NOW ! BCOZ NORMALLY THEY SHOW 3 NEW ADS PER DAY ; SO IT TAKES MUCH LONGER TIME TO GET GOOD BUCKS !

HERE IS WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THEM ::

FOR AFFILIATES:

At AdBux, we will PAY YOU to view websites, complete offers, sample products, signup for free trials, play games, shop online, and more! There is currently over $2,000 available in offer earnings! Join now to receive a $0.10 signup bonus!

FOR ADVERTISERS:

Advertise your website, auction or affiliate program on AdBux and receive great targeted results! Cheap advertising with great conversions! All visits are 100% unique and 100% targeted! Over 13,000 satisfied advertisers

FOR MORE DETAILS , GO TO :

ADBUX.ORG

How to Get Billions of Pages Indexed by Google

A Romanian company has taken spamming Google to new heights. Monetize, a blog dedicated to tricking search engines, described how the company got Google to index over 5 billion webpages - copied from legitimate sites - within three weeks. Yahoo and MSN were fooled too, eventhough not nearly as bad.

The story was featured by Digg, reddit, and Techmeme. Due to the publicity, the indexed pages of these domains were quickly removed by Google.

According to Ana’s Lair, the search spoofing project was fairly simple. It requires an SQL-driven auto-page generator, a modification of DNS software, and redirection/cloaking code to show Google one thing and the user something else.

Apparently the spammers’ sites did well, with some domains like eiqz2q.org and t1ps2see.com ranking under 10,000 in Alexa. Non-coincidentally, the sites are running some AdSense ads too. It really doesn’t take a mathematician to know that you can earn a good deal of money from billions of pages indexed by search engines.

Devil’s Guide to Google

Here’s how to become a totally evil, worm-like creature with Google’s array of services in under a month:

Start a spam blog with Blogger.com. Use Google News to send automated email alerts on any conceivable high-paying topic to your Blogger’s blog-by-mail address.
Copy Wikipedia’s content, which is free to share, and create a website with AdSense ads that look exactly like content. Wait a week or two for Google to index your site and send innocent searchers toward you.
Create a module for the Google Personalized Homepage that does nothing more but advertise your website.
Pay a 12-men army of Russian click-workers to click on your AdSense. Tell them how to switch proxies so they won’t show the same IP to Google. Cash in the check.
Spam every blog on Google’s BlogSpot. Pay a couple of thousand upfront for some poor developer to crack the captcha Google uses.
Create a huge database of affiliate products (stuff you don’t own, but get paid for in commissions), and automatically create a multitude of variants for each product title, including spelling errors. Then, submit this massive spamfest to Google Base and find new income streams in a week.
Become a copyright lawyer, search Google Images for copyright violations committed by teenagers, and threaten their parents to pay you hard cash or be sued.
Pay for advertisement on any major location on Google Maps, and make your ad read “Frank sucks.” (Replace “Frank” with someone you hate.)
Tell the Chinese gov’t that website xyz.com (replace “xyz” with your competitor’s website) is doing some “really nasty human rights stuff.” Watch see the site be censored on Google.cn in approximately two weeks.
Buy 2 million cheap domains, heavily interlink them, and wait until they go up in Google’s ranking. Start using them to sell Viagra.THERE R HIGH CHANCES THAT U MAY GET BANNED IF U DO THIS ! SO PLS BE CAREFUL .

AdSense Pay-Per-Action: End Of Click Fraud?

It is bound to happen one day. As click-fraud issues mounting up, AdSense is moving towards affiliate marketing style, introducing cost-per-action ads.

David Jackson of SeekingAlpha reports that Google is inviting a selected group of AdSense webmasters to test out the new Cost-Per-Action (CPA) ads. Quoting reprint of Googles mail:

How do I get paid?

You get paid whenever a site visitor clicks on the ad on your site AND performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product.

And unlike traditional ads, webmasters are allowed to choose what products to display and to actively promote it.

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?
Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like I recommend this product or Try JetBlue today next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying Click Here is not ok.

Currently, AdSense offer pay-per-click (CPC) ads and pay-per-view(CPM) ads to the publishers, both with their own problem. CPC ads pay publishers when some one clicks on the ads. This has been long pointed out as a major problem as it creates incentive for click-fraud.

CPM ads does not fare much better than CPC ads. Hidden ads that no one click on, automatically generated page views, and sneaky redirects are just some problems that plague the system.

Pay-per-action ads - it seems - is the perfect solutions. Publishers get paid only when someone clicks on the ads and take some action (like buying a product) from the advertisers’ site. It will be much, much harder for publishers to abuse the system, as whatever is paid to them is less than what the advertiser makes from the sale. From advertisers’ view, it will be much easier to calculate the ROI, as they pay only for sales made.

Step-By-Step How Anyone Can Make Money With Adsense - by Alan Cheng

There are heaps of ebooks and membership sites on the online teaching you how to make money with Adsense websites. With so much information, you’ll be overloaded. Well I’ve read them, joined them and know what works and what does not. Here’s my advice.

Adsense is a Google advertising tool that is placed on your website. The ads that are shown on the website are determined by your content - the text on your website.

If you have pages and pages of articles on a certain topic, such as “Internet Marketing” then the ads shown will be all be related to that topic.

Your webpages should contain keyword related to internet marketing such as “email marketing”, “Adsense”, “ebooks”, “web traffic”, “affiliate programs” etc…

Therefore the visitor on your website will likely click on the ads since they have an interest in them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be reading your article in the first place.

So the most important thing you need for a good website that generates automatic income using Adsense is “Content”. Where do you get this content? There are three ways:

- Write the content yourself - Pay someone to write the content (about $5 per article, the cheapest rate currently) - Buy Public Label Resale (PLR) articles and alter the content

The easiest way is the last option - Buy PLR articles and change the words yourself.

With PLR articles you can do whatever you want with the article and even add your name to it so that you’re the author. There are many places on the internet where you can buy these articles. They are normally sold in a batch of 10 or more that are related to a certain topic.

You can even purchase websites with PLR articles in them and have an Adsense website online right away. Again there are many places to buy these Adsense websites on particular niches.

Now the following advice is worth gold so please read carefully.

You can’t just buy ready made websites with PLR articles and put in on the web. You’ll have so many competitors with the exact same site and the search engines will ban you for having duplicate content. You’ll have no search engine traffic and you can forget about people clicking on your website.

What you have to do is alter the PLR articles. My recommendation is to alter them by 50% to be on the safe side. I alter all my PLR articles 50% before placing them on my website. This makes them original and therefore more valuable. Search engines will index all of your pages so your website will be listed under several keywords depending on the content.

The next thing you need is a good design for your website that will contain all your own articles with other people’s articles mixed. For the website, you can either design it yourself or buy a template.

A word of warning. Make sure the design makes the Adsense ads stand out on your website and also blend in with the background. For example, make the ads borderless and the colour to be the same as your website. This way, it seems that the ads are really part of your website. People tend to dislike clicking on ads.

These are the 2 most important things for an Adsense website. However, there are other additional things you need such as:

- XML maps which Google loves to search and index - A script to rotate your articles so that it seems that your website has new content updated regularly - Link exchanges with other websites so that you get traffic from them and also get ranked higher by search engines - Search Engine Optimize your website so that it ranks high in the search engines

The final piece of the puzzle for a successful website is to drive traffic to it. You can do this also by purchasing PLR articles and modifying the words so that you can add your name to it. After that submit it to article directories and with your resource box at the bottom, people will read it and visit your website.

PLR articles are very important. You need it for the content of your website and to drive traffic to your website.

That’s all you need to create a website you can put on the internet that makes you money on auto-pilot. It will sound overwhelming for beginners but there are easier ways.

For information on recommended resources and websites on helping create Adsense sites easily, send a blank email to my autoresponder ne-art1@aweber.com

Additionally, with Adsense websites you need lots of them to make a respectable income. If you have a website making $2 a day then in a month you’ll be earning $60. However, if you have 50 websites and they are all making $2 a day, then you’ll have a monthly income of $3000. Now tell me if that’s attractive enough for you to start.

Tips For Creating an Adsense Website

Nowadays, it is near impossible to surf Internet for one or two hours without seeing “Ads by google” advertisements. The Google Adsense allows webmasters to display advertisments according to the content of their site, and get paid from the ads. The earnings can range from few dollars a month to 5-digits amount. Here are some tips to before you start a website if you want to have your adsense earning too.

1. Niche

Create a niche site with enough advertisers and high paying keyword, but not crowded with too much competition.

This post brings out nicely how to get the idea for a good niche. While being written mainly for community/forum site, it sure applies to whatever website that you plan to do.

When you found the niche / keyword that you like, try to do a search at google. 10 millions result is not good - it’s too competitive. It is much harder to climb to the top search engine result page if there are 10 million competitors compared with 1 thousand competitors.

If it is too crowded, drop that keyword and find another one. But beware if it is too low too. Very likely that indicates a low interest in your chosen topic. Try to find somewhere between 10,000 results to 500,000 results.

Then, use overture keyword tool to find number of searches done for your keyword. While low search number does not mean it is not good, you can get an estimate of how popular your niche is.

2. Advertisment Keyword

Now that you find a niche for your website, you want to put keywords to drive the ads. Please note that this can be different from your niche keyword.

Use a not very high paying keyword for you niche, to get around the competition. But to get advertisments that pays well, use also high paying keywords in the contents, slightly less than the main niche keywords.

This is because adsense will serve ads that it thinks will perform best, and most of the times that means highest paying keyword. Keep in mind tough, that it should still be related. Otherwise, the visitors will have no interest to click on the adsense ads. To gauge how much keywords are priced, use this overture bid tool.

3. Content & Traffic

Now that you have decided what your site is about, you need to bring in traffic to your website.

First and foremost, you need contents. Write original contents for your site, the more the merrier. Write keyword-targetted contents to get search engine ranking. Most of the times, search engine will become major source of your traffic, so pay attention to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques. Write well for human too, it can bring incoming links from people who likes what you write.

One of the best way to create traffic is to write article and submit to article submission sites. If your article is good, it will be posted by many webmasters. In exchange, they will provide put links to your site at the end of the article. It can help in two ways. With more incoming links, your site will rank higher in search engine. At the same time, readers who found that your article is useful will go to your website.

4. Advertisement Placement

Generally, advertisement CTR (click through rate- number of clicks per number of times advertisement are shown) range from 2% to 10%. If lower than 2%, that means there is room for improvements you can do to increase your income. If it is higher than 10%, however, it may raise the red flag of click-fraud.

Where and how you place your advertisments is one factor that will determine your CTR. The best way to find optimum placement form is to keep on testing. You can try different location, format, color, etc.

Generally, the placement that are most popular are above fold, with 336 x 280 rectangle, the 300 x250 rectangle or the 160 x 600 sky scraper format, using color that blends with the contents.

Take note also of number of ads you put on the page. Google Adsense serves ads based on best performing one. When you put too many ads on the page, while it increase number of ads your visitor can click, the ads clicked might be the low paying ones.

Adsense Blindness - How To Beat It!

Adsense Blindness - How To Beat It!

Adsense blindness is a topic that is becoming more relevant with each passing day based on the enormous success of Googles Adsense program. The amazing success of the Adsense program has led to what seems like universal adoption of Googles ad serving technology. The problem is that the ubiquity of Adsense is causing more and more people to unconciously filter Adsense ads as they view websites. The question that this article seeks to answer is what can be done to recapture the revenue that is being lost?

In a word - experiment. Gone are the days when you could throw up some great content and cash in by throwing some Adsense panels above the fold integrated into your text. The mantra of the past couple of years has been blend - blend your Adsense panels into your content. Common wisdom and experience dictated that the closer your Adsense panels resembled your content, the better your click-through ratio. Trick the user and all that

This strategy will suffer from lower and lower conversion rates on high-value content sites with a high returning visitor rate. You see, the more familiar a reader is with your site and its layout, the easier it is for her to identify your Adsense panels and filter them in favor of your content. This is not a new trend; it is simply the culmination of several factors.

First, Adsense has achieved world domination or something close to it. Adsense is everywhere and its format is static and unchanging. There are only so many panel sizes and each of them is branded plainly with Google�s label. Sure, you can vary colors, borders, and link colors but that darn Google name is still tacked on to the corner of every panel. Second, Internet adoption rates in the English speaking countries is slowing. With less new users coming online each day the pool of Adsense neophytes is shrinking. Every day a larger percentage of users become desensitized to the presence of Adsense and that Google tag on the corner of each panel. Finally, as I previously mentioned, if you provide high-value content your readers will return and the more familiar a user is with your site, the easier it is for her to filter your Adsense ads.

What can be done to turn the tide back in the favor of the humble website owner? Dont be afraid to experiment with Adsense. While the panels remain relatively static you can vary colors and borders. The key with experimentation is to make subtle changes. Your Adsense panels should continue to blend with your content overall. Well blended content captures new readers every time. What you want to do is create a situation where the user, especially returning readers, stop and process your changes. You want her mind to note that the Adsense panel is different but only slightly. Those borders that everyone matches with the pages background color can be made to be slightly darker or lighter than the page background color. Nothing too garish mind you - just a slight difference that makes the reader pause and consider what she is being presented with.

The same approach can be applied to text color and link color. Subtle changes can work wonders for improving click-throughs. The idea here is that we have trained the readers mind to expect Adsense panels to be blended very deeply into our content. Now, their mind is presented with panels that are standing out just a little more than usual and once they notice this, they will process the Adsense text and hopefully click-through.

Varying the panel type and size you are using can also help to improve your click-through ratio. Every change you make to your site layout causes readers to work at processing the changes this requires attention. This simple act draws the readers attention to the panels and hopefully creates a click event. The key to sucessful testing is to make only one change per day so that you can effectively assess what effect the change has. If you make two or more changes you will have no clue which change caused your readers behavior to differ from the past. My Adsense resources page listed below has some great pointers concerning how to effectively test changes to your Adsense panels.

My next suggestion will shock and anger many - heresy some will claim but I stand by it nonetheless. There are other options! Adsense isnt the only game in town. In fact, there are thousands of other fine affiliate programs that you can join and integrate into your content right along with Adsense. Granted, you will have to work a little harder and this is the true evil that Google has perpetrated upon us. Adsense is so easy that we have become lazy in matters of monetization. Break the Google chains that bind you! Do some research. Yes, work and find an affiliate program that matches your niche and promote the hell out of it. I suppose if you are happy with your Adsense earnings you can stick with Google solely but consider the money you are leaving on the table.

Almost any piece of great content can be matched with a suitable affiliate offering. There are literally thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of affiliate programs available. Find one or two that match your niche and give them the same billing you give Adsense on your website. You might just be surprised. A quarter-per-click is nice when coupled with a conversion rate of 1.5% and some decent traffic but consider a $5 or $10 affiliate commission that only converts ten percent as often. You will quickly discover that adding a program or two has no effect on your Adsense earnings but does provide a welcome new revenue stream!

Get More Out of Adsense - Tips to Improve Contextual Targeting on Your Site

As an Adsense publisher, I am often annoyed to find my web pages filled with public service announcements (PSA) and ads unrelated to the content of my site. Fewer relevant ads means fewer click-throughs and ultimately lower Adsense revenues. However advanced Google’s contextual ad serving algorithm may be, it is still a computer program (as opposed to a human being) trying to figure out what a web page is about.

Below are some tips to help you optimize your pages to make them more Adsense-friendly. Note that these tips deal with ad delivery rather than ad formatting or placement. While ad formatting and placement may affect ad click-through rates, they have nothing to do with the delivery of relevant ads to your site. Your site must display relevant ads before they have any chance of being clicked on.

1. Avoid too much content on a page

If Adsense does not understand what is your page is about, it cannot deliver ads targeted to its content. Although a human being can easily tell what a web page is about by taking a glance at it, computer algorithms are no so intelligent. If your page contains too much content, chances are that it also contains too many seemingly unrelated keywords. Adsense becomes confused and displays PSAs or ads unrelated to the topic of your page. Try dividing the page into smaller ones, each focusing on just a few related keywords.

2. Avoid too little content on a page

If your page contains lots of graphics and very little text, Adsense may have a hard time figuring out what it is about. This is especially true when the bulk of your content is derived from graphics and scripts. When possible, use text rather than graphics to display website names, page titles, and headline texts. Make certain to include your keywords in the title of your page and repeat them throughout the page. Avoid hiding your text through sneaky tactics, such as using tiny fonts or making your text the same color as the background. This may be construed by search engines as spam.

3. Repeat keywords that you are targeting

Keyword repetition makes it easier for Adsense to decipher what your page is about. Do this in moderation as excessive repetition may be considered spam by the search engines. Excessive repetition may also make your writing sound awkward to the human reader. Instead of repeating the same keyword more than 5 or 6 times on a page, use synonyms and related keywords. For example, instead of repeating “Adsense optimization” 20 times, you might try alternative phrases like “increase Adsense revenues” or “earn more from Adsense”.

4. Avoid acronyms

I once wrote an article on pay-per-click advertising for one of my sites. When I uploaded the article to my site, I was surprised to find that all of the ads showing on the page were for Apple computer products and had nothing to do with pay-per-click. It later occurred to me that instead of repeating “pay-per-click” over and over in the article, I used the acronym “PPC” numerous times. As it turned out, “PPC” also stands for “PowerPC”, Apple’s line of Power Macintosh computers, which explained why I was getting all the Apple related ads. When I replaced all the “PPCs” with “pay-per-click” and “pay per click”, the problem went away.

5. Choose keywords with commercial value

You may get public service announcements rather than paid ads if your page deals with a subject matter whose keywords no one bids on. A remedy for this is to incorporate keywords with commercial value into your manuscript. For instance, if your page is on some obscure medical condition, you might try sprinkling a few drug names into your document to make it display paid ads rather than PSAs.

AdSense: Image No More

Putting images next to AdSense has for quite some time been among the top tips given by many AdSense gurus, it increases the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of the AdSense units significantly.

Opinions have been varied all this while. Some will say no problem, some says no, some says it’s ok as long as there are lines dividing images from the ads.

While it might be a little too late, after many publishers banned for “generating invalid click”, Google has officially put an end to the endless debate.

The verdict: Images placed next to AdSense ads is unacceptable.

Can I place small images next to my Google ads?

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Publishers should also be careful to avoid similar implementations that people could find misleading. For instance, if your site contains a directory of Flash games, you should not format the ads to mimic the game descriptions.

January 2007 AdSense Policy Update

Google AdSense has updated their policies. You can see their updated programe policies:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182

As usual, JanSense has been among the first, if not the first one that write about this policy update. While Inside AdSense claims that “nearly all of the policies themselves have stayed the same”, JanSense has pointed few major changes:

Referrals
Publishers are now allowed to display maximum of two referral unit per product on a page, up from just one unit per product.

Image next to AdSense
Unsurprisingly, Google has included the rules regarding the use of images next to AdSense ads.

AdSense for Search
Publishers can show an ad link unit in the custom Google Search page

Copyright Material
Changes in wording. Apparently now the policy cover is tighter in term of copyright infringement.

Competitive Ads and Services
The most significant change, and the one that affect publishers most. Significant enough that JanSense has written two more posts just to cover this (here and here). There has been some different interpretation among publishers, some concluded that now publishers can display AdSense together with Kontera or IntelliText, and some disagree. Darren from Problogger thinks whatever that means, the fact that now AdSense publishers are not allowed to display on sites that have YPN - same page or otherwise - will make many publishers jump to YPN because of less restrictive policies.

What Exactly is This Google Smart Pricing? - by Rebecca Game

What Exactly is This Google Smart Pricing?

If you are experienced in the Adsense arena, then you know that Google has now developed a new way to decide how much you earn through your Adsense ads with their new Smart Pricing formula. What is the formula? No one knows exactly. There is a theory though…

It involves their formula for the alogorithm that determines if the visitor who clicked on one of your ads is a good customer for the advertiser. This means the “clicker” should be interested in the product advertised and make a purchase from the advertiser. How does Google get this information? They don’t actually.

Avertisers who work with Google through Adwords are not required to share their conversion rates from click-to-purchase. Some advertisers do share this information since Google has a way for them to share it, while most advertisers don’t share this info. If the advertisers don’t share this information, then how does Google decide how clickers are converting to sales? Hmmmm… they must have to guess, (or use one of their famous formulas).

The new Smart Pricing equation being thrown into the Adsense income mix has a lot of web site owners upset. They have seen their sales drop dramatically even though they are showing the same amount of ads with the same amount of monthly clicks on average. Google won’t share what they are doing because then people can “beat the system” and cost Google and their advertisers money that is not actually earned through honest site optimization.

What can you do to help your site with this new change? Well one of the things that Google does is decide if the ad showing is in “theme” with the page it sits on. Your site should contain a consistant theme throughout. You can still use related keyword optimized pages AS LONG AS your site is also related to the same subject.

If you are going to do tracking, then only change ONE thing at a time. You should monitor the change and it’s results. If the change brings you a larger income, then stick with it. IF it doesn’t then change it back and change a different element. Then monitor those results. Keep doing this until you have your own perfect formula for surviving the Smart Pricing alogorithm.

Having too many different subjects on your web site can actually get your clicks penalized and you will be paid less. It’s wise to have different web sites that focus on each individual subject with different related keyword optimized pages. The more you “niche” your site the better. A niched site relating to one major theme will get you a higher payout on your Adsense income.

What part of this new Smart Pricing is unfair to publishers? My own theory is crummy landing pages. If you have an ad show up and your visitor clicks on that ad and then get sent to a crummy landing page and leaves. You have just been penalized because the customer did “not” convert to a sale and it’s not your fault.

The other down side is Adword advertisers who are buying keywords not even related to what their web site sells. This is another lost customer who didn’t convert to a sale and you might be penalized instead of the advertiser who actually gets money back from Google because of their low conversion rates.

Whether you like it or not, and even if it’s not the “smartest” of Google’s new changes, it’s already in place and you are already a participant if you serve up Google Adsense ads. It seems that the ones paying Google, (the advertisers), are going to have a little more say than the publishers naturally. If they are complaining about click fraud or bad conversion rates, then their voices combined are what makes Google change.

Since Google likes to make money, I am sure they have several bean counters going all the time to find out if the changes have hurt their bottom line, or helped it. We can probably expect these changes often. Google promises that it tries to make you the most money as an advertiser because then they make more money.

I do know this….

In April 2005 I was making over $3,000 a month with Google Adsense. In March 2006, I am making around $750 a month with Google Adsense yet my traffic has increased since last year. If I am making less, then Google is making less from me. I have a high traffic web site and yet my Adsense earnings have plummeted.

How do you fix the problem when you are not privy to the conversion rates for the ads showing on your site? How do you know which are the bummer ads compared to high converting ads. With this knowledge you COULD apply Google filters weeding out the bad advertisers who have a problem converting sales once their visitor has landed.

The only thing we can really depend on is that Smart Pricing is fairly new and maybe Google will get it all ironed out in the end. Did I say “end”. Google never ends, it just keeps on going and going and going….

How to Double Your AdSense Income Instantly

How to Double Your AdSense Income Instantly

As you probably already know, AdSense is revolutionizing the way many infopreneurs are creating revenue from their web site traffic. The reason for this is its simplicity. Through AdSense, revenue is generated when someone simply clicks thru the AdSense ads displayed on the webmasters web site.

In this article I want to give you a few simple ways to dramatically increase your AdSense income.

The bottom line:

To increase AdSense income all you must do is increase the number of click thrus you receive.

There are two ways for you to increase your total number of click thrus. You can either increase your website traffic or you can increase your AdSense click thru rate. Now, getting more traffic would be great, but lets be honest increasing your web site traffic is much easier said than done. So, lets focus on increasing your AdSense click thru rate instead.

4 Tips to Increase Click Thru:

Match your AdSense to your website:

You want your AdSense ads to appear as seamless as possible. Your goal is to match every aspect of your AdSense ads to the theme of your website. What you want to do is remove the borders from your AdSense ads and match the background color of the ad to your website. Additionally, you want to match the color of the AdSense links to the rest of the links on your website plus choose an ad format that makes the ads look seamless.

For example, if your web site has a white background and the default color of your hypertext links is blue you will want to remove the border from your AdSense, make the background white, choose either a square or a rectangle as your ad format instead of a skyscraper or banner, and yep you guessed it make the links blue.

Placement Matters:

Where you place your AdSense ads is just as important as how they look. Luckily, there are only a few concepts that you need to worry about in order to increase your click through rate.

�The more white space around your ads the better
�The closer to the top of the page the better
�The closer the left of the page the better

Follow these concepts and I can assure you that you will see an increase in your AdSense click thru rate. (It really is that simply!)

Google Search:

Now this is one that I rarely see webmasters take advantage of. The Google AdSense program gives webmasters the ability to add a Google search box to there web site.

Why should you use this function?

Well, when a website visitor chooses to use this search box from your website your AdSense ID will be imbedded in ALL of that visitors Google searches. If that person does 1 search or 50 your AdSense ID will still be imbedded throughout process.

Why is this so great?

If that visitor clicks on any of the sponsored listings while surfing from your web site guess who makes money. YOU! If they hit the back button and click on another ad guess who makes money? YOU! This is absolutely huge. Through this function you now have the ability to earn multiple click thrus from the same visitor on the site visit. Please dont overlook how powerful this is. Besides, most of your website traffic will just be browsing anyway, so I why help them find what there looking for and make a little coin along the way?

Tracking:

Just like any other type of marketing, you wont know whats working the best for you on your web site unless you track the different things that youre experimenting with. Set up a few Google AdSense channels for the different ads that youll be placing on your website. Then just see which channels are working the best and stick to those.

Thats it!

Follow the tips above and I can assure you that you will absolutely double your AdSense click thru rate and your AdSense income. The best part about the four tips Ive shared here is that you can put them into action immediately and see how they will work on your website right now. Who knows you could be making twice as much by tomorrow by just making a few simple tweaks here and there.

Good Luck!

10 Basic SEO Techniques Every Webmaster Should Know

Now, it’s easier than ever to have websites up and running. You can just setup a blog at blogger.com for free. Or you can spend some $20 to buy a domain name, get a cheap web hosting and install free ready-made scripts like Wordpress, phpbb, oscommerce, joomla, etc. Some web hosting sites even made the script installations as easy as one-click-install.

Many aspiring webmasters create new sites without even knowing HTML, let alone search engine techniques. They get AdSense account and paste on AdSense code, waiting with high hope for the quick money to pour in. But day by day, the earning is really just enough to cover the hosting fee, or even less than that. So, they start to get frustated.

Most quit after some time. Some worse, they “fall into the dark side”, employing black hat techniques or hiring less-than-honorable search engine optimizer firms.

The rest stay on, determined to learn, and improve. Soon, they found out something about called search engine optimisation.

Here I will try to describe some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

Optimizing a website for search engine means you design a website so that search engines (like Google, Yahoo, MSN) can easily find the pages and include them in the search result. Thus, it will increase the number of visitors coming to your site. Objective of search engine optimization is to have your pages displayed highest possible in the search engine result for your choice of search phrases.

These are 10 basic search engine optimization methods I think every webmaster ought to know. See if the tools you use to create your webpages (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc…) allow you to do these. If not, it is time to learn some basic HTML.

1) Page title

Title is important. Place important keywords on your page title, and try to have different one for each page. I’ve seen sites with same title for every pages. While it gives stronger branding for the site name, that’s something I can do without rather than sacrificing my sub-pages traffic.

Limit your page title to 80 characters the most. Shorter page title means higher importance on each word.

CheatAd ! - Click-frauds on Google AdSense and 2) Keyword and description meta-tags

These two popular meta-tags used to be most useful search engine optimization techniques, until they are abused by the search engine spammers. Even then, they are still holding some importance today, specially the description meta-tags.

Meta description tag is used by some search engine in displaying the result page, and by other search engines to determine the relevance of your page.

Limit your page description to 200 characters the most. Put a descriptive, gramatically correct, meaningful sentence for best result.

This is the page tiSome proclaim that keyword tag is dead. Apparently not so. Yahoo webmaster guidelines lists using keyword tag as a way to help improving search engine ranking.

Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Even then, if you have to make a choice between creating good keyword tag and developing useful content - our next point - , go with the latter. Limit the keyword to 300 characters.

This is the page t3) Body text

Next to a good title, this is the next most important on-page optimization you can do to bring more visitors to your website.

Most important thing you must remember here is this: you should write for your users first, search engine second. Write in natural, easy to understand language. The reason here is that if you write just for search engine, even if you can rank high up, the visitors will close your page as soon as they find out that your site contain just junks.

Besides, search engines now increasingly use some kind of artificial intelligence to analyze websites before indexing. You don’t want to caught off-handed using some useless texts.

First write some useful contents just as you would write offline magazine articles. Then, only after that, you can do some small tweaking to empasize certain parts, and make some changes to the word choices.

Generally, it is thought that keyword density plays some importance to seach engines. Keyword density refers to number of appearance of your keywords relative to overall page. No agreement on the optimum number though. Some believes the keywords should be around 3% compared to the overall page. Some believes the number should be higher, aroung 8-10%. Whatever it is, just try to include some of these keywords on your page, and make sure the page is still read well naturally. If it is not, take them out.

Then there are HTML tags you can use to emphasize importance of certain words. The most commons are bold, italics, and headers.

header 1

header 2

header 3

bold or strong
italics or emphasis

And, of course, you should use text instead of graphics or flash. Search engines can’t read what is written on your beautifully crafted picture. If you want them be indexed and found by search engines, use text.

If you must use some images, use your keywords on the file name, and always use the ALT tag.

Major search engines have developed some ability to read text in flash files, but to play it safe, avoid flash banners, buttons or page contents. Flash is great for embedded movies, not for any other use.

4) Regular content

SEO or not, this is important. Regularly updated content will draw visitors and search engine alike. But don’t put content just for the sake of it. Contents copied from other site, for instance, not only doesn’t help in search engine ranking, but can even get you penalized.

Write original, useful contents that make your visitors want to come back and recommend to their friends. You will get repeat visitors that way, regardless of search engine traffic. Good contents will also get link from other webmasters, and this will greatly help in your search engine ranking (read next point).

Blogs are very easy to set-up and is a good avenue to create new contents to your site. Major blogging software, like Wordpress, supports RSS by default. By using RSS reader software, your visitors can then choose to be to be notified about new contents on your site.

Creating contents regularly rather than pump in many articles at one go has many benefits. Firstly, your visitors know that everytime they go to your site, they will see new content instead of the same old ones. This will make them want to visit more often. Same thing to search engine crawlers. If everytime the crawler couldn’t find new content, it provides little incentive for them to come back regularly. Thus, your new pages will not get indexed as fast as you want it to be.

Additionally, if you pump in a lot of contents at once, the search engines may think that you are trying to spam. This can result in being penalized.

5) Link and get linked

Link popularity is a way most search engines determine the importance of your site. When a website link to your site, search engines takes it as a vote for your website. In the past few years, this has greatly helped search engines getting the most relevant result for users.

Recently, with a lot of sites using links to cheat into search engines ranking, major search engines, specially Google have increasingly use and develop new technologies to determine the importance of the links.

So, not all links are treated as equal. Links from big reputable sites, for example Microsoft or Reuters are definitely worth more than link from CheatAd.com.

Relevancy of the sites also plays a part. Relevant website will give more value to the linked site. Then there is age in play. Older sites are deemed to be more trustworthy than new sites. Consequently, links from older sites are treated as more valuable too.

Directory submission is the oldest way to build your link reputation. There are free Dmoz, free or paid Yahoo Directory, and thousands other directories. Just search for “directory submission” and you have enough work to do for a whole year. Just do directory submission moderately, probably around 20 directories per week, and you can watch your search engine traffic climbing up slowly.

If you have a blog, you can submit it to blog directories as well. Just search for “blog submission”.

Exchanging link with another webmaster is another way. Termed as “link-exchange”, basically you link to the partner site. In exchange, the partner will put hyperlink in his/her site pointing to yours. As many abuse this technique, Google has degraded the value of link-exchange to virtually non-existant. You might even get penalized if your link partner is considered a “bad website” for Google.

While Google has diminished the value of reciprocal link, Yahoo and MSN are still holding on, though with less value. Even then, it still valuable enough to work on. Just be careful to have only reputable link partners.

To check whether the link partner is bad, just search for “site:www.domainname.com” in Google (replace domainname.com with the partner’s website) and see if the pages are indexed.

The most “in” link-building technique now is via article submission. You can write or buy an original article, and include a link to your website on the resource box (a small section after the article, where you introduce yourself and your website).

This is what I mean:

Article here
…
..
.
About the author
Fernando Hal is a contributing writer for CheatAd.com, a blog about click-fraud on pay-per-click advertisements.

You can then submit this article to a myriad of article submission sites, e.g. GoArticles.com for other webmasters to put it on their website.

The wonder of article submission is that not only it helps search engine ranking, but also brings in interested visitors who like your articles. This is very targeted traffic, compared with directory submission or link-exchange.

Other link building methods are visiting relevant blogs and leave comments there, as well as joining forums/discussion boards and leaving hyperlink to your site on the signature.

If you intend to purchase link from other sites, consider getting links from many smaller sites rather than few major sites. The paid link might be considered as spam by Google.

On the other hand, don’t be stingy in linking to others. Be choosy on who you want to link, but don’t hold back if you find a good site that can be useful for your visitors.

6) Usability

Always remember, your most important audience is the visitors. Give them a good experience, and they will come back. Framed pages, for example, is irritating. It breaks navigation’s “Back” button, and is confusing. Pop-up windows, javascript hyperlink, and fixed text size are just a few design mistakes notoriously committed by many new web designers/ webmasters.

For a start, read Jacob Nielson’s articles on web usability and web design mistake
.

Build the website for your visitors. Make easier navigation. Look at Google, MySpace, eBay, and Amazon. There is one striking similarity among them. All four of them have drop simple interface. Many will describe them as “ugly”. But these are few of the most successful sites online.

Fact to be told, web visitors don’t need pretty interface. They need a usable website. Beside helping your visitors, good navigation system will help search engines to find and index your sites.

Or look from other point of view. Your website may be well optimized for search engine, but if your site is not visitor-friendly, the visitors will leave as soon as they come. Like the way this article says it:

In other words, time and money was spent to “optimise” these sites in a way that brought them traffic, and then drove it away!

7) Use Tools

There are many tools to help you rank better in the search engines. By that, I mean tools that can help you to analyze your website so you can make changes accordingly. By all means, stay away from all automated tools that promise to help your ranking, e.g. automated search engine submission software or automated link-exchange software. Your website can get penalized by search engines due to the intrusive nature of many of these automated tools.

Here are few tools that you can use with peace of mind:

- Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)
Google Analytics is powerful site statistic service that tells you almost everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

Currently Google Analytics is offered by invitation only. I have an extra invitation that I’d like to give away. If you are interested, just leave your comments or trackbacks for this post. I’ll give the invitation to the most useful comments/trackbacks.

- Sitemap generator
A sitemap is a file/page where you can list down URL of all pages from your website. A correctly done sitemap can help search engine crawlers find and index your pages.

xml-sitemaps.com provides free service to generate sitemap in three different formats: xml, html, and text format. You can then upload these sitemaps to your site and follow the search engine submission procedure accordingly (see next items). Note that the free service from xml-sitemaps.com has a limitation of 500 pages per website.

You may also try http://www.sitemapspal.com/. It has higher limit, but can only create sitemap in xml format.

- Google Sitemaps (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap/)
Google Sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.

After you have the sitemap ready, you can then submit to Google Sitemap. Google Sitemap takes in xml-formatted sitemap. Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap/ follow the instruction there. If you already have a Google account (e.g. Gmail), you can use it straight away. Otherwise you’ll need to register an account.

But Google Sitemaps is much more than just for sitemap submission. It can also answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site. For example, you can learn about errors and statistics.

- Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo Search. You can view the most popular pages from your sites or competitors’ sites, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

- Yahoo Feed Submit (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request)
Yahoo does not have the service equivalent to Google Sitemaps, but if you are looking for a place to submit your sitemap to Yahoo, you can do it at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. It takes in RSS, Atom, and text format. You can submit the urllist.txt created by xml-sitemaps.com above.

8) Be patient

Google imposes a period of time called sandbox, which cap your ranking from going top until a certain period of “probation” is passed. This range from few weeks to more than a year for competitive topics / niche.

Many webmasters agree that Yahoo also has a certain kind of “sandbox”, although there is no specific name for it.

So, if your site is not yet ranked well, be patient. Remember that search engine optimization is not magic. Search engine companies closely guard their mechanism for fear that the information will be used to trick the search engine. All these SEO talks that we have are based on observation of many experienced webmasters. Nothing is fixed here. The search engines may change their algorithm - and thus, your ranking - anytime.

Refrain from overdoing anything, including techniques above or any other technique. Search engines’ main interest is to provide quality result for their audience, the web searchers. When you do too much, it raises suspicion that your content might be not worthy enough to build up naturally.

Know your limit and ability. If you are new on search engine optimization, don’t go for a very competitive keyword like gambling, lawyer, or the infamous mesopotamia.

Moderation, thus, is the key.

9) Stay away from black hat optimization techniques

Black hat search engine optimization techniques promise quick way to improve your site ranking and bring visitors to your site. These includes page cloaking, hidden text, link-farm, comment-spamming, and duplicate pages.

You may not understand all these terms, but if you anyone telling you they can improve your search ranking overnight, these are most likely black hat techniques.

They work by tricking search engines to think that your pages hold more value than what they really are. As the search engines competes to provide the most useful search result to the visitors, they shun these techniques.

Nowadays, major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN have advanced detection technology to sniff out these black hat techniques. When they fail, your competitors are all too happy to point it out to the search engines.

Search engines will then take action accordingly, like penalising your site ranking or even take them down altogether.

10) Keep on learning

These techniques are just the basic to get you started. There are many resources on the Internet to learn search engine optimization.

Here are some places to get you going:
- Wikipedia
- Google Webmaster Help Center
- Yahoo! Webmaster Resources
- Webmaster World
- Digital Point Forums

Quick Apply Google AdSense Account

Your AdSense account application might have been rejected. To get the AdSense account approved quickly, apply via blogger.com

Here is step-by-step for applying AdSense account via blogger:

1. First, go to http://www.blogger.com and sign up for a new account. Do as normal registration. Fill in the details like username, password, etc.

Blogger registration

2. Fill in your blog information
Blogger registration 3

3. Choose a template

Blogger choose template

4. Now, your blogger account is ready.

Blog created

5. Write a post. Preferably this will be useful content, with subtle indications of long-term survivability of the blog. For example, you can write “This is the first part of 10-part series optimizing AdSense. For more tips about AdSense optimization, visit again in a day or two.”

6. When you are done, publish the post. Write 2 or 3 more posts.

7. Now, it’s time for the AdSense account. Click “Template” tab on top of the page. It will show your current page template code.

Template AdSense

8. Then, just below the Template tab, choose AdSense. It will now display the AdSense application form.

AdSense Registration

9. Fill in all the details and click “Create Account“. Probably, it will display an error saying “The specified email address is already in use.” That is specially if you used this email address on your rejected AdSense application. Apply using another email address.
AdSense Email Error
10. If everything goes well, you will see AdSense block on top of your page now.

AdSense Format & Color

11. Choose the ad format and color that match your template. Read the 100 Google AdSense Tips. Then, Save. Your pages will be republished, now with the AdSense blog.

Publish

Now, your job is done. You’ll get confirmation letter from AdSense team in 1 or 2 days.

How Google Detects AdSense Invalid Clicks

Still thinking to cheat AdSense? Stop that. It will never bring you anywhere. You might pull it off with smaller ads network, but definitely not with Google. Here are some detection methods they might use. At the very least, they have the resources to do so.

IP Address
If the AdSense click is originated from the same IP Address as the one used for accessing your AdSense account, your account is flagged.

Cookies
Most home users do not use static IP Address for Internet connection. In most cases just disconnect and reconnect will give you a new IP Address. But don’t forget, Google has set cookies on your computer.

Other Google Services
Thinking that you are safe just because you do not access your AdSense account? Think again. This time, consider these: GMail, Google Earth, Google Calendar, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Sitemap, Google Desktop, Blogger, and so on, and so on. With the wide range of services they provide, Google can trace the originator of most (or probably almost all) clicks.

Click Pattern 1
Oh, why this computer / IP address / person is so trigger-click-happy on this particular website but never click on the ads on other sites?

Click Pattern 2
And why is it that people accessing these sites direct (type-in URL or from bookmark) tend to be very active ad-clickers compared with those referred from search engine or other sites?

Click Pattern 3
And why the ad-clickers like to hit and run, compared with non ad-clickers that surf a few pages before leaving?

Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Your CTR may range from 0.5% to 10%, but if it exceeds a certain point (probably around 10%), you are flagged.

Geo-Location
Used Urchin (Google Analytics) before? Then you should know that Google can trace traffics origin down to the small town. Different IP doesn’t mean much. Unless you site is really targetted to one small geo-point, a high number of clicks from nearby location will get you banned quickly.

Hardware address?
MAC address of the LAN card, modem, and router works almost like a fingerprint. I’m not sure if Google can track this, but probably they do. They have rocket scientist, remember?

Advertisers conversion rate
Ad click is one thing. But does it bring value to the advertisers? If none of the clicks on your site translate to conversion to the advertiser, you are in trouble. First the Smart-Pricing hits, then your AdSense account disabled.

Search Engine Ranking
Your website is not indexed on any search engine, not linked by any prominent website, but get consistently high traffic? That sounds like something is in play. Regardless of whether it is an adware-embedded software, spam, trojan clickbot, or intentionally installed click-exchange network, it doesn’t sound right.

Webpage design
How about the “click here” or “support us”? Google has the best search engine in the world. Is it really that hard to find those words?

Combo
Each of these detection methods might seem rather weak. But combine them together, and not many click-fraud can pass-through these filters. Even the smartest clickbot will have a hard time.

In short, it is almost impossible to cheat AdSense in the long term. Instead of spending time, money, and effort trying to outsmart Google, try these tips to improve your AdSense earning.

Disclaimer : I’m not working for Google nor in anyway know anyone inside Google. Google might or might not use these methods to detect click-fraud. I’d believe that they have much better detection mechanism.

10 Worst AdWords Campaign Mistakes

On the highly competitive Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) search engine, it's now more important than ever to ensure that your PPC campaigns are optimized to their utmost potential. All of us want to achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to our businesses, and are most likely to provide our sites with targeted traffic.

With the cost-per-click (CPC) prices available through various PPC search engines always increasing, it's essential that you avoid certain mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poorly performing PPC campaigns. The mistakes that you should avoid include:

creating a long list of less than targeted keywords

failing to identify unique aspects of your product or service

a lack of keywords in your ad text

directing users solely to your home page

creating single ad groups

utilizing single campaigns

using broad match only

failing to optimize ad serving for your ads

failing to track results

entering the content network without modifying bids

This article will explain each of these mistakes in turn, so that you're aware of the problems they cause, and know how to avoid the pitfalls.

1. Creating a Long List of Poorly Targeted Keywords

When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign, it's important not to go "keyword crazy" -- resist the temptation to create long lists of irrelevant, generic keywords. For example, if you ran an automotive dealership then, it wouldn't be in your best interests to target the keyword "truck." The cost per click (CPC) for such a generic keyword would be incredibly high when compared to a more descriptive and relevant keyword, such as "T-Z783 Extended Cab."

Similarly, the keyphrase "tail light covers" would not produce conversions if you strictly conducted automotive sales only. The phrase may bring visitors to your site, but if they don't find what they're looking for when they get there, they'll leave just as quickly as they arrived.

It's important to identify your specific niche, and to market directly to users who want the products and services that you offer. Don't trick yourself into thinking that broader is better. With AdWords, that's just not true.

2. Failing to Identify Unique Aspects of your Product or Service

Before you implement your AdWords campaign, you must understand exactly what it is that makes your organization stand out from the competition. By identifying your unique products, services, or offerings, you'll see clearly how you can rise above your competitors and zone in on the keywords or phrases that are unique to your business.

I'd recommend that you perform an analysis of your competition. Have a look and see what they're doing, and which phrases they're using. After you've conducted a competition analysis, and you understand what makes your products or services unique, you'll be able to come up with a strategy that will topple your competitors.

3. A Lack of Keywords in your Ad Text

When you're creating descriptive ad copy, it's imperative that you manage to inject your keywords in to your title and description while maintaining a delicate balance between clarity and relevance. Your ad copy should be tailored in such a way that as visitors read it, they understand exactly what they can expect when they click on your ad.

4. Directing Users Solely to your Homepage

Few site owners take the time to decide which destination URL should be applied to each ad. Instead, they point all ads in a campaign to the site's homepage, then wonder why they're not getting decent conversions.

If you've spent time compiling a list of relevant keywords that describe the unique aspects of your offering, why on earth would you send everyone to your homepage in the hopes that they'll navigate through the site to find what they're looking for?

Why not send them straight to the page that contains exactly what was described to them in the ad copy? Referring back to our example, if, as the automotive dealership owner, you'd created an ad that contained the keyword "T-Z783 Extended Cab," which URL would you send prospects to? Instead of sending them to www.auto-motive-dealership.com, you'd send them straight to www.auto-motive-dealership.com/T-Z783_Extended_Cab.html, of course!

5. Creating Single Ad Groups

If you categorize ads that target related keywords into a common AdWords ad group, you'll establish a high level of control over your entire campaign.

Let's image that you own a sporting goods store. You might start by grouping all the ads you'd targeted towards hockey skates into a single ad group. You'd then create another ad-group which would contain ads that targeted hockey sticks, another that contained ads for hockey gloves, and so on.

Organizing your ad group structure in this manner gives you the ability to create in-depth reports on each ad-group, and to make real changes that have a significant impact on those ads' performance over time.

6. Utilizing Single Ad Campaigns

Once you have your AdWords ads sorted into easily identified ad groups, you can move on to the next step: creating campaigns.

In the example above, we created ad groups that contain ads relating to separate products: hockey skates, sticks, gloves, and so on. Now, it's time to create a container entitled "hockey equipment" to hold all of the ad groups in the campaign. Then, you can repeat the process of creating ad groups for tennis -- one group for shoes, one for racquets, and so on -- and drop all the groups into a single campaign called "tennis equipment."

Having highly organized campaigns is the key to determining which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Don't simply put all your ads into the one campaign -- split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.

7. Using Broad Match Only

Unless you take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available, chances are that you're missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC for yourself.

As the name suggests, broad matches are usually less targeted than exact and phrase matches. Broad matching is the default option under which your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations.

When you utilize phrase matching, your ad will appear for your chosen search terms in the order that you specify, and sometimes for other terms, too. Exact matching is by far the most targeted option to use, so don't neglect it! You ad will appear for the exact keyword you specified. The negative keyword option is also a great tool -- it allows you to specify the keywords for which you don't want the ads to appear. Here's a quick example of how these targeting options work:

Broad match: Default option: blue widget
Phrase match: Surround the keyword in quotes: "blue widget"
Exact match: Surround the keyword in square brackets: [blue widget]
Negative match: Place a negative character before the keyword: -blue widget

Take the time to test these different matching techniques, and to tweak your selections to improve your conversions. Broad matching is not necessarily the best -- or only -- option!

8. Failing to Optimize Ad Serving for your Ads

When you take advantage of the AdWords ad serving service, you'll ensure that your most popular ads are displayed more often.

The AdWords platform will give more weight to the ads with the highest click through rates (CTRs), and will display them more often than ads with lower (CTRs) in the same ad group.

9. Failing to Track Results

In order to have any idea about your AdWords campaign's performance, you must be able to identify which keywords work and which do not. Google AdWords supplies a vast array of very useful tracking tools. Google has also built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics -- a marvellous web analytics tool that provides in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign's performance.

I cannot stress enough the importance of creating goals for your AdWords campaign, then comparing your actual performance against these goals so that you can gauge your success.

10. Entering the Content Network without Modifying Bids

The AdWords platform has recently given advertisers the ability to set different bids for the content network than for the search network.

If you don't set different bids on the content network for your keywords, you'll be paying more than you should be for each click. Lower the prices on certain keywords, and you'll notice that the number of clickthroughs you'll receive will remain the same as at the higher bid.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to create awareness among AdWords advertisers about the common mistakes they can make with this network, and to eliminate frustrations that may emerge as you manage Google AdWords campaigns.

The points outlined above are compiled from the mistakes that I've stumbled upon time and time again. I hope that this advice helps you to create a marketing campaign that will generate dramatic increases to your business profits.

PPC Click-Bot Network Shut Down

Panda Software says the central server sending instructions to computers infected with the Clickbot.A virus has been taken offline. This is a result of collaboration between Panda Software and RSA Security.

The clickbot network, first detected by Panda Software last month, was designed to swindle Pay-Per-Click advertisements like AdSense and YPN. Panda didn’t name any advertisement network in the press release.

Fraudsters set up a number of Internet addresses and posted a series of (genuine) syndicated search-engine advertisements. The bot network -comprised of more than 50,000 zombie machines infected by Clickbot.A was programmed to access these Internet addresses and to register clicks on the syndicated advertisements. The fraudsters received a slice of the pay per click advertising revenues even though the original advertisers did not receive any visits to their sites.

What Is AdSense Clickbot (a.k.a Automated AdSense Clicker)?

What Is AdSense Clickbot (a.k.a Automated AdSense Clicker)?

Note: I do not condone or encourage cheating on Google AdSense or any advertiser network.

Apparently, for some reason, it is not easy to find information about clickbots from the Internet. I need to dig a bit into Google cache to get some decent information. At the time I’m writing this, even Wikipedia does not have an entry specially for “clickbot” yet. The nearest term from Wikipedia is “Internet Bot”.

A bot is common parlance on the Internet for a software program that is a software agent. A Bot interacts with other network services intended for people as if it were a real person. One typical use of bots is to gather information. The term is derived from the word “robot,” reflecting the autonomous character in the “virtual robot”-ness of the concept.

Put simply, clickbot is a specialized bot made to simulate clicking. Initially popular for gaming cheat, now clickbot has taken the highlight in pay-per-click advertisement business. In 2004, a California man created a clickbot that he claimed cannot be detected by Google. Failed to make good money selling the program, he tried to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program. He was arrested, nonetheless.

For computer savvy users, creating a clickbot is very simple and straight forward. You just need a macro to record your activities. While the macro is recoding, you visit your own site and click on the ads. Save the macro, and then let it run. Of course, you will also need a list of proxies to cover your track.

Fortunately for advertisers and honest publishers, Google is not stupid. With the huge amount of data that it has, Google can easily compile the most comprehensive proxy list on earth. In the AdSense report, clicks from proxies will add up to the number of clicks, but no money is credited to the earning. As you guess, when the proxy clicks exceed a certain number, your AdSense account is disabled.

Organised crimes handle this by having the clickbot software on many computers around the world, each with their own Internet Service Provider. Some of these software may be installed without the computer owners’ permissions or knowledge, via trojans and viruses.

Beginning of this year, Greg Boser from WebGuerilla did an experiment to test the extent of click-fraud by using clickbot, with no conclusive answer. Some experts claims that click fraud accounts for up to 20% of the clicks, generating more than $1 billion in a year.

Whether or not the estimation is correct, one thing is sure. Google, Yahoo and other big players in the PPC advertising business takes click-fraud very seriously, and it will be just a matter of time when fraudsters are caught.

If you want to increase your earning, there are legal and easier ways.

100 Google AdSense Tips

100 Google AdSense Tips

Webmasters everywhere can participate in Google AdSense programme where Google will serve advertisements on the webmasters� sites in exchange for some payment. If you are a webmaster and have not put AdSense, consider to do so.

Here is the 100 Google AdSense Tips

AdSense Earning = Impression-count x Click-though-rate x Cost-per-click x smart-pricing-factor.
Impression count is basically referring to your traffic. It means the number of times AdSense block is displayed.
Click-through-rate (CTR) is ratio of clicks per impressions. It can range from 0.1% to 30%, but most commonly around 1% to 10%.
Cost-per-click (CPC) is the earning you get per click. While traditionally it refers to the amount advertisers pay for each click, it can also mean the amount publishers get for each click.
Smart-pricing is AdSense method to determine how valuable clicks from your site is worth. If clicks on your site doesn�t provide good value to advertisers, e.g. from visitors� geo-location that seldom translate to sales, you will only get a fraction of the supposed CPC.
Apply for AdSense account via blogger.com for faster approval.
Once you get your AdSense publisher code, you can put it any of your websites without requiring further approval.
Read and reread Google AdSense Program Policies and Terms and Conditions.
Don�t click on your own ads, or ask people to click, even if you are using proxies.
Don�t use click-bots.
Don�t encourage your visitors to click on ads. The only acceptable text is �Sponsored Links� and �Advertisements�.
Don�t put competitor contextual ads on the same page as your AdSense, for example: Yahoo Publisher Network, Clicksor. Non-contextual ads are ok.
Don�t put your ads on objectionable material, e.g. adult sites, gambling sites, mp3, etc.
Basically, don�t cheat AdSense. Google will catch you, sooner or later.
Viewing your on website will not get you banned. Just make sure you don�t click on the ads.
However, repeatedly reload your page to jack up page impressions can get you banned.
When in doubt don�t hesitate to contact the AdSense team. They are very helpful.
Choose a high paying niche without too much competition.
You can try highest paying keywords from cwire.org, but know before-hand that you�ll face very fierce competitions.
Use Overture Bid Tool and Search Engine Keyword Tool to find suitable keyword.

How to Get Banned from Google Adsense

How to Get Banned from Google Adsense

With so many people ranting and screaming and crying that Google has disabled their adsense account, it’s really an interesting topic worthy to write about. You might be another one who just got the dreaded “invalid click” account closure email from Adsense team, and furious over it. Relax, mate. Not the end of the world, but it is definitely good to know the reason why you are banned. If you still have your account intact, read this, but as our Uncle Ferdy says: “Don’t try this at home.”

Keep in mind that these are HOW TO GET BANNED. In other words, this is a “DO NOT” list if you don’t want your adsense account to be disabled .

Ignore Adsense Program Policies & TOS
Click on your own ads, specially those you are “genuinely interested” in. Ask people to click on your ads: your friends, your family members, your relatives, your visitors, or even your dogs or your cats. Use proxies to avoid detection.
Participate in some form of click-ring. Click-rings are groups of people who gather with consensus to click each others’ ads. Most commonly used methods are Yahoo Groups, instant messenger, mail list, web forum, or specially written software.
Buy, write, or use click-bot software. Click-bot software will go around your site and click on your ads. Most of the times, these click-bots are using proxies to avoid detection.
Pay the Indian-clickers. These are the people whose main jobs are clicking on PPC advertisements and paid by the malicious publishers. Most of them are from developing countries like India or China.
“Invest” with websites that promises to deliver “adsense clicks” for your site. Whatever methods they are using, most likely it falls under one of the aboves.
Extra words to make your visitors to notice your ads. Write “Click here” or “Please support us” or “Visit our sponsors”. Anything other than Google-approved “sponsored links” or “advertisements”.
Put in as many ads as possible in every page. Put more than three units of the normal ads block, more than one unit of ads links, or more than one referral buttons for each adsense, adwords, and firefox; all in one page.
Use spyware to get traffics to your site. Spyware, adware, malware, or whatever it is called can force computer users to open your website everytime they start the computer. Or even better, use some kind of specially written software, toolbar, etc to display or click on your ads.
Use pop-ups on your website. Everytime your user open a page, pop-up another one, ideally with the smiley or the IQ Test advertisements.
Get as much un-targetted traffic as possible, for instance using the auto-surfing programmes to rotate the members around your site and other sites.
Put the adsense code in non-content pages: registration forms, term and condition, login page.
Have a competitor contextual ad on same page with adsense ads, for example Yahoo Publisher Network. Please note though that non-contextual ads, e.g. affiliate links or keyword-based ads are acceptable by google and won’t get you banned.
Get more than one adsense account. Maybe one for your dog-site, one for your cat-site, one for the v1agra pills, one for mp3 download, etc.
Put your adsense code in email the email, usenet, RSS, etc.
Tell everyone what is your CTR, your page impressions, etc. Telling people about your total earning, unfortunately, is allowed.
Put Google logo where you shouldn’t, and don’t put the logo where you should. In other word, ignore Google trademark.
Modify Adsense code as you see fit. Modify the layout, color, URL, will be well. Just anything other than copy-and-paste the code from Google.
And, this is important: if and when Google Adsense Team sends you email, ignore it.
Put adsense codes in the banned contents

* Excessive profanity
* Violence, racial intolerance, or advocate against any individual, group, or organization
* Hacking/cracking content
* Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
* Pornography, adult, or mature content
* Gambling or casino-related content
* Excessive advertising
* Any other content that promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others
* Pop-ups, pop-unders or exit windows that interfere with site navigation, obscure Google ads, change user preferences, or are for downloads. Other types of pop-ups, pop-unders, or exit windows may be allowed, provided that they do not exceed a combined total of 5 per user session
* Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
* Incentives (monetary or point-based) to users or third-party beneficiaries for online activity including, but not limited to, clicking on ads or links, performing searches, surfing websites, reading emails, or completing surveys
* Sales or promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles
* Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol
* Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products
* Sales or promotion of prescription drugs
* Sales or promotion of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods

This is the dreaded email:

Subject: Google AdSense Account Disabled

Hello (member name),

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that this step was taken in an effort to protect the interest of the AdWords advertisers.

A publisher’s site may not have invalid clicks on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks generated by:

- a publisher on his own web pages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking programs or any other deceptive software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

Practices such as these are in violation of the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions and program polices, which can be viewed at:

https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms?hl=en_US
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in AdSense and do not receive any further payment. The earnings on your account will be properly returned to the affected advertisers.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Subject: Google AdSense Account Disabled

Hello (member name),

Your AdSense account was found to be related to an account previously disabled for invalid click activity and we have therefore disabled your account.

Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in AdSense and do not receive any further payment. The earnings on your account will be properly returned to the affected advertisers. As outlined in our programme Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate any publisher’s participation at any time.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

When you write to Google to, this is their standard reply

Hello,

Thank you for your email regarding the action taken on your account.

We understand that you wish to receive specific information regarding the invalid clicks we observed on your account. However, due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account.

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid click activity very seriously. By disabling your account according to our policy on this matter, we feel that we have taken the necessary measures to protect our advertisers and to ensure that invalid clicks will not continue to occur on your site.

Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further participation in Google AdSense. We appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

What is constitutes invalid clicks? This is what google says:

Invalid clicks are clicks generated through prohibited methods. These prohibited methods include but are not limited to: repeated manual clicks, or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software.

Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited, to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. All clicks must be generated as the result of a user clicking on the ads. We therefore require that Web pages do not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers’ sites as well as labeling the ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”

Update (15 April 2006) : Someone suggested that having the word AdSense in domain name might get you banned as well. I contacted AdSense Team to clarify that. Domain name with “AdSense” will not get you banned, but the may just decide not to display ads for that specific domain. I have removed the AdSense blocks here out of good will, but still have it on my other websites.

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