Don’t Abuse Google AdSense by Self Clicking or Asking Others To Click On It

The one rookie mistake while using AdSense is to click on your own ads or asking others to click on it. DONT DO IT. It’s pretty risky and while you may earn a few extra cents, you face the risk of getting yourself banned from Google AdSense, with the additional risk of losing everything you have earned till date.

In the past I have reported any accidental clicks on my own ads to Google, but they have relaxed the policy of reporting accidental AdSense clicks.

Google also has a pretty strong policy of banning websites that urge users to click on ads, so stop thinking about adding “Please click on this ads” “Help our server costs, click on ads” type of messages on your website.

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Never Lose Your Patience From AdSense

Blog income does not grow overnight or for that matter it may take few weeks or few months or even a year, it takes a lot of patience to start getting a steady income from AdSense, and there is no real time limit when you should give up, always keep trying and you will definitely see greener pasture.

In my first year’s experience with AdSense I hardly earned a few cents a day and sometimes none at all, it was all getting so frustrating that I only wanted to get to $100 and bail out of it, since I thought I could not wait another year for getting to the second $100.

But I had a resolute and once I got my first AdSense check from Google, which was after 14 months of signing up, I got motivated to start working harder to earn more, the hard work did pay off and all that mattered was me having patience with it.

Your AdSense won’t grow just by changing the layouts or formats, you need to work harder to grow your traffic, and get more traffic from search engines, its all a matter of how much patience you have and how you work hard to grow. Once you learn that these tips won’t matter much since you would have already learnt a lot, but before you get there get a huge quota of patience while you can

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Using Custom Targeting for Displaying Ads

Lets be frank, you cannot survive running a website day in and out, without generating income from it, after a certain period of time, but that does not mean that you overwhelm your readers with tons of ads.

Having done quite a lot of research I can tell you that search engine users are the most likely ones to click on ads and more of the ads should be targeted towards that traffic.

On the other hand, in my experience of tracking ad views and clicks, social networking users never click on ads, on top of that they despise sites with ads and tend to comment negatively about it.

So targeting your ads to only certain sections of your traffic helps immensely. On this blog I do not display ads to users who visit it from social networking and also delay showing ads to regular readers.

Why Targeting ads will benefit?

1. You do not piss off regular and social users who do not like to see ads.
2. You are targeting to people who are more likely to click on ads.
3. Your CTR and eCPM will increase, because you are less likely to display ads to people who are not bound to click on them.

How Do You Display Targeted Ads To Users?

If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform, the Who Sees Ads allows you to target ads to different sections of users, it is definitely a must have.

If you are more PHP savvy, here is a little routine I wrote, that can help you with ad targeting, it has conditions to sort out search engine users, social network users and tell you whether you should display ads or not. Feel free to modify and use it for your own purpose. Download Basic Ads Targeting Basic Logic.

As a footnote, I aggregated this data by channelizing the ads, the first step I told you about, so you can already see the importance of using channels for your ads.

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Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets

I’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place without the comments. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. We start out with some of the basic general stuff and move to the more specific topics later on.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (seecash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with.TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com - 728 banner
• domain1.com - 336 block
• domain1.com - text link
• domain2.com - 728 banner
• domain2.com - image banner
• domain2.com - 336 block
• domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail.TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different,Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Added:
I got a little criticizm for this and rightly so, as I wasn’t specific as I could have been. Do not use very identifiable brand name or products for your images. Use generic non-specific stock images whenever possible and appropriate.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.

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Google Adsense Tips and Tricks

’ve been reading a few forums and blogs about Google Adsense tips lately, and thought it would be helpful to consolidate as many as possible in one place. I’ve also thrown in a few tips of my own. The list of Google AdSense Tips and Tricks shown below give you some ideas on how you can optimize your AdSense site and boost your AdSense income.

1. New Sites - Don’t put ads on empty pages –Find the right topic
When you’re building a new site don’t place adsense on it until everything is finished. The first AdSense secret business is choosing the right topic for your web site. Don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links (IBL, also called backlinks) and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It might guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays might not be relevant. You’ll have to wait until Google recrawls the site for the ads to correct themselves.

2. Target keywords
The most important AdSense secret is the keyword research. Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. Find out keywords that can improve your ad relevance. Once you have defined your list of keywords, you should focus on them but build your content human readable. Use your keywords frequently but naturally.

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

3. Choose the right AdSense format for your website
Wider formats are usually successful because the ads are complementary to the content of your page and compact.

The profitable AdSense formats are:
1. 336×280 large rectangle
2. 300×250 medium rectangle
3. 160×600 wide skyscraper
4. 468×15 horizontal ad links(under your navigation bar).

Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors.

TIP: For forums you should placce the ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

4. Ads and website color tips
Use the color scheme and style of your web pages so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders usually perfom better than ads within borders with background color (but it’s not a general rule).

Create a custom AdSense palette:
• border color - should be the background color of your web site
• background color - same as boder color(the color of your background site)
• link color - the same color as your links are in your website
• url color - same as link color
• text color - should be the same color of your main content
You can also select multiple color palettes that blend with your site to create variety.

TIP: Change your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color and then change the ad title to the same color.

5. Position tips
Usually not just users but also customers tend to scan the web pages, they look at the big headlines to see if they are interested in the content of the page.  If you manage to get their attention, they might read all the text and look for other related links.

Place the AdSense ads in a prominent place, maybe around the top-left part of your page or under your main headlines, where your customers are most likely to look at. Google heat map is a useful positioning guideline which provides specific adsense tips on ad placement for your web pages.

The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). Each AdSense webpage is different. You should understand the behavior of your visitors using Google channel or AdSense tracking tools. You should change your placement when it doesn’t work for you.

6. Increase the number of ads, but not too much

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google Adsense you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page.

So, if you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple AdSense units, as I used in this blog. Link units allow the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if your users might not be interested in specific ads on your webpage, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.

AdSense for Search allows your customers to search Google.com or your sites (up to 3 domains). Even If you have no product of your own, you are able to earn money whenever they will click on the ads that come up on the search results. If you want to keep your visitors on your page, select from settings to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window.

TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

7. Preview Google ads
 

Adsense Preview tool is a free utillity for seeing and understanding which Google Adsense ads would be likely to appear on your page. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list.
There may be no Google AdSense ads available for your webpage, so Googlw will display Public Service Ads. You can hide them using alternate colors or images.

8. ATTENTION DON’T DO

Don’t try to trick Google! and don’t try to trick your customers!

• Don’t click on your own ads;
• Don’t ask others to click on your Google ads;
• Don’t manually change AdSense code;
• Don’t place Google ads on sites that include prohibited content;
• Don’t employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links;
• Don’t use AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads!

9. Show images above or next to your ads
Placing images above or below or even between two AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. But you should include a border line between the ads and the images. Don’t show specific products in your images, in order not to mislead the visitors. Just use generic images that will increase the visibility of your ads.
You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about computer services, use pictures of a laptop or computer.

TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit; it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

10. Use section targeting
Use section targeting to emphasize some content in your page. On your site, place this code where you want to emphasize.

Content you want to emphasize.

 If you want some content to be ignored, use     

     

 

11. Alternate the colors of your ads

AdSense allows you to have up to 4 color variations for each variable for which you can specify color. You should do that if you put AdSense ads on pages that receive many impressions from the same visitors to reduce ad blindness.

12. Your Google ads should be visible
Make sure your text ads are visible to the surfers in all screen formats.

13. Use AdSense channels
You can categorize the content of your website into channels and then track your performance. This way you can experiment with different types of ads and see which is performing the best. Instead of buying an AdSense tracker, you can enter the most important pages in your site and see how they are doing. Create up to 200 channels for AdSense.

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total.

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What is AdSense for feeds?

AdSense for feeds allows web publishers to earn by placing targeted Google ads in their feeds. AdSense for feeds works the way the rest of the AdSense program works: by delivering ads that are relevant to your content and your readers.

Like other AdSense ads, feed ads can be paid in two ways: by click, or by impression. Feed ads can also be targeted in two ways.

contextually targeted to the content in your feed
targeted by advertisers to your specific feed when you set up an ad placement
You can control the frequency, appearance, and positioning of Google ads in your feeds. The ad size is automatically determined based on where your feed is appearing.

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The 411 on the 502

As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.

As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)

We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google's platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.

Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a "502 Error" or "503 Error" when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.

To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.

The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we've been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.

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Intro to Feed Placements

In times like these, we know that generating as much revenue as possible is on many publishers' minds. This will be the first of many posts that will hope to explain how to better configure AdSense for feeds to help maximize revenue.

Before going into specifics though, it's important to understand a couple important differences in how your subscribers are different from visitors on your website. If you use an analytics package for your site such as Google Analytics, most publishers will see that a large amount of their traffic comes from web searches. Many of these visitors may have been searching for a certain item, such as one of those blankets with sleeves and a hood - let's call it a shanket. You happen to have written about how much you love your shanket, and let's face it, you know how to write with the best of them, so your page ranks high in search results.

That visitor may see an ad for a shanket next to your search result but wants to know more. So he or she clicks and reads your post, which seals the deal on this visitor needing a new shanket. You use AdSense for content, which includes ads for shankets that are matched contextually; the visitor clicks; a shanket is sold; and you earn revenue in the process.

Your feed subscribers, however, very rarely, if at all, get to your content from a web search. On the contrary, they subscribe to your blog because you write entertaining musings about your family life, and occasionally also write about some of the wonderful products you have come across, such as your shanket.

Because of this, the types of advertisers that run campaigns targeted at your feeds are not necessarily the same advertisers that are targeting search users. Instead of targeting keywords that match a search, advertisers wishing to use feed subscribers target placements in the Google Content Network.

How do you ensure that your placements are exposed effectively in the Google Content Network?

That's the easy part. When setting up new feeds on the AdSense Setup tab, make sure you leave the box that says "Create a channel that allows advertisers to target the selected feed." If you are creating a new channel that aggregates all of your feeds or subsets of your feeds that you would like to show to advertisers (highly recommended), make sure by selecting the "Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement."

In a week or so, these placements will show up in AdWords and some of the other tools used by Google advertisers to target the content network.

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What kind of revenues can i earn from adsense ?

The Google advertisements which are displayed on your pages of contents can be paid with the costs per click (CPC) or the cost for thousand impressions (CPM), whereas those diffused by the AdSense program for the search function are paid by the costs per click (CPC). That means that the advertisers pay either when a user clicks on an advertisement, or when their advertisement is displayed on your site. By your side, you perceive a part of the sum paid by the advertisers for these two types of activity on your Web site.

To determine your potential incomes you have to register and start to display/post advertisements on your Web pages. The inscription is free of charge and is supplied with no obligation, and the implementation of the program is very fast.

Once the inscription done, you will be able to determine your incomes at any time while connecting you on your account Google AdSense. The ratios contain the following informations: overall number impressions of pages and units of advertisements, many clicks on advertisements, rate of clicks, cost for thousand impressions (CPM), effective and total revenue. You will be able to thus make you an idea of the performances of your site and advertizing revenues which you will be able to bring out in the executive of this program.

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The 7 things you should never do

1. Webmasters can make AdSense more successful by focusing on attracting more visitors to their sites. There are several ways to accomplish this. Improving content is critical, as visitors are more likely to view the site when it holds quality material. Market to the right people, and take every opportunity to give the website URL exposure.
2. Develop a mailing list, create a newsletter, offer a free item to encourage sign-ups, and publish a form on the website that allows visitors to request more information. This is all free advertising, which keeps viewers aware of the website and encourages new viewers to visit. The more of it that is done, the faster traffic will increase and the more clicks on Google ads you will get and the more money you will make.
3. Since AdSense is web based, you must have a website or blog to participate. This is not a problem. There are dozens of free websites and blogs you can get. Just do a web search. Once your website or blog is ready and the contents optimized, you can submit your application to Google. The AdSense program is not just for high page rank sites as some seem to think. Brand-new sites or blogs also qualify. Try the free Blogger.com. They are owned by Google and have AdSense built into their platform.
4. The Google AdSense program is a great way to earn an additional income for most webmasters and a big income for some who have made it the main source of revenue.
5. Do update your websites and keep them fresh with new content. Google loves it when you add new content to your websites. You might even want to consider adding a blog and a forum to your AdSense websites. Blogs and forums are great sources of new updated content. If you add a blog make sure you add it right to your websites, ie: mydomain.com/blog
6. Do take all of the articles you write for your website content and submit them to the article directories. My favorite article directories are EzineArticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articlecity.com, Ideamarketers.com and now the newest one Affsphere.com. Once your articles are approved by the article sites you’ll start to see results in the search engines. In addition other website owners and bloggers that pick up your articles to add to their sites will provide backlinks to your AdSense Niche Sites from the links you provide in your “resource box” and the more backlinks you receive the higher your site will rank in the search engines. Do write lots and lots of articles and keep submitting them on a regular basis. These same articles can be added to your website as new content and visa versa so you only have to write the content once and use it twice.
7. Do build your AdSense websites with the primary intent to provide good content and earn revenues with AdSense. If you spend the time developing an informative website and drive free traffic to it you will make money with AdSense. Some niches will make more money than others…but your cost to develop these AdSense sites is your time so every “Cent” you earn is just pure profit beyond the cost of your time.

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Six ways to experiment with AdSense and grow your earnings

Welcome to our first-ever guest blog post on Inside AdSense. We're thrilled to have none other than Blogging Evangelist himself, Darren Rowse, to share his expert tips on AdSense optimisation.

Darren first discovered blogging in 2002, and initially thought he'd turn it into a hobby to supplement his full-time job. These days, Darren runs a handful of successful blogs, his most popular being Digital Photography School, and has co-authored a book. He also posts regular tips and advice on ProBlogger.net, a respected and successful resource for bloggers around the world.

We recently caught up with Darren at his home office in Melbourne Australia, and asked him about his experience with Google AdSense.

October 4, 2003 is a date I'll never forget - that was a day that my life changed. It was the day that I discovered AdSense and added it to my very first blog. I added that first advertisement to my blog on a whim, with what I thought was the lofty dream that I might be able to pay for my blogs hosting costs. Over 5 years later, those little text ads have paid my mortgage, fed my family, and enabled me to move my blogging from a hobby, to a part time job, to a full time job and beyond.

It's not been an 'overnight success' by any means but as I've learned to use it, AdSense has been one of my highest online income streams.

My #1 Tip for Using AdSense

If I had to narrow my advice on using AdSense down to a single word it would be 'experiment'. Let me explain.

That day back in October of 2003 I had no idea on what I was doing. The next day when I logged in to see how much I'd earned it was barely enough to buy me a coffee.

However, on that day I decided that those few dollars in earnings showed potential and I determined within myself to learn how best to use AdSense to grow that income. Almost everything I've learned since that day has been through trial and error.

It has been a long process of testing and tracking results. You see, while there are a few good home truths that seem to work on most sites, every website that I've used AdSense on is different. Some things work well on some sites, but it is rare to find something that will work on every site. As a result I tend to experiment with my use of AdSense in these six ways:

1. Ad Position - Most AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites. In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make sure you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best for your site.

Hint: Ads near (or even surrounded by) content have worked the best. I've also found ads at the end of content perform well. People get to the end of reading your article and then are looking for something to do or click -- an ad positioned there can work well.


2. Numbers of Ads - More ads earn more than less ads... don't they? Unfortunately it isn't always the case.

Test different combinations and numbers of ad units on your site. There's usually a 'tipping point' where you hit a ceiling of how many ads your users will accept -- push it too far and you could hurt reader engagement, traffic, and in the long run your earnings. On the flip side of this, don't be afraid to have more than one or two ads on a page, particularly if you have long pages with lots of content.

3. Ad Design - I can still see the first ads that I first used on my blog back in 2003. I can still see them because they fried their imprints into my retina -- they were so LOUD!

I figured that the ads would do best if people noticed them so I went for the most crazy color scheme I could come up with. Over the years I began to experiment with different combinations of ads and found that more subtle or blended ads tended to work best for me. Having said that, you can sometimes blend too much, to the point that the ads become invisible to your reader. So test different colors and designs of ads to see which work best. Use the ad rotating tool that AdSense offer publishers to rotate different designs to work against ad blindness among regular readers.

4. Ad Sizes - AdSense offers us a range of different ad sizes, so experiment with them all to see which works best. Hint: Some might think that the bigger the ad the better it performs. This is not always true.

For example, I found that the 'large rectangle' ad (336 x 280) didn't work as well for me as the smaller 'medium rectangle' ad (300 x 250). It turns out that more advertisers (at least those in my niche) prefer the medium rectangle ad as it's a more standard ad unit size than the larger one. Again, the key is to experiment and see what works best for your site and niche.

5. Ad Formats - I've found that choosing image and text ads works better than just choosing text ads, but that's not the only choice we get as AdSense publishers.

AdSense also allow us to run link units, AdSense for search, etc. I've found that each of these different formats will work differently from site to site. I've had blogs where the link unit ads were the best performing units on the site while on other sites it didn't really perform at all. You'll never know unless you test it!

6. Which Content Converts? - One of the best advances that AdSense has made in the last year has been the integration between it and Google Analytics. To be honest I'm still digging into the metrics that this opens up, but the insight that this gives has amazing potential to increase earnings.

By looking at this data you can see what type of content is converting and what isn't. You can also see what type of traffic is converting and what isn't. For example, I've found that search engine referrals are converting better than traffic from social media sites on one of my blogs. Knowing this is powerful as it tells you what type of ads to serve to what types of traffic, what type of promotion to put effort towards, and what type of content to write more of.

Test Track Test Track....

There are books, blogs, articles, forums, and other kinds of resources available to AdSense publishers to help them learn how to use AdSense better. However, in my experience the best way to learn is to 'do'. Put time aside to try new things and then put more time aside to review what you learn.

But don't leave it at that. When you learn something -- test it against something else (do some research on A/B split testing to learn how to do this). This continual learning will help you to grow in your own expertise of AdSense and increase your earnings.

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Payments by Western Union now available in Indonesia

We're excited to introduce Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for Indonesia. If you're located in Indonesia, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union money transfer service. This payment method is quick, easy, and free -- that means no more waiting for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

A few things to keep in mind:

* Payments follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they are issued.

* You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions listed in our Help Center.

* Payments by Western Union are currently only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

* Payments must be picked up within 35 days of issue or they'll expire. If this happens, a payment hold will be placed on your AdSense account and the payment will be credited back to your account.

* Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.

Follow these instructions if you're interested in signing up for payments by Western Union. You can also find useful information in our Help Center about exchange rates and other countries where this payment method is available. We hope you enjoy using this new payment option in Indonesia!

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Sekilas Tentang Google Adsense

Google AdSense adalah layanan iklan yang dimiliki oleh Google, dimana para pemilik blog/situs Website dapat memasang iklan dari Google di situs atau blog mereka dan mendapatkan penghasilan dari Google AdSense Yang Berupa Dollars.

Anda Mungkin Tahu dan pasti menggunakan Website ini yaitu www.friendster.com merupakan salah satu pengguna atau pemasang iklan dari google adsense banyangkan saja berapa dollars yang mereka peroleh :)dan jika anda gemar membuat situs atau blog dan anda sangat suka sekali menulis kenapa TIDAK apalagi situs anda sudah terkenal WOW bisa anda banyangkan sendiri berapa dollars yang akan anda terima.

Kemabali ke awal tadi; Terus iklan apa saja yang akan muncul dari Google Adsese pada situs atau blog punya kita, Google AdSense Akan tomatis menampilkan Iklan Yang Sesuai dengan isi conten anda atau artikel anda dan iklan tersebut bisa muncul berupa teks, gambar, ataupun video yang menggunakan sistem kontekstual (contextual), dan itu tadi dimana iklan tersebut akan relevan atau sesuai dengan isi (content) halaman dimana iklan tersebut dipasang.

Cara Memasang Kode JavaScript dari Google Adsense :

Setelah Anda melakukan Pendaftaran dan situs atau blog anda telah di review oleh Team Google AdSense serta anda telah mendapatkan E-mail dari Google AdSense dan di Approv, maka anda akan mendapatkan area member yang mana dapat anda gunakan untuk mendapatkan atau men-generate kode JavaScript selain itu juga anda akan mendapatkan tool -tool untuk memanage/mengelola area member serta Iklan anda dan juga Report / laporan, Jumlah Clik yang didapatkan dan beberapa info lainnya.
Proses Pendaftaran Ggoogle AdSense :

pada prinsipnya mendaftar google adsense itu mudah kita hanya di hadapkan pada 4 hal yaitu :

1. Website Information
2. Contact Information.
3. Product Selection
4. Program Police

Khusus Untuk Contact information dan Program Police harus benar karena kalou salah tidak gampang untuk diedit dan ini kaitannya dengan Team Google AdSense, kalau anda merasa sudah yakin dan benar dengan isiannya anda:

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Panduan Google Website Optimizer untuk Split Testing

Berikut adalah panduan menggunakan Website Optimizer dari Google sehingga kita bisa melakukan split testing. Split testing adalah experiment untuk menentukan content seperti apa yang memiliki conversion paling besar. Saya pernah menjelaskan pentingnya melakukan split testing di sini.

Untuk menggunakan Google Website Optimizer, Anda harus memiliki account Adwords terlebih dahulu. Mendaftarlah Google Adwords terlebih dahulu dengan link di bawah ini, apabila Anda belum punya.

Join Adwords di sini

Setelah itu, Anda akan diminta melakukan aktivasi adwords sebesar $5. Hanya 1 kali seumur hidup. Nah, dengan memiliki Google Adwords, Anda dapat mengiklankan website Anda menggunakan PPC (Pay Per Click). Namun kali ini saya tidak akan membahas itu.

Setelah Anda login ke dalam account Google Adwords Anda, akan ada pilihan menu menuju ke website optimizer seperti gambar di bawah ini

Akan terlihat bahwa Anda belum memiliki experiment apapun. Klik link “add new experiment”

Nah, akan ada 2 pilihan lagi. Yang pertama yaitu pilihan untuk mengetest 2 page yang berbeda. Sedangkan pilihan kedua digunakan untuk mengetest kombinasi content. Perbedaannya seperti ini:

• Pada A/B experiment, Google hanya akan merandom 2 halaman. Beberapa visitor akan masuk ke page A, dan beberapa visitor lainnya akan masuk ke page B.


• Pada Multivariant Experiment, Google dapat mengkombinasikan rotasi berbagai content di dalamnya. Misalkan kita punya headline A dan B dan paragraf C dan D. Google akan merotasi kemunculan semua kombinasi. Berapa jumlah conversion A dan C, A dan D, B dan C, dan B dan D.

Saat ini kita hanya mencoba yang mudah saja, jadi pilihlah yang atas.

Lanjutkan dengan mengklik tombol “continue”

Masukkan nama experiment Anda. Berikan nama yang mudah diingat supaya mudah diingat (hehe :P)

Kemudian ketikkan halaman yang akan dieksperimen. Pertama2, Anda harus sudah mengupload dulu file2 yang akan dirotate. Pada contoh yang saya berikan, saya meng-upload file index1.html dan index2.html. Lalu ketikkan file yang original, dan satu lagi file variasi berikutnya. Berikan nama yang spesifik supaya mudah diingat. Anda bisa saja langsung memasukkan nama domain Anda, dan otomatis dia akan mengarah ke file bernama index.

Setelah itu, tuliskan ke mana visitor akan dialihkan apabila terjadi conversion. Masukkan link halaman yang akan dituju setelah visitor subscribe atau setelah memasuki halaman yang dituju.

Setelah mengklik tombol continue, berikutnya akan ditanyakan, apakah Anda ingin mengkonfigurasi sendiri atau tidak. Tentu saja pilih yang pilihan kedua, yaitu mengkonfigurasi sendiri.

Halaman berikutnya akan meminta Anda memasukkan kode

Masukkan script yang diminta ke dalam bagian akhir dari file HTML Anda. Bahasa teknisnya, copy-paste script yang diberikan dan taruh di sebelum tag </body>

setelah itu masukkan script berikutnya ke halaman conversion, letakkan sebelum tag </body>. Kalau sudah, klik validate pages.

Kalau semuanya sudah dimasukkan dengan benar, ketiga bagian tersebut akan dicentang. Lalu klik ok. Kalau belum benar berarti perbaiki dulu.

Halaman berikutnya hanya menampilkan detil eksperimen

Klik tombol “Start Experiment” untuk memulai split testing Anda.

Kalau sudah diklik, seperti ini tampilannya

Dan ini adalah layar experiment tempat Anda akan menganalisis, page mana yang paling baik

Conversion visitor merupakan jumlah orang yang subscribe (masuk ke halaman conversion) / total pengunjung yang melihat page tersebut.

Berikut adalah contoh website saya yang lain yang sudah berjalan experimentnya:

Untuk melihat report, klik link “view report”. Data yang diperlihatkan yaitu total visitors sejumlah 112 dan subscribernya 36. Artinya 32% conversion rate.

Nah, ini hasil report nya. Terlihat bahwa page 1 memiliki conversion rate yang lebih besar yaitu 18 dari 54 artinya 60%. Sedangkan page 2 memiliki conversion rate yang lebih kecilyaitu 18/58 atau 39%. John Reese mengatakan untuk menunggu sampai 100 baru bisa diputuskan, content mana yang lebih baik. Lebih besar dari 100 tentunya lebih akurat lagi.

Dengan menggunakan split testing, kita akan terus mengoptimisasi landing page kita dan memaksimalkan conversion rate.

Silakan mengunjungi halaman hasil split testing saya, coba Anda lihat, Anda akan masuk ke page 1 atau page 2. Hasil setiap orang bisa berbeda2.

http://www.RonaldKang.com/tutorialsplittest/index1.html

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